It's been a long strange trip over this past year but, for once, the league returned intact so I won't waste time with pleasantries.

 

2017 Season Recap

 

The 2017 season will forever go down as being the year of "The Great Experiment" with game planning.  Josh's horribly thought out disaster of a rule went down in flames after one awful season which saw crazy score jumps and teams that shouldn't have won (or lost) doing so.  Luckily, the league voted on the side of sanity this year and restored rules that will let the players determine scores on their own, as it should be. It was a year on steroids and I will always look back on the season's results as entirely questionable.

After turning around an absolute clunker of a team in 2016 and winning the championship in his first year, Derek had a falling off in a bitterly competitive White division to finish at 7-7, while another upstart new owner, Steve Schillinger, brought another historic clunker of a team back into the fight to win the White division.  This division was up for grabs well into November of last year before the Beavers went on a 5-2 tear to close out the year and take the division. Steve eventually lost in the playoffs to the eventual champs, the Amish Electricians, but he had a strong rookie campaign and takes home the Owner of the Year award (as voted on by our committee of me).  It's actually more of a compliment to Josh that he didn't win the award, since we've come to expect his team to perform at a high level and also his division sucked this past year.

Speaking of the Amish, they hit their stride after week 5 and rolled out a 7-2 record to close the season and take the title.  Josh won his fourth title in league history and now sits one title behind Byron and yours truly for the most championships won by a single owner.  Josh did not however fulfill his duty as champ and rename the Toilet Bowl loser, perhaps in homage to the late, great Sean Taylor (RIP). We speak your name.

 

Fancy Numbers

 

I try every year to put something new in here and not just do the same boring predictions year-after-year.  This year I wanted to try and put some math behind my predictions so I did some number crunching in an attempt to quantify potential team performance.  For the nerds out there, thanks to Josh and the addition of the API, I can now easily pull down team rosters and picks, dump into a database along with player rankings, and compute a base score for each team based on these player ranks.  There are a few issues with this, which I'll detail below, but it provides some interesting numbers.

The issues are pretty big so this needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

1) Since not all teams have the same number of players, I dropped each team down to 20 players.  For example, if you have 23 players on your team currently, I dropped the 3 with the worst rankings from your score.

2) The player rankings are based on my own ranking system, not one from any of these websites derived from so-called experts.  I suppose I could incorporate those in the future but mine takes into account our scoring system, unique positions like OL, keeper rankings, and my own personal feelings about players (kiss my ass Jay Ajayi, you screwed me for years).

3) There is no weight for the scores a player can generate.  Meaning, if I rank a DL as #2 and a RB as #2, they get the same weight even though the RB will far outscore the DL.  This is by far the biggest issue but maybe I can address it in future years if I feel like putting in the time. The point is really to determine how many top players a team has with the thought being that this will, in-turn, reflect how well they'll perform.

4) Some people drafted guys I didn't have ranked at all.  If you did this, they got the lowest ranking but, since I dropped the player counts down to 20, this should have a minimal impact.

 

On to the fun, based on this system here are the results.  The lower the score, the better the team should perform.

 

MeggaMen	155
Fightin' Bitin' Beavers	266
Trump Molests Collies	268
Fighting Squirrels	290
Norsemen	315
Amish Electricians	343
Crusaders	361
Testudos Revenge	371
Sacks on the Beach	381
Gallic Warriors	411
Richard's Lionhearts	455
Sean Taylor's Ashes	501

 

As one would expect, my team is the top result because we're using my rankings and I obviously drafted based on them, so we can discard that result since I really don't expect my team to be that good.  I think this pretty well reflects how the bottom teams have performed historically and I also think it reflects Mike's team pretty well, since he missed much of the draft. There are some ranks that I think are a bit out of whack, like Testudos Revenge and Crusaders, both of whom I think will be much better than this and I don't think the Fighting Squirrels will be the third best team (sorry Brian).  If anything, it will be fun to compare this with next year's results and see how the computerized method fares.

 

Team-By-Team Review and Predictions

Just to toot my own horn a bit, here are the results from last year's predictions.  I was close to spot on nearly 70% of the time. I clearly need to quit my job and pick phony team records for a living.

Nailed it	1 team
Missed by 1 game	7 teams
Missed by 2 games	3 team
Missed by 3 or more	2 team

 

 

Amish Electricians

2017 Predicted Finish: 9-5

2017 Actual Finish: 9-5 (damn I'm good!)

2017 Results: Josh did a great job again this year in fielding, by far, the best team in his shit division.  As always, he managed his team well and hit a good winning streak to close out the year and take home his fourth title.

 

Best Pick: Budda Baker

Worst Pick: Sammy Watkins

Strongest position: LB

Draft Grade: C

2018 Predicted Finish: 7-7

Summary:  Again, I didn't like Josh's draft but he'll probably do ok in his mediocre (but improved) division.  I didn't like pick of drafting an injured Jeffrey in the first round, nor did I like the picks of Watkins, Nelson, and Dalton.  In the end, he'll field a good QB in Stafford, close to great RBs in Bell and Howard (if/when Bell decides to play), and one good receiver in Davante Adams.  The best part of his team is his defense, where he's solid all around and potentially great at LB.

Norsemen

2017 Predicted Finish: 5-9

2017 Actual Finish: 7-7

2017 Results:  Byron had a very up-and-down year and didn't win back-to-back games until the last two of the season.  If it wasn't for the emergence of Alvin Kamara, my 5-9 prediction would have been accurate.

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