The third place
Empire has fallen to my lowly last place squad. Assuming Yoda's kicker doesn't pull a seventeen in MNF I will actually have the highest score in the league this week. Which is insane. I have been struggling to get 100 points a week for most of the season and now I beat my opponent by forty.
And it was not due to Lamar, who had another maddening game that came within a pass of being a win but was going to be below his projection either way. His 19.62 points were fine, but far less than his projection of 28 and nowhere near the 34, 36, and 49 ceilings from earlier in the year. Generally if Jackson doesn't have one of those big nights I have no chance. This week that was compounded by my two top receivers being out, Davante Adams on a BYE and Deebo Samuel with a minor injury. Jerry Jeudy and Jamison Crowder had to be my reluctant starters and they both had OK but modest games, coming in right about at their projections with 9.70 and 8.20 respectively.
What carried me to victory were my RBs, a position that has let me down all year, and my mighty TE who for the first time in 2021 performed like the third-round draft pick he was supposed to. George Kittle has been very un-Kittle-like. Partially due to injury - missing Weeks Five through Eight to the IR, partially because Frisco's QB by committee has unsurprisingly not been effective, and partially due to game scripts. But he had a monster game in the loss to Seattle this week! Nine catches on twelve targets for 181 yards and a pair of TDs. THAT is what I thought I was drafting. Oh, well. He finished with 35.10.
That alone wouldn't have been enough. Happily Antonio Gibson had a big game with his backfield mate McKissic out versus the Raiders. Gibson had 23 rushes for 88 yards plus five catches for another 23 and a TD in the Washington Football Team win. Meanwhile Devonta Freeman continues to be the number one-ish back for Baltimore with 97 combined yards and another TD.
Kyler Murray was left on The Empire's bench, but while he was twenty-two and a half points better than Carr he still would have been short had he started him. It just would have been closer.
If Kittle had four or six games like this one I might have actually been competitive this season. I had to play Tyler Conklin and Ricky Seals-Jones this season and they averaged 8 points a game for me. Before this explosive game Kittle was averaging about 9.6 in the eight games he started. This week's barrage bumbed him up to 12. Middle of the year when my season fell apart I would have killed to have 35 points from anybody.