Fear the Head! You can't kill the Head, you can only hope to contain them. This may be the single greatest comeback in the history of fantasy football.Let's review for a second. Coming out of the draft you had a team that was widely considered (by me) to be hands down the worst team in the league. Remember, this was a team led by Peyton Manning with more knee surgeries than healthy knees, Kenny Watson as their #1 RB, Randy Moss but suddenly without Tom Brady. At the half-way point in the season, they were 2-5. But they kept plugging away. A lesson for all those teams that gave up half way through the season (whoever that may be)?
Nevertheless, they stood at 5-7 and solidly in 5th place in the Quakes Division entering the last week of the season. They needed the Wombats to lose to Semi-R (OK that's possible) and the Fatties to lose to the Killer Ds, who had not won since week 7. And they needed to beat the defending champion Sprockets.
Well, Semi-R took care of business, laying the wood to the Wombats 123 to 60, with only Antonio Gates scoring under 10 points. Not enough to hold off Team Brokerage for division champs, but enough to make the playoffs for the first time in team history.
The Fatties inexplicably left DeAngelo Williams, who had averaged just over 20 fantasy points per week the last four weeks and was facing the 30th ranked rushing defense in the league, on the bench. His 32 points in place of Frank Gore's 8 would have made last night's game irrelevant to the entire world instead of just relevant to Coach Eickhorst. And with the Killer Ds coming up with 95, the stage was set.
Now I've said before, "Down 49 going into Monday Night" is not a phrase you want to hear. Peyton Manning put up a grand total of 5 points, with 125 yards passing and two picks, plus a fumble literally inches away from the end zone. Colts QBs have 235 points, trailing Sage Rosenfels and just 5 points better than Tyler Thigpen. So to say Manning has been disappointing is putting it mildly. Randy Moss has 121 points on the season, including a whopping 5 on Sunday, with about 17 dropped passes in the end zone. He trails Greg Jennings and Roddy White, among others, who were not in the auction, and is just 4 points ahead of the immortal Lance Moore.
So while Andre Johnson had an early TD and Kris Brown put up 3 FGs, it looked like it would all be for naught until about 5 minutes left to go in our fantasy season when J Zgonina recovered a fumble by David Garrard and the next play Steve Slaton burst through the line for a 7-yard TD.
Still the E-Head trailed, but the Fatties were getting a litte nervous now. And when the Jags finally engineered a TD drive and failed at the on-side kick with 2:11 to play, the confluence of events proved mightier than the Monongahela and the Alleghany. Again, a one-play drive with Steve Slaton going off-guard, slicing through the defense and 40 yards later, the Head had gone from paupers to playoffs.
Now THAT is a comeback! So the playoffs are set:
BYOB and Brokerage win their divisions and earn first round byes. Semi-R and Dale's Doormats will face off in the Canes Division to earn the right to play Brokerage. Congrats to the Doormats on holding off BYOB by 7 points for the points race, going wire-to-wire.
And in the other bracket, the Mavs and E-Head will battle for the right to play BYOB.
One other side note - you knew I couldn't leave this alone - yes, the Killer Ds earned just one victory after the controversial firesale. However, I would point out that we led the league in points against, 159 points more scored against us than against Brokerage. Put another way, over 12 points per week more were scored against the Ds than Brokerage. Put yet another way, we scored more points than 6 of the 7 teams in the Quakes Division and finished DFL. Only twice all year did we score less than 70 points and never less than 60.
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