I am well aware of the myriad of fantasy football sites that are promising to instruct you on how to dominate your league, win the respect and admiration of your friends and relatives and make the women swoon, but this year I've decided to start my draft prep by taking a different tack. Last year I was fortunate enough to have won my league. (Although I get the feeling that my friends still do not respect and/or admire me, and my wife's reaction could hardly be classified as "swooning".) This league is a fairly competitive ten team tilt which has been in existence for eleven years, so we've worked out any bugs and weeded out the non-competitive types. Even allowing for an elevated self-opinion of my FF skills, I consider the fact that I have only won the league twice in its history and I absolutely live for it as evidence of the level of competition. It's a snake draft, non-keeper, standard-scoring league with weekly score prizes and enough cash involved to keep everyone interested.

The tack of which I spoke earlier was to do a CSI-style analysis of my championship season of a year ago, starting with the draft and see how I did it. So, without further ado, the breakdown of a champion's draft, and what we can learn from it.

It's a humid August night, and the league's members sit in the back garden of a dive bar in Manhattan, except for me. I'm in San Diego and participating online and via speakerphone as I have for the past two years. Quite frankly, it sucks. Most of the fun of a long-lived league is getting together, drinking and eating too much and insulting each other. I, on the other hand am sitting in the playroom, wearing a headset, sipping a Stone IPA and trying to explain to my three year-old daughter what daddy is doing. Not quite an FF atmosphere. The order is picked, and I go number one. As every seasoned FF vet knows, picking number one is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you get the consensus number one, and the closest thing to a lock in the entire draft, on the other hand, you're then forced to sit there helplessly as every other decent pick flies off the board as fast as you can keep track. Here's how it went for me, pick by pick:

Round 1: LT, of course. You can't ask for a better first rounder than this. Piles up both rushing and receiving yards, doesn't get hurt. An anchor. And he's mine, all mine.

Round 2/3 (remember that it's a snake draft, so the order from here on out for me is irrelevant) I go with Ocho Cinco, because studs are studs, and eight-five doesn't disappoint - 1,400yds, 8tds - I'll take it. And then the RB desperation sets in. I have never played a three receiver set throughout a season and don't intend to start now. The problem? Seventeen of the first twenty picks have been RBs, and I don't love anyone on the board. I end up grabbing MoJo Drew and get relentlessly mocked as a result. After all, I had essentially picked a third down back/backup in the third round. This doesn't help my RB desperation. But, at the end of the day, MoJo racks up 1,200 total yards and 8tds for me. If that's not a number two back, I don't know what is. The lesson: Mockery is usually a good sign.

Round 4/5: Ahhh... here's how championships are won: Randy Moss. You're probably thinking "What kind of league are you in that Moss was still available?" But that type of thinking is a product of hindsight. Remember that two owners had already been burned by Moss, there were huge questions about how he would fit in at NE and, well, generally people don't like to have to root for the guy (at least before last season). 1,500yds and 23tds later, this might have been the best fourth round pick of all time. So, to balance it out - with my fifth pick, I choose... Ahman Green - ugh.

Round 6/7: Wait a second. Who's that still on the board? It's... it's LaMont Jordan! Sure the Raiders blow, but we're talking about a STARTING ENNN EFFF ELLL RUNNING BACK. In round six! I'm ecstatic. And while Jordan actually had a decent start to the season, he soon fell off the table (and my roster). Then we get to one of the most agonizing parts of having a wrap pick - the dreaded "run". This time it's TEs. I sit helplessly as they start flying off the board. Like clockwork, I cross off all of the tight end prospects. I start praying simply for a guy I can play every week. By my calculations, I'm going to end up with Todd Heap. I start to feel nauseous. Then, the FF gods smile down on me. The guy in front of me takes... Todd Heap! This leaves Tony Gonzales on the board. I breathe a huge sigh of relief and grab TG my man, pots and pans. 1,200yds, 5tds. Like a rock.

Round 8/9: I am now wearing RB desperation like a parka. I go with DeShaun Foster. While the man did go for ~1,000ty, he only scored three times, and only cracked my lineup once (as a bye week fill-in). Ninth pick - a complete bullet hole in Matt Leinart. High risk, no return. Sometimes you've got to say WTF.

