Week 13 Reactions: The Decisions We Don't Make

Fantasy football is hard. No matter how much research you do before and during the season, no matter how many stats your review, articles you read or podcasts you listen to, there are still a ton of things that have to go your way to win a big DFS tournament or your season-long league. Heck, even making the playoffs in season-long leagues is an accomplishment worth celebrating.

There are plenty of decisions that are in your hands (do I draft Dalvin Cook or Christian McCaffrey?), but there are so many more that are totally out of our control. Was drafting Cook a bad decision? Of course not; Cook was the leading rusher in the NFL at the time of his injury and no one saw his season ending so early. But drafting Cook put you in a big hole versus the person who picked McCaffrey, even with the latter not really having the dominant season many had hoped.

Then again, maybe after Cook went down in Week 4 you read Kevin Payne's waiver wire article and picked up Alvin Kamara, who caught 10 passes for 71 yards and a touchdown against the Dolphins that week. Sure, Kamara was stuck behind Mark Ingram and Adrian Peterson on the depth chart, but you had a pretty big void to fill. Unfortunately, Kamara had his bye in Week 5, so maybe you went with Wayne Gallman, who also found the end zone in Week 4 and looked primed to get a bigger role for the Giants, who got basically nothing out of Paul Perkins and Orleans Darkwa. I think we all know how that turned out.

Having a player on your team get injured isn't the only reason that you'd have to make a move. Fantasy owners of Jordy Nelson saw their prospects crash when quarterback Aaron Rodgers suffered a broken collarbone in Week 6. Nelson wasn't racking up the receiving yards like he had in years past, but he had six touchdowns in the first five weeks, even while playing only seven snaps in Week 2 against the Falcons due to an injury. In the six games since Rodgers' injury, Nelson has failed to catch even six passes or record more than 35 receiving yards. Was drafting Jordy Nelson ahead of Michael Thomas or Brandin Cooks or Dez Bryant a bad decision? It may feel like one now but I'm not sure many would say that at the time.

The big decisions don't end there. Once the season starts, you always have the trouble of figuring out who to start. Sometimes the decisions seem easy, but it takes just one big game from a bench player for you to start hating fantasy football. Unfortunately, it seems there may have been plenty of people who felt that way this week.

Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers were widely considered the best fantasy quarterbacks heading into this season, enough so that they were drafted well ahead of most other options. Rodgers' injury obviously ruined his fantasy year, but Brady's owners were likely content (or at least not angry) with their decisions to draft him. The record-setting season that many predicted didn't come to fruition, but he was still a very strong option, one that threw for at least three touchdowns five times, including three straight heading into the fantasy playoffs.

Jordan Howard had an NFFC ADP in the top 20 this summer, and while his production this year wasn't quite up to snuff, he had an excellent matchup Sunday against the 49ers, who came in allowing the most fantasy points per game to running backs in both standard and PPR formats. Despite some considerable inconsistency this season, Howard still had four games with over 100 rushing yards and fantasy owners who made the playoffs with Howard in their lineups were certainly going to roll him out there again.

Julio Jones had a first-round ADP and was coming off a huge game last week when he caught 12 of 15 targets for 253 yards and two touchdowns, helping many fantasy owners clinch playoff berths. Jones is another player who battled inconsistency this season, and while the matchup against the Vikings on Sunday wasn't ideal, it was hardly one that needed to be avoided, especially with a player like Jones. The same could be said about Mike Evans, who got starting quarterback Jameis Winston back to throw him passes against a Packers defense that allowed the fourth-most PPR points per game to wideouts this season.

So, if you were lucky enough to make it through a season that saw a number of superstar fantasy options like Rodgers, David Johnson, Odell Beckham, Ezekiel Elliott and Andrew Luck miss some, most or all of the season, take a minute to appreciate it. Fantasy football is a gauntlet, and if you made it this far with a solid team, well done to you. And if you relied on players like Brady, Howard, Jones or Evans in the first round of the playoffs, well, there's always next season.

As previously mentioned, one of the difficulties of fantasy football is having to make decisions on who to start in a certain position among two or three options. We agonize over these decisions, asking anyone we know even slightly connected with fantasy football who they think we should start. If we make the right decision then we relish in our superior football knowledge, telling anyone who will listen (there usually aren't many) about the great decisions we made. And when we're wrong, we look to all the other people we can blame for the poor advice. We point to obscure stats that help justify our correct decisions after the fact to prove that we know what we're doing while we curse those who would dare suggest starting Matt Forte over Carlos Hyde or Kenny Stills over Stefon Diggs.

