Monday Night Observations That was low-key a very satisfying game. Not only did it clinch my weekly home picking pool — only $60, but the first money I’ve won this year — but Davante Adams somehow caught only four passes for 45 yards against his old team. It’s so interesting when a defense takes away a team’s best weapon, and you wonder why every team doesn’t just do that. Reminds me of the NFC title game between the Seahawks and Panthers in 2006 when Seattle held triple-crown-winning WR Steve Smith to an 11-5-33-0 line, one week after Smith had torched the Bears for 218 yards and two TDs. It’s as though an ingenious defense got together and decided maybe they should dedicate some resources to covering that guy! Instead the Raiders looked to TD-machine Jakobi Meyers 10 times, hopefully on people’s benches, though with the byes you never know. The shine has come off Jordan Love’s star. He’s more in the Kenny Pickett probably-just-a-guy bucket rather than in the CJ Stroud (maybe a future star) one. AJ Dillon ran hard and showed his usefulness, but Derrick Henry he is not. Christian Watson looked all the way back from the hamstring injury and saw targets down the field. He should get his. Romeo Doubs also did nothing, hopefully in other people’s lineups. In life you shouldn’t be a hater and root for other people’s failures, but fantasy football is a zero-sum game, so you absolutely should be doing that, especially if due to your own mismanagement it’s all you have. Jimmy G is just a guy, as his initials indicate. (Any QB with initials JG is just a guy.) Josh Jacobs had nowhere to run for much of the game, but broke free late. He still looks more or less like the guy who led the NFL in rushing a year ago, no worse for the wear. Josh McDaniels settling for a 52-yard field goal on 4th-and-2 up four when a first down wins the game was malpractice. Even if the field goal make was slightly more likely than the first down (it’s close), the reward for making the first down is game over, while making the field goal gives the Packers get the ball back down seven with two minutes left. Less importantly, but still true, the miss costs you seven yards vs the stuff. Luckily for him, he got bailed out on a forced throw by Love and a great play by his DB.

The worst part of fantasy football is lineup setting. You know you’re going to get some close calls wrong, and instead of being like me where you want to defenestrate over it and actually root against the guys on your bench (whom really you should be rooting for), you should accept it and calmly incorporate the new information into your subsequent decisions. But in a season of lineup errors, this was maybe the worst week I’ve ever had on that front — or so I thought. And then, with that idea in my head, I made a last-minute switch that made it catastrophically worse. I had Kirk Cousins in my lineup against the Chiefs in one league, but I read somewhere that Anthony Richardson’s points per minute were tops in the league (remember he got hurt early in one game, coincidentally the other one when I used him over Cousins the week Cousins went bananas against the Eagles), so I made the swap. Richardson of course got hurt in the first half (again!), with five points, and again I have Cousins on my bench in a high total late game. As I’m stewing over that, I’m also upset I started CJ Stroud (even though I knew the Falcons were the type of team to grind games into the muck) over Matthew Stafford who has Cooper Kupp back. At this point, it’s the first half of the late games, and Stafford already has two TD passes and a decent amount of yardage. Everything I’ve done has been wrong. But there’s more. I sat Jared Goff in the Steak League (for obvious reasons) and Goff (in this TD-heavy league) has three TD passes and a rushing TD! My alternative was Brock Purdy, who plays Sunday night, and I went Purdy. Moreover, I had Kyle Pitts in as my flex in one league, due to byes and injuries, and at the last second I swapped him out for Skyy Moore because (and this is what drove me nearly to suicide) I looked on Fantasypros, and those midwits had Moore higher in their PPR flex rankings. Keep in mind this is the same Fantasypros that gave my Main Event NFBC team an F, the one that was in first place much of the year and finished second. I used Moore over Pitts and didn’t even consider Zach Moss with Jonathan Taylor coming back. But I haven’t gotten to the pièce de résistance yet. Feeling positive Cousins was going to go bananas against the Chiefs and Stafford against the Eagles, I thought — well, I’m stuck with Purdy and his likely meager output in the Steak League, but I can still swap him out for Dak Prescott in the Sunday night game! After all, I had Prescott in initially, and (I did two seconds of research) the Cowboys defense is No. 1 against the pass. (Of course, it only dimly occurred to me they were No. 1 against the pass because they faced the Giants, Jets, Patriots and Cardinals.) So I made the swap, watched the game this morning, and it’s only because I am able to express myself via this post that I haven’t pulled a Jeffrey Epstein. (Just kidding, everyone knows Epstein didn’t kill himself!) And the final kick in the nuts (although it’s almost funny at this point) is that Goff outscored Purdy by one point from my bench in Steak, i.e., it was still a bad decision to have Purdy in, even though, I tried