Week 10

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I am not going to lie. I am flattered. This week, Matthew Berry wrote his Love/Hate column on one topic: ChatGPT. Now as you are aware, he is not the first Fantasy Columnist to focus their craft on ChatGPT: yours truly did that at Draft Weekend. So while I am clearly ahead of my time, you should check out the Week 11 Love/Hate because well, Matthew is clearly onto something.

Unless you were under a rock (which based on how you responded to multiple trade offers over the past week it may be possible some of you are) you would know by now there were three trades in the league this week. Live footage from Dirty Mike’s HQ:

I thought it would be good to do a quick trade evaluation:

Trade 1: Dirty Mike & The Boys trades Christian McCaffery, Devonta Smith, and Jared Goff to The Commish for Travis Etienne Jr, Tank Dell, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba

I mean I am obviously biased, but I think this trade was beneficial for both teams. Primarily because I know it was painful for both teams. Anytime you trade Christian McCaffery it has to hurt. But I want to focus on Tank Dell for a second. While 90% of this production has happened on my bench, Tank Dell has been awesome. He has scored the 16th most Fantasy Football points out of all WR YTD. He has two games of 20+ points. But most exciting, did you know that he has the 6th highest open score in the NFL behind only Keenan Allen, Brandon Aiyuk, Garrett Wilson, CeeDee Lamb, and AJ Brown? That is some pretty good company. With a 15th round price tag, in my opinion, he may be the best keeper in the league. This guy is very good. And yet I just traded him. Painful. And Christian McCaffery is very good and we are excited to have him back in the locker room. But Jared Goff is going to be key. He is averaging 22.5 points when he plays indoors this year and 6 of his final 7 games are indoors. I am betting big time that he has a strong finish.

The Commish: A-

Dirty Mike: A-

Trade 2: Dirty Mike & The Boys trades Mark Andrews to The Institute for Kyle Pitts and Anthony Richardson.

Hindsight is 20/20 and well, this trade isn’t going to work out how VZ wanted it to. In a cruel twist of fate, approximately 4 hours after VZ traded for Mark Andrews, he broke his ankle and is out for the year. That is a bad beat and I honestly feel sorry for VZ. I really do. I know things like that are just difficult. I really don’t wish that upon my worst enemy and I am just disappointed that it happened. But let’s be honest. He traded two players that hadn’t started either one of them the last two weeks and Richardson was out for the year. It is highly unlikely that VZ is going to look back and miss either one of the players he traded away in 2023. On the other side, Richardson was drafted in the 8th round and is not exactly premium value. Transparently, I am sort of surprised that black is for sunday (Dalton Kincaid) or the icon (Jake Fergueson) weren’t more active in the Mark Andrews sweepstakes. I am fairly confident both of them are thrilled they weren’t right now.

The Institute: A+ for the first 4 hours. F for the remainder of the season.

Dirty Mike & The Boys: C-

Trade 3: This is The Way trades AJ Brown and Josh Jacobs to KayakPirates for Brian Robinson, Tony Pollard, and James Cook.

Even though he had a bye last week, AJ Brown has scored the 2nd most Fantasy Points out of all WRs over the past 4 weeks. And Josh Jacobs has scored the 10th most out of all RBs over the same time period. The bottom line is that both of these players have been very good. But the KayakPirates are essentially replacing Jaylen Waddle and Tony Pollard, also very good players that have underachieved so far YTD. Pollard continues to touch the ball frequently, but hasn’t scored a touchdown since week 1. Shockingly, of the three players that Jeff and Jacob traded, Tony Pollard had the least amount of Fantasy Points. Brian Robinson actually has the most YTD. Pollard was considered a top 10 RB preseason and the most valuable keeper in the league. He has lost a lot of the shine, but if the Cowboys keep blowing teams out he has to start to score more points doesn’t he?!?!?! It is unclear to me if Aaron had other options, but I think this trade definitely helps him get keeper flexibility because the highest round cost of these three is the 12th round so its fairly easy to see Aaron keeping at least two of them along with Chase. But the headline of this trade will be, can Brown and Jacobs continue their strong performances and clearly outperform Waddle and Pollard because if they do, the Kayak Pirates will become a dominant force for the remainder of this season.

