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I decided, on a bit of a lark, to move the waiver to Tuesday’s this season. The thought behind this is that it makes more sense to talk about players being added and dropped when the information could prove useful as opposed to after the wire has already ended on a Wednesday. Now I will probably reflect on some losses and gains come Wednesdays, but for now I am content with discussing player movements at a more relevant time.

One player move that worked in the short term was the pickup of Dunbar (RB) for the Cowboys. He was a PPR pickup and paid out some as a flex this week. It wasn’t terribly much but it floated me and my partner to a win. Of course, he tore his knee up in that game so he will be on the IR moving forward. Who should I replace him with at flex? There are a handful of choices.

Eric Decker/Leonard Hankerson, WR
Flex is about a playmaker who gets points. Decker has fit quite naturally into his #2 position, and generates +10 points each time he plays, with a possibility of breaking 20 every game. I mean EVERY game. Hankerson is a feast or famine option based on how well Julio Jones is being held in check. I’d go for Decker if available.

Kick Pick
The kicker is an oft overlooked position that has increasing value this season, given the proliferation of sputtering offenses. To that end I suggest bringing in a streamer. There is still enough talent out there that you are best off taking the week by week look for the best possible D. Matchup. Few teams are getting shut out. Most are putting up 9, and we know how they get there.

D-Nice
Don’t fret if you cannot get the Broncos or the Seahawks. Odds are the Giants are available. I’m serious. Though often laughed at due to a lack of real starpower on the D-line, the Giants have quietly become a force to be reckoned with. Considering their schedule moving forward, I think there is real hope here.

 

My mid-kid was flipping through some of my books today, eyeballing stuff i’ve published and growing more and more curious with each turning page. It helped remind me that I keep my boys out of a great deal of my life, peeling back the layers of onion at a rate I find appropriate. Perhaps what I find appropriate isn’t the way to go. These are curious boys who deserve to know more about their pop (nope, can’t say pop and feel like I belong to this century–dad it is) and what he does when they aren’t around.

I started reading around them more–monkey see monkey do. It half-worked for the kittens when their mom attempted to train them. I figure it ought to work for the boys, but so far the 50/50 rule applies. Maybe introducing them to the writer’s life will work at that same rate or better. I’m hopeful.

Some Thoughts:

1. Before long I’ll have outpaced even the Shadowrun years with this post…
2. Giants and Jets and Bills remaining schedules are conducive to winning. What if these three teams wind up in the playoffs (with the latter two being AFC wildcards behind those dang Patriots)? Best FB year ever.
3. What would make it better would be if Landry was traded to the Giants, giving us Cruz, Landry, Randle, and Beckham. The trade seems very unlikely, because Landry represents talent and heart, but the G-men need that 4th wide and then need a TE and maybe a few DE to be really tough.
4. 99 Homes looks very interesting… or really stupid. The director, Ramin Bahrani is the real deal.
5. Refs stole the game from the Lions tonight. The VP of officiating straight up admitted it.
6. All day McDonalds bfast is a thing. Wait… I don’t care.

At the beginning of this new week I am excited to note that I have been getting into a good routine with getting work done and moving past simply catching up on classes. Now, I’m not there yet, but I’m getting closer. The stuff about decluttering my life is a huge part of that. The rest of what is happening has to do with recognizing that opportunity is a fickle sort of thing and you mustn’t ignore it. I choose not to ignore it ever again.

So, here I am reflecting on all of this and still, in the corner of my mind, carrying all of that stuff around from yesterday and trying to unpack what it means. In terms of the football stuff, I recognize that the coach, being the leader of a winning high school program, has other things going on. The larger program, his actual job, acquires the greater part of his mental energy. This smaller team is really about a father teaching a son his trade, and that can be dangerous, because it can prevent him from recognizing that the rest of us are fathers and mothers with as much at stake and some of us have been down there between the hash marks and recognize what we are doing as giving our kids an opportunity to experience something we loved. Beyond that, it can be hard to be a winner and have a system and recognize that your system might not work under all conditions.

Still, meditation teaches me to accept and appreciate all situations as temporary and to get out of them what I can. I can learn a lot about me from what I am watching them go through and how I am reacting. I can also learn about myself by what I choose to do moving forward…

Especially if what I choose to do is nothing at all.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Very successful day for my pro football teams. Someone had to lose and I am grateful that it was the Bills. I only like the Bills because of Rex Ryan, and that cannot supersede my Giant fan-ness. The Jets handled business across the pond and now have a well deserved rest week.
2. Fantasy isn’t looking as epic. I’m in a battle in both leagues and it comes down to RB and QB play tonight from both teams.

