Saturday, December 12, 2015

Free Crab Legs wins Royale with Cheese regular season!

Man that season went by quickly, huh? The regular season was one week shorter this year in order to include more teams in the playoffs and have a true round-robin schedule. So here we are. And it's time to crown a regular season champ.

Congratulations to Free Crab Legs, which won its final four games of the season to finish 10-3 and beat out Taking it one game at a time by one game.


Crab Legs won convincingly, too, beating Off Constantly (there's a joke in there about crabs but I'm too tired to figure it out) 141-87 in the final game of the regular season to clinch the title.



This is the second time that Free Crab Legs has won the regular season title. The team, then known as Correctamundo, went 13-1 in 2012 but ended up losing in the championship game to Blaupunkt.

Free Crab Legs took time out of his busy schedule to send me a statement on his championship win. It reads, in full: 

Greetings Royale With Cheese, from your regular season champ!  It feels good to be back in the post season. I know what you guys are all thinking , "He is always crushing it in our league! He is always in the playoffs! Didn't he win 12 games one season!?"  All of those would be correct. So if you are tired of seeing my team dancing in the playoffs then take this advice from Not Ray Lewis:



Sidenote: I think we've officially killed the dab. When a bunch of rich old white men are doing your dance move, it's dead. So, from now on, can we leave the dabbin' to Cam?

Now for the playoffs. 

First, let's publicly shame the two teams that were so bad that they are the only ones to not make either of the playoffs: 

- SugaLumps finished 2-11 in its first year in the league. Yeah yeah, you had a baby -- OMG CONGRATS BTW SO CUTE -- but that's no excuse. You're lucky we don't have promotion and relegation (which would be fun ...)

- The Reservoir Dogs finished 5-8, which was actually a tied for 12th, but they were the only team to not break 1,000 points for, so they lost the tiebreaker.



In the consolation playoffs: 


- Jeff Fisher's Mullet and Dolphins of Old have byes in the first round, thanks to this new six-team system.

- (4) Blaupunkt plays (5) Cant Be That Hard in the first matchup. Blaupunkt won the regular-season matchup 89-63. Winner plays Dolphins.

- (3) PerpetualMotionSquad plays (6) Muscular Mathletes in the other matchup. The Mathletes won the regular season contest 100-53. Winner plays the Mullets.

In the championship playoffs: 


- Free Crab Legs and Taking it one game at a time have byes in the first round.

- (4) Big Kahuna Burger plays (5) Off Constantly in the first matchup. Off Constantly won the regular season matchup 108-69 waaaaay back in the first week of the season. Winner plays Crabs Legs.

I'm going to out Jeremy here: He's been basically controlling both Williams teams -- Burger and Crabs -- for the past several weeks, which means it's possible that he'd be playing himself next week. If that happens, I'll be on collusion high alert next week.



- (3) Academic Probation plays (6) Watt Me Whip Watt Me JJ in the other game, which is actually a rematch of last week, which Academic Probation won 74-66. Winner gets Taking it one game at a time.


Some other notes from the regular season:


- Taking it one game at a time scored the most points of any team this season, but his 1,230 is actually the lowest top number in Royale with Cheese league history. The previous low was 1,394.

- The best weekly performance of any team in 2015 was by Muscular Mathletes, which scored 146 in Week 3.

- The best individual player performance for one week goes to Drew Brees (WMWWMJJ), who had 46 points in Week 8.

My goal is to write updates for each round of the playoffs, but since I've been so slack this season, no promises.

Any thoughts, feelings, trash talk? Tweet, email or comment.

Best of luck in the playoffs (except for SugaLumps and The Reservoir Dogs because you're sad and alone at the bottom)!

- C
Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, October 18, 2015

[League Update] Week 5: The fantasy football gods are cruel and unreasonable

Let's think back to last week, shall we? When I had that awful 30-some-odd-point week and everyone was laughing at me.

You may remember that I had two starters who didn't score any points. So, like any good team owner, I put both of those underperforming (they had been for several weeks) players on my bench.

