Weekend Blizzard: fantasy, and other stupid things

My recent Viking dream
Last night I dreamed I was going to my wife's parenting group. The actor J.K. Simmons was standing at a white board, and he was talking about the Minnesota Vikings. He had Brett Favre's name, and under it Adrian Peterson's name. He pointed his marker at the AP and Favre, saying that AP's success was going to depend largely on what Favre is able to do. Is this the weirdest dream I've ever had about the Vikings? Absolutely not.

Fantasy: the value of elite tight ends
I think the elite TEs (top tier Antonio Gates and Jason Witten, and I'd put Dallas Clark and Tony Gonzalez just behind) are more valuable in an auction draft than a snake draft. In a snake draft, you probably have to pass on a starting RB, WR, or QB to draft Gates or Witten. Not so in an auction league: you can budget your money for an elite TE, and still get quality starters at other positions.

But what do I know: this year I've drafted Gates in an auction league and snake draft.

In fantasy preparation, I give much greater weight to a player's past yards than past touchdowns, because I think the yards are a better indicator of future value. But I still found Brandon Funston's argument for Gates over Witten utterly compelling: "Witten 's best TD campaign (7 in '07) is lower than Gates' worst TD campaign in the past five years (8 in '08)."

My worst fantasy football draft story
I printed up my own (color-coded) documents for the Hazelweird Auction Draft, which was two weeks ago. This weekend I was preparing for the Kloss Memorial League Snake Draft, and I was looking over the documents from the earlier draft. Even though I had names crossed off on the documents, I thought, "Ah, I can read this; I don't need to re-print these." During the draft, things were going fine. In the eighth round I really didn't like anybody for the value, and decided to just go with a solid backup RB, Pierre Thomas. The next pick: Steve Slaton.

Steve Slaton is my #4 ranked fantasy RB. Earlier in the day, I had been at the card store Beyond Shinders and looked right at two Steve Slaton rookie cards. For some reason, nobody else in the league bothered with him until round eight. And for some reason, I straight up forgot the man existed. Every time I would scan through my draft document, my mind would somehow skip past the fourth crossed off name on my running back rankings.

This is my worst fantasy draft story.

Viking links
Sports Illustrated's Ross Tucker objects to the Favre signing for a similar reason I've objected to it:

"I don't think the Vikings are a one-and-done team. All of their best players, like Antoine Winfield, Adrian Peterson and Jared Allen, are under contract for the foreseeable future. The window is wide open. Why not try to build with Jackson or Rosenfels and give it a legit shot over the next three years? Doesn't seem as likely now, that is for sure."

Is signing Favre a good football move for 2009? It might be. Is it a good football move for 2010 and beyond? Almost certainly not.

Grant's Tomb writes about why the Vikings are now the most interesting team in the world.

Is going to talk to random Packer fans about their feelings the easiest column to write these days? Jim Souhan takes his whirl at it.

Other links
I have to give credit to Cold, Hard Football Facts: they've evidently let a critical reader, Mark Wald, write critical things about CHFF on their website, including this Cold Hard Football Facts Playbook (pdf), where Wald dissects some of the flawed argumentative tropes CHFF often uses. Let me not get too carried away with my praise: it is fucking brilliant. I love seeing arguments featuring logical fallacies debunked (I wrote my own lengthy post examining CHFF's problems with correlation and causation), and Wald does a freaking brilliant job.