Challenge Contests — by Justin Eleff

Last week's column proposed a strategy for going from near the top of the standings to very near the top of the standings, and a week later it seems to be working fine. My $50K points team is up to 6th overall; last week's featured team, Statman's Crew, is up to 12th in the Football Challenge.

Then again, while my team did surge, my two favorite low-percentage plays, Larry Fitzgerald and Greg Jennings, were hardly the reason why. They combined for 30.4 points in Week 15 -- solid, but hardly challenge-changing.

After careful consideration, Kevin Dallas indeed added Nate Kaeding to Statman's Crew -- but Kaeding scored 9 points this week, 1 fewer than Shayne Graham, whom he'd sent to the bench. And Kevin also added Vincent Jackson, who had a great game ... but isn't really a low-percentage play, except to the extent that his owners got down on him as he slumped in Weeks 10-13.

Bottom line?

In Week 15, at least, the strategy wasn't the difference. Both teams surged, but primarily because they were already good teams. Sometimes endgame strategies take a backseat to previously best-laid plans. If you have the right team -- and a lot of us do, in huge part because we chose players wisely before the season started -- you can sometimes stand pat and still gain ground.

That was a lesson I learned early in my challenge career, when -- back when the Diamond Challenge was Sporting News-owned, before CDM and then Fanball -- I'd sometimes find at the end of a season that I would've had better hitting numbers if I'd just left my Opening Day roster intact, never shuffling the position players in and out of my lineup. That was before I really knew what I was doing, mind you, but it made an impression; to this day, I never make a Sunday morning change in the football challenges unless injury or weather news breaks.

The other changes you can talk yourself into -- the ones that come from your gut second-guessing the analysis you've performed earlier in the week with your brain and a calculator?

Those changes are usually worse than no changes at all.

I actually made a rule something like that earlier this season, you may recall, but in a different context. How to conserve new player purchases early on? When in doubt, do nothing. You could replace the strategy I proposed last week with a modified version of the same rule -- unless someone is hurt or playing in an actual blizzard, do nothing -- and you might just be OK.

I'll offer the concretest example I can to demonstrate the potential value of just not doing it, and that will be the column for this week. Shorter than usual, I know, but I'm buried in what will eventually be Fantasy Baseball Index 2010 at the moment. (You should absolutely buy that, by the way; newsstands everywhere in the spring.)

That example:

I mentioned in the comments section of one of these columns a few weeks ago that I've been fooling around with a Mid-Season Football Challenge team. "Fooling around" were indeed the operative words in that last sentence; my whole idea was to take a couple of chances to distinguish my roster from most others and see what happened, figuring I'd have no trouble capping my losses if it came to that. One thing I've always been good at is knowing when to stop spending money on a team that isn't working.

So I played the team, typically starting one extra cheapo WR and one extra costly RB, and it didn't work. My rushing categories were too strong in a sense (remember, there are no extra points for dominating categories) and my receiving categories were too weak. It also didn't help that I'd bet against Matt Schaub, leaving him off of my roster entirely. In Week 14 -- not this past week but the one before -- I decided to try two last-ditch purchases as a final bid to compete in my league.

I bought K Garrett Hartley and WR Andre Johnson. They put me exactly at the game's $28 million salary cap.

(I always get a good feeling when I spend right to the limit, incidentally. Find that combination of players that costs exactly what the game allots and you're doing something right -- or so the feeling goes.)

So A.J. had a monster first game on the squad -- 11 catches for 193 yards, 2 TDs -- and ...

... nothing.

The team was still 7th in its league of 25, around 350th overall.

I pulled the plug.

This week I made no changes: salary still $28 million on the nose; Week 15 lineup still optimized for Week 14 matchups. Except that the team combined for 1,061 receiving yards, finished 1st in league and 5th overall for the week, and surged all the way to 2nd in league and 127th overall for the season.

I'm back in the game, looking at a better-than-even shot of doing better than breaking even financially, because I did nothing.

Because -- I'm sure some of you agree with this -- more-or-less random chance is better than my best analysis and most careful planning. Or it can be, anyway.

From one perspective, you look at a thing like this, an accidental surge, and have to laugh -- just as you have to laugh when a dominant office-league team loses its second playoff game because Steve Smith (CAR, not NYG) has his only really great game of the season. This stuff happens.

But from another perspective, there is a lesson here:

We do have the right teams, a lot of us. We're picking our teams in the preseason better than we ever have before (whether "preseason" in a particular challenge means before Week 1 of the NFL season or before Week 9).

If you take anything away from what you've read here, it ought to be that the methods we've honed together, over the several years I've been writing this column, really do work. Every one of my teams is now doing well this season. A lot of yours are, too -- it isn't just Kevin.

I want you to pick apart everything I write next fall, not holding back when you think I'm wrong about something, because I really believe the discussions we can (and do, and will) have here will make all of our teams better.

Several years back I wrote baseball challenge columns for this website, too, and one of the games I covered was run by a company called Sportsco. The day I learned of the existence of that game, I wrote a column promising that my team would finish 1st overall.

It did.

Three years in a row.

We're not quite there yet with football -- Kevin has a better chance to win the Football Challenge than I do the $50K points game, but he still has work to do and still has to be considered a longshot -- but next year I want to write these columns just knowing that one of my teams, or one of yours, will take home an overall prize in addition to the tidy profits a lot of us stand to make this season.

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