HAPPY HANUKKAH, SPECIAL ED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Shout out to all the real teams in this league who had no starters in Monday night’s game. Was nice to have nothing on the line except for the final Hall of Shame. Great Job, Everybody!!! We had a nice relaxing evening to kick off the bye week. We just lit the candles, then caught up on a few episodes of This Is Us and went to bed early.
We heard the Eagles won, though, and Mark Sanchez made an appearance. Good times. It’s a nice thing for our Eagles fans to get a Monday night win since none of them made the fantasy playoffs.
The Special Ed Playoff seeding is now complete and we’re very excited about the two match-ups we’ve got on tap for week 14. Both games feature a renowned Special Ed Champion against one of the league’s top contenders.
Let’s break it down:
WHO'S HOT: PLAYOFFS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Week 13 was by far the lowest scoring week of the 2018 fantasy season. The average Special Ed team score was only 104.59 this week, a full 14 points below the season average. Lucky Week 13 was a tough one for everyone except Gentrifiers who now enter the Post-Season as the league’s HOTTEST team. They’ve been a pretty good team for three weeks in a row now including week 13 where they were the only good team.
Paul finishes the regular season as the 2nd HOTTEST playoff team and with the highest last-three-week average of any team playing week 14. The winner of this game is sure to be a difficult test for the COLD Commish.
On the other side of the bracket, snickers and Team Meh both finished the regular season cold and nursing one game losing streaks. These two have the lowest last-three-week average of any playoff teams. The winner will have to face the league’s highest scoring team of the last three, DYM.
R/W/T??????????????
The winds of change are blowing in the Special Ed League.
The Rules Committee has been debating a major change in league rules for next season. We are looking to replace the TE position in our starting line-ups with a new R/W/T Flex. Teams will be still be allowed, but no longer required, to play a Tight End.
The measure has polled strongly across the league and looks close to passage. Defend Your Moves officially endorses this change.
TE is not even a real position. Like race or gender, football positions are a social construct that often do not actually exist by rule. The term “Tight End” only appears twice in the ENTIRE NFL rule book, and both of those references simply designate the “Tight End” as a player who wears the same jersey number and equipment as a receiver. The verbiage in the NFL rule book mostly refers to players not by position but by function: they are referred to as “Runners”, “Passers”, “Receivers”, “Blockers”, or “Kickers”. For all intents and purposes TE’s are receivers, nothing more. The term “Tight End” simply denotes the location of a certain receiver in the offensive formation: The TE is just the guy next to the Tackle. They are not generally asked to do anything a receiver would not do and, appropriately, they score fantasy points the same way too. They are interchangeable with many other position players in real football, so should they be in fantasy as well.
In general there are two schools of thought when it comes to Fantasy structures and rules:
Some people prefer a league that reflects “Real Football.” They despise PPR and bonus-point systems. They say: only things that help real football teams should help fantasy teams.
Others want a more predictable statistically-based game. These people see the value in PPR and super-flex positions, but may want to do away with “flukier” positions like Kicker.
We believe this rule change should appeal to proponents of either philosophy.
In recent years the TE has become a sparse, unreliable and volatile position in fantasy football. There have been only about 3 or 4 good TE’s in our fantasy league this year. So the statistical argument goes without saying - It’s simply not possible to satisfy the dimensions of our fantasy league with the current crop of NFL Tight Ends. But for the conservatives, this rule change allows our lineups to no longer be bound by arbitrary positions. Now the sixth player in your lineup can be any eligible “Runner” or “Receiver” just like the real NFL was meant to be.
HALL OF SHAME FINALE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So here it is, folks. The Final Hall of Shame for 2018 and, we hope, forever. For the ninth time [REDACTED] was not the lowest scoring team of the week, but everybody did set their line-up again this week so that’s an improvement over where we were mid-season.
Thankfully neither of the teams being inducted this week made the playoffs, they’ll need this week to rest up before the Constellation Tourney.
