ASTRAL GEEKS S09E01: Gouge Away

There goes my hero… (jk)

“I would argue there is no better feeling in fantasy football than your kicker having one of those random 30-point games. It’s better than any other outcome. It’s better than your quarterback throwing for seven touchdowns or Kamara running for five. Your kicker putting up 28 points is like the best feeling in fantasy.”

-Craig Horlbeck – The Ringer Fantasy Football Show

Craig is also the originator of such gems as “There should be a whale tax. If you don’t make the playoffs you [the team owner] should have to relocate a whale from captivity,” and “Handshakes are hard. There’s too many now.”

In the fantasy community, when it comes to kickers there is the age-old argument between purist snobs and old school lovers of randomness. For a long while now the snobs have been winning. They would like to pare down the game of fantasy to just QBs, RBs, and WRs, because they want a streamlined block of predictable numbers and nothing more. Tight Ends are too shitty, get them out! Single QBs aren’t valuable enough – real fantasy players stick to Superflex! DST scoring is stupid (it is). And kickers are too random!

Now, I too am a lover of fine things and better ways of doing stuff. But I’m also a lifelong anti-snob. I too have flirted with the above ideas, and have played in a number of leagues that have adopted some or all of these more streamlined rules. However, not because I think they are better, but merely because I approach fantasy like I do every other appetite in my life: Give me the smorgasbord! I want to try it all. 

But when it comes to what I’m cooking for myself, in our home league we’ve mostly stuck to the old formats. We roll single QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 2 Flex, TE, DST, and K. Why? Partly because we got some old school cats who fear too much change and vote on any new proposals the same way rural Minnesotans vote on local ballot measures. But also because our roster includes a breadth of different elements and most clearly reflects, in my mind, the sport of football — without being needlessly complicated. In general, yes, Tight Ends suck. But they also add an interesting wrinkle to draft strategy. Standard DST scoring is stupid and boring, but defenses and special teams do matter immensely to the sport of football. So instead of going full IDP (again, grumpy Boomers) we addressed that by implementing dynamic DST scoring, which rewards defenses for the little things they do that affect the game. Single QB not valuable enough? Well, then we tweaked the scoring so that the good QBs are worth drafting a lot higher. And kickers… well, we just like the randomness! I tried a few times to get rid of them myself, but the proposal just got voted down every time. Now I’ve come back full circle on them. Football is a game of odd bounces, double-doinks, wide rights. So why not keep some of that chaos in the mix?

The argument around kickers has even extended to the sport itself. Remove it all together, they say. It’s not worth the potential injury, it’s almost always boring, and it adds extra time to an already long game. But personally,  I like the weird vestigial limb left over from football’s history and its origins in rugby. Football fans don’t quite embrace the ancient history of the sport like baseball fans do, but it’s all the strange little rules an elements, some incongruous, that make these sports so interesting. Let’s not just give all that up for a few more downs of running and passing, which we already get up the wazoo. America is already actively suppressing its own history in favor of the juiced up white supremacist view of its own supposed perfection. History is messy, and it still lives with us every day. It always more interesting (and valuable) to acknowledge it.

I saw Pixies the other night at Edgefield with Modest Mouse and Cat Power. It was a very sedate show, all of us onstage and in the crowd officially old now, but they played this song and I forgot how much I love it live. I’ve seen this band half a dozen times, but this was the year I discovered them and first saw them live. This performance kicks ass.

This video isn’t quite as good of a performance, but I had to throw this in for the fun visual things. Black Francis with hair! Kim Deal has always had that effortless don’t give a fuck coolness. Joey Santiago looks super slick with his pompadour and cool black Gibson and the cigarette in the strings, and then he flubs a note and makes a funny face. I love this band so much.

Football is finally back! It’s the most wonderful (and soul-crushing) time of the year, and to celebrate I bit the bullet and purchased Youtube’s Sunday Ticket, trying to get in before the $50 discount went away. Yippee dippity doodle. As a service it…. hmmm… I guess the word I’m looking for is… SUCKS. Oh yes that’s it. At twice the price of European Game Pass (which moved to DAZN this year, a streaming service that chokes off VPNs with ruthless efficiency), it offers much less. I already knew that it wouldn’t be offering prime time games. When it comes to those, it doesn’t matter how much money you paid, you can fuck off like all the other peasants (which I am anyway, having spent my next ten paychecks on Sundae Tickle) and go cram into a sports bar and get COVID and die a slow, agonizing death, leaving Youtube to forcibly seize what remains of my earthly possessions, as spelled out in the fine print of my contract. But besides all that, it’s cheap-looking, jankily organized, and weird to navigate, with the games all jumbled up arbitrarily like any other random collection of videos on the site. The whole thing is decidedly inferior to the streamlined user interface of Game Pass. Also, just randomly, at least two (not-local, mind you) games on the Sunday slate will just be blacked out with no explanation because, once again, Fuck You, Peasant. 

Now, the ubiquitous cutesy commercials all focus on Sunday Ticky Tack being the only way to watch all of your out of market team’s games, which is hilarious, since my very much out-of-market team’s game was not available. Fuck me then, and remember NO REFUNDS on your way out to the gutter, Piss Boy. But other than that blithering nonsense, their Money Shot Selling Point is the fact that you can watch (oooooo) multiple games at once with their Quad Box feature. Well now, if you are a sports bar, a two-bit bookie, or Bill Simmons wiling away an entire Sunday with Cousin Petey, Bonko, and Hark the Shark, I can see how appealing this feature might be. But me, I just use Red Zone like a normal person (also, very few of the quad boxes worked, because besides the Seahawk game, every combo I picked included some mysteriously blacked out game). 

And look, all I really want is a reliable way to watch the Niners every week that doesn’t involve 23 different viruses crippling my computer (Ha ha ha, good luck, scum-ridden Serf!). But I also enjoyed Game Pass features like All-22, condensed games, and replays on demand. Unsurprisingly, Little Tick Energy does not offer any of that. It claims to offer “condensed” games, but they’re really just the cheap 11-minute highlight vids anyone can watch for free (and they have Youtube ads in them, because of course they do).