The People's Week 9: High Score!

by Renal Failure


Everything is better when you score 153 points... and have Jim Ross doing commentary...

Renal Failure, your People's Champion, is kicking things into high gear in the 2nd half of the season, racking up an authoritative 153-96 win over Bald Spots this past week (and our second A+ rating from the Yahoo! recap bots).  Jeremy Maclin's throwing bears into orbit like they're going to outlaw the practice soon (34pts this week, 37pts last week).  Alfred Morris and Marshawn Lynch each put up two TD's en route to their big 22 and 25-point days respectively. Denard Robinson is paying off as our new FLEX with 16 points.  Drew Brees was projected for 21 and got 21, Jason Witten was projected for 6 and got 6, so OK on both of those.  Billy Cundiff continues to be Billy Cundiff with a 10 point day.  Our only mistake was letting go the Miami Defense because we thought they'd have trouble with San Diego's offense, but you can't make all the right choice all the time (we grabbed them back for this week's game though).

Bald Spots had Gronk (22pts), Carson Palmer (22pts) and Andre Ellington (18pts), and that was about it, not that it would have made a difference which makes leaving Reggie Wayne's 15pts and Joe Flacco's 26pts on the bench tolerable. Bald Spots were missing Brandon Marshall and Megatron on bye weeks, though Bald Spots has been missing Megatron for way longer than that.  Both will be back in action next week but it may be too late for Bald Spots, and a number of other HBFFL, to turn things around — if indeed Points For is an indicator of team success.


3rd in the HBFFL in scoring... you can't run from Renal Failure! BURN BABY BURN!

Bourbon Blasters and Cranberry Sauce are at 2-7 and pretty much dead in the water, especially since Cranberry Sauce's owner seems to have bailed (not that it would have mattered against The DreamCrushers! this week - 142-52).  Predator Press, Bald Spots, and Meaty Clackers are at 3-6 and the highest scoring team out of those three is PredPress with 829 points.  They're a full two games behind 5th place Renal Failure (5-4) who has 1010 points for (112.22 pts per week, and we've only scored less than 90pts once) — and if we didn't have the 3rd highest points against our record would be much better. Looking at that points disparity between the three 3-6 teams and 5-4 Renal Failure does not inspire much confidence that they'll be able to go on a long winning streak or that Renal Failure will suffer a catastrophic collapse — barring injuries of course.

The Traveler's form has been chosen!
And it doesn't matter that Mark Sanchez
is throwing him the ball.

Regarding your current playoff ranked teams - 4th place Future Ex-Cons (6-3) have 987 points for - the same as the 7-2 3rd place Patriots.  Fellow 7-2 teams, the 2nd place DreamCrushers! (1044pts for) and 7-2 1st place Mile High Club (1099) are the only squads that have more points than Renal Failure, thus making them the least likely of these four teams to falter. Patriots don't seem to have a lot of depth and Ben Roethlisberger is not going to keep throwing up 50 point games, so they might be the ones most likely to stumble.

Ex-Cons are humming along with a 6-game winning streak and have made out very well from their trade with us. Sammy Watkins and Chris Ivory have produced but Tom Brady's stuck on the Ex-Con bench with 40+ point games.  Ex-Cons are deep at WR but if anything happens to his RB threesome of Forsett/Bradshaw/Ivory he's pretty much screwed.  Troi may need to engineer another trade to bolster his RB ranks some more, but who has an RB to spare worth the newly-revived Tom Brady? The only team with that much RB depth is Renal Failure and we've already got Drew Brees.  Maybe DreamCrushers! in a pinch but they already have 2014 God of QB's Andrew Luck. Anything to keep Renal Failure off their backs, because the People's Champ is infamously dangerous in the 2nd half of the season.


Kill all the bad guys, get to the playoffs, then you can live on the planet with the teddy bears...


So Week 10.  We're facing the Patriots again and this time they don't have the element of surprise on their side from being new to HBFFL. They still have DeMarco Murray leading the league in RB scoring, and he'll probably be running for miles vs. the Jags. Randall Cobb and Mike Wallace hold down the fort at WR.  Eddie Lacy will be fresh from the bye week.  The question is: do the Patriots go with Matt Ryan or Big Ben?  Mattie Ice is against the Suckaneers and he already lit them up earlier this season, but Big Ben is suddenly Bear NASA over the past two weeks. Do the Patriots play the matchup or play the hot hand?

Renal Failure is without Alfred Morris (bye week) but Denard Robinson's been running up some decent pointage. We're conflicted about our FLEX option. Will Fred Jackson be back? Do we go with Bobby Rainey and hope the Bucs don't decide to tank the season and run rookie Charles Sims all game? Bishop Sankey... uh, no.  Do we plug in Larry Fitzgerald for a spark? We're hoping we get enough out of our killer WR tandem of Maclin and D. Thomas, and that Brees goes wild at home even if he is playing against the Niners because Drew Brees at home is always a bear-into-deep-space threat.  Marshawn, you keep scoring TD's, okay?

Yahoo! says we're losing this one hard 108-102, but then again Yahoo! failed to predict we'd score 316 points in our last two games too.

Renal Failure is the People's Champion and the only team to win the HBFFL and FTWL championships in the same year. We also won big in Week 10 in the FTWL - 162-69. We're in 3rd place, winning the 4-way tie at 5-4 because we have 319 points in our last two FTWL games - just like in the HBFFL. Coincidence?  We think not!