The 49'ers game in New England, on a sleet filled Sunday night was barometer matchup to see how far Jim Harbaugh's team has come. By the outcome its safe to say they've come a long way. In the PAFFL that dominance is currently owned by one of the league's perennial powers, Short Bus, who had a barometer matchup against their nemesis, Team Kitty. First though the 49'ers looked good, Colin Kaepernick continues to prove Harbaughs confidence in him was well guided, their defense continually delivered big plays and they made two fewer mistakes and big plays against a New England team that typically is on the otherhand of these scores.
With the Oakland Raiders season cratering, there's been a lot of talk about getting Terrell Pryor experience at the end of the season, however statistically the one player at least living up to their pre-season expectation is their starting QB Carson Palmer. He's certainly not playing his best football (accounting for 21 turnovers and only 23 TD's) but he's still young enough (32) to be part of the rebuilding project. In looking at this 2012 numbers and his career, it dawned on me that his statistics are worthy of hall of fame consideration. Here me out on this.
In the PAFFL we have a long history of rich debate around lineup decisions and game integrity. This stems from a core group of teams that want to ensure every team faces its toughest opponent each week and secretly want their rivals to lose whenever possible. Over the past decade the league has made huge strides to formally legislate specific rules around what does or doesn't constitute a violation of this, however whenever important games are decided by subjectivity, there's healthy debate.
I wonder how many fantasy league games turn on tonight's juicy Monday Night Football game? With the AFC's top two team overflowing with fantasy talent (Tom Brady, Matt Schaub, Arian Foster, Stevan Ridley, Andre Johnson, Wes Welker, Owen Daniels, Aaron Hernandez among others) that likely includes no fewer than 8 starters in nearly every fantasy league. I personally will be rooting for a slow, low scoring affair where its hard fought but there aren't any big runs or crazy, uber-stud like performances from guys with the name Arian Foster.
For nearly every fantasy football league in the world, this past weekend was the 1st round of playoffs. It's when the games go from being about fun and fine tuning to put up for shut up. It's a great time, holidays, football and one & done matchups. For the PAFFL it brings out the best in all of us.
The PAFFL league body passed legislation, or rule modification, that starting in 2013, the final wildcard playoff spot in each league will be given to the highest breakdown & points scored leaders respectively at the end of the year that didn't qualify via their record in the original format. Thus starting in '13 there will be the same division winners (4), but instead of four wildcard teams based soley on record, two will be selected based on record, and the final two will be based on their power ranking. The details are as follows.
Arguably one of the best non-playoff participant consolation prizes is the rookie tourney, which pits the non-playoff squads against each other in a fight for a higher rookie selection. It's broken into a top 4 (or worst) teams and bottom 4 (better), which fight for selections 1-4 and 5-8 respectively. Here are the seedings and matchups.
2012 ushered in the new era of playoff tiebreakers that led to an incredible finish for the final slots. In what previously was decided by generic criteria prone to confusion when more than two teams were tied, the league approved legislation a few years back that reverts ties to the power ranking (which takes into consideration total points scored & record vs. all teams overall). This year is the first that this new process was used and it resulted in a wild final weekend that didn't conclude until the final play of Monday Night Football; and even then there were fellow paffl members (East Bay Funk) wishing with all their might the result wasn't true.....
Firkin Fanclub was a unique squad this year that made an early move for a playoff spot (acquiring WR Calvin Johnson) and then made a bunch of moves geared to 2013 once their playoff hopes were dashed. Here's a list of those that haven't been documented to date.
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