Starting Brady in the first round of the fantasy playoffs was a no brainer, especially against a Bills team that came in losers of four of their last five games and had beaten the Patriots about three times in the last decade. What were you going to do, start Josh McCown against the Chiefs, who had the perfect opportunity Sunday against the Jets to bounce back after a few weeks of struggles? Sure, McCown was a serviceable fantasy option at times, but what kind of idiot would even have a thought to do something as ridiculous as starting him over Brady in the first round of the playoffs?

The same could be said about Howard against the atrocious 49ers run defense. Howard has lost touches here and there to Tarik Cohen, but Sunday was the perfect opportunity to show why he was an early round draft pick back in August. Yeah, you have Kenyan Drake and Alex Collins on your bench, but let's be serious here, Howard and Kareem Hunt will lead your team to the next round.

And while you have Jermaine Kearse and Cordarrelle Patterson on your bench, are you really even thinking about starting them ahead of Evans and Diggs? Of course not. And that's when fantasy football reaches a level of frustration you didn't even know existed. Instead of sweating the decisions we consciously make, we're left steaming over the decisions we didn't even consider.

The Patriots easily took care of the Bills on Sunday, winning 23-3 in Buffalo, but Brady failed to throw even a single touchdown pass for the first time since Week 1, a pretty significant fall after throwing 10 in the past three games. And how about McCown, who was probably on more fantasy benches than starting lineups? He completed 26 of 36 passes for 331 yards and a touchdown while also rushing seven times for 19 yards and two more scores, finishing as the second-highest scoring quarterback for the week. McCown's big game helped Jermaine Kearse (nine catches on 10 targets for 157 yards) and Robby Anderson (eight catches on 12 targets for 107 yards) finish as top-five receivers (with two games left to play in Week 13).

Meanwhile, Howard rushed just 13 times for 38 yards while losing five yards on his lone reception on two targets, and Hyde had 17 carries for 54 yards while catching three of five targets for 12 receiving yards. McCown had the big game under center for the Jets, but his lone passing touchdown went to Forte, who rushed 15 times for 58 yards and caught all three targets for 33 yards and that score. Forte's big game paled in comparison to Collins', as he rushed 15 times for 75 yards and two touchdowns while catching both of his targets for 23 receiving yards. And that wasn't even good enough to reach Drake's level, as he rushed 23 times for 120 yards and one touchdown (the first Dolphins rushing touchdown of the season) and added three catches on five targets for 21 receiving yards. But really, who was starting Drake over Howard this week?

And now to the wide receivers, who seemed to have more star busts and scrub breakouts than any other position. Winston's return did basically nothing for Evans, who caught two of six targets for 33 yards at Green Bay. Meanwhile, Patterson took advantage of the absences of Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree to catch all four targets for 97 yards. Not a huge game by any means, but Evans' fantasy owners would have taken that from him. The Vikings beat the Falcons on Sunday thanks to two passing touchdowns from Case Keenum, but neither ended up in the hands of Adam Thielen or Stefon Diggs, neither of whom caught more than four passes or finished with more than 55 receiving yards. Meanwhile, Mike Wallace had five catches on eight targets for 116 yards and Ryan Grant ended up with five catches on nine targets for 76 yards and a touchdown in a 38-14 loss to the Cowboys. Did anyone really consider Grant or Patterson over Thielen, Diggs or Evans?

But that's how it goes in fantasy football. Sometimes you roll out a starting team of sure things and they get outscored by the list of bench names you obviously didn't even consider thinking about in your wildest dreams. Sure, there was probably some kind of thought about Drake or Collins instead of Hyde and Howard, and there was a brief moment in time when you thought "maybe Patterson could be worth a flier in the utility over Diggs" before remembering that Patterson had five games with one or zero catches this season. Plus, you trusted these guys enough during the fantasy regular season, why make drastic changes now, right?

The worst part about all of this is that we won't learn from it because there is nothing to learn. Sometimes Josh McCown outperforms Tom Brady, but we roll with the guys we know and trust and that's it. Unfortunately, that's it for your fantasy team this season.