Then, this week:

- Andre Johnson scored 19 points after scoring 0 the previous two weeks and a grand total of 5.1 the first four weeks combined. On my bench.
- Ryan Mathews scored 15.6 points after scoring zero the previous week and only breaking 10 points one other time all season. On my bench.

And everyone laughed.




The fantasy football gods are cruel and unreasonable.

In other league news ... after last week we no longer have an undefeated or winless team.

The Reservoir Dogs lost their ofer status with a 96-93 win over PerpetualMotionSquad. And it wasn't taken away from them by a stat correction this time.

At the other end of the standings, Taking it one game at a time beat undefeated Academic Probation 94-84.
We now have a three-way tie for the league lead with those two teams and Free Crab Legs, which dominated the Williams Bowl with a 119-69 win over Big Kahuna Burger.

- Free Crab Legs' 119 score was the highest of the week.
- The Sad Trombone goes to Off Constantly, which was beaten 61-57 by Dolphins of Old. Gotta love having the two worst scorers of the week going against each other.



- The DOH Award clearly goes to me, because I have no idea what I'm doing with fantasy football. WMWWMJJ beat Jeff Fisher's Mullet 97-75.

Other scores;

- Blaupunkt 90, SugaLumps 77. SugaLumps is taking its lumps (see what I did there) this season. That's the team's third-straight loss and now it's tied for last place with The Reservoir Dogs.
- Cant Be That Hard 90, Muscular Mathletes 87. This was a close one, decided by the foot of Giants kicker Josh Brown on Sunday night.

There's a chance we could have a new avatar next week ... We'll have to wait and see.

Wishing you sure hands and strong ACLs.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, October 10, 2015

[League Update] Week 4: Premature celebration

Let's just get this out of the way first: My team was a dadgum dumpster fire last week.

OK, fine, it was a ... smoking landfill? Whatever. It was awful. I don't think I've ever fielded a team that bad. Thirty-six points. Two players scored zero points and one scored a half a point. I don't even understand.

Here's the worst part -- This is one of the first weeks where I spent a significant amount of time on my lineup. As I've told you, things have been busy recently, so most weeks I've just set up a healthy lineup and ignored it. Last week, I added and dropped and really thought things through. Clearly that's a bad strategy.

The lucky team that got to play me was Free Crab Legs, which won 81-36.
Smart ass.

I have no idea if that's the lowest full-roster point total in league history, but it sure does feel like it. Jeez. At least Tom CHEATER CHEATER CHEAT Brady is back this week.

Continuing with the fantasy-football-is-mean theme, The Reservoir Dogs were hardcore gloating about a close win ... until Tuesday. Stat corrections can be the worst.




Womp. Still 0-4.

Dogs actually ended up losing to the Muscular Mathletes 84-82. What happened? The Mathletes got an extra two points because Latavius Murray (OAK) had a fumble taken off of his stat line. It's a cruel game.

The highest point total this week came from Dolphins of Old with 108 in a win over SugaLumps, which would have been this week's Sad Trombone with 55 points if I hadn't crapped the bed so badly.

The Sad Trombone ... yeah, we already know. Me.



Other scores:

- Blaupunkt 72, WMWWMJJ 70. Blaupunkt had its best possible lineup in, pulling out the close win. The bench combined for a grand total of .2 points.
- Taking it one game at a time 89, Big Kahuna Burger 65. Your defense scoring negative points is totally fine when your running back, Devonta Freeman (ATL), goes ham with 32 points.
- Academic Probation 96, Cant Be That Hard 79. Academic Probation is confident at 4-0 right now, y'all. He's not messing around. Can he go 13-0? No pressure or anything.


- Off Constantly 81, PMS 69. At least when I have a player score 0 points, he's active and just useless. PMS had a player on a bye in its lineup. It probably wouldn't have made a difference, but still.

No random early London game this week, so it's your normal 1 p.m. deadline. Teams with a bye: Panthers (sad face), Dolphins, Vikings and Jets.

Wishing you sure hands and strong ACLs (and more than 30 points).
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, October 3, 2015

[League Update] Week 3: NEW AVATAR ALERT!

It feels a little early to be doing this, doesn't it? We're entering Week 4 and we already have a new avatar.