to hedge against that by inflicting utter catastrophe on my Primetime team which is 1-4 and pretty much drawing dead even when Saquon Barkley returns. . . . The other lead lining in all this is that when I checked the final scores of the late games this morning (I quit watching half way through because I was so annoyed), Cousins and Stafford did almost nothing in the second half, i.e., the Stroud-Stafford decision wasn’t that bad, and Richardson was in fact probably the right call over Cousins had Richardson not gotten hurt. And Purdy/Goff made little difference. In other words, I had imagined a narrative of disaster (besides the truly idiotic Pitts/Moore move) that didn’t exist and used it to justify the one truly catastrophic decision Purdy/Prescott that might have destroyed my Primetime’s chances to compete as it took me from 2-3 to 1-4. The moral of this story is threefold: (1) Don’t listen to other people. You will make your own mistakes, but that is 100x better than making someone else’s; (2) For the love of God, once you’ve decided on your players never make implusive, last-second switches, barring new and *material* information; and (3) Do not spin up narratives about how because you have failed at (1) so far, so that you need to violate (2). . . . The Giants lost by 15 despite being plus-three on turnovers, including a pick six at their goal line which was essentially a 14-point play. But for the second half against the Cardinals, they have been not just beaten but absolutely destroyed for 18 of the season’s 20 quarters. They are not a top-31 team with their current healthy roster, and now Daniel Jones is going for an MRI on his neck. If Jones is okay, Darren Waller, who everyone was bellyaching about, will be just fine, however. I said this last week, on my NOSTR feed, but no one really sees it, so it’s just a place where I jot down mental notes. It’s worth revisiting the De’Von Achane discussion in this post. CJ2K is a good comp, only if Chris Johnson were playing for the Greatest Show On Turf Rams. Raheem Mostert had a good day, averaging 6.5 YPC, but Achane had more than double at 13.7 YPC. The Dolphins moved the ball with such ease and in such huge chunks, they could have won that game by 50. I went to the park yesterday to get some sun and read a book rather than watch the London game, but got back before the fourth quarter, pleased to see Josh Allen, Gabe Davis and Travis Etienne hadn’t yet done much for my opponents. (By the way, the book (Broken Money) is excellent. Damar Hamlin did a CPR tour in London, replete with gifts of defibrillators to youth organizations, because young people have always have had heart attacks!, but was inactive. I know people might be upset that I’m harping on poor Hamlin (who really was a victim), but turning a crime against humanity into this abject charade is too much to stomach. I faded the top QBs, and that would have worked out just fine had I made even 60th percentile lineup calls this year. If CJ Stroud (who is on pace for a zero-interception career) is the real deal, consider how loaded the AFC is at quarterback with Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson, Trevor Lawrence already there. And that’s with surefire Hall of Famer Aaron Rodgers out for the year and possible Hall of Famer Russell Wilson looking cooked. I neglected to mention I swapped in Jonathon Cooper for Will Anderson as an IDP lineman at the last second, and Cooper doesn’t show up in the boxscore, even though he wasn’t listed as a pre-game inactive, and I can’t find any news on it. On RotoWire in his game log, he’s listed as “DNP”. And on Twitter, if you search for Cooper, you get 100 posts by a bot called “JonathonCooperBreakoutSzn.” The information ecoystem is deterioriating in real time. I argued with Seslowsky during our Survivor video about not overbidding on Jaleel McLaughlin and was set to take the W when Javonte Williams logged a full practice Friday. But Williams was scratched, and McLaughlin caught a TD and had 89 yards on 12 touches, making him worth it, at least for this week. It’s interesting that during the preseason Williams was deemed the healthy, fully-recovered back while Breece Hall was still working his way back and being eased in. DeAndre Hopkins looked more or less like his old self, and Ryan Tannehill only had eyes for him. I ask this every week, but what is the purpose of this Patriots roster? Why even bother? Rhamondre Stevenson, who I liked before the year, has his value on life support. I know the receivers dropped a lot of passes, but there’s something not quite right about the Ravens offense under Todd Monken. Cooper Kupp looked very much like himself, but Puka Nacua can still be Robert Woods. Like Kupp, Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase are back. It feels like the season finally started in Week 5 for a lot of players and teams. Justin Jefferson left the game in the fourth quarter after hurting his hamstring. He seemed to get hurt two other times, earlier this year too, but returned to those games. Maybe he’s been playing through something the whole time. A couple weeks ago, you’d have been aghast you had to settle for Chase at pick 2, instead of Jefferson at 1, but that’s now flipped 180 degrees. Did I really swap out Kyle Pitts (11-7-87-0) for Skyy Moore (2-2-11-0) at the last second because of something I saw on Fantasypros? Why yes I did.