Fuck. In my big money league I’ve become something of a RB whisperer but it’s always too early and I cut them and then a week or two later they explode and I can’t sign them off waivers. It’s like that shitty Dane Cook movie but football related.

I did crush this week though thanks to the Broncos defense. Now time to drop them before the Queefs destroy them Sunday.

I really don't see how trading for cooper helps Dallas, Dak isn't going to magically become a better QB because you add in another ok WR. AND for a 1st round pick, this is why Dallas is stuck in mediocrity.

If I had to wager, I'd say this is an attempt by Jason Garrett to save his job. Jerry Jones has started to voice his frustrations with the team, and having a first round pick in the next draft won't help Garrett much if he's fired by then. Cooper won't fix Dallas' offensive problems/shitty playcalling, but in a weak NFC East (and NFC overall) he might mask them enough to get the Cowboys to the playoffs, and that'd probably keep him as coach for at least another year.

WEEK 7 RESULTS

Week 7 was another solid week for both the prediction league and the NFL in general. Patriots win, Bills, Jets, and Dolphins all lose! What more could you ask for? Well it would've been nice if the Bills and Colts could've somehow both lost, but I'll stop complaining when things are this good.

I swear Rol has some kind of psychic powers that exclusively apply on Mondays. After predicting tonight's result perfectly, along with Farsala, he now has 3 PRs. I'm not sure if that's some kind of record but only four other participants even have one right, and nobody has two. It's probably because he loves across the Atlantic. If you think about it, he's in the future when he's predicting these games. What a cheater.

Farsala, cycychris, and BlowoverKing each finished first for the first time this season, although since nearly all of the participating league was within a game, it wasn't much of a boost. Cycychris is now tied for first after being in fourth last week, although his (relative) lack of PP technically puts him in third. He probably doesn't deserve to be there given that he was actually going to pick the Bengals and Giants before someone presumably whacked him with a rolled up newspaper and restored some sense to him, but that's life. For the second week in a row, there wasn't a whole lot of movement in the standings: the biggest change was for LudicrousSpeed, who fell from #7 to #11 after he went for a couple of upset picks that didn't pan out. 

As always, please check my work and let me know if I've made any mistakes.

Weekly League Manager Rambling

For all the shit that Jon Gruden (rightfully) got at the start of the year for trading Kahlil Mack, the sheer idiocy of Jerry Jones has suddenly put him in a position to succeed at just the right time. The Raiders now have three first round picks for this upcoming draft, and if they end up dealing Derek Carr to some QB desperate team (hello Jags), they could potentially wind up with another. Oakland is going to be awful this season, and definitely next season too (incidentally they still don't have a home stadium lined up for next year), but they could very well be legitimately scary team when they move to Las Vegas in 2020. It'll probably take a few more years beyond that for the young talent that the Raiders are stockpiling to become solid NFL players, but it's genuinely possible. On top of this, Gruden's got an unprecedented ten year contract that would be incredibly expensive to buy out, and if the Raiders' interactions with the city of Oakland are any indication, it's money Mark Davis doesn't have.

So Gruden can't be fired anytime soon, and I'd imagine he knows it. Which means...why not go full rebuild? If you don't think you can win with the roster you have now...why not blow it all up and focus on getting as many young players to win 5-7 years in the future when you could actually be fired? Even with Mack, Oakland wasn't a playoff team, and even if they could somehow stumble into the playoffs they would get crushed by the Patriots, Steelers, or someone else. The prime years of Mack, Carr, and whatever time Lynch has left in the league would be put to waste. But give it a few years...Brady and Roethelisberger (not to mention Rivers) will presumably be gone, leaving the AFC much more open. If the Raiders handle this draft right, and get solid players that can produce...they'd legitimately be in position to challenge teams in the playoffs.

Of course, that assumes Jon Gruden has any real clue as to what he's doing as a coach, and that's probably the biggest assumption of all here. Still, it's wild to think that he may have bumbled his way into an incredible opportunity, and just in time for the team's big opening in Vegas too.

Here are Week 8's games:

To prevent any more forgetfulness on my part, I'm picking Houston now.

I thought this was a move by Jerry Jones? Anyways, we have to give Dak some kind of receiver besides Beasly. Dak's level of difficulty is extremely high compared to most quarterbacks. Dallas Cowboys have lost two games (Houston and Washington) by 3 points and they were both winnable games. We just need one decent receiver that can get open constantly and we need a better left guard. 

It's difficult to say who's responsible for what exactly unless someone inside the organization discloses, but it's very rare for a move like this to be made without heavy involvement on the part of the head coach. At the very least, coaches have to be consulted about the player and whether they think they'll fit in with the current scheme/roster. The only situation in recent memory where there was a major disconnect to the point of not having the coach involved with personnel moves like this was Indianapolis when Ryan Grigson was GM and Chuck Pagano was head coach, and that (unsurprisingly) ended in disaster. Simply put, Garrett was almost certainly involved, and given that he took part in the conversations I'd imagine that he was also probably the one that initially pushed for it to happen.

In regards to the team, I agree that Dallas is in a tough spot, but they overpaid significantly for Cooper, who's been really struggling over the past season and a half. They probably could've gotten Cooper for, at most, a second round pick + a later round pick, and likely just the second. And even if they somehow couldn't, there are plenty of teams who would likely be willing to trade a receiver of Cooper's ability for less than a first. Juju Smith-Schuster, Robby Anderson, Kenny Stills, Jamison Crowder, Nelson Agholor, Keelan Cole, Sterling Shepherd: all young receivers (24 or under) with more yards than Cooper last year that you could almost certainly pry away from teams for a second round pick or less.

And the problem is that, even if Cooper puts them over the top in the division, they're going nowhere in the playoffs. They certainly don't have the ability to challenge the top tier teams in the NFC like the Rams or Saints. You're trading a first round pick for, at best, the right to get stomped in the playoffs. You can argue that trading Cooper for a first doesn't change much since they would've likely picked a WR anyway, but Cooper's gonna be 25 by the time next year starts and he's already got a significant amount of mileage on him (to say nothing of injury concerns). Personally, I think the much smarter option would've been to just accept this year as a lost cause, go for a high draft pick, find a great WR or LT in the first and the other in the second. Or maybe trade a high first rounder for two mid/late firsts to get a really good LT/WR if you don't think either is worth drafting early first. As an added bonus, you have an excuse to fire Jason Garrett too, and you can get the new guys a coach that isn't more conservative than rural Alabama.

Gotcha. Some of the formulas weren't updating properly, so those should be fixed now.

To early to tell on the Cowboys/Raiders trade. I'm leaning towards the Raiders though simply because the Cowboys offense sucks as a whole, adding a B tier WR doesn't magically fix the terrible Oline play, and the poor QB accuracy.