After two years of trying to inject some offensive line talk into the fantasy football discussion, I think the time has come to pack up my knickknacks in a box and call it a day. I’d like to thank Scott Fish and the Fantasy Football Oasis for allowing my thoughts to find a place to be read. I’d also like to thank Gary Davenport who was the lead writer at the Oasis before moving on to Fantasy Sharks prior to [...]

One of the things I like to do toward the end of fantasy sport seasons is look back at my predictions before the season started and call myself either a genius or an idiot (or maybe some combination of the two – fantasy football’s idiot savant – I wonder if that will stick). Before I do that, I figured I’d add a few words about the Tim Tebow experience. I was able to watch Tebow for the first time this [...]

My initial plan in this week’s The Big Picture was to profile the worst three offensive lines and to try to figure out what went wrong. However, in looking over the Football Outsiders stats, it was hard to determine exactly which teams had the worst offensive lines. Based on their rushing statistics, the bottom five are the Lions, Rams, Chiefs, and Titans. Tennessee has the second best adjusted sack rate, which wasn’t a surprise to me. They have not done [...]

There are many reasons why offensive lines are not the subject of much fantasy football writing, but I think chief among these reasons is the fact that offensive line play is hard to quantify statistically. Even if the offensive line does exactly what it is supposed to do, a defensive player can make a fantastic play and ruin the entire effort. A play can also break down (I almost think Ben Roethlisberger roots for this) and a positive outcome can [...]

We expect a lot of our football players. As I detailed last week, we want players to rub some dirt on their injuries and get out there and play. Today, I’d like to talk about a different issue of expectation. There is a certain expectation that these guys play like animals from snap to whistle, then immediately turn it off in between plays. Do you know where I am going with this? I don’t condone what Ndamukong Suh did, but [...]

I have been thinking about the term “injury prone” lately. I think we as fantasy owners are somewhat unfair to football players by labeling them as injury prone or saying “if he could only stay on the field.” Let’s face it: fantasy owners are pretty selfish. We not only want our players to play through injury but to score as much as they can. I know that is the name of the game, but I don’t have to feel completely [...]

I can’t stand listening to ESPN. I know that the sports world generally isn’t the best place to hear reasoned arguments. Yet, whenever I listen to “analysis” on ESPN it comes down this: good decisions work out, bad decisions don’t. There is no thought to process, no thought to lessons learned from failure (which is often where most lessons are learned). This may not be local to ESPN, but it is often where I happen to hear it the most. [...]

It is right tackle week! It seems like every other entity has its own cultural awareness week, so why not right tackles? They aren’t paid as much as left tackles (unless the team’s quarterback is a southpaw), but they are often just as important. Before we get on with the celebration of your broadening cultural awareness, a tribute: have you noticed recently that centers have grabbed numbers in the 50’s. Players like the Steelers’ Maurkice Pouncey are flouncing around with [...]

I enjoyed this week’s slate of games. Maybe it was because I didn’t have to worry about the Bear and Packers, although I think they can worry about themselves. I took in the intense battle between the Patriots and Steelers, the Eagles being resurrected against the Cowboys, and topped it off with Chargers and Chiefs (although I missed the end of the game because it ran off my DVR). The first and third games were very competitive and the Philadelphia [...]

In addition to writing about offensive lines, I follow college basketball closely. One of the many things that annoys me about college basketball coverage is the annual complaint about the “weak bubble.” In other words, media pundits do not believe there aren’t enough good teams to make up the NCAA tournament. Granted, one of those weak teams last year turned out to be VCU (who made the Final Four), but talk of the weak bubble persists. I thought of the [...]