At some point frustration just boils over. It doesn’t necessarily come from one thing or even two, but once it does it isn’t long before I’m some blog bound version of Lewis Black just spitting vitriolic verse after vitriolic verse with no end in sight. The tipping point came near half-time in the pee wee tackle football game when my son, who’d only been a part of less than a handful of snaps till then, trotted off the field after a on-sides kick and fixed me with ‘the look’. I’m intimately familiar with the look. I taught it to him. Its the look that says, WTF am I even doing here, and please realize that from this moment forward I fully intend to check the F out. Moments later a teammate who does get minutes came over to the sideline, motioned for my son to get up and then proceeded to take his seat.

I was done.

Then my boys told me they were done. Looks like both of my football age kids have decided to take a break from tackle next fall season. They explained that the issue was boredom and lack of enjoyment. Both recognize that there is little to know chance of them playing on the offensive side of the ball except as linemen. Neither are over 68 lbs, so even that proposition isn’t going to yield much success or joy for the sport. In fact, the joy for the sport has largely been killed off in both boys. I’m not surprised. They spend the majority of their practices standing in a straight line, watching the starters practice, or getting pummeled by linemen at least twice their size. This is hardly acceptable, but even less so when you consider that we have a roster no larger than 18 and most practices and games we only have 16 players and start 11. Of the remaining 5 non-starters, only two get the minimum or near minimum in snaps allowed for players (5). The other three see limited and situational action–mostly as linemen. In fact, unless you’re a starter you’re only ever coming in on offense as a lineman. My boys come in on defense as cornerbacks, and the older one, who isn’t much for tackling, doesn’t see hardly any time at all on that side of the ball either. In fact, only 2-3 players ever touch the ball on offense. It has become so predictable that this last game I watched the opposing coach point out the offensive play while we were breaking huddle. He did this multiple times. So, is it really a surprise when they decide football is crap and they ought to stick to soccer where they can get minutes and have practices that actually challenge then within their zone of proximal development?

Now its a rant.

Meanwhile I am here fighting a kitten invasion. I didn’t realize how much of a cat person I wasn’t until I had five. It is beyond reasonable to have that much raw kitten energy (and training ‘accidents’) under one roof. It is clearly time for these little guys and gals to move on before they decide this is gonna be their home for ever.

I could go on, but I promised I’d keep these blogs to ten minutes…

I stumbled across The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and realized that my finding that book was no accident. I think I’ve been looking for it for a while; struggling to figure out why, despite having a large home, I never have room for anything. That question was answered straight away: I keep a great deal of stuff I don’t need.

I started cutting back on clutter this summer, hoping to affect my kids in some way. I’ve become increasingly aware of this responsibility I have as a father to set a good example for the boys around me and to be a really good person so that they know what being good looks like and hopefully make the decision to be good as well. This choice is more about keeping only what we need and gaining a better appreciation of what we have in the process. We do in fact have a lot of extraneous junk. I’m talking straight up trash–old pieces of leftover paper from cutouts and letters from stick on letter packs that were never used. This is solely the hall closet, mind you. I have a lot more to dig through before I hit the gold mine of stuff to get rid of.

It ought to take us a few weeks to really pare down, but this is the right way to go.

I’ve posted a lot of words this year about youth football and how I’ve felt about the season thus far. I go back and forth about my motives here. It is hard to get a real sense of what is brewing beneath all of the personal disappointment and confusion I feel about how my own children are being utilized on the team. I am used to watching my boys be team MVP candidates and, at the very least, be in the conversation for playing time. It is a hard shot to go from that to hoping my kids get in the game for at least five plays over the span of two hours. Still, as I continue to unpack the way I was feeling and process everything I watch go down in practice and on the field, I am closer to recognizing the real issue at play here: I am noticing a groundswell around youth football in the way it is played and reacted to. We are quickly taking sides for or against a sport that isn’t going away and in that we are losing sight of and ability to control the real issue at play here, which is how do we make this sport we love more safe for the people we love who are playing it?

I read an article on Grantland about the recent death of High School player Evan Murray that stated, “American football is the great, gravitational force at the center of the universe in which our spectacle sports operate. It is fine to operate from the moral high ground, but the fact remains that the existential crisis of physical destruction in American football is an existential crisis at the heart of American sports.” There is truth in those words and truth in the idea that, perhaps, we shouldn’t let our kids play this sport. Well, I prefer they play the sport now and develop the fundamentals for safety instead of being thrust into it at an age and a style of coaching more concerned with wins (and thus job security) than the safety of the kids. It is a slippery slope at all levels. Coaches and players and parents want wins. We want to cheer the big hits and in fact do cheer the hits that end with a player being carted off the field. As a result, we lean on the players and plays that get the wins and the big cheers.

