Commitment to Incompetence

Carson Palmer running the Raiders famous no-offense huddle.

I never had much interest in fantasy sports. I root for teams, and not for players unless they happen to play for teams I like. And the whole idea of obsessing over statistics means nothing to me. The objective of the game is to win. When you’re playing a real game, you don’t give a shit who scores what. Trust me, you don’t. So long as your team scores more than the other, it doesn’t matter whether or not you score 2 TD’s or go 3-for-4 or grab 15 rebounds. You don’t care. You care a lot more if you lose, of course – “maybe we would’ve won if I hadn’t gone 0-for-10 from the floor.”

This is particularly true in football and basketball, both of which require you to figure out on the fly what’s working and what isn’t. It’s all about making adjustments. Sometimes the adjustment is “give the ball to the other guy.” Go back and watch the NCAA championship game from last spring, and watch how Louisville wins the game by putting Russ Smith, their best player about 30 feet from the basket for the entire second half – thus spreading the floor out and creating more individual matchups they could win. Russ Smith had, by his lofty standards, a pretty bad game, and while players hate underperforming, winning championships is a pretty good tonic.

My other reason for not playing fantasy sports is that I cannot bring myself to draft players from teams that I dislike. They are the enemy. I finished second the one time I played in a fantasy baseball league, which was a NL-only league, in part because I steadfastly refused to draft anyone who played for the Dodgers. I want the Dodgers to go 0-162 and get no-hit 159 times. The Dodgers had some pitching that year which I could’ve used on my fantasy team – my team wound up being mostly St. Louis Cardinals, if I remember correctly, but it didn’t pitch all that well – but I wouldn’t ever want a Dodger to succeed. I hate everything about the Dodgers. I remember having to hope for some Dodger wins over San Diego back in 2010, when the Padres and Giants were battling for a division title. It made me feel so unclean that I thought about going to confessional afterwards. So I don’t want no stinkin’ Dodgers or Yankees or Dallas Cowboys associated with me in any way, shape, or form.

Others are certainly welcome to partake if it brings them an enjoyment of the game, of course. And I did always make it a point to participate in a different sort of office wagering shenanigans – dead pools. Journalists are particularly macabre sorts, of course, and every newsroom has a dead pool. We certainly didn’t want people to die, but we definitely didn’t want it happening while we were working the desk, because a famous politico or celebrity dying just meant MORE WORK. (And you call it a deadline because someone famous is likely to croak 10 minutes before it, just causing you more misery as you scramble to redo the next day’s edition.)

Most sports departments I was involved in, meanwhile, had their own version of the deadpool – figure out who would be the WORST team in the league before the season began. And since I love bad football, the NFL Dead Pool was my personal favourite of these.

It’s actually somewhat tricky picking the worst team in the NFL, because for years the league has tried to emphasize parity. The NFL’s great weapon for doing this, for years, was the schedule matrix used to determine the following season’s opponents. Teams could bomb out one season, have a ludicrously easy schedule the next, and promptly be in playoff contention. (That doesn’t really happen so much anymore, as the 32-team matrix is much less fluid and more locked in from year to year.) And the great unknown in a football season, of course, is injuries. That often tips the scale from a not-very-good team becoming truly awful, as their depth is depleted, but that’s hard to predict.

And it’s also hard to gauge how low the bar will be. Some years 2-14 will win by two games in the standings. Last year there were a pair of 2-14 teams. Yeech. One of those, the Kansas City Chiefs, probably wasn’t that much on the radar of deadpoolers at the start of the season. There was some talent there, but not enough to be that competitive, but they shouldn’t have been that bad. The Chiefs seemed to take on an attitude of “let’s get the coach and everyone in the front office fired” as the year wore on, and they had about the most awful thing imaginable happen off the field that left the whole organization in a state of shock. They get a mulligan. I’ve seen 8-8 predictions for the Chefs, which I think might be a tad optimistic, but they’re not deadpool-worthy this year.

The other 2-14ers of 2012, the Jacksonville Jaguars, really are that awful. They capped off their season with this ignoble performance against the Tennessee Titans (another team which looks pretty bad here at the start of 2013). I’m not sure who they’ve added to improve the squad. To be honest, I’m not even sure why the Jags exist in the first place. But hey, Tim Tebow is available now. I’m sure JAX is contemplating signing the local hero in an effort at trying to convince the Gator Nation to drive up from Gainesville and fill their empty seats at their blacked-out home games.

The temptation is always there to pick the Arizona Cardinals in the deadpool, but the Cardinals are never quite bad enough. My buddy Adell and I used to call them the 5-and-dimes, both because their owners – the Bidwell family – were/are notorious cheapskates, and also because Arizona was usually 5-10 going into the last game of the season. But 5-11 isn’t gonna cut it in a deadpool. The Cardinals may be even worse this year than last, simply because they’ve got two burgeoning juggernauts in their division – the 49ers and the Seahawks – but they also have a good sleeper deadpool pick as well, which would be the St. Louis Rams, who overachieved last season but still don’t seem all that long on talent.

Some good bets from past years aren’t so good anymore. Houston and Cincinnati are, like, actual good teams (which is kind of scary to think about), and the Detroit Lions went 4-12 last year but seemed to invent ways to lose games. Surely, they’re going to grow out of that at some point. That, and maybe they’ll finally learn how to tackle someone. The mistakes on the lakes – Cleveland and Buffalo – are much better deadpool bets, since both franchises seem bereft of both talent and ideas.

But there is one clearcut #1 deadpool selection at the start of the season, and that would be the Raiders. Gads, what a mess. They have home games v. Jacksonville and Tennessee this year, and those are the only two games on the schedule I can see them winning. Carson Palmer threw for 4,000 yds. last year and usually seemed to be the only guy on the field who knew where he was supposed to be lined up. Now he’s in Arizona. There goes the offense. They have an unsettled QB situation, a RB that’s always hurt, they lack playmakers on the outside. For “competitive” reasons, they’ve not yet named a starting QB for this Sunday’s game with the Colts – who do, in fact, have a QB, and Andrew Luck’s gonna throw for a billion yards on that sieve of a Raiders’ defense. This team is terrible, the front office is a mess, the ownership situation is muddled. ‘Commitment to Excellence’ should be replaced by ‘Commitment to Incompetence,’ since I cannot recall a sound football decision made since they last went to the Super Bowl.

So with the 1st pick in the NFL Deadpool, gimme the Raiders. But I’m open to other nominations.

Let bad football begin!