Round 10/11: Knowing the Leinart pick was a total reach, I make another attempt at QB. My philosophy on QBs has always been: If you can't get a stud cheap, just get a top ten with some upside. So who do I pick? Jay Cutler, who finished exactly tenth in QB fantasy points in our league, with no discernible upside. If I was psychic, I'd be pretty worried about my QB situation right now. Then again, if I was psychic, I probably wouldn't have taken Ahman Green with my fifth pick. Next pick: Running back, running back... oh, here we go - a sleeper (cardinal rule of FF: Sleepers are usually sleepers for a reason) Kevin Jones. He did score 8tds, but how can you ever play a guy with 700ty consistently?

Round 12/13: D.J. Hackett. 'Nuff said. WTF? I'm not even sure I made this pick. How many Stones had I consumed at that point? They're higher in alcohol content than regular beer, you know. With my thirteenth pick, I break yet another cardinal FF rule - I draft a defense. Jacksonville to be precise. Repeat after me - kickers and defenses in the last two rounds. Keep repeating.

Round--/15: Will I never learn - fourteenth pick - Matt Stover (see above reference to kickers and defenses). On a side note, I used to be in another league and there was one guy who loved to point out the fact that you picked the same player as you did in a previous year. Right after you made the pick, he would chime in with a Joe Pesci Brooklyn accent "Hey! That's yer guy!" Well, Matt Stover is "my guy". I can't put it any less gay-ly. I end up with this mf every year. In the league at hand, Roller insists that the reason I choose him is because he looks like me. Maybe it is, but it's deeply subconscious, I assure you. Moving on: Pick fifteen: Matt Schaub - still in trouble at QB here (although, at the time, I believe that I'm stacked).

Round 16: Mr. Irrelevant - Mike Furrey. I could not think of a more apt description. I don't think he made it to week two on my team.

In summary of the draft: sixteen picks and seven were dropped (including 5, 6 and 9) over the course of the season (including Stover and the Jags - I refuse to ever have two defenses or kickers on my roster at the same time). Sound like a championship-worthy draft? Of course not. Did I pull off a rip-off trade? In a ten team league, it's hard to pull off any major trades unless someone gets decimated by injuries at a key position and has a stockpile at another. This didn't happen. So let's look at my waiver wire pickups:

Wes Welker - that's right, someone took a flier on the guy and then dropped him after week one to get a free agent RB. I was officially a three receiver set guy for the first time in my career.

Kurt Warner - the old man. I picked him up when he took the starting job in week three, and he put up 27tds the rest of the way.

Aaron Stecker - Injury replacement pick-up. No real impact.

DeAngelo Williams - Waiting to see if he or Foster would emerge as an every-down back. Didn't happen.

Ron Dayne - What can I say? I can't resist waiver wire RBs with even a remote chance at getting carries.

Kevin Curtis - Here's a tip for this year's draft. Someone in your league will look at Curtis' numbers and pick him about four rounds early. Let it happen. He was the ultimate boom or bust WR. Half the time he'll kill you and half the time he'll put up numbers. Now that he's no longer under the radar, I suspect that ratio will shift dramatically towards killing you.

So that's how the league was won. Without Welker and Warner, no chance. With them, I take home the cup. The lesson is: Never look at your team after the draft and think you're either dead in the water or all to the good. You're probably neither. Oh, and also - be very, very lucky.

Standard starting line-up for Phil Bender last season:

QB Warner

RB Tomlinson

RB Jones-Drew

WR R. Moss

WR C. Johnson

WR Welker

TE Gonzales

K Whoever

Def Whoever

So, with that, I am off to Manhattan to participate in this year's draft as the conquering hero. I will document the proceedings in a column next week.

So, I spent last weekend at Chris's summer house. The usual fantastic banter with ciggys, grogs, and the purchase of some wonderful lobsters from a true islander named Jimmy set the tone for the visit. After getting comfortable with us for approximately 30 seconds, Jimmy starts throwing around f-bombs like eggs on Easter Sunday as he tries for the 4th time to add up our order. Finally Chris does it for him, we grab our chow and are on our way.

