League Lineup

With just under 36 hours until kickoff of the 2008 NFL season, I'm reviewing lineups in my various leagues and making sure I don't have any roster holes or injuries heading into the weekend. I'm participating in five leagues this year. Only one league, IDI All Stars, is a money league. And since I know all the owners in that league, it's the most fun. The other four leagues, which I will detail below, are all ESPN leagues that I joined primarily for the experience. Each league presents its own learning opportunities and challenges:

-Tag Team Skirmish (Texas Bison): This is a "best ball" league. Sixteen teams, standard ESPN roster, everyone drafts their own team. After the draft, everyone was assigned a partner at random. I merged my roster with my partner's and each week, the highest scoring player from either team at each position "counts." Dan, the league manager came up with the idea on the golf course and it looked just wacky enough to be fun. It's going to mean a lot of work on paper for Dan each week, but the concept is cool. The big challenge here is that I felt I drafted extremely well for such a deep league, but my partner did not. He did manage to wrangle Peyton Manning in a VERY advantageous trade, but due to some drafting missteps on his part (Shaun Alexander and Tatum Bell for example), and the fact that we drafted almost a month ago, there will be some roster work to do in the coming weeks.

-Charlie's League (Kornheiser's Kombover): This is a keeper league team that I picked up off the ESPN FF boards. In short, it's a restoration project. This team has an absolutely ridiculous receiving corps (Houshmandzadeh, Wayne, Boldin, Driver and Fitzgerald), but was ridiculously week at QB. This is a problem in a league that starts two QB's and two OP's in scoring system that overvalues quarterbacks. I was able to snag Matt Schaub, but for the moment he and Brodie Croyle are my go-to guys. Kind of scary.

-Mandatory Steroids (BALCO Bandits): My first IDP league. Starting a standard ESPN roster, plus two IDP slots, this will be my first exposure to the IDP aspect of fantasy football.

-Mile High Club (Kornheiser's Kombover): Ok, so I used the same team name twice. But come on, it's kind of funny. This is a straight up, vanilla, ESPN public league with only eight teams. I felt pretty good about my chances of dominating this one, but a draft snafu (more on that in another post) may have compromised what might have been an even better roster.

-IDI Fantasy All Stars (Raging Bison): This is my office league. It's my only money league and my only Yahoo! league. This is my biggest prestige league and I'm coming off a 2nd place finish last year. The roster is fairly small (QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, WR/TE, K, D/ST) with only four bench spots. Often the biggest challenge is juggling players through the bye weeks. But with two fewer teams than last year (we're down to 12), there are still quality players on the wire to use as stopgaps.

So that's the rundown. Many of my posts will be on player developments in general, but I expect to spend a respectable amount of time discussing my own leagues, and what I'm learning.