By Eric Emery

As I write this, I have one eye on my writing, and one eye on history. It’s clich to talk about how important the civic duty of voting is in comparison to the simple game of football. Most media coverage I listened to emphasized the greatness of the American democratic process, and glossed over all of its idiosyncrasies. Good thing these idiosyncrasies are not part of the NFL, or fans would riot.
* Large market teams wear shiny new safety equipment; small market teams wear wool sweaters with leather helmets.
* Some fans stand in line for three hours to watch the game, others walk move directly to their seats.
* When scoreboard goes down, 12,242 fans file lawsuits instantly.

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Posted on November 6, 2008

By Dan O’Shea

This is one of those crazy times of year when we’re all suffering from information overload. No, I don’t mean election time, though in your real life, you certainly may be suffering from election info overload, too. What I’m talking about is fantasy info overload. This condition becomes especially acute at times when different sports seasons overlap. Drafting your fantasy basketball team can be difficult even if it’s the only thing you have to worry about, but when your middling fantasy football team at the same time is facing a big Week 9 test and requiring waiver wire help to reach the playoffs, well, who can blame you for not having time to take out the trash?
We’re contributing to the info overload with this column, of course, which is just one of dozens – dare I say hundreds? – of fantasy sports advice columns, research dispensers and informational resources you can turn to for different takes on who to draft, who to sit or start, who to pick up from the waiver wire, or who to trade for. And a lot of us may feel like we need to check out every single one of them. Some might say it borders on obsession, but it doesn’t just border on obsession; it crosses the border and heads straight for the next state: insanity.
Managing a fantasy sports team is one of those things where most of us feel we are better off the more information we seek out, but the more information we seek out, the more directions we get pulled in. It’s best to pick a few sources of information that prove trustworthy and effective over the course of a pre-season or the first couple weeks of the regular season. Or, you could find someone who has more time than you do to organize that information for you.
So, here at Fantasy Fix, we’ll now make that part of our weekly mission. Let’s start with a couple of “kitchen sink” sites, ones that cover all sports:

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Posted on November 5, 2008

I don’t really remember how much it hurt when I broke my foot a couple times before I was 10 years old. When I messed up my elbow playing high school baseball and had to have surgery, the initial popping sound was the worst part. There was discomfort but it was far from agonizing. It wasn’t until I was in college and playing rugby that I first experienced significant, sports-related pain. And that was in addition to suffering the worst break of all: I didn’t have even the beginnings of a decent story to go with the injury. I took a bad step during practice one day and twisted my ankle. And it hurt so much I was sure I was going to puke. The next season I banged heads with a teammate and eventually had to get a half-dozen stitches but that was also a ways down on the pain scale.
Kyle Orton’s second quarter injury didn’t happen the way most sprains happen – in fact it was downright weird. Most of the time people turn their feet on the way back down to the ground (and the end of a stride or a jump) and the combination of gravity and body weight do the damage. You could see a 300-pound lineman falling on a quarterback and making it difficult for him to breath for a while, but twisting his ankle? Athletes have always been encouraged to hide how badly they’ve been injured, at least from the other team. And surely Orton would rather have kept his pain to himself on this occasion. But it wasn’t surprising that he couldn’t do it. A field microphone picked up Orton yelling, if not quite screaming, in pain. His attempt to walk off the field ended quickly and after a short delay he was carted off.

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Posted on November 3, 2008