Usually, I feel like, it takes a little longer to have just one undefeated team left. (I could look this up, but that would take research and stuff, and y'all don't pay me enough for that.)

(OK, fine, I looked back at last year and the new avatar actually happened after Week 3 then, too, so forget everything I just said.)

I love the parity in this league right now. Only one team is 3-0, and only one is 0-3. Everyone else is crammed in the middle at 1-2 or 2-1.

That 3-0 team? With a 88-70 win over The Reservoir Dogs (the 0-3 team), Academic Probation has taken sole possession of first place in the RWC league standings.


That means this beautiful mug is our new Twitter avatar!


What's fun to look at, though, is whose team is actually playing the best. Right now, Off Constantly leads the points for standings with 311, followed by PMS, Muscular Mathletes and Jeff Fisher's Mullet. Academic Probation comes in at fifth, but has had the third fewest points scored against him.

It's all about matchups.

Speaking of, let's take a look back at what happened last week.

- The week's highest scorer was Muscular Mathetes with 146. She beat Off Constantly (!!), which had 120 (the third-highest point total of the week.
- The Sad Trombone goes to Blaupunkt, who scored 63 in a loss to Jeff Fisher's Mullet (thanks!).


- The DOH! Award goes to Dolphins of Old, which left a minimum of 20 points on his bench and lost by less than a point to Watt Me Whip Watt Me JJ. LaGarrette Blount had 27 on the bench and Dolphins' starting running back, Ronnie Hillman scored just 7. He did have Cam Newton in the game, which was a good choice last week. Just not quite enough.

The rest of the scores:

- Taking it one game at a time 108, Free Crab Legs 67: It probably wouldn't have made a difference, but Ben Roethlisberger going down really hurt Crab Legs. But I got exciting, thinking we'd see the debut of Jameis in the RWC league! Nope. Derek Carr. BORING.

- Big Kahuna Burger 91, Cant Be That Hard 65: CBTH had two solid quarterback performances last week with Andy Dalton scoring 30 on the bench and Matt Ryan scoring 23. Too bad no one on the rest of the team (other than the defense) scored 10 points.

- PerpetualMotionSquad 138, SugaLumps 101: High scoring game, this. Lumps' best player was the defense, which just destroyed Colin Kaepernick. 4 picks, 2 sacks, 2 TDs. Ouch.

Now it's time for TWEET OF THE WEEK!


Totally unrelated to our league, but Jeremy retweeted it and it made me laugh. Bring the fire this week, y'all.

So I obviously didn't write this early enough to warn you about the Thursday night game, but I do have another warning for you: 9:30 a.m. football in England! The Jets and the Dolphins have the honor(?) of playing that early game, so be sure to get lineups set for them tonight or early tomorrow.

Finally, sorry about missing the Week 2 update. Hope it won't happen again this year. As always, if you want to guest write the update one week, I'm open to it.

Wishing you sure hands and strong ACLs.
Posted by at 2 comments:

Thursday, September 17, 2015

[League update] Week 1: Hey, I wrote a blog post, y'all!

You didn't think this would actually happen, did you? Be honest. Neither did I. But here we are, the first league update of the Royale With Cheese season!

These will be shorter than in years past and I'm not going to take the time to copyedit them so don't yell at me about typos.

I am open to having guest columnists, though. If you want to write the league update one week, let me know. You know how to reach me.

Now to the important stuff.


First, it's time to introduce the newest member of the league: SugaLumps.



He replaces Something, who couldn't bother to buy a TV and do the math to figure out when games come on in Hawaii. He could be back in a future season, though.

A bunch of y'all changed team names, too, which is at once confusing and awesome. The award for my favorite new team name goes to: Watt Me Whip Watt Me JJ. Genius. I laugh every time.



To the football.

The superlatives:

- Highest point total: Me! (119-105 over Dolphins of Old) KEEP DEFLATIN' THOSE BALLS, TOM! Cheaters always win.
- Sad trombone: Muscular Mathletes (62-84 to WMWWMJJ). Deja vu?
- I haven't decided what the third superlative will be yet (suggestions?) so let's watch Josh McCown try to morph into a helicopter.



Jesus.

Other results:

- Cant Be That Hard 88 - Taking it one game at a time 74. Greg Olsen only got 1.1 points? No wonder the Panthers' offense looked horrendous.
- Blaupunkt 89 - PMS 66. You know you're in trouble when the best player on your team is Jay Cutler.
- Free Crab Legs 107, The Reservoir Dogs 70. Free Crab Legs should be contractually obligated to start Jameis Winston every game. The Titans beat the Bucs like a drum. The TITANS, people!
- Off Constantly 108, Big Kahuna Burger 69. What if we all threw our game against Off Constantly so that he wouldn't be able to make the joke? Yeah, he'd go undefeated, but it would almost be worth it. Right?

And now it's time for TWEET(s) OF THE WEEK!
Classic stuff. He got excited by a touchdown and then realized that the player wasn't even on his team. Blaupunkt still won his game, though. Which means ...
Your Thursday Night Football looks like this: Broncos vs. Chiefs. Get those players set before kickoff. Then get the rest of the lineup set before Sunday.

I told you these things were going to be shorter.
Posted by at 1 comment:

Friday, August 21, 2015

2015 draft information: It's 2 p.m. Aug. 22!

The draft is currently scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 22. That's tomorrow! 

We will be doing a live online draft. If you can be there, great! If not, you can always set your pre-draft rankings on the fantasy site and the computer will draft for you. This isn't the worst thing. We've had some pretty good auto-drafted teams in the league. 

**As I said in an email earlier today: If you're one of the 7 that said you can draft tomorrow and you actually cannot, let me know ASAP so I can decide if we need to postpone!**

The draft order will be the reverse of last year's standings in a snake format, which means that the order flips each round. If you picked first in the first round, you'll pick last in the second round, and on and on. 

Here's the order for the first round: 

1. Blaupunkt
2. Muscular Mathletes
3. PerpetualMotionSquad
4. Taking it one game at a time
5. Off Constantly
6. Free Crab Legs
7. Big Kahuna Burger
8. Team 8 (The currently-unnamed new team. As in the past, I put the new team in the middle of the draft.)
9. The Reservoir Dogs
10. Academic Probation
11. Cant Be That Hard
12. Turn Down for Watt
13. Jeff Fisher's Mullet
14. Dolphins of Old

What you should do now: 

- Set your pre-draft rankings, even if you're drafting live. It's easier to draft when you have your players organized. 
- Test your draft client. There's a link to that on the home page of the league. 
- Pray. 

---

There will be dues this year, same as last. We will get that sorted out before the season starts.

---

One change I made: Extending the playoffs. Why? 

A 14-week season for our 14-team league doesn't make sense. Each team ends up playing every other team once and one other team twice. That could either be really helpful -- you play a bad team twice -- or detrimental -- you play a good team twice. 

To get rid of that 14th game, I expanded the playoffs to six teams. Now it will work like the NFL: The top two teams get a bye in Week 14 while the next four teams play each other. The winners of those games play the top two teams and then we go to a championship. The season still ends on Week 16. 

The consolation bracket will work the same, meaning that only two teams will miss the championship and consolation playoffs. If I could find some way to have y'all play a "Who is the worst" game -- Sacko Bowl, if you will -- I would do it. We'll see. 

The other option is to have 8 teams in the playoffs, but I like the idea of the top two regular-season teams getting an advantage. 

If you have any questions, let me know! 

Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Two things for the upcoming Royale with Cheese season

Friends: It's been too long. Welcome back. It's football time.

First, let me apologize for the lateness of this post and of the scheduling for the upcoming season. As most of you know, I've moved to a new job that has taken up a ton of my time this summer. When I was covering high school sports, summers were boring and I had way too much time on my hands to come up with random fantasy football ideas. No longer.

But we are still doing this league and it's still gonna rock. I'm still planning on posting weekly about the league, though the updates will likely be shorter. If anyone wants to write a weekly update, lemme know. I'm open to it.

So here are two things we need to decide right now to get started. There are polls for both of these things on the right side of your screen, so please vote!

(1) Draft date. 



