League #1
Last week, in the first round of the playoffs, my team was up by 28 points on my opponent after Sunday’s games. I felt pretty good; though I didn’t have any other players going in the Monday night game (Tampa Bay at Carolina), he only had one guy, his third WR, some shitdog named Antonio Bryant. In the three games prior, Bryant averaged four catches for 57 yards, and had one touchdown in that span, which is an average of nine points per week. Again, I was up by 28. He only had Bryant, against Carolina’s tough D. I felt good. The feelings I had were good. Good, good, good.

But then, guess what happened? Bryant had an incredible nine catches for 200 yards and two touchdowns in the Monday night game – for a total of 34.97 points.

Result? I lose. Shitdog Bryant has the game of his life and I’m done. Sweet.

League #2
In my main league, I snuck into the playoffs as a #7 seed and promptly knocked off the #2 team last week. This week, facing the #6 seed, I was down 26.6 points after the Sunday games. Yikes. However, he had no players in last night’s Philly-Cleveland game, whereas I had both McNabb and DeSean Jackson. McNabb and DeSean versus Cleveland…that’s a yummy match-up. All I needed was for each guy to have an average game, and I’d win.

McNabb came out firing and DeSean had 70 yards receiving in the by the end of the first half. However, both McNabb and DeSean threw interceptions, costing me four points. However (again), with 12:41 left in the 4th quarter, I was down only 3.36 points – basically, if DeSean had 20 more yards receiving from McNabb, I would win. I felt good.

But then, guess what happened? With that 12:41 left in the game, nearly a full quarter, both McNabb and DeSean were benched. Gone. Dunzo. Done for the game. So no 3.36 points. So I lose. Sweet.

POSTSCRIPT: In this league, I drafted Torry Holt in the 5th Round. And every week, I stuck by him, starting him week after week, dealing with those lovely 3-37-0, 5-23-0, 3-28-0, 1-5-0 (!) and 3-30-0 games he had sprinkled through the season.

But finally, with the conference final game looming, I couldn’t take it any longer. I thought Indy would explode against Detroit and so I picked up Anthony Gonzalez to start in place of Holt. I was kinda right – Indy scored 31 points. However, Anthony Gonzalez had one catch for six yards. That’s 0.6 points. Torry Holt, on my bench for the first time after fourteen weeks starting, had four catches for 64 yards and a touchdown. That’s 12.4 points.

Again, I wound up losing by 3.36 points. 12.4 is greater than 3.36. So I lose. Sweet.

League #3
In my buddy Kyle’s league, which I have played in for many, many years, I had probably my greatest fantasy football team ever. During the regular season, I went an amazing 12-1. The second place team was 8-5, and I had nearly 1250-something total points to 1110-something points of the second highest-scoring team. Just good ol’ fashioned dominance.

You can probably figure out where this is going: In the first round of the playoffs, facing the #8 seed, a team I scored almost 250 more points than during the regular season, I lost, 108 to 100.

But then, guess what happened? Every single top seed lost – #7 beat #2, #6 beat #3, and #5 beat #4. The best four regular season teams all were finished after the first round, while seed 5, 6, 7 and 8 moved on. In all my years of fantasy football, having competed in literally dozens and dozens of leagues, I’ve never seen all four bottom seeds advance in the first round of an eight-team playoff. And this just had to happened in the year I was 12-1 and all but planning on how best to spend the $1000 first prize.

League #4 (not cruel – yet)
I’m still alive in this league, and had a bye last week (for some reason, these guys do their playoffs 15-16-17 instead of 14-15-16). This week, I face my agent Joel, who finished third in the regular season to my second. I contemplated changing my team name to “Dead in the Water” in this league, because after a pitch meeting about a year and a half ago, Joel and I walked out of said pitch and felt terrific and slam-dunkish about the prospect of the pitchees buying my idea, so much so that when I asked Joel what would happen if they didn’t buy the idea, Joel said, “Well, you’d kinda be dead in the water, but you don’t have to worry about that.” At that very moment, right there on the lot, Joel’s cell phone rang and it was the pitchees – passing on the idea. Joel was shocked and then couldn’t stop apologizing to me about it, saying that I wasn’t “dead in the water” and yada yada yada (fortunately, the writers’ strike happened the next week and killed pretty much everyone).

(Actually, the writers’ strike was kinda unfortunate, but you know what I mean.)

To this day, Joel feels bad about the “dead in the water” comment (in as much as an LA agent can feel bad about anything), and making this my team name might just be the psychological advantage I’d need to get past him and face his fiancée Liz, the number one seed, who handed me two embarrassing losses this year. However, both because I am a nice guy and because I don’t want to anger the karma gods, I’m sticking with the name I’ve had all season, Knorben Knussen.

Would anyone like to guess what will happen this week?