There was about a six-hour window where all was good times for The Scooters. Finally.
A season that I had all but given up on turned promisingly after I ended our league's regular season with two straight victories to boost my record to 6-5-1, with a season sweep of one of the teams I was battling for a playoff spot. During a strange campaign that saw three ties within the league and many teams finishing up with similar records, I was unsure of my status, still thinking I was going to be on the outside looking in.
However, one of my friends from the league sent me an e-mail yesterday congratulating me on getting into the playoffs. After I expressed doubts that I actually was going to slide in, he began to break down the possibilities. After crunching numbers that began to look more like the quadratic formula than tiebreaker scenarios, my friend informed me that I had, indeed, made it into the playoffs, despite all the shoddy luck and inconsistent play all year long. A new season, right? Anything's possible? Armed with a firm belief that I still possessed arguably the league's best team, I was heartened and optimistic for a veritable do-over in the playoffs.
But wait.
Our formula didn't include an impossible, nonsensical comeback by the league's resident douche … in fact, the same douche that we discussed here a coupla weeks ago. Down more than 100 points with three players left to play last night (Drew Brees, Pierre Thomas, Lance Moore), this buttnugget had been written off, despite having kiked me over already by a Hail Mary (literally) just a few weeks before. His opponent even had Green Bay's kicker to go with the 100-point lead, to at least partially offset the New Orleans passing attack. Another playoff candidate was in play as well, but he needed a fairly enormous game from Aaron Rodgers to get in the hunt.
I'm sure you can guess what happened from there.
The game turned into a pinball shootout, Brees had his usual monster game, Pierre Thomas went from selling croissants to transforming into Gale Sayers for a game, Lance Moore exploded as the team's second option and Rodgers was forced to throw on every down. The bottom line is my new arch-enemy, who I've dubbed Rectal Wizard, got a tidy 112 points from his trio of Ain'ts, the other jackleg got 30+ from Rodgers and out of nowhere, I got consolation e-mails from several members of the league saying that they'd never seen someone get screwed over so badly while getting backdoored out of the playoffs. There's no way to make this simple, but I'll tell you that five teams finished with a 6-5-1 record, and only four of us could make the playoffs. I lost out as the fifth team on a total-points tiebreaker by 35 points (1180 to 1145), or an average of less than three points per week. Now, this even takes precedent even though I swept both games played against another 6-5-1 team that did get in the playoffs (not even I understand that at this point). P.S. I'm dry-heaving as I type that.
Now, Rectal Wizard has had a rather interesting year. The two-time defending champ after lucking his way past me in last year's title game, he bitched and whined all year long about people not wanting to trade with him, our rules, and waiver-wire pickups and payments, eventually stooping so low as to suggesting that our commissioner was cheating him. Mind you, our commissioner has run our league for a decade, is a friend of mine, and grew up as a boyhood friend of the Rectal Wizard. So needless to say, Rectal Wizard should have taken his slightly-above-average team and bad karma and spent the offseason rocking back and forth in the fetal position in his grandmother's basement.
Fantasy football is fantasy football, but when you're in a 14-team league with a $200+ entry fee and people who are willing to pay $80 in free agency for an over-the-hill Irving Fryar, you can do the math and see that the payouts start to get pretty sizable. So not only did I get jewed out of a minimum $250, but I got rooked out of the opportunity to win as much as a couple grand. In this economy, I hate to say it, but I depend on fantasy football as a significant part of my budget.
Anyway, I was pretty down in the dumps by the end of the game, when it became clear that I was getting the shaft and Rectal Wizard and Random Dork were going to skate past me and into the playoffs. After the shock and fury passed, I consoled myself by watching a replay of this game until the wee hours of the morning. It helped.
So I went from thinking I was out to being told I was in to being back out. Goddam fantasy football; I don't know why I do it to myself. Anyway, ABS, fuckers. I'm taking the entire Scooters team to Tahiti with Jessica Simpson to be some drunken, motor-boatin' sumbitches for a week. They deserve it. Me, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment