Season Four

[Tasan]

Season four starts out with our OC needing either a new contract or to be replaced. We have a pretty good OC, so we offer him an extension, which he accepts. I am suprised because he's fairly talented, we are a crap team, and it was a small raise over 5 years. Oh well, his loss.

Everyone is under contract for this year, so nothing to do but maybe negotiate some extensions during FA1.

Butch still has 61 weeks to go for his stupid head to heal, and his ratings, while never very good anyway, are almost all gone. I bet he retires.

[Tasan]

Peaking at the draft, an astounding 5 guys didn't sign last year and reentered the draft. I've never seen more than 3 in all my seasons of FOF.

I've decided to drop all my draft picks on the worst NFC team last season. That honor goes to division rival 2-14 New York Giants. I hope busts on all of them. The Giants had to surrender a 7th next year and a 7th two years from now for all the picks.

Odd thing from the draft: We get a B for drafting nobody.
The Giants get an A+, and they completely rebuilt their offense with our picks. Parts of their draft: a 25/69 QB, a 60/65 RB, and a 23/61 WR. They are going to be good soon.

We get a trade offer for our C. So far, we've gotten offers for just about every one of our guys still over 55 or so.

Reeves looks to have topped out at 62/62, and McG is now 41/41, and learned 2 new formations finally. I did bump up the film room time during TC, so maybe that was the key.

Preseason is fairly uneventful, except that we lose TE Matos for the season. I think his ratings took a big hit as well, but I'll have to go back and double check.

We stick with the Smash Mouth offense again this year.

We get our first week 1 win this season, our 12th overall, 17-14 over Philly. McM runs wild, and McG unleashes some bombs, and the D holds on to save the win.

Week 2 has an important injury, TE Kop goes out. Combined with TE Matos's injury, we have to convert someone. The main problem is that the primary guy to do this with, our backup FB, is also our backfield leader, and possibly would become the receivers leader. This could throw us into craziness...As it turns out, the FB is our new receivers leader and has an afinity with the old leader. Our new backfield leader is Bucky, our backup RB, and creates no conflicts. Whew.

Week 5 sees us as 4 point favorites over Arizona, and we escape with a win, 17-16, for #13 overall. McG tosses a TD with 2 minutes to go. Its the only thing he does well as our RBs carry us.

8 games in, we've lost several by just a few, and a couple that we probably should have won. We stand at 2-6.

[Tasan]

We are big dogs in week 10, but to our suprise we get win #14 over 7-1 Washington, 17-10. Our running game returns, and McG doesn't make many mistakes, and we hang on to win at the end.

Week 14 sees win #15, 23-7 over a hapless New England team. We move to 4-10 overall on the strength of a solid running game and a late 91 yard pick for a TD.

Back to back wins are nice, especially when the second is against a team that waxed you earlier in the season. Win #16 overall comes week 15 over the Giants, 37-13. In one of our best scoring performances ever, our defense is actually the real star of the show, getting 5 sacks, 3 picks and a fumble returned for a TD. Our offense was only so-so, but didn't need to bring much to get it done.

5-11 season again. I don't see much more from this team, we might be capable of 8-8. 7 of our losses were by 7 points or less, but 3 of our wins were by the same margin. Our offense was generally good, McG had over 3200 yards passing, 23 TDs and 11 picks. McM had 1200+ rushing but only 3 TDs, and Reeves caught 109 passes for almost 1600 yards. Nothing good-special happened on defense though, and thats where we lost games probably. Two guys topped 100 tackles, but thats not always good. Nobody was even close to 10 sacks, and our pick leader was 4. To win 3 of those 7 close games, we need more of both of those. We'll see how next year goes, I guess.

[Tasan]

We get two awards this season. WR Reeves is first team WR because of his 109 catches and almost 1600 yards. These are products of having NO ONE ELSE to thow to for McG. Reeves was targetted a whopping 179 timesso his % was nothing to write home about. He also had 11 TDs.

Our other award winner was LT Clemons. He was solid with almost 50 KRB's, but his % was fairly low for an award winner. We run to his side a LOT, with good reason. I'm beginning to wonder, though, we we would have been better served picking an impact D player instead of him though, and maybe just some decent scrub later in the draft at LT. Maybe I'll try that next time.