Ostensibly, my son is not being given the chance to do what he is good at, which is utilize his speed, because he hasn’t shown that toughness to go out there and tackle the way some of the other kids do. I get it. When I played the first thing the coaches did was throw me, a raw walk-on, onto special teams and demand that I lay out to bring down the returner. What my boys’ coach did was to throw my eldest on the offensive line and tell him to block boys who are, at the lightest, twenty pounds heavier than his 68 lb frame. It is worse in practice where he lines up against kids who are anywhere from 120 to 187lbs and is expected to hold them back for ten seconds. That is when he isn’t lined up against his 65 lb little brother in one on one drills, which is a whole different set of issues a father can only hope he doesn’t have to deal with (fortunately, I turned it around so they war on the field and not in the living room).

I will continue to unpack this and continue to search for understanding. I know this: I am spending a great deal of mental energy thinking about coaching and I’m not actually coaching right now. That seems like a waste of psychological resources.

 

 

I’m off the pine, as I shared previously. I have that first sweet taste of W and want more. Now, having a timing issue continues to present a problem–I wanted to pick up Vick a week ago just in case and wanted to drop Matthews because I felt I had a need elsewhere (Hankerson) and could stream him in a week. None of that wound up being true, but the win came true and I’m grateful.

Now comes the plan to find more. I think that plan is based around my running game. I have Bell and Forte in there now and hopefully I’ll be able to stream a back later in the bye weeks. The WR situation is less than desirable with Cruz pulled from practice yet again. That dude is as soft as Derrick Rose these days (yep, injured again!)

My picks are decent. I’ll post the running total next week. For this week, pay close attention to what lies below…

PIT over BAL
Vick isn’t the 2004 Madden 99 he once was, but the dude can ball. He does best these days with weapons around him. He has that in spades. PIT in a rout.

NYJ over MIA
J-E-T-S! There is a lot of anger over letting the Eagles off the hook. Expect no let down from that D this week and expect even less running down hill from the Dolphins.

ATL over HOU
The Falcons are rolling and will continue to do so for several weeks. Its a strong playoff look for a team that was supposed to rock last year and sucked for lack of a better receiver. By better I mean Julio was hurt.

NYG over BUF
Giants 2-2. This is a must win for both teams in a sense, but I feel like the G-men want and need it more. There are fine things happening in Gotham, including a defense that is overlooked but still very successful…

OAK over CHI
Raider nation rejoice! Without the Cutlet’s dad, the Bears are not going to be a problem.

CIN over KC
I give this one to Cincy in my close pick of the week. Both offenses are moving in the right direction, but without a consistent ability to throw the ball downfield to receivers, this game belongs to cincy–a team that can

IND over JAX
Finally, a schedule that allows for some wins. Didn’t feel that way at all the first few…

CAR over TB
Cam…whoa, Cam!

PHI over WAS
The Eagles are gaining confidence and Cousins is losing it. I se a few picks here bringing on the bboo birds.

SD over CLE
ARI over STL
DEN over MIN
GB over SF
NO over DAL

SEA over DET
My last discussable pick is about a monday night showdown sans Marshawn Lynch. He ain’t about that Monday Night action and it will show in the run and short pass game… Still a lot that needs to be figured out in Seattle.

My boys go to a school that wound up on the news tonight. The story was about how the Charter school CEO came down to the high school and fired the principal and VP on the spot. The reality of what happened is somewhat different. Both P and VP are out and the CEO did come down there and handle it personally–handled it badly I might add. Still, beyond that lies a lot of media spin and the anger of parents and teachers who, though badly mishandling the situation, have every right to be mad.

My boys are in the k-8 side of the school. The pair that go there have never known another k-8 school. Now at least one of the boys seems to be on the verge of losing his teacher to this situation, given that many reports are surfacing that she has or will soon quit. This is the part that gets me angry and compels me to walk back through the story to find out the truth. See, I believe schools are really about teachers and without good teaching the school has little value. This teacher is one of four my son has had in his time there, and it doesn’t appear that any suitable replacement can be called up and brought to speed quickly. The other one is already dealing with a parade of substitute teachers as the result of a maternity leave, and isn’t learning much of anything this year. Still, this school and this community of parents seems worthwhile.

The real issue for me is how this got so out of control. I stand by the teachers and they in turn stand by the P and VP, but why did it spiral? A lot of people became vocal and someone called the news, that’s why. Now it is out of the hands of the parents and in the hands of a media hungry for a story and a resolution–no matter what that resolution winds up being. I’m worried the fallout will continue to spill over the the elementary side, and if that becomes the case, my boys will looking for a new school for the first time.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’ve given it a lot of thought and I believe there is something to why I’m disappointed about this year’s tackle season and team. At first I thought it was just about my kid’s lack of playing time. The main player went from scoring touchdowns on practically every carry to not being allowed to touch the ball and instantly becoming the lightest lineman on the team. He isn’t built that way, and the reasoning the coach gave, though cogent and valid in regards to the way he runs a team, is not at all sensible to me. You should not penalize a kid for not playing defense the way you want by taking him away from the position/side of the ball he is actually passionate about. I sat and watched him, learning all the weaknesses and things he needed to develop as a player and realized that there are absolute deficiencies in his game, but he is not being coached on how to correct them. In truth, the problem this year is coaching. I fear the coach has too much going on in his life, so as a result the players spend a significant portion of practice standing around or engaging in 11 starters on whatever bench player is left–usually my two boys. The starters learn the play beats and get a confidant rhythm against a D that is undermanned and outsized. It is basically an ego stroke for the starters and a pain clinic for the bench players. I am fully done with the whole experience this year and need to tune it out, before I get even more upset. Hopefully they win the championship like the boys want. Short of that, the season is largely a bust.

