This article is part of our East Coast Offense series.
The Team I Wish I Had Drafted
Now that all six of my fantasy teams have been bounced from the playoffs (nice work, Jimmy Graham), I'd like to focus on what might have been. If only I knew on draft day what I know now, this is the team I'd have assembled:
Round 1 Jaguars Defense - (I'm assuming they'd be available even in the back half of the first round.) I like to start my team with a player that isn't at risk of going on IR. (The Odell Beckham owner mocks this and offers a sidebet. I accept. David Johnson owner too? Done.)
Round 2 I love Justin Tucker, but I can't pass on Greg Zuerlein here. Combo of leg strength and an offense I project to score a lot more than people think. (Jordy Nelson and Amari Cooper owners offers sidebets. Done and done.)
Round 3Mark Ingram - It might be a reach, but he'll learn quite a bit from Adrian Peterson. (Terrelle Pryor owner wants a side bet? Sure.)
Round 4Carson Wentz - I like Year 2 QBs, plus Nelson Agholor is an underrated weapon.
Round 5Robbie Gould - Love his playoff schedule, plus a Week 13 revenge matchup against the Bears? Sign me up.
Round 6Alvin Kamara - I love handcuffing early, especially because there's a good chance Peterson gets traded.
Round 7Adam Thielen - Need a stud No. 1 receiver.
Round 8Marvin Jones - Those first four games of 2016 are much more predictive than the last 12. Plus he trained with Randy Moss during the offseason.
Round 9Robby Anderson - The Jets passing game is massively underrated.
Round 10Sterling Shepard - I have a feeling he'll outperform Beckham and Brandon Marshall. Plus, he's the kind of player who comes up big in your fantasy playoffs.
Round 11Robert Woods - I love his upside with Jared Goff likely to improve in year 2.
Round 12Devin Funchess - If Greg Olsen gets hurt and Kelvin Benjamin is traded, he'd probably be Cam's No. 1, especially if Curtis Samuel is also out for the year.
Round 13Jason Witten - He's old and slow, but I think he'll get off to a fast start, and I can drop him in Week 3.
Round 14Chris Thompson - He's injury prone, but he could be useful for as long as he holds up.
Round 15Evan Engram - I suppose I need a non-washed up TE, and he'd get a lot of targets should the Giants receiving corps get entirely decimated with injuries in a single game.
Round 16Deshaun Watson - More injury prone than I'd like, but he could give my team an early-season boost for as long as he stays healthy.
Round 17Dion Lewis - Honestly, I doubt the Patriots will stick with Mike Gillislee on early downs.
Round 18Blake Bortles - In case anything happens to Wentz and Watson, I want a solid dual threat QB for the fantasy playoffs.
Round 19Alex Collins - Worth a flyer late in case Kenneth Dixon, Terrance West and Danny Woodhead get hurt.
Round 20Garrett Celek - You want to lock down a solid playoff TE.
This team might actually be an underdog in Week 16, but the league fees would be paid for many times over in sidebets, and there's no doubt you'd make it to the finals.
Fixing Replay
One of the problems with NFL games is long delays caused by replay reviews. No fan wants to waste his life sitting around while a committee of lawyers decides the fate of the game. And no one wants to see plays that anyone who played football in the park would call a catch ruled incomplete on a technicality.
Part of the problem is the league's desire to have a consistent set of criteria defining a catch. The concern is if the league didn't have these consistent criteria, then what was a catch in one game might not be a catch in another. But isn't that already the case? Don't we have close calls that get ruled one way or the other, based on what the play was called initially on the field? Don't we have replay officials who might differ in how they apply the criteria to a given play?
The truth is there are grey areas where perfect consistency is impossible. The black and white questions - "did the receiver get two feet in bounds?" - are universally agreed upon, but concepts like "controlling the ball to the ground,"
"made a football move" are less clear and not useful for advancing our understanding of what defines a catch.
The solution is to stop legislating grey areas with vague concepts that don't make intuitive sense to anyone who's watched or played football. A catch should be like pass interference, a judgment call with some black and white criteria but otherwise subjective. For example, if the defender never touches the receiver, but simply waves his arms in front of him, he cannot be called for PI. Similarly, if the receiver doesn't get his feet down in bounds, he cannot be said to have completed the catch. But if the basic black and white-level criteria are satisfied, it's merely the ref's judgment as to whether something is PI or a catch. Both calls should be reviewable, but only the black and white basics upon which everyone agrees. The judgment part - assuming the DB did make some early contact with the receiver - cannot be challenged or changed.
