The NFL Network is reporting that Brady is out for the season with a knee injury. This is my 6th season of fantasy football, and I can't honestly remember the last time such a highly rated player went out so early. Perhaps in '03 when Komron took Vick #7 in the first round. This year Brady went 6th in one league, and 2nd in the other.

Also in football news, who would have guessed that the Bears, Carolina and Tennessee would have put down Indy, San Diego and Jacksonville respectively? The Indy game just ended, Matt Forte look pretty darn good and Peyton looked human. Sorry, Marc - I thought Detroit was going to be a winner too. :(

We have always individual defensive players (IDP) in the Naked Bootleggers league. It adds a mild layer of extra strategy to the proceedings, and sometimes you get lucky and one of your IDP players pulls off 8 tackles and 2 sacks on Monday night for the weekly win. Not always, but sometimes. In this edition, we investigate when to start thinking about drafting IDPs.

This weekend, Marc posted an analysis of overrated and underrated players in the upcoming fantasy football drafts as measured by the Yahoo ranking vs the ADP. Then the excellent Fantasy Football Librarian came out with a list of the average rankings (ARP) for a number of players from some of the more popular websites including yahoo, the NFL, EPSN, CBS and high quality blogs.

Last time, you saw the graph
comparing the relative point values of various first round fantasy football draft strategies. For that graph, I assumed that if you chose a running back in the first two rounds, that you would follow up the third round with a quarterback. This seemingly makes sense - the quarterback is the most valuable player on the team (points wise). But does it make sense to take a quarterback as early as possible.

The days are getting shorter, the dew is on the leaves, and the air is getting crisp. On Sunday morning you go to get your paper, and if you listen really hard, you can hear it in the distance - the theme song for Monday Night Football. Oh, yeah - its that time.

And that time means that fantasy football drafts are just around the corner. The draft in the usual Naked Bootleggers (NB) league is on the 24th, followed by my first year in Marc's family & friends league on the 27th. That means its high time to start looking at the statistics and pretending I somehow can get a leg up during the draft (you know it never works out), but hey, its still fun. Even hard core systems hackers like myself enjoy spending time with a spreadsheet. In this installment: early round strategy. For some time now, the hard and fast rule of the first two rounds has been to take two running backs. Woe to the poor sucker who took a quarterback too early. But today's NFL is different - Peyton Manning has inspired a generation of passers, and teams are increasingly going to two back systems thanks to more aggressive rush defense and injuries. So too has the RB/RB strategy turned the corner? Read on....

Bernie Mac died yesterday of complications from pneumonia . He was only 50. Funny, funny dude.

Issac Hayes was found dead today. He was an accomplished singer, but we'll all remember him as the guy who did the theme song for Shaft (I can dig it), and his role as "Chef" on South Park. Move along children.

Ted Stevens Is Indicted on Corruption Charges. Woo! Couldn't have happened to a more deserving asshat. Enjoy your forced retirement, Ted ol' boy. Perhaps you can finally learn how the intertubes really work.

This last Friday was the final episode of the Next Food Network Star. One of the finalists (who didn't win, to our dismay), made "beer-in-the-butt" chicken. The beer of choice? Old Chub from Oskar Blues. They didn't exactly come out and say it, but the label was unmistakable. That is really cool, especially considering the fact that they were filming in New York City, where they had a much wider choice of beers to choose from. Furthermore, the finalist was from Philadelphia, so clearly, they used a Colorado beer due to superior craftsmanship and taste rather then lesser familiar beers. Congratulations, Oksar Blues!

If you know anything about me (and lets face it, if you are reading this, you probably do), then you know I am very against software patents. Thats why this is great news. From the article:

n a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”

Thats the best of all worlds I think - general purpose alogrithms (like the ones that I use every day) are not patentable, but important machine specific things like microcode (which are important to my company) are. This is a great thing for software developers everywhere, especially those of us striving toward making the open source community play well with others.

I won't comment on what Jesse Jackson said, but I will comment on how he was caught. A night staffer was training transcribing on the new digital equipment when he caught the naughty comments. It looks like Ol' George was right - they are watching us. Only its not the government (who obviously needs private help to easedrop on us), but rather the 24 hour news channels. I have a theory, eventually we'll all end up on TV. Its only a matter of time.