I was scanning the audible.com website when I came across yet another Elizabeth Gilbert (eat, pray, love) novel that strained the boundary between personal narrative and self-help. In truth, this latest effort feels a lot more like self-help than anything else. It set me to thinking about the genre in general and about how some people feel qualified to ‘preach’ about how to do things the right way whereas others don’t feel like they have the ethical or moral lungs to do so. Then I recognized something fundamental: All these people are really doing is talking about what worked for them and about how they were able to navigate the common difficulties of life and emerge intact. It set me to thinking about my own life and trials and learned experiences. This isn’t me saying I am going to write a self-help novel or even blog (unless that is in fact what I have been doing all along). This is me saying that all writing is in essence a form of that. We are always expressing experiences and trying to make sense of those experiences and our own choices. Every so often we figure out a routine that works and then, if we are very lucky, we get to share it with someone who it might affect in some small way.

1. Some Thoughts:
   This weekend marked my first win of the year in both leagues I am in. It also marked the first loss of the year for the Jets, first win for the Giants, and first win for my boys’ Jr. Pumas. That last bit is the most meaningful to me, because I got a chance to see the smile on their faces as a result of the victory.
2. That’s the good news. The bad is that a kid was carried out on a stretcher. A player from the Casa Grande JPW Rattlers suffered what appeared to be a head injury late in the 4th quarter. It is not clear how he was injured but since it was a head related injury, local authorities erred on the side of caution. I hope the kid is okay.
3. The disappointing part is the way the kids are being used in the games. On the one hand I am disappointed as a dad to see my eldest go from 6 tds in 7 touches to being the kid who doesn’t get to touch the ball at all and in truth is shoved on the offensive line as a ‘We gotta play him somewhere’ sort of play. The program he is a part of is starting to trouble me in general. The coaching style focuses on whole team activity vs. breaking kids up into groups and allowing them to move through stations for the 1:15 of practice they get twice a week. I have to defer to the coach, because he played college ball successfully a lot longer than I did, so has a sustained experience that level of coaching and also coaches a successful high school program—his second such program. On the other hand, high school kids come pre-loaded with a set of skills, which are usually learned at this level. I worry those fundamentals are being ignored in exchange for adherence to an offensive and defensive philosophy. Still, no helicoptering. They’ll learn this thing one way or another. In the end, I might just wind up teaching them myself.

I want to talk–nay, rant–about football and the state of the universe.

Let me start by saying this rant is powered by a bad Jets loss and, more fully, me having four kittens bent on destroying my home. I am someone who has claimed to be a ‘cat person’ for years, but four kittens and a momma who wants things just how she wants things for her kittens spells bad news, especially when there is a wimpy Yorkie involved. I don’t want to recount how many times I had to pull his whimpering butt out of a corner after being dominated by a kitten. It just isn’t cool, man. Not cool at all.

Also not cool: My lack of rhythm in fantasy football. I long labored under the impression that I was a fantasy impresario, a real candidate for fantasy consigliere to the stars. Maybe some of that would be true if I just figured out which of my instincts apply to this week or next week or the week after. Case and point: I saw something in Hankerson last week, enough to recognize the budding chemistry between him and Matty Ice. I did not, however realize the pitch count Roddy White has been on until just today. This in turn caused me to drop Rishard Matthews as a result of streaming receivers (poorly I might add) the week he scores 2 TDs to the tune of 100+ yards. Yeah, that isn’t happening next week, so hopefully I can snag him again in free agency, but the problem is I needed him this week. That or I need Manning to put up less than 30 fantasy points to record my first win of the year–that with Weeden and McCown (Luke at least) as my starters.

The fact is, I’m not putting in the necessary time to be truly great at breaking down football match ups. Sure, there are experts who do put in the time and still suck worse than me, but they ain’t me. I come pre-loaded with the belief that I can do anything I put my mind to. I haven’t ben proven wrong yet–yet I haven’t put my full energies to much of anything over the past decade. Perhaps that is a larger conversation to be shared. It seems like being good enough is good enough for most people.

Not sure it is good enough anymore for me.