Fantasy Football Librarian

There was a time in my life (and perhaps you're in that time of your life now), when I couldn't have cared less about playground mulch. Wouldn't have even known it was a thing. Put some dirt down below that playground and tell kids to watch out, I would have said. Bwaahahaha. Yes, "watch out" always seems to do the trick and keep em safe. Anyway, fast forward to now when we built an amazing play structure in our backyard replete with climbing wall and slide for our boys and we had to ask them to wait for weeks before using it since it lacked the requisite mulch to cushion their falls. (Note: asking a 5- and 2-year-old to not go down a tube slide day after day is asking them to do things of epic proportions. Many stuffed animals were thrown down the slide in their stead.) Of course the mulch turned out to require a retaining wall and this backyard project evolved into the most epic, bank account-crushing gift to our boys ever thus far, but I've spent a lot of...

Bob is baaaack! He's got thoughts and deep wisdom on defenses this week, which I definitely need help with since I'm a Seattle girl this year. So let's read on. It’s the dreaded Week 9, six teams on Bye, including the ARI and SEA Defs. Heck, even the Chiefs are missing and becoming a force on Def. Along with that, two other notable Defs, GB and CAR, are facing each other this week, and neither team gives up Def points easily. What’s a girl to do? (I was asking Sara, not me, I’m a man…) So let’s get to it and I’ll try to show some enthusiasm in the face of distress. First, as usual, I’m big on accountability, so how’d we do last week? It was a pretty good week for the highly owned and recommended. SEA, CAR, ARI, and STL all did well, but they were supposed to, given the weak opponents for each. NE surprised, and are looking like a juggernaut now. Did you know they are leading in sacks? And I was flat out wrong about DEN, but I don’t think anyone saw that beat down...

What a weekend. Turns out I kind of love Halloween. Our oldest (the picky eater) tried a Kit Kat for the first time ("this is amazing, have you tried this before, Mommy? It tastes just like candy!") and our youngest melted my heart with his repeated use of "thank you" all night long. Of course the night ended in total chaos with our sugared-up, naked, overly-exhausted kids running around the house, but hey, good times. And I can't stop liking photos on Facebook of all my friends' kids and dogs dressed up and gleefully enjoying this tradition. But that said, I could really use a long, tropical vacation right about now. I'm pretty sure the best thing that one spouse can do for another when there are young children around, is to provide an opportunity for sleeping in. I had no idea that I had this deep and abiding love for sleeping in until it became such a rare commodity. So my husband wins some sort of award for swooping the boys up on Sunday morning and ...

We carved pumpkins in our house last night - we do it up with fancy templates and carving kits and such. When I was a kid, my sister and I basically just told my mom where to put the eyes and whether to make the pumpkin happy or toothy or menacing. But my husband and his family were far more advanced in their carving and that has spread to our family now - so last night my husband helped our oldest son carefully carved out a witch stirring her cauldron. The youngest mostly just stabbed at one of our other 9 pumpkins (yes, 9, too many pumpkin farm trips have been made...) while I carved Daniel Tiger's face into a pumpkin, much to the 2-year-old's delight. All hail the free templates from PBS Kids. Let's head to this week's lineup help: Week 8 Rankings: The Fantasy Fix's Week 8 Rankings Rotoworld's Week 8 Rankings  Looking for ROS (rest-of-season) rankings? See Yahoo's Shuffle Up: The joy of Danny Woodhead  RotoExperts' Week 8 Rankings, Flex Ranks...

I've got Bob back with his streaming defense knowledge - read on for his insight. It’s time for streaming some of those defenses again and I’m here to help. Specifically, I do the research, and you pick your best option from the lists below. This week marks a change to my research. I’ve decided to do some in-depth data mining on my own, instead of depending on the research of others. As such I’ve compiled an extensive research spreadsheet of both the Defenses’ and the Offenses’ generosity. This gives me a great rankings system to use for analysis. With that I look at the matchups, specifically the strengths of the Defs and the weaknesses of the Offs. Then I look at trends that are emerging. Finally I look at the teams from a coaching and leadership angle, which gives me some intrinsic data that can be used to split those hairs. But first, as usual, let’s look back at last week’s results.  The highly owned averaged over 13 points last week, but was high due to STL’s be...