NCAA Bracket Challenge Update

We have switched to ESPN for our bracket challenge. You can click here to get to ESPN’s tourney challenge front page. From there just search for the group TOUTS, fill in you bracket and we’ll have some fun. Hope you join up and good look with your office pools

O.B.R.

By: Justin Jacobs

Hello again world.

Sorry about the extended break, but for some reason my school deems it is necessary that we have our midterms during one of the most exciting times of the sports year. Salavy. Now we are indeed, back and better than ever, and just to prove it to you I’m going to give you a post that has been six months in the making. You see, this Thursday night at nine o’clock, that’s central time, I’ll be drafting my fantasy baseball team. This may seem like a completely innocuous thing to do on a Thursday night, but let me assure you, this is my most anticipated night of the year. Yeah, Christmas and New Years have their draws, and I almost always have a good time on my birthday and Halloween, but they just don’t compare to the rush that I get from drafting my fantasy baseball team. I know that sounds a bit strange, maybe even a little homoerotic, but let me explain further.

Last year was an incredibly disappointing year for me in fantasy baseball. I felt I drafted a good team, a team that had a nucleus of: A-Rod, Hanley Ramirez, Matt Holliday and Mark Teixeira. Unfortunately, due to some injuries and instability in my pitching rotation, my team just couldn’t get out of the middle of the pack and I did something that I will probably regret for the rest of my days. I made a rash trade with my arch nemesis, at least in the world of fantasy sports, Chad Ruter. Yes, the same Chad Ruter who’s columns you read on this very site. Now it may be important to note that I have a history of making bad trades with Chad. Three years ago, my first year playing fantasy baseball, I traded Albert Pujols to Chad for Roy Oswalt, and what essential added up to a shit sandwich. Anyone who follows fantasy baseball could tell you how that deal ended up. Pujols went on to have a monster season and my team ended up in last place. Well last year I made what basically was the same mistake. I traded Matt Holliday and Mark Teixeira to Chad for Chris Young, Hideki Matsui and Kevin Youkilis. Well, that didn’t end well, Matt Holliday and Mark Texiera went on to have great years after the all-star break. Whereas Chris Young didn’t fix my pitching and I ended up back at the bottom of the standings… again.

Operation Beat Ruter

This kind of losing motivated me to change the way I approached fantasy baseball. I swore to myself that this year will be different. No longer will I be a slave to bad trades that propel Ruter to championships. That’s Operation Beat Ruter’s rule number one by the way, no making desperate mid-season trades to Ruter. Following this rule alone will decrease Chad’s chances of winning by about 15%. I’ve also ramped up the amount of research I’ve done for this year. Starting in mid-Janurary I bought a number of fantasy magazines along with Baseball Prospectus 2008. Every weekend since then I’ve redone my cheat sheets where I rank every player by position and tier them into groups according to how well I think they will produce in 08. A couple of weeks ago I got to a point where I no longer needed any sheets, I could just tell you what tier a given player was in. At that point I sent Chad a message saying that “I know Kung Fu,” the scary thing was Chad knew exactly what I was talking about.

Another thing that I’ve done this year more than any other is participate in mock drafts. A mock draft is where you get together with 10-12 other people and draft a “mock” team. This is used to see how others are drafting in order to create a sound drafting strategy. I’ve always enjoyed doing mock drafts, but this year, with the loss of my Xbox 360 for a couple of weeks, they’ve become my number one source for recreational fun. I jokingly told Chad that I will have been in 100 mock drafts before the time we actually have our draft, but in reality that total is probably closer to fifty. Although fifty mock drafts is still a daunting number. It’s gotten to a point where I know exactly when a run on a certain position will start and when it will end. I know how the dominoes fall when I take certain players early and have a strategy to act accordingly. Moreover I have a general strategy to how my team is going to be drafted, and even though it is impossible to predict exactly how a draft is going to go, I have a general idea of what my team is going to look like.

The War Room

Of course you can do all the preparation in the world and it won’t mean anything if you don’t bring your “A- Game” on draft night. This is another area where I wanted to be completely and utterly prepared. This year I will be drafting up at my moms’ place in Wisconsin. My sweet mother (happy birthday mom!) has a fantastic HD televison along with a state of the art laptop that I will utilize in order to have a 40 inch draft board at my disposal. Is it completely necessary to have a 40 inch draft board? No, but it is pretty sweet knowing that I will have the coolest looking draft set-up. I will also bring my own laptop along with me so that I can have another screen keeping track of all of the other teams’ draft picks. This comes in handy when you are trying to decide whether or not you can wait for a player to come back around to you in a snake draft. This computer will also be in charge of instant messaging, just to make sure I don’t have too many applications on the laptop will be in charge of the big board. Nothing would be worse than having your system freeze up right before you first pick right?

Now Chad made a bit of a mistake scheduling the draft on the same day that NCAA tournament starts. Anyone who has read this blog knows that Chad and I are suckers for any major sporting event and it would be almost impossible for us to go the entire length of the draft without checking the scores. Well, I have that problem solved as well. To go along with my parents kitchen television that is in perfect view of my drafting area, there is another 30 inch television that is being moved into the “war room”. This television is going to be running any games that may still be being played while the kitchen television will be running on mute with ESPN news on the entire time. I expect to stay 100 percent informed so I don’t start getting antsy and walk away from the draft at any time.

I may or may not have also bought a draft analyzer that will tell me in live time where my team is expected to finish in our league. A little tool that does absolutely nothing but makes me feel good about myself at the end of the draft. Unfortunately I was unable to convince Darlington’s high school cheerleading team to come and give me that extra pep to get me through the later rounds. Now that I think about it, it was probably for the best, I’m not sure what the laws are in Wisconsin, but I don’t need any harassment by law enforcement while I’m trying to prepare for the upcoming season.

To finish things off I bought a bottle of cheap champagne and a twelve pack of Corona. I figure if things go as well as I hope they do I will have cause to celebrate, and even if things go horribly wrong I’ll have enough booze to make myself forget about it. Either way Thursday night is shaping up to be the best night of my year that doesn’t involve naked women or a large scale party… or a combination of both. There’s probably a lot of people out there who think I’m crazy for putting so much effort into such a trivial event. Hell, I’d even have to agree with those people, but I guess if nothing else this is my way of bringing in the spring and what is probably the best time of year in the sports world. It’s a celebration of all things that on the surface seems to be entirely trivial, but deep down are the things that keep you sane during the long winter months. So wish me luck as I look to take the next step in the world of fantasy sports and take down my friend and arch-rival Chad, but I don’t think I’ll need it. Not this year.