We live it up well into the evening, hit the rack, and awake early in the AM. As I walk from the bedroom to the bathroom, I feel three things; my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, a painfully full bladder and an overwhelming sense of self disgust. As I attempt to temporarily scrub my sewer breath away I realize that the self-disgust is entirely justified. Let's just say that my 38 year old body is not what it used to be. A glimpse in the mirror is all that is needed to confirm the notion - A few random hairs on my ears, Phil Mickelson type boobs, and a gut draped over my new J Crew underwear.......waist 37-40. This is when I say to myself "how the hell do these guys 35 years and older still play professional sports"?

The aging athlete can be a train wreck. You watch the guy your whole life, now he is an old mess, hanging onto glory, for one last season.........or 5...........not these guys.

Nolan Ryan pitched well into his 40's collecting his 5000th strike out at age 42, his 6th career no hitter at age 44, and he won the ERA title at age 40.

Jerry Rice had 92 catches at the young age of 40 while playing with the Oakland Raiders, he also had 1,211 yards receiving that year and went on to play in the Super Bowl.

George Foreman was better know for selling his grill, but at age 47 he won the Heavy Weight Title and managed to defend it 3 times.

Gordie Howe scored 103 points at the age of 41.

Michael Jordan was the best NBA player of our time, and at age 40 he averaged 20 points a game and scored over 40 points numerous times that season.

Roger Clemens, steroids or not, is truly a remarkable athlete, this guy did more after 40 than most pitchers do their entire career.

I purposely did not mention any golf or tennis players because the guys listed above took a beating day in and day out, maybe the not the pitchers mentioned so much, but try throwing a tennis ball against a brick wall 30 times, see how you feel the next day. For those of you over 35, think about suiting up for a professional hockey game.....getting slammed into the boards, taking a puck to the shin, or forget the game.......how about just walking around with that gear and skates on for an hour. Can you imagine running a rout over the middle and getting hit by a 23 year old d-back........talk about bleeding internally.

The juxtaposition between aging athletes and aging males in general was recently brought to the forefront of public discourse as I, along with 90% of the nation's sports fans cursed Brett Favre for pondering a comeback. I mean, where does this guy get the balls to think he can come back at his age and continue to play at an elite level? Give it up. You're ancient, man.

Then it hits me. "Wait a sec. I'm the same age as Brett Favre." As the logic unfolds in my mind, I realize that I've officially reached the worst age to be a sports fan. When you're a kid, you look up to the pros with a sense of unmitigated awe. Then, during and after college, these guys are either your peers or oldsters that you grew up watching. On the other side of the divide, once you hit 45, if a guy your age is still playing, he's generally acknowledged to be a freak of nature and you can feel free to throw out the "Imagine a guy my age still playing pro ball?"-line and refer to all athletes as "kids" for the rest of your life. At 38? Not so much.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I haven't kept up the type of fitness regimen one would presume would be necessary in order to pursue a career in professional athletics, but then again, going on anecdotal evidence alone, I spend infinitely less time going to strip clubs, getting DUI's and testing positive for marijuana at work than these guys do. I have thus concluded that there exists a specific gene which allows men to punish their bodies severely and shake off results that would put a mere mortal in a wheelchair in the same manner as you or I would recover from a mosquito bite.

In discussing the issue with Chris, he was kind enough to remind me of the bachelor party we threw for James a few years ago. It was to be a day of softball played in one of Manhattan's Astroturf-ed municipal parks followed by an evening of furious imbibing at a local German bier garden. The game begins - a bunch of guys in their mid-thirties and a few cases in each dugout. What could be more innocent, right? By the time we reached the bier garden, Cliff had broken his hand, Carter had a fractured leg and Ted had pulled a hammy badly enough to not be able to make it to the office on Monday. For my own part, in my first at-bat, I lined one sharply into left-center, took a wide turn at first and... my knee gave out. It wasn't injured or anything. It just seemed to be saying: "Really? We're running bases? What the fuck?"

