Breakout Potential

So I don't usually write about my fantasy football team for two reasons:

One, it's not really all that funny,

and two,

My chief demographic are moms 25-52 and couldn't care less that Doug Martin's nickname is "The Muscle Hamster" and that he was injured this week and that his back-up is no longer available on the waiver wire.

Probably don't even care what a waiver wire is.

Get well soon Muscle Hamster.

Yet something kinda odd happened this weekend which has been rolling around in my head for the last 24 hours.

You see, this weekend, my team was primed for an awesome win.

The whole group has been right on the cusp, and by right on the cusp, I mean that they have pretty much sucked all season long and each and every one of them was due for a big blowout game.

This was gonna be my week.

But the exact opposite happened.

Not only was every member of my team not good, it is almost statistically impossible to have scored as low as I scored this week.

A freakish mathematical anomaly of suckage.

And all I keep thinking is "What exactly were the steps, the decisions, the thought processes that lead to the most historic low score in league history?"

How could my team possibly be this ridiculously bad?

Especially, and this is what is killing me, especially since this is almost exactly the team I was hoping to get after a month or two of some pretty heavy research and speculation.

My chickens just won't hatch.

And I'm getting hungry.

So last night, I went back a bit to look at where, why, and how I made the picks I made, for there are all kinds of different attributes that go into drafting players, and when it turns out that you've single handedly drafted the worst possible with the best intentions, it might be time to rethink everything.

So I looked back and I found it. I found my Achilles heal.

As I said, there are all kinds of attributes to sift through, and to a data collector like myself, a set of statistics makes me as giddy as my wife with a new episode of Downton Abbey. And when you're dealing with all kinds of possible outcomes, as an analyst, you kind of have to decide which attribute is going to be the most effective. Which trait is going to be the leading indicator of future success.

For me, this year, every choice was skewed toward breakout potential.

Take everything into consideration except, and this is hysterical, take everything into consideration except past performance.

Pick the guys who were statistically primed for the best season of their careers.

I didn't want a fleet of mini-vans, or pick-up trucks, or classic muscle cars, or a combination thereof,

I wanted rocket ships.

And all of them, with the exception of a few well timed ignitions, blew up on the launch pad.

Cause I didn't go with the guys that were great, I went with the guys that were supposed to hopefully be great.

Interesting, right?

I guess that's where my head is at.

Cause, as of September 6th 2013, I'm totally betting my life and the lives of just about everyone around my that I am supposed to hopefully be great at the dream I've always dreamed of doing. And when you deal in magic, you start to see omens everywhere, and the complete implosion of my fake football team sends this monster metaphoric signal to my sub conscience that I and the rest of the Partridge Family are doomed.

Doomed, I tell you, doomed!

But that's just stupid.

Even if it takes me a day or two to work out how stupid that is.

Cause the fake football game is really fun when you win, and it's really fun when you lose (it's just funner to win), but winning or losing doesn't make the games less exciting, or the data mining and speculation any less fun. Everybody wakes up Tuesday morning looking to the next week.

And living the dream is fun. It's fun when you have success, and when you fail, at least you get to sleep in, and if "Wait . . . Dad?" implodes in real life that way it has in Yahoo's Fantasy Football game, then gee whiz Mr. Cleaver, I guess I'll have to go back to the cushy middle class life where I teach people about coffee and tea. Bummer.

But those two things are mutually exclusive.

Like soccer moms and muscle hamsters.