As I said in an earlier email, we won't be having an official party this year, but I still want to do a live online draft.

Would this Saturday, Aug. 22 work for everyone? I'm thinking mid-afternoon would be good, like 3 or 4 so that we're not messing up anyone's dinner. And that translates to a regular time in Hawaii, I think.

If that doesn't work for most people, we'll figure out another date. Vote in the poll. If you can't make it, remember to rank your players so that when you autodraft it picks people you want it to.

(2) Add two teams? 

I have a request from a friend to join the league. (He actually quit another league in the hopes of joining us. We're that awesome.) As of now, all but two of the teams have confirmed to me that they are playing this year. If all 14 confirm, how would you feel about adding two more (it has to be an even number) to take the league to 16?

I know it will make the league harder, but who doesn't like a little challenge?

Again, vote in the poll. This will be a majority rules situation. If someone happens to drop out before Saturday, this doesn't matter and I'll plug in the new person.

I think that's it for now. Please vote in the polls! I'll do a more formal beginning-of-season post soon.

Happy football!

- Corey
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, January 8, 2015

[League Update] Dolphins of Old is your 2014 Royale with Cheese champion!

This blog post is way overdue.

First there was Christmas. Then there was the New Year. Then there was getting back to work.

I could say that I wanted to give myself some time to reflect on the season. Really, though, I needed time to deal with my unfathomable grief.

Your 2014 Royale with Cheese fantasy football champion is Dolphins of Old!



For that great honor, this wonderful picture will be forever* enshrined on the right side of this page.



Dolphins of Old beat Jeff Fisher's Mullet -- and I kid you not, this is the first time I've looked at the final score -- 108-72 in the championship game.

Why hadn't I looked at the score before now? Because after Andrew Luck laid the biggest egg of the season (of his career?) I didn't even want to know how bad the Dolphins were going to beat the Mullets. Dolphins had two running backs playing Monday night. To feel any kind of safe, I needed a solid performance out of Luck. Nope. Good ol' Neck Beard just crapped all over the bed.

But that's enough of me complaining. Let's focus on what Dolphins did to win.

Dolphins had to be the hottest team coming into the playoffs. After staring 0-3, they lost just twice more all season. In Week 12, Dolphins scored 148 points and in Week 13 they scored 153. Even in their loss at the end of the regular season (to the Mullets), Dolphins scored more than 100 points.

The Dolphins also deserve credit for playing the waiver wire well. They picked up Denver running back C.J. Anderson, who, starting in Week 10, only scored less than 19 points twice the rest of the season.

They also grabbed the Bengals' Jeremy Hill, who had a 28- and 27-point performances in the second half of the season.

Players like those two kept Dolphins in matchups when Drew Brees had a bad game, and he had some bad games there at the end of the season.

The Gronk and Dez Bryant were solid performers throughout and the Rams defense even showed up some, scoring 27 points in the league's season finale.

Dolphins of Old breezed to their first RWC finals appearance with a 126-77 win over Cant Be That Hard in the semifinals.

After another easy win in the final, Dolphins became the league's fourth different champion in four years.
Turn Down for Watt won the third-place game 93-71 over Cant Be That Hard.
 Dec 22
For the playoffs this year, I turned in my 2nd and 4th worst performances of the season. #1 was going up against Courtney

Academic Probation won the consolation bracket 89-75 over The Reservoir Dogs.

And the highest scorer of championship week was Big Kahuna Burger, who scored 115 points in a win over Big Poppa in the seventh-place game, the least important game of the week. Well, maybe it was important in that household.

And that's it! Here's how the final standings looked:



I'm going to take this time to put out a call for any year-end award nominees, like the season's Jameis Winston Award for Poor Decisions winner (I know who I'd pick ...).



Also, I'd like to do a Super Bowl party again this year. More information about that to come.

There will also be a blog post coming about possible changes in the league for next year. Nothing too drastic.

Finally, I just want to thank all of you for playing in the league this year. Thank you for reading this blog, for getting on Twitter and talking trash before, during and after the games, for watching (and participating in) the videos, and just helping make this league a whole lot of fun.

I hope you all come back next year. Now go Panthers!

Corey
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)