I'm way way behind on my journal now, what with all the work that I've been doing. So even though I'm going to write about my fantasy football league again one journal after the last time, it's already been a week. Two weeks ago I needed to win my last three games to win the league championship on tie-breakers. Now with one game left I see that I've won the last two games and am now one simple win away from the championship.

Week 16 saw my team, the Sacramento Stallions (name inspired by Cal, another Sacramento native, who loves horses and owns one herself), pitted against the then number 2 team, the San Francisco SunSeters (hope that was an intentional misspelling). I was confident in my team, as they had scored over 100 points in each of their last two games, while San Francisco had not cracked 90 in eight games, and had scored over 90 only twice in 15 games (but they *were* 11-4).

Once Sunday's games were over and I estimated the results for my team, I wasn't feeling so hot. Other than Eddie George who had another great game, everyone else on offense was going to score 5 points or less, other than my kicker who had 7 points. I can't estimate defensive players so that doesn't go into the estimate. But today it's nice to see that I had an ok game, scoring 81 points, due to an extra 10 points over average that my defensive players scored. Meanwhile San Francisco had a bad game, only scoring 53 points.

Entering into the final week we have the Seattle Crackers at 12-4 and riding a 6 game win streak, followed by Sacramento and San Francisco with 11-5 records. I expect San Francisco to beat the #9 team to finish at 12-5. If I beat Seattle I win the championship; I already have more points and hold the tie-breaker and obviously if I win I've scored more points than Seattle. Also, I don't think San Francisco can make up the 45 points their behind me to win on a tie-breaker. So if I win then it ends with Sacramento, then Seattle and finally San Francisco unless they outscore Seattle by 33 points which is possible in this league. If I lose it's Seattle on top, then San Francisco while Sacramento falls to third place. So for Sacramento it's either first or third.

Seattle brings a 30 point running game and a 20 point receiving game, the 10 point differential is not enough for me to switch to a run defense. I'd gain 2 points on strategy but lose 3 points from my defensive output, on average. So it's a standard defense for me. Meanwhile Seattle puts up 2 linebackers and a defensive back on defense, meaning a +10% for my running game and a -10% for my receiving game. This plays to my strength, since I average 29 points running and 14 points receiving. By now I have my standard starting lineup and I'm going to stick with them in this final game.

Apparently the top team in the league goes to some sort of bonus round with all the other league champions. You guess who's going to win each playoff game and then some SuperBowl statistics as a tie-breaker. Not very interesting to me, since it's not head-to-head, it's just like any other football pool. If I do win the championship, next year I'll have to play in a serious league. It would be the fair thing to do.

Once again I started the season with two bad quaterbacks and had to replace them both. I've stuck with Grbac in every game possible as the backup is not that great (though he at least he scores points, except in the one game he started for me). Once again I picked up a nice Denver running back that's helped my offense. Once again I was lucky in a couple of close games in having picked the hot player out of my stable of mediocre players (all the difference between a contender and an also-ran). It's a fun diversion.