The first five picks in fantasy drafts are all about
mitigating risk. You don’t get your
second pick until the rest of the elite players are more picked over than the
fat chick at a junior high dance.
#1. LeSean McCoy. McCoy catches passes and scores TDs every
week. Nearly as importantly, there
is ZERO competition for touches behind him.
If McCoy, who is just 24 and has only a couple years of wear on his
tires at the NFL level, gets injured the Eagles have less “Plan B” than the
Pope’s girlfriend.
#2. Ray Rice. This sawed off little pocket rocket manages
to play every down, catch everything, and run both between and outside the
tackles effectively - an increasingly rare and therefore valuable commodity
these days. Harbaugh would rather send
his grandchildren to Jerry Sandusky’s Prison Fantasy Camp than trust Joe Flacco
to throw the ball to anyone but #27, which is why Rice accounts for no less
than 137% of Baltimore’s
offensive production annually. Ray-Ray
would be even higher if not for the 4+ years of heavily featured work at the
NFL level. At his current rate of over
usage (which is fantasy gold), it’s only a matter of time before he
spontaneously combusts like the drummer for Spinal Tap, or various limbs randomly
start falling off right on the field.
#3. Aaron Rogers. It is tempting to take a running back here
given how quickly they disappear; however, in this age of running back by
committee there are less valuable/reliable RBs, but more playable RBs to be had
much later. Rogers is about as consistent, reliable, and
elite as it gets. In every year as a
starter he’s been among the top three fantasy scorers overall. It’s as though he has made it his personal
mission to show Brett Favre what could have been were he not averse to practice,
teamwork, and not annually generating more drama than a thirteen year old cheerleading
captain with her own reality television show.
*Meanwhile somewhere in Mississippi Brett Favre announces, through his
agent, to his wife that he’s “holding out” until the end of training camp and will
no longer be taking out the trash, recreationally farming, and/or filming
Wranglers commercials that look suspiciously like ads for Viagra.
#4. Tom Brady. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could hate
this guy? When he’s not knocking up
various supermodels he’s winning Super Bowls, both fantasy and (the far less
important) NFL kind. He is surrounded by
the league’s best players at their respective skill positions, with the notable
exception of at running back – which is great because it means none of those
pesky rushing TDs to rob Brady of his fantasy stats. His chiseled stubbly jaw alone could outscore
lesser beings like Mark Sanchez, who we’ve all seen struggling this
preseason…with the realization that he’s simply never been very good at
football.
#5. Chris
Johnson. No, not Calvin Johnson (Madden
cover.). There are just too many good
wide receivers around much later in this new passing oriented NFL. If you can land a young (26) every down back with
2,000 yard potential, like CJ2Pay will have this year, jump on it! Don’t get me wrong, I advised everyone to
avoid him like a pregnant ex-girlfriend at a church social last year, and I was
right. After being all douchey for an
entire year and sticking it to the team (that DID pay him) by smugly loping
around for an entire season, eventually 2Pay realized that the perception out
there now is that he ACTUALLY SUCKS at football (not just as a person.) Thanks to his latest set of grillz, he’s
pretty much perfected his life long pursuit of looking exactly like Jar Jar Binks. Now he can finally turn his attention back to
less important matters like doing his job and actually EARNING his huge
paycheck.
Sleeper: Ben Tate. Many of you who have read other fantasy
lists are doubtlessly freaking out about Arian Foster and his conspicuous
omission. Arian made the stupidest football
career decision this side of being on the cover of Madden, he converted to
“delusitarianism” (vegan.) Dude, there
is a reason vegans are all 90 pound sickly looking women! Foster was already a risk because in games
where up big or down huge Houston
hands over the reins to the equally potent Ben Tate. It’s only a matter of weeks before Foster’s
legs snap like the twigs and berries of which his diet suddenly consists exclusively.
