« New Group Launches "Stay the Course" Ads | Main | Outrage Fatigue »
August 22, 2007
Wednesday Evening
1. In 2007, lots of folks play fantasy football, which is great, because back in 1992 - when me and my crew from Black Rock started our league - it was kind of a complicated thing to explain: "Well, you make your own team, ya see, using players from, uhh, real life..."
Yeah, we got started early, well before we could drink beers. Me and Doug were 11; Phil U., Phil W., Bigg Slamm and Josh were 13; and Lil Slamm - fuck, he was only 8 or so. But we knew the NFL inside and out - the Bills were about to go to their third straight Super Bowl, for chrissake, and when we weren't playing tackle in the St. Francis Xavier dirt, Super Tecmo Bowl was a daily focus. So we used the rules I'd found outlined in what must have been one of the first (maybe the first) fantasy football books and started the league one late summer day in my garage. That year, the Butte Holes, Super Keagnus, Lotto Monkeys, Armenian Terrorists, Bigg Slamms, and the rest battled it out to make it to what we dubbed the "Super Game." I think I won that inaugural year, on the strength of Falcons scrubs Chris Miller, Michael Haynes, and Andre Rison. Since this was pre-internet, all of our scoring was done by hand, pencilled in composition notebooks, relying on Monday's box scores in the evening edition of the Buffalo News.
Fifteen years later, we're still at it. Members have come and gone - and Biggs, we'll miss ya this year homie! - but the core is still strong. Anyways, as we approach the 15th annual Black Rock Fantasy Football League draft this weekend, my man Phil Urban - one of the founders - sent out an e-mail today entitled "Sacred Text":
Anyone who recognizes The Official Franchise Football League Fantasy Football Journal by Dick Geibel was most likely hanging out in Caps's garage waiting for Randall Cunningham to be announced as the first ever pick in BRFFL draft history. (He subsequently blew out his knee in one of the first games and was lost for the season) This was the book that gave us the idea to start playing fantasy football. It also inspired a few bad ideas, such as a TD-only scoring system with double points, whereby a player could potentially score a TD worth 24 points. It also seems that this book gave Doug the idea of drafting individual defensive players for one year. (a failed experiment)
Among the many highlights in the book, it ranks Patriots wideout Hart Lee Dykes as the 11th best rookie to come out of college that season. Jim Everett, Neal Anderson, Jerry Rice and Rodeny Holman top the lists for each of the major offensive skill positions. I could go on and on, but I'll bring the book to the draft for ya'll to take a look at.
Over the years, my team has morphed from the aforementioned Terrorists - a weird choice in retrospect, yeah; but I was 11, and it sounded bad-ass - into the Buffalo Scrubs into the Wildebeests into the MF Wildebeests into the squad's current incarnation, Erasmus' Razzle Dazzle. Unhappily, the Dazzle came up short in last year's Super Game - the first time I'd even got to the damn thing since hitting puberty - but I got it locked this year.
2. More real talk on the Democrats' equivocating re: Iraq:
Many Democrats are again missing the first principle of the matter and treating Iraq in political and tactical terms.
The latest view from Democrats is to adopt their politics and tactics around the proposition that the Iraq escalation is working but the Iraq leaders are not.
Confronted with an obsessed and intransigent president, Republicans in Congress who are endlessly submissive to presidential power and disastrous policies, and a Democratic national security establishment that is incoherent and careerist, the most likely outcome in September is this:
The president will win full support for the full escalation without any effective limitation in what would be the third disastrous Democratic failure in the new Congress, the first being its surrender on Iraq before the May recess, the second being its surrender on the Constitution before the August recess.
Posted by caps at August 22, 2007 05:42 PM