This would solve the problem of correcting egregiously wrong calls but without creating arbitrary criteria which don't correspond to anyone's intuitive understanding of the game. It would also shorten the time for and lessen the need for replays because they'd be looking only for black and white errors, not fictional criteria to comb over endlessly while precious minutes of our lives are squandered.
Finally, I'd give each coach one challenge per game, but have full-time replay officials watch for black-and-white errors only and immediately correct on-field officials in their earpieces when there was one (not getting two feet down, not crossing the plane on a TD, e.g.) These are the same replays that are obvious when you're watching at home, i.e., when you know for sure how the review will turn out, and it would take them two seconds to hit a button and let the ref know.
There would likely be unintended consequences from this solution too. But no system is perfect. Whether you have no officials, like you did when you played with your friends in the park (only works in low-stakes situations), the old system with no replay and glaring errors like a game-winning TD where the receiver's second foot was clearly on the chalk, or full replay like we have now, with its delays, interruption of flow and unwanted new rules and criteria that alienate the audience, you give up something. But a hybrid system that eliminates the worst errors and preserves the spirit of the rules with moderate rather than severe disruption would be, in my opinion, the best solution.
Week 15 Observations
• Jason Garrett and Scott Linehan run the most predictable offense in NFL history. (I'll give them a slight edge over Ben McAdoo/Mike Sullivan.) I could have called out their plays for them. And why bother to get Dez Bryant involved when you have Jason Witten and Cole Beasley. Dak Prescott needs to show more courage too – throw it to Bryant and let him make a play. It actually worked late in the game.
• What a joke of a game. The Cowboys kicked the FG from the one-inch line rather than going for the TD, but still had the Raiders dead to rights before committing a 55-yard PI on 4th-and-10. But Derek Carr, despite having the tie locked up and the win likely in hand if he simply goes down at the one, instead of reaching for the pylon, voluntarily fumbles the ball out of the end zone to gift the game back to Dallas.
•Marshawn Lynch still has it. Too bad he wasted perhaps his final season in Oakland.
• The Patriots-Steelers game was also a joke. The Patriots went ahead, the Steelers drove down the field in two plays and had it all but won on the TD to Jesse James. But James' TD was overturned because he didn't control the ball all the way to the grave*, and Ben Roethlisberger threw a senseless pick rather than getting the game-tying field goal. Can't any of these games be settled on merit rather than technicalities, bad decisions and lucky bounces?
* Only upon one's death is the catch actually completed (Rule 85f, subsection 44c.)
•Rob Gronkowski showed why he's great. But it's also Tom Brady who throws to him while he's covered and trusts Gronk to make the play. I don't think the Patriots are that good this year, but they'll probably win the Super Bowl again when some other team botches the end-game clock management and fumbles an inch from the pylon.
•Antonio Brown's injury was unfortunate, but I don't feel sorry for Brown owners who have gotten so much consistent production and health. Maybe it's because I've so rarely had shares of him the last few years, while I've had plenty of A.J. Green and Julio Jones at similar cost.
•Le'Veon Bell has 1,849 YFS and 80 catches in 14 games. He's already over 300 carries. Those totals prorate to 351 carries, 2,113 YFS and 91 catches. His 10 TDs are relatively meager by comparison.
• The Titans are unwatchable. Is there one player on that team you look forward to seeing play? Let's hope they miss the playoffs so an interesting one like that Chargers can get a shot. Even the Bills, who have no chance to go anywhere, would be a much more interesting story.
•Jimmy Garoppolo is a monster – 389 yards, 8.9 YPA with Marquise Goodwin as his best receiver. Garoppolo will be drafted as a top-10 QB next year, given his coach and the likelihood the 49ers sign/draft better targets for him.
• The Rams beat the Seahawks 42-7, and the game wasn't that close.
•Todd Gurley had a game for the ages with four TDs, 180 YFS and three catches in three quarters. Gurley has 1,717 YFS, 17 TDs and 54 catches in 14 games, numbers that prorate to 1,962 YFS, 19 TDs and 62 catches.
• The Seahawks sacked Russell Wilson seven times, and he managed just 4.7 YPA not including the sack yardage, which was massive.
• It would have been nice for the Seahawks to provide notice ahead of the playoffs about Jimmy Graham. He totaled minus-one yards in Weeks 14 and 15 combined. That I have Graham on three teams goes a long way to explaining why I did so poorly in the playoffs this year.
