Christmas is here

Fantasy football is here and it might as well be Christmas! I am in 2 leagues and today was my first draft. It's one of the 3 or 4 days a year I wake-up before 9 AM on a weekend! This draft is always early and the other one is always late in the day. But both my leagues do the draft pretty late in the pre-season and I love that. It officially signals the start of the NFL season for me and I don't have to wait long between now and the actual start of the season. I know some fantasy leagues hold their drafts in July and I never understood that. I had a rare 1-St pick today and it was LT all the way. No ifs and or buts about it. The rest of the draft was obviously tougher with the draft snakin' it's way through and I didn't get to pick until 24 and 25 after number 1.

We do an online draft on Yahoo for this league and big-ups to Yahoo for hosting THE best fantasy site on the web - simple, elegant and powerful. I usually make one mistake every year during the draft. I am not talking about the quality of the picks (thats all up in the air at this point anyways) but just some mistake with the execution of my plan or the logistics or something. I won't click on the player before the time expires or have a brain freeze and don't check the bye week or something of that nature. Today's mistake was in the second round which is inexcusable. It's inexcusable for 2 reasons because it's way too high a pick to mess up and also I had so much time between pick no 1 and 24 to plan and execute. Luckily, it was not a costly mistake. I was going to draft a WR and a RB with 24 and 25 and the software picked a WR with the 24 while I was looking at a RB. No biggie since I ended up picking the RB with the 25-Th pick. The software also picked Carolina's Steve Smith as that WR. Not too shabby because Chad Johnson and Marvin Harrison were already gone. It was Smith or TO or Torry Holt. Normally I would have taken Holt, but was a little concerned about his knee surgery. Steve Smith's schedule is softer plus I ended up drafting Marc Bulger as my QB, which means Holt would have made my team too dependent on the Rams and I am glad it's more "balanced" now. So all in all, I am hoping Steve Smith comes through big for me.

I did make some bye week errors again and at one point it felt like all my RBs were off on week 7! I balanced it out later. The other issue was I wanted to protect LT with his backup Michael Turner. I was surprised when someone drafted him in the 10-Th round before I could get him. I thought he was taken too early for a backup. Or May be I messed up by waiting too long. I guess he is not just a backup but a good RB and I am considering trading for him right-away. Anyways, here's my team and it looks half-way decent decent.

1. LaDainian Tomlinson RB
2. Steve Smith WR
3. Thomas Jones RB
4. Marc Bulger QB
5. Jamal Lewis RB
6. Brandon Jackson RB
7. Darrell Jackson WR
8. Bernard Berrian WR
9. Joe Horn WR
10. Owen Daniels TE
11. Brandon Marshall WR
12. Josh Brown K
13. Philadelphia DEF
14. Adrian Peterson RB
15. Jeff Garcia QB