Our two inductees are also the most often shamed teams of the season. Ertz scored less than [REDACTED] 5 times, and Matt finished tied with Randall Cummingham with 4 HoS inductions. Congrats to The Commish - he's got the only team to never have been Shamed this season.
Here’s the final tally:
¡Que Lástima! – 5
Polk High Panthers – 4
Randall Cummingham – 4
DYM – 3
Gentrifiers – 2
Snickers – 2
3-28 – 1
Team Meh – 1
Commish – 0
FOOD BEEF 2018 SANDWICH TOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This place is good. The only bad thing is the location. They are smack-dab in the middle of downtown Chatham so parking is very hard to come by. But, if you’re getting off the train in Chatham or have something else to do down there it’s worth stopping in.
The place is clean and nice inside, looks like it was recently renovated.
Amari and I both had hot sandwiches but the service was still very fast and friendly. They also throw in the free pickles which have become sadly rare on this tour, so bonus point for that. Both sandwiches were good, no complaints, but they can’t match-up with our 9-point playoff contenders.
Amari had grilled cheese with bacon. It was super greasy, Summit Diner style. I loved it. Cynthia called it a “heart attack”. There is a dearth of good diners in Madison/Chatham so this might actually be the best bacon sandwich in town.
We had hot pastrami and mustard on rye. It was soft and juicy, but kinda pedestrian. Not a lot of flare, but good comfort food. We have to admit it was particularly enjoyable on this rainy weekend, but the flavor isn’t anywhere close to Mimi’s pastrami.
Score: 8/10
AMERICAS GAMES OF THE WEEK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Prediction Record: 11-7
EAT A SNICKERS BITCH vs TEAM CHIMPS
The Top 2 TE’s in the playoffs face off in the Wild-Card Round!!!!
After the release of Kareem Hunt, Kelce may be the only elite player on Team Meh. The strength of the squad all year has been the starting WRs but Theilen and Mike Thomas have each scored less than 20 in three of the last four weeks. Their RB position is a shambles without Hunt and they are now likely to start two RBs who are a combined 68 years old.
The only team worse off at RB is snicks. Their season has come full circle now where just as they began the regular season by handcuffing a 49er RB, they have now handcuffed the handcuff to ring in the post-season. We LOVE the Justin Jackson and Jeffery Wilson Jr pickups. There’s nothing more exciting than starting guys you never heard of in the playoffs. Heady times for ol snicks.
Prediction:
eat a snickers bitch – 118.23
Team Meh – 112.74
UPSET SPECIAL:
GENTRIFIERS vs 3-28
Paul’s biggest advantage is in the pivotal RB1 position:
Cook has been decent recently but we think this is a BIG game for Aaron Jones. Of course ATL is one of the elite RB match-ups this year, but we also think he’ll get season-high usage in the first game of the Joe Philbin era. Mike McCarthy was a shit coach for a long time but his greatest crime was his misuse of Aaron Jones. In McCarthy’s final game at the helm he gave Jamaal Williams 11 touches, his most since week 2. Jones could see 20+ touches in a squeaky wheel game and finish the week as a top-10 RB.
The RBs make Paul a huge Yahoo projected favorite but The DYM MVP has some sneaky upside:
Mahomes is the #1 QB in the playoffs and Justin Tucker is the #1 kicker - He’s averaging 13.3 points per game in the FG-heavy Lamar Jackson era. Tyler Lockett is a guaranteed TD every week, while Tyreek Hill has been very hot and cold. Cooks is in a potential shoot-out against Chicago with Trubisky returning, while Julio faces an underrated Green Bay pass defense that features its strong young DBs.
The feature match-up in this one is Antonio Brown vs Juju. Brown is still The Best WR in our book but Juju is a super-star in the making and he’s outscored Brown in two of the last three weeks.
Prediction: Gentrifiers – 137.23
3-28 – 135.52
HAVE A GREAT WEEK EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
