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SKL WEEK 9: DEAR SANTA, IT’S NOVEMBER

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  SKL WEEK 9: DEAR SANTA, IT’S NOVEMBER Last week we were still wearing Halloween costumes. Apparently Thanksgiving has been canceled. Last week, this column was still handing out Halloween costumes. Parkhurst was Michael Myers, Burst was Charlie Brown, Bernie was Ferris Bueller, Erica was Cinderella, Trey was The Mask, and Travis came dressed as Travis because nobody was completely certain the person scoring all those points was the same guy who had shown up in September. That was seven days ago. The costumes have barely made it back into the plastic storage bins, there are still pumpkins collapsing inward on front porches across Central New York, and Thanksgiving football is still several weeks away. Naturally, this means somebody has already dragged the Christmas decorations out of the attic. The inflatable Santa is on the lawn. The lights are wrapped around the railing. Mariah Carey has been released from containment. Somewhere, a neighbor who spent October complaining about Ha...
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WEEK 8: THE MIDTERM

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SKL WEEK 8: THE MIDTERM Report cards are due. Costumes are mandatory. The spreadsheet is taking both far too seriously. Week 8 landed in the narrow part of the calendar where American schools traditionally combine two activities that should never happen on the same day: academic evaluation and children arriving dressed as Batman. So naturally the Syracuse Keeper League is doing both. The Midterm grades are due, the Halloween parade has reached the cafeteria, and twelve teams are wandering through the hallways dressed as monsters, movie characters, ghosts and, in one case, a preseason D+ draft grade. Somewhere behind a folding table in the grading office, a spreadsheet has been created to determine whether the student dressed as a 5-3 contender is actually a 5-3 contender. The spreadsheet is unsigned, the formulas are suspiciously well-commented, and one of its first official acts after coming online was to begin asking uncomfortable questions about Bernie. This is why people were happi...
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SYRACUSE KEEPER LEAGUE — WEEK 7

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MONDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES The SKL Hits the Red Carpet Most fantasy football Mondays are not premieres so much as cleanup. By the time everyone wakes up, the costumes are hanging back on the rack, the critics have mostly filed their reviews, and at least half the league is already doing the peculiar fantasy-football thing where a disastrous lineup choice is slowly reclassified as something that was never really a choice at all. Somebody will point out that a bench player scored 31, somebody else will insist nobody would have started him, and by lunchtime the entire exercise has become less about football than reconstructing everyone’s state of mind at 12:57 Sunday afternoon. Monday Night Football is usually just the last reel of a movie whose ending everybody already understands. Week 7 was different, because somehow all six Syracuse Keeper League matchups arrived at Monday night with unfinished business. Bernie had a 29-point lead over Jim, but Jim still had Tanner McKee and Jaishawn ...
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Week 6: The Name Recognition Tax

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  Week 6: The Name Recognition Tax At some point in every fantasy season, the draft is supposed to stop mattering. Not literally. Nobody is suggesting that if you spent a first-round pick on somebody in August you should forget why you did it, erase the scouting report, and treat him like a stranger who wandered into the locker room looking for the bathroom. Draft capital exists for a reason. Better players generally get drafted earlier. Proven players generally deserve more patience than somebody whose entire résumé consists of one good Sunday and a preseason blurb that used the phrase “sneaky upside.” But there has to be a statute of limitations. By Week 6, August is six weeks old. Preseason rankings were hypotheses. September gave us evidence. October is starting to give us patterns. At some point the fourth-round receiver who keeps scoring nine points stops being “the fourth-round receiver” and becomes “the guy who keeps scoring nine points,” while the anonymous bench player wh...
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