Kayak Pirates: A+

This is The Way: B

Finally, I want to talk about the Las Vegas Grand Prix which ended just a few hours ago.

Not sure if you have been following, but there has been a TON of hype about this race. They literally have been building a race track on the Las Vegas strip for months and had a race there last night. I thought about going, but well I am old and it was expensive. But it looked like real life Gran Turismo!

The city was packed and basically everything was way too expensive. I was looking at hotels out of curiosity and some suites were like $10K a night.

Sidetrack: The track went right by the Sphere, which is another wild attraction in Vegas. While there are many videos of the different videos the Spheres play, this is the funniest thing about the Sphere to me:

Check out the actual racetrack!

Before we get to the awards let’s check this week’s episode of Gridiron Heights:

Manager of the Weak

Well needless to say Trevor was not Brave. He was awful. He scored 0 points. And my entire team had 47 losing by 59 points. I was thinking I am not sure I have ever been more wrong on a player. I was so certain that he was going to breakout this year. Was so so confident. And was so so wrong. Sigh. Last week Billy wanted to be the Manager of the Weak because he thought it would end his losing streak (it didn’t). I know better than to expect that. You gotta compete and perform if you want to win in the Playoffs!?!, and in week 10 I didn’t do that.

Move of the Week

Brent picked up Foreman in Week 6, but it wasn’t until Week 10 until he finally needed to start him. And boy did Foreman come up big on TNF vs. the Panthers. Foreman had 15 Fantasy Points with 80 rushing yards and a touchdown and helped secure a massive Week 10 victory while filling in some gaps during the bye. It will be interesting to see how much Foreman is involved with Herbert back, but he performed very well not only during the past few weeks while Herbert was injured, but he was very good for the Panthers last year (and dramatically better and cheaper than Miles Sanders).

MVP Josh Dobbs, Aman Ra St. Brown, Sam Howell, Courtland Sutton, Mike Evans

Courtland Sutton, 9 Fantasy Points, 11 Targets, 8 catches, 53 receiving yards, 1 receiving touchdown, 1 fumble lost

Some big performances in Week 10, but none bigger than Courtland Sutton on MNF securing a must win victory to keep KRABS season alive. Down by 4 going into the game, KRABS needed Sutton to come up big and he did with one of the most amazing TD catches you will see all year.

Manager Of The Week

Don’t look now but KRABS has won 3 in a row and finds himself in 6 place and essentially tied for a playoffs spot. He is behind by 50 points scored, but there is plenty of time to make that up. KRABS had a must win matchup in Week 10 vs. Aaron and he came out victorious (as described above). The worst part about this renaissance story is that he is doing it based on the play of CJ Stroud, who I dropped while he was on bye. And KRABS would have never picked him up if he didn’t mistakenly think he was keeper eligible. So even with KRABS is doing stupid things that make no sense he is still hurting The Commish. That is skill. But the only thing that matters at this point is to win, and KRABS is doing that. Somewhat surprising that KRABS didn’t make any trades this week to try and get better (I know he had offers for players that had scored more fantasy points than the ones wanted in return). But he must feel comfortable with David Nijoku, AJ Dillon, and Dalvin Cook providing a strong locker room presense to motivate the team. And don’t look now, but Justin Jefferson could be back any week now. Can Stroud keep it going? And is there enough there in Mixon, Metcalf, and Kamara to keep this roster going until Jefferson is back? I mean let’s look at the bright side, if Jefferson doesn’t come back over the next two weeks at least KRABS can start Rondale Moore. Congrats to KRABS for winning the Week 10 Manager of the Week!

Until Week 11… (but boy was it was rough injury filled start to the week)

- The Commish