Not only does this party illustrate my point about the "athlete gene", it also establishes the connection between this gene and the "bounce-back" gene, as in, the amount of time it takes a person to recover from egregious bodily abuse. Favre was an alcoholic at one point during his playing career, and seemingly dozens of NFL players get pulled over for drunk-driving every year -during the season. While playing with the Wizards, Chris Webber was stopped by police with a lit joint in his ashtray on the way to practice! WTF! A couple of excess grogs on a weeknight usually equate to an hour's worth of late arrival to work for me the next morning.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not invoking the pathetic "Can't put 'em away like I used to" excuse. I can consume as much alcohol now as I could when I was 20; it's just that, I need a little extra time to shake out the cobwebs.

As definitive evidence that the "athlete" and "bounce-back" gene are related (indeed, they may be one in the same), I offer a follow-up story on one of the participants in the fateful afore-mentioned softball game.

At the time Cliff was the father of two (soon to be three) lovely daughters. As any married male with children knows, a day of debauchery like the one briefly mentioned above comes with strings attached. The setup is usually in the form of you being able to go to town on Saturday in exchange for watching the kids while your wife runs some errands solo on Sunday. Given the shape Cliff was in after the game and a near all-nighter in the bars, a bad answer to "Are you okay to watch the kids?" would be a groggy "yeah, yeah, I'm going to take them to my parents' house". A worse answer? "Honey, we need to call the babysitter. I'm going to alternate puking and sleeping all day." A terrible answer is flashing a pair of bloodshot eyes and some chapped lips, holding up a crumpled and suddenly obviously broken left hand and saying "Uh, I think I need you to drive me to the hospital.

Why the Steroid Era and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis are (Pretty Much) Exactly the Same Thing

In our new feature "From the SandJ Archives", we giddily throw the spotlight on the comedy inherent in reading old features about Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, et al which are hilarious now in that they scream out the question "How was it not obvious!" I mean, it's not like steroids snuck up on us. Lenny Dykstra showed up at training camp looking like "The Thing" in 1993. Brady Anderson hit fifty dingers in 1996. Most informed sports fans knew that steroids existed. But, for some reason, there we all were in the "feel-good" summer of 1998 cheering on Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, two sideshow freaks bearing no physical resemblance to themselves five years prior as they proceeded to obliterate one of baseball's most hallowed records.

Hindsight, as we all know, is 20/20, but now that the United States Congress, eighty-six Mitchell Report players, and a then fifteen year-old country singer have been wrapped up in this circus, people need to begin coming to terms with how to account for an entire generation of our national pastime that now needs to be explained to our grandchildren. And when I say "how to account", I of course mean "who to blame"...

http://www.sportsandjokes.com/id21.html

SHEA HAPPENS

We have all been there, a bright sunny day at a ball game, a brisk Sunday afternoon watching the lords of the grid iron, or perhaps an NHL playoff game so intense you can't leave your seat. Your life could not be better, the grogs are flowing like the Nile, your team is winning, your buddies are nearby, the night is young... little do you know that 60 seconds from now your life will change. You have no idea that within one minute of the time where life seems so grand that things can and will go drastically south. Desperate measures will be taken in 60 seconds in order mitigate the indisputable fact that you HAVE to sh*t...

http://www.sportsandjokes.com/id2.html

The day started off well enough thanks in part to an ingenious decision by Ted and me to go to bed early on Friday night. That investment paid dividends that fully vested first thing Saturday morning when I awoke feeling fresh and well rested - the perfect feeling for a day of relentless drinking, smoking, gambling and socializing; a day that ended, I should add, the next morning at 2:45am with an unprovoked shot-gun of a Schlitz can and an unwelcome sucker punch in the stomach from Gruden, but more on that later:

http://www.sportsandjokes.com/id23.html

Go with me here - It's not as ridiculous (or offensive) as it sounds.

http://www.sportsandjokes.com/id28.html

What is East Coast Bias? Better yet - What is an ECB fan? Sportsandjokes investigates and drops the science (seriously... we mention Buffon's Needle and everything) on y'all.

http://www.sportsandjokes.com/id30.html