Gold Dinner IV – Fantasy Football League: The Draft & Week 1

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The Beginning

For those of you who don’t already know, the Gold Dinner league is the fantasy football league that consists of my former teammates from my collegiate football team. The Gold Dinner is our annual spring dinner that celebrates the latest graduating class of football players, and as the name of our league would suggests, this is where we reward our annual winner of the fantasy football league.

This is the fourth season of the Gold Dinner Fantasy Football League, but it was harder than ever to get his year’s league up and running. I sent the invitations out in early August and didn’t have the league full until Labor Day Weekend. This meant we had to do away with our usual round of draft pick trading. There are pluses and minuses with that though. On the plus side, somebody always gets fleeced in those deals, which makes the league more lopsided than it ought to be. And on the minus side, those trades are a lot of fun and are a good way to pass the time and warm up the troops before the season starts.

Once we did get the league together, we had to go with the difficult draft day of the Sunday before Labor Day. That’s a typical party day for me, but usually don’t go out until well after 10 on that night, so it wasn’t all that bad personally. However, some people spent the weekend either on the Jersey Shore or out in the Hamptons, so some people went on auto-draft mode.

The Draft

With 9 out of 12 of us on board, the draft was very interesting. There were some interesting occurrence and some really weird teams built, but all and all, the draft went as expected. I wound up with a pretty good team, which I’ll get to in a second. However the story of the draft would have to be how several teams were out drafted by the auto-drafters. One of our former running backs reached on three running backs, drafting Ryan Grant, Ronnie Brown and Brandon Jacobs quite early. Another of our players best picks included an obvious pick in Aaron Rodgers, and a questionable guy in Malcom Floyd, whom he picked pretty late in the draft. There is actually a former defensive lineman who had a sub draft for him, and his best pick was Vincent Jackson, a guy who might not even play this season.

The two guys whom autopicked, however, have well balanced teams and very few reaches. ESPN said they had worked on their auto-drafting strategy, and that they did. ESPN’s auto-drafter seems to be a lot smarter, especially when it comes to rounding out a balanced team, as opposed to when it used to draft four or five running backs in a row and then filled out your squad. Anyway, I “summed up” the draft here, if you want to check it out.

Fantasy Football Week 1

As for Fantasy Football Week 1, I begin the season facing off against one our former tight ends. He’s got a loud mouth and I can’t wait to shut him up. His team is pretty weak, and I certainly plan on winning. I’ll give you his starting lineup and then I will give you who I’m planning on starting for this week as well. On Tuesday, I’ll be back to let you know how the first week of the league went and who won the trash-talking battle on the message boards!

Opponent:
QB: Joe Flacco
RB: Maurice Jones- Drew
RB: Shonn Greene
R/: Ryan Mathews
WR: Dwayne Bowe
WR: Lee Evans
TE: Antonio Gates
DF: Bengals
KR: Matt Prater

My Gold Dinner IV Team:
QB: Matt Ryan (who is starting until Big Ben comes off suspension)
RB: Chris Johnson
RB: Matt Forte
R/: CJ Spiller (I have Michael and Reggie Bush as backups)
WR: Roddy White
WR: Calvin Johnson (I have Mike Wallace—my sleeper pick of the year—as well)
TE: Bo Scaife (weak, I know)
DF: Titans
KR: Neil Rackers

Here’s to a win Fantasy Football Week 1!

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