Rhode Island Rabbits (Away Helmet)

I’m happy to announce that my Yahoo! Fantasy Football team, the Rhode Island Rabbits, have taken first place in my league as of this morning! Yahoo’s leagues run sixteen weeks total (the regular NFL football season) with the first fourteen dedicated to regular season place, week fifteen to semifinal play offs of the top four teams, and week sixteen with the final “Super Bowl” game determining the league champion for the year between the two semifinal game winners.

The league uses real NFL players’ game statistics for a given week (week runs Tuesday through Monday) to compile a score. You are rank first by how many wins you have. I have six wins and four losses right now– anything over .600% is consider good with .500% being average and below .400% being bad. When you tie others by win rankings (notice there are four others teams with the same win amount as mine) those aforementioned player statistic points are used to sort who is better than who in the tied group of teams. I’m at the top with 980; some twelve points ahead of the number two team.

Here’s the current standings in the league as of this morning:

This is my first year playing fantasy football, but I’ve being doing fantasy baseball for two years now (my Rabbits Baseball team finished in fourth place this year) and those same statistics/scoring skills carry over into football. I am not, admittedly, a football expert though I do follow weekly highlights and game stats. As I’ve always said, when you grow up and feel too old for AD&D role playing you graduate to fantasy sports to make yourself feel “cool” though obviously you’re still a pretty big nerd. I mean come on, the whole thing is mathematics (statistics, law of averages, logic tables, and chance determination) like chess so if you are good at it and won’t admit you’re a nerd you’re lying to yourself. 😀

Basic math says that if you win eight of fourteen game (or roughly .571 winning average) you are almost 100% assured of placing in the top four positions. Having said that you really want to win as many as possible and accrue as many points as possible because of the aforementioned ties by wins (we’re a very close league and anything can happen in these type of less than twenty point spread situations).

This week I play the cowboys21 team listed above. They are the “worst team in the league”, but if you look at their line up they have an incredible roster of players. The problem is many of them have spent the year hurt until now. There is the bigger problem– he has a team of great players very healthy who could turn an upset very easily. Prediction odds say I will come out ahead (105 to 90 points) according to the Yahoo! prediction math nerds, but anything can happen on any given Sunday as they say. A fifteen point spread on prediction is still pretty close (anything under twenty is close) so we’ll see what happens.

If anyone is interested in Fantasy Baseball (starts in April 2010) let me know. I’m contemplating running a public open league this year in addition to the closed invite only league I participate in. It will be head-to-head league (similar to the style of league above) hypothetically and it would be pretty cool to get some df.com contributors and viewers duking it out for the championship. Drop me a line via comments on the post if you’re interested. We’ll follow up with you from there via email (be sure to put your valid email address I can contact you at in the comment line– don’t worry it’s never shared for marketing purposes to third parties nor will it be used for marketing purposes by df.com or displayed in the post itself).