Geoff Decker | The Big Lead

Author Archive

2010 Fantasy Football Rankings: Wide Receivers

Posted August 23, 2010, 4:15 pm by Geoff Decker (54 Comments)

Generally speaking, Wide Receivers are (rightly) undervalued compared to quarterbacks and running backs. The last two scoring leaders – Andre Johnson and Larry Fitzgerald – would have been the 7th and 9th best running backs in their respective years and, the trend across the NFL is that running backs now account for larger shares of [...]

[ Read More... ]

2010 Fantasy Football Rankings: QBs

Posted August 20, 2010, 3:15 pm by Geoff Decker (104 Comments)

For a deeper explanation of how these rankings were formed and how the tiers can be used for assessing relative value, see yesterday’s post on running back rankings. Quarterbacks, as you’ll see below, are more clearly distinguished from one another than RBs are. This is because there’s a smaller pool of players, and hence smaller [...]

[ Read More... ]

2010 Fantasy Football Rankings: Running Backs

Posted August 19, 2010, 3:15 pm by Geoff Decker (153 Comments)

At the end of last season, TBL published results from an inaugural report that examined the accuracy of preseason fantasy football rankings from seven web sites. This time around, the sample has been expanded to 12. Draft season is getting busy and most should be completed within the next three weekends, so you should be [...]

[ Read More... ]

Baseball Hall Of Fame Changes Induction Rules At a Convenient Time

Posted July 28, 2010, 6:00 pm by Geoff Decker (110 Comments)

On the heels of an unmemorable Hall of Fame weekend in Cooperstown, and in advance of an expected dry voting period, as Steroid Era players line up for eligibility, The Baseball Hall of Fame sent out a press release announcing changes to its voting procedures. The changes are to veterans committee elections, which vote in [...]

[ Read More... ]

Is LeBron James Another $40 Million Dollar Slave?

Posted July 13, 2010, 4:31 pm by Geoff Decker (122 Comments)

Jesse Jackson got too much credit for being the first one to associate America’s tragic past in the context of modern sports. His public statement was the first such one of the 24-hour LeBron James Free Agency news story that invoked the historically-loaded language, calling Dan Gilbert’s reaction to James’ departure a “slave-owner mentality,” but [...]

[ Read More... ]

LeBron James Should Play For … Thoughts From Celebrities, Politicians, Musicians and Athletes

Posted July 8, 2010, 7:30 pm by Geoff Decker (444 Comments)

A good metric for how saturated a news story is getting is the degree to which public figures who lack an apparent insight on the subject garner headlines for merely offering their perspective. It happens every year with the Super Bowl, when sports and news sites survey celebrities for their predictions of the games. It [...]

[ Read More... ]

“Gay Succumbs to Dix” Headline … Intentional?

Posted July 8, 2010, 12:45 pm by Geoff Decker (96 Comments)

A big professional track & field meet – the Prefontaine Classic – took place in Oregon last weekend. Despite the dearth of live mainstream sports on this weekend (post-US World Cup; opening stages of the Tour de France), however, this ambiguous non-sequitur of a headline is probably the only reason you’re being made even remotely [...]

[ Read More... ]