Football Is Coming

With the Hall of Fame Game last night, I thought it was appropriate to kick off this year's blog posts. As I did last year, I'm going outline why I'm excited for the 2013 season.

Divisions
As you may have noticed, the layout of the site has been updated for 2013, complete with Ajay's ridiculous mug as our background, and overall records on the right panel. These records are important because they may provide some insight into who will get taken where in the Inaugural Division Draft. I don't know if I'm more proud of the Draft Location Bracket, the Division Draft, or Alan for holding down a relationship with a cool girl for over 6 months, but needless to say it's close. I'll be doing a Mock Division Draft in my annual Draft Preview, but one thing I wanted to point out ahead of time (other than Barnard being an extremely vanilla 26-26-0) is...

Kimmel
Just like baseball has its Mendoza Line (to save Weissbard from Googling it, that's a .200 batting average), FALAFEL has its Long Line. Finishing with a winning percentage under .346 (or under 5 wins) puts you in Chris Long territory. Having more than one consecutive season in that zone should have you scared for your FALAFEL life. Having a lifetime winning percentage below the Long Line, and failing to ever email the league or do anything besides show up for the draft, well I don't even know why we bother. If Kimmel shows up in Savannah, I guess he gets to keep his spot. If he doesn't, we may have to rename the Long Line. The Kimmel Line has a better ring to it, so I'm rooting for this situation for that reason alone, but there could be some changes in the FALAFEL roster coming soon.

Ajay's Reign
Last year our Mr. Shah became the first FALAFEL member to appear in multiple Stevens Bowls, in back-to-back years no less. In between these two impressive feats, he also won our highly competitive Fantasy Baseball Keeper League in his first year in the league. He has responded with an extremely subpar baseball season this year, and while he has assembled a solid minor league roster, it will be interesting to see if this funk continues to the football season. He gets to make the first move in the Division Draft, so he will be in the driver seat for choosing his own competition, but I'm skeptical if Ajay can pull of his own Three-Heat and win back-to-back titles after losing in the finals.

The Billy/Marshall Team
There is no ceiling on the entertainment value this team will provide. I can see them running the table at 13-0, as well as losing each game by 30 points, but either way they will keep us all amused. I would literally give a kidney for their team picture to be Marshall carrying Billy on his shoulders on Vegas, but that moment in time can never be re-created. And at the draft, well shit here's another new topic...

Dual Owner Drafts
We've never really seen how AGD operates behind the scenes. They've been pretty successful overall, but I've always felt that one of them was pulling the strings, while the other funded the team, sort of an owner/GM relationship. Seeing them crouched over one laptop in Savannah will clear some things up. As for the Billy/Marshall team, well that's going to be a whole 'nother experience. They might take Adrian Peterson and Arian Foster because they can't decide between the two. They might not take any of the first 50 players nominated because they can't form a consensus. Or they might have an extremely rational, well thought-out game plan that re-defines the way we all think about fantasy football and life. Literally anything is in play.

And now for something that I'm not excited about...

My Schedule
After 4 years of tireless service to this league through blog posts and CPP rankings, things are unfortunately going to change in 2013. I just got promoted at work but now have to manage a team of 4 people (#HumbleBrag), which essentially gives me no free time to fuck around and analyze Bennett's waiver bids. In my more limited free time, I still have to put out a weekly IDP ranking for Razzball, and because I'm being compared against other "experts" in the industry, I can't embarrass myself by not putting research into it. On top of all of that, I have a wedding to help plan, and if it's anything like the movie, I'll need to take dance lessons, taste cakes, and hang out with Matthew Alright Alright Alright McConaughey on a daily basis.

But I would assume most of you don't care about any of that. So this is how 2013 is going to work in this space: I'll continue to update the CPP Rankings every week, because it's relatively quick, and that's what keeps you all coming back. As for individual team write-ups, those are going away, or at least will be severely limited. I'll still put out a Draft Preview and Grades, along with some other write-ups, but the length of my posts will decrease notably. Which brings me to my final topic...

Guest Blogger(s)
If any of you are interested in taking over the team write-up portion of the CPP Rankings, or just want to put up guest posts in this space, you're more than welcome. I'm still going to own the CPP Rankings themselves because they are my baby. Or rather they are Gutman and my love-child that I commandeered sole custody of. But either way, they're mine. I don't know if any of you are interested in writing for fantasy sites, but if you are, this was great practice for me because no one will ever ridicule you harder than your friends. Well, no one will ever ridicule you harder than Nick, but after that, it's your friends. Anyway, if you want to write in this space, and you're good, I can try to hook you up with my editor or an editor on another site.

Draft Preview will be out in a couple of weeks, and we're 19 days from the Big Day itself. Stay cool out there.