Red Zone and Football Fantasies

This will be backdated to January 2020

Cooper loves his football. A couple years ago, Grayson was at the AT&T Store and he got talked into switching to DirectTV. We were with Comcast for Internet, and we had kept cable tv ... for sports. NBA of course, but Cooper liked football too. With this DT change, Gray got HBO included, which he liked. So a dish was added to the roof and we figured out the new channels. One thing that was included free that first year was "Red Zone" ... which is a football featurette. With "Sunday Ticket" you could access all the games, but Red Zone would follow ALL the games and show all the exciting stuff, when teams were "in the red zone" and scoring. Coop fell in love with this new way of watching. The ploy worked ... the second year we paid the price to get Red Zone again. As the 2019 season was set to start, our special promo pricing was over and the DirectTV bill inflated so much, we dropped them and went back to Comcast. I was SO worried about the whole "Red Zone" thing though. Apparently there are two Red Zone programs. One by DirectTV, which is exclusive to DirectTV, and one run by the NFL. We could get the NFL RedZone, but that's not what Coop had become accustomed to. I held my breath that first week ... and Coop said the new program was acceptable.

Now I don't understand Fantasy Football at all - but I guess that's one reason why the Red Zone carried so much appeal. It's the scoring and power plays that affect Fantasy Football? So Red Zone lets the guys see all the action at once (seriously, often multiple games being shown at the same time, split screens). Cooper had done some Fantasy Football in previous years with friends, but I guess during the Seattle Trip last fall, Kolby invited Coop to play in a league he had going. What I didn't know (Cooper didn't know either) was that there was an entry fee ($50, which Kolby fronted for him). This went toward cash prizes at the end. 

Cooper won the whole thing. $300 for first place. I emailed Kolby a couple times to get a little background info so that I could understand, and Kolby was great and getting back to me and explaining some things (although most I still didn't really understand). I'd try to get Coop to tell me a little about what was going on, and he had some nail-biting moments during the final weeks, wondering if he'd get eliminated. But he didn't.   I asked him to do a write up of his Fantasy Football experience, and here it is ...

2019 Fantasy Football Season:

Back in September, I joined my third fantasy-football league, but it was a lot different than the previous two times I had done fantasy. This time, I was playing with Uncle Kolby and a lot of his friends in a 12 person league, instead of my own friends making up only a 6 person league. And there was also a cash prize for the winner and the two runner-ups.

I remember when we initially started the draft, and I knew it was going to be much harder than the previous two leagues I was in, since there are double the people. That meant getting a good, balanced team was going to be really difficult since the spacing between every draft pick is much bigger, and the players I may have wanted were probably off the board by the time it was my draft pick. At the end of the draft, I was pretty happy with my team: Michael Thomas, Julio Jones, Josh Jacobs, Deshaun Watson, Phillip Lindsay, Melvin Gordon III, Marvin Jones, Rashad Penny, Rams Def/ST, Hunter Henry, Harrison Butker, and a few other irrelevant picks that didn’t matter. Even though this was my starting team, it changed a ton throughout the season.

I tend to remember this season in two parts, and that is the first 6 games, and then the rest of them. In the first six games of the season, I went 3-3, which was okay, but not compared to some of the other teams going 5-1. It was a pattern for the first 6 games as I won, and then I lost continuously for these games until I was 3-3. My favorite game in that span was against Pbody&RichardSherman, where it was an extremely high scoring game, as well as an extremely close game, of 157.64-156.56 where I won. Both of our scores were at least 50 more points than the prediction for that week. And I remember that week for the sole reason that my kicker got me into the lead late Saturday night, and I took out Jarvis Landry who was playing the next night out of the game, because I was worried he may fumble and lose two points to lose me the game (even though he scored 9 points, I didn’t regret it).

After the sixth game is where it all started. For the next seven games of the fantasy regular season, I went 7-0 and went into the playoffs with a first-round bye and a 10-3 record. Even in the previous two leagues I played in, when players went inactive and didn’t update their lineups, I never had a dominant run like this. Fantasy Football almost never relies on your skill like real football does, but I still felt awesome winning every game. In this stretch of games, my personal favorite when I was up against Kolby. I was the second seed in the league at that point, and I’m pretty sure Kolby was dead last, and even then, winning against him felt awesome because of the angry texts he sent me and that I could brag. Another matchup that was great was the final game of the regular season against the #1 seed. It was a battle of the top two seeds, and the winner would become the #1 seed. Despite being the two highest scorers of the season, the ending score was a pitiful 82.28-77.30, and we both scored the least amount of points out of everyone that week. But the important thing was that I scored a little bit more than him, and I got the #1 seed for the playoffs, and knocked him out to where he no longer had a bye.

It was the first round of the playoffs, but that didn’t matter as I had a first-round bye and was going on to the semi-finals no matter what. But the funny thing is that when I knocked the former #1 seed out of a bye, that cost them their season, and they lost in the first round of the playoffs. In the semi-finals, I was really worried because I was going against the fifth seed who was the hottest team because they had the best fantasy player in the league, Lamar Jackson. Since both the 5th and 6th seed one their matchups the week prior, I initially thought that since I was the first seed, I was going to match up against the weakest seed like they do in the real NFL playoffs. But I was going against the winner of the 4th and 5th seed matchup. I thought I was screwed going against him, and I had good reason. Lamar Jackson played first on a Thursday night, and to no one’s surprise, he racked up 40 points, and just with one player’s performance, he was now heavily favored to win. Nothing seemed to change during Sunday’s day full of football. But Sunday night, Austin Hooper got a few points, and Julio Jones got 13 receptions for 134 yards and 2 TD’s, getting an insane 31 points, getting me into the game. I was down 12 points, and my fantasy MVP, Michael Thomas, was all I had left. And fortunately, he didn’t disappoint as he got 12 receptions for 128 yards and a TD. It was his performance and an ultimate choke from his RB Marlon Mack that won me the game and put me in the championship.

After all of that madness, I was in the championship against the Cinderella story 6th seed. But I really don’t have a lot to tell about this match as I won in a blowout 159.06-90.86. In the championship, I got a new personal high of points in a match, and literally everybody in my lineup for that week got 10 points or more, including the Colts Defence/ST who got a monstrous 30 points for me. And like I said, my team changed a ton, as my final team was: Deshaun Watson, Michael Thomas, Julio Jones, Philip Lindsay, Deandre Washington, Breshad Perriman, Austin Hooper, Harrison Butker, Colts Defense/ST, Chiefs Defense/ST, Denver Defense/ST, Jarvis Landry, Juju Smith Schuster, Carlos Hyder, and Lesean McCoy. And in the championship, there were 3 players in my lineup that I had never used previously in the season, but they still all showed out, and I got the 1st place prize of $300.

I happened to see a "Fantasy Football Champ" t-shirt on Groupon, that I bought him. I'll have to see if he'll agree to a picture when he's wearing it.