fantasy football team analysis

Good evening, friends!

I have acquired a "fantasy football team" via "Yahoo," which I will tell you guys about to emphasize the sports nature of my blog.

I've developed my own fantasy strategy over the years. The strategy basically consists of me auto-drafting, figuring that my ability to rate players in the order I think they'll go strictly dominates me actually showing up to a draft. I've had to use this strategy in live drafts before, and it normally ends up in me finishing in the middle of the league. Last year, I used the autodraft to nab Larry Fitzgerald and Kerry Collins. Thus, I am awesome at fantasy sports. Since I don't believe in playing fantasy sports for money, though, it doesn't really matter.

Why don't I play fantasy for money? The logic basically consists of my desire to take weeks off from a league at a time, regrouping just in time to try to make the playoffs. You'll have to note that this doesn't actually work in fantasy baseball, a game I'm seriously considering giving up because of the nature of the league that I'm in this year. This league is designed to pitch as many innings as you like, and innings pitched is a scored stat. So I don't win much, since I don't start two starters a night.

So, I signed up for my default Yahoo! assignment in football, and the team looks like this:

QB: Trent Green/Drew Brees. I love this tandem. I personally don't think the Saints will suck all that much this year.

The reason why the Saints were so bad last year has something to do with the fact that Aaron Brooks was on the team, and also has something to do with the fact that Deuce got hurt for the whole year. Brees/Bush/Deuce will be much better at the skill positions this year, but nobody seems to think this will matter. I don't get it at all.

I like Trent Green because the Chiefs score lots of points.

RB: Edgerrin James/Rudi Johnson/Chris Brown/Kevin Jones/Frank Gore.

That's right, I have five starting running backs. I think that Edgerrin is my pick this week, as is Rudi. Really, two of these guys were available, and I just felt that having five running backs would be a great plan. They're supposedly valuable, so I might try to trade one of them for a receiver.

WR: Plaxico Burress, T.J. Houshmandzadeh, Matt Jones, Joe Horn.

I like these guys... actually, I don't care at all. Joe Horn is awesome for that whole cell phone thing a few years ago.

TE: Dallas Clark. My logic for rating this guy stemmed from the fact that the Colts will be throwing the ball roughly every play this year, which should make Clark a good fantasy play. Seriously, letting Edgerrin James go will backfire in a most serious way. Dominic Rhodes and Joe Addai might not be the answer to the question.

Geez, I wish I had drafted Marvin Harrison.

K: Neil Rackers. Rackers exploded onto the fantasy scene last year, which I found to be rather odd because he was wretched awful with the Bengals. Just look at the stats.

DEF: Chicago. Washington.

I ranked defenses because I felt that a consistent number of points is a good thing. Have Trent Green, Chicago, and Rackers means a generous 25 points guaranteed a week. That's enough to win in really bad weeks. Any time that you have something like that, you're in the money.

Washington will shut some team out this year, most likely the Eagles.

so tomorrow i'm re-taking my quals.

despite getting over 50 percent on every section, the macro department decided to give the useless "m.a. pass" on the first round of the macro quals.

thanks guys. i seriously think that artun and i had the highest non-phd. passes in the history of the department.

now i have to take a micro qual which i got a stellar "35 percent" on the first time. apparently, that's good enough for a master's degree.

but before you laugh too much, i have a game for you to solve.

a firm and a union are bargaining. there are two total periods. the union knows the firm's profits are uniformally distributed on the interval [0,1]. the union makes an offer, call it w1, to the firm. if the firm accepts, its payoff is: 2(profit-w1). the union's payoff is: 2w1. if the offer is rejected, the union makes another offer, w2. the payoffs are, quite obviously, (profit-w2) for the firm and w2 for the union.

solve for w1 and w2 numerically.

the winner (any of my non-econ friends) gets $2.

if you want this to be sports-related, replace firm with "nhl" and union with "nhlpa." note that in this sports-related game, the nhl rejected the union's offer about 500 times.