Monday, January 3, 2011

Week 17: A People's Retrospective on a Championship Season


by 2010 HBFFL Champion Renal Failure






If you missed the HBFFL championship game... our special Fantasy Football Battle Simulator has recreated it for you. LOBO is the creepy dark-haired girl who kicks fire, and Renal Failure is the flexible British blonde without pants...

It's time for the People and their champion to reflect on the 2010 season and reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and what went meh.

The Good

Draft Day: We started the year with a great draft, which is easy when you have the Number One pick. Chris Johnson ended the year third in RB scoring, Tom Brady was 6th in QB scoring and threw a few bears into space at key points in the season. Humor Bowl III MVP Dwayne Bowe put up outstanding numbers after a weak beginning to his season and when he wasn't being shut out in the last few weeks of the regular season, coming in second in WR scoring (and was a 5th round steal too). And Jason Witten paid dividends with our fourth-round pick, having the most points of any tight end not named Antonio Gates.

Free Agency: Two words: Brandon Lloyd. The highest scoring WR of 2010 (beating Dwayne Bowe by one point). We picked him up after losing Mark Clayton (who in his own right was a steady performer and nice pick-up) for the year and the People finally had not only stability at the wide receiver position but someone who could put up huge numbers. Brandon Jackson filled in nicely during Chris Johnson's bye week to get us past The Ramblers. And Fred Jackson had great numbers on our bench, making us wish we had a second flex spot so we could have played him.

Trades: Eli Manning and Marcedes Lewis for Peyton Hillis and Brandon Pettigrew. Hillis fizzled in the playoffs but he got us through the middle of the season where we won six of our last seven games to make the playoffs. Pettigrew was fine for us until Witten became Jon Kitna's best buddy. As for Eli Manning, he ended up being 7th in QB scoring just behind Tom Brady, but he wasn't enough to get Chris into the playoffs.

The second half off the season and playoffs: When it came time for the People's Champion to win or die, R. Failure won 6 of their last 7 games, scoring a redonkulous 825 points in that span to not only get into the playoffs but earn the 3rd seed over LOBO via the points tiebreaker. And while we've had much better games than ones we had in the playoffs, we won and that's all that matters.


Other HBFFL squads thought that Renal Failure, after their 2-5 start, was going to be the team to steal on in 2010. We took great steps to correct that misconception...

The Bad

Injuries: Ryan Grant, Clinton Portis, and Pierre Thomas were supposed to give us mad depth at running back. Then Grant went down for the season, Portis followed suit, and Thomas sat out for nine games with an ankle injury, eliminating all of our vaunted depth at running back within the first four weeks of the season. And then there was the aforementioned Mark Clayton season-ending injury as well to screw with our WR corps.

Free Agency: We let Kicker David Akers go when the Philly offense was in flux early in the season (he ended up being 2nd in kicker scoring). And we could never find a good defense to use either, changing it from week to week with little to show for our efforts aside from a few good weeks from the Kansas City Defense. Sure, Matt Bryant finished third in kicker points, but it was a distant third and Renal Failure is infamous for having strong kickers and defenses to burnish our credibility as The Wild Card (bitches!) of Fantasy Football because we've had the number one K and DEF the previous two seasons

Trades: Our memory is a bit hazy on this one, but we remember offering Rambler Peyton Hillis and Dwayne Bowe for Arian Foster and someone else who we can't recall - probably a receiver. Yeah, we're glad that one didn't go through. Also we made offers to LOBO for Stephen Jackson and Maurice Jones-Drew which, also in retrospect, we're also glad didn't go through either.

The whole first half of the season: Man, those were some brutal weeks. Getting blown out by the Bald Spots. Only putting up 48 points vs. La Machine (who we went 0-2 against this year, still not avenging our loss in Humor Bowl II). Losing to the Eunuchs before Don abandoned his team. If you had told us after some of those piss-poor performances that we'd end the regular season in third with the second-highest point total in the league, we'd probably would have laughed at you. And if you told us we'd not only be in the championship game but win it, we would have asked what you've been drinking and can we drink straight from its bottle.


Dramatization of the Renal Failure crew after losing to LOBO in Week 7 to fall to 2-5...

The Meh


Hines Ward made it onto our roster for the third straight season, but with the emergence of Mike Wallace in Pittsburgh Ward was made irrelevant most weeks. And we might as well not have made that trade with Chris for Sidney Rice. We thought he was going to heal up faster than he did, and by the time he was active again we were riding the Lloyd/Bowe Express to Playoff-Town. Sam Bradford did okay. There were a few weeks when either he had dominant weeks or shit-the-bed performances, but overall he was an adequate backup. Then there was Matt Stafford who was putting together some big number games... and then he immediately wrecked his shoulder upon landing on the People's Bench.


The total opposite of "meh" is Our Lady of Tight Denim Victory Ines Sainz...

But good, bad, or meh, in the end Renal Failure won the HBFFL Championship. We did what we set out to do, though we would have liked to have gotten a win against Chris (1-4 vs. La Machine in our last five). But we kept Rambler from beating us and we take great pride in that. 16 weeks of high expectations, tribulations, suffering, bottoming out, redemption, revival, and eventually glorious and ultimate victory... that was the Renal Failure season of 2010.


Thank You, Pain... the theme song to our 2010 season... because no one circles the wagons and suffers more than your People's Champion. That and the lead singer reminds us of Arch Enemy's Angela Gossow, though Angela has a scarier voice...

We're pretty sure we'll be around during the NFL playoffs to compete with some of the more active HBFFL owners to pick winners, squeezing out one last competition between this motley group of degenerates and men of questionable character. Until then, just remember who your daddy is.


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Renal Failure had pretty much the exact same championship season in LOBO's FTWL league (going 2-5 to start the season, winning the next five, beating Rambler and LOBO in the playoffs)... except with a lot less interesting smack-talk and Ines Sainz pictures.

3 comments:

Chris C said...

Nice a Slapshot reference! The greatest hockey movie ever made.

LOBO said...

I can't believe what's-her-nose is topless in Slapshot.

-Best baseball movie ever.

renalfailure said...

That would be the mom from A Christmas Story. I had to Google that, and that was the first result.