•Blake Bortles is yet another example of how quarterback play is usually a function of conditions and not something inherent about the player. At the extremes (Aaron Rodgers, Wilson), players can excel in a below-average environment, but most QBs are massively dependent on good conditions. Bortles had 326 yards, 11.2 YPA and three TDs playing with a huge lead against a weak defense Sunday.
•DeAndre Hopkins always gets his. I doubted he would this week, given the matchup, but 13 targets were good for a 4-80-1 line.
•Aaron Rodgers made some mistakes, but more or less looked like himself in difficult conditions. The Packers probably would have tied the game too, but for a fumble on the final drive.
But with the Packers all but eliminated from the playoffs, it looks like Rodgers might sit the final two games.
•Greg Olsen is back, and that makes Cam Newton and the Panthers significantly more dangerous in the playoffs. He's the receiver with whom Newton's had the greatest rapport during his career.
• One thing that went right is my best bet, the Redskins, covered. They barely covered, but I'll take what I can get.
• The Giants played the Eagles tough twice this year. Even with Carson Wentz, Philadelphia needed a last-second 61-yard field goal to win.
•Eli Manning had an out of nowhere 434 yards and three TDs on a solid 7.6 YPA, but he not only wasn't in your active lineup, he was probably on the waiver wire. Sterling Shepard had a monster 16-11-139-1 line. The Giants should have a top-5 receiving corps (including tight end Evan Engram) next year, and I shudder to think they might be dumb enough to bring back Manning after this showing.
•Nick Foles had four TDs passes, but an otherwise unremarkable 6.2 YPA and 237 passing yards against one of the league's worst pass defenses.
• The Saints-Jets was surprisingly competitive, thanks in part to Brandon Coleman losing two fumbles in Jets territory. Bryce Petty got 4.6 YPA though, and the game was never seriously in doubt.
•Mark Ingram had 151 YFS and two TDs, thanks to a garbage time 50-yard TD. He now has 1,420 YFS, 11 TD and 51 catches in 14 games.
• The Bengals should not have bothered to make the trip to Minnesota. It was a waste of jet fuel.
• The DeShone Kizer experiment has run its course. The Hue Jackson one too. If Josh Gordon can resist going back to booze and drugs after playing in this offense, he is truly healed.
•Joe Flacco played his third straight credible game in a row. The Ravens might not be an easy out in the playoffs.
•Jay Cutler ran the four-minute drill (down two scores) like he took too much xanax to cure his hangover. I've never seen someone so relaxed with the game ticking away. DeVante Parker and Jarvis Landry combined for 25 targets, with several of Parker's in the end zone.
• It's amazing the Bills, who could make the playoffs, gave away a game with Nate Peterman at QB. Tyrod Taylor has been very good when you account for the conditions around him, though it should be pointed out Goodwin and Robert Woods are excelling in their new homes while Sammy Watkins was better with Taylor.
• Why did the Chiefs forget to involve Kareem Hunt for almost half the season? It's incomprehensible. Hunt almost never goes down on first contact, and he's one of the most dangerous receiving backs in the league.
• I dogged Tyreek Hill all year, but he's proven me wrong. He's just too fast to cover one-on-one, and even if his route tree is limited, who cares if he's catching long TDs?
• Many people look at Philip Rivers' career rate stats and think "easy Hall of Famer," but he seems to save his worst for the biggest spots. He's the anti-Eli Manning, and I'd argue neither should get in.
• I have nothing to say about the Bears-Lions except that it was so unwatchable, I went to bed (Portugal time) at 11:00 pm rather than watching the second half on which I wasted 20 minutes of my life the next morning. We don't need two games Saturday, three waves of games Sunday and standalone games on Thursday and Monday nights. If each game is 3.5 hours, that's 24.5 hours to catch them all.
•Jameis Winston played a great game – 299 yards, 8.5 YPA, three TDs, no picks and only two sacks. He also ran for 18 yards. Mike Evans caught five of eight targets for 79 yards and a score, but it would have been a huge day had he not been called twice for offensive PI on big plays. O.J. Howard might have had a big day, but he got hurt on his TD catch and left the game.
•Peyton Barber started for the Bucs and looked okay. LOL at those who waited out Doug Martin's early-season suspension.
•Matt Ryan and Julio Jones had pedestrian games – you simply can't count on either this year.
•Devonta Freeman had a huge game, leading the team in both rushing and receiving and totaling 194 YFS and a TD with five catches. He almost had a second TD, but fumbled into the end zone.
•Matt Bryant had a FG blocked, but also crushed a 57-yarder. It's crazy how good the kicking in the modern NFL is compared to past eras.
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