Cut and Dry : Fantasy Football Magazine!

So I was feeling ambitious this summer and decided I would start my own online Fantasy Football Magazine. I am a regular contributor to a NFL football forum called, Footballsfuture.com ( Linked at the top of the main page ) and I posted the first edition of my magazine project there. However I would feel just wrong if I were to not share it here as well, being this is my home base and all! So over the next fews weeks, I will post the different features of the magazine up in sections for the Cut and Dry readers.

My inspiration for doing this came while in a grocery store line up with my girlfriend. I grabbed a Fantasy Football magazine featuring Ray Rice on the cover off the news stand, and gave it a browse. I use to purchase such publications in the past for my own enjoyment, yes I like reading pages of statistics for fun, but I gave up on them a few years ago. I did so for one simple reason, because writers of 90% of these football magazines do nothing to entice or pursued the reader that he or she is getting an original, well thought out point of view on all the players featured in the magazine. You go to these magazines because you want to know what Ray Rice is going to do this season, statistically speaking. When you find him and check, you see that he is projected to record the same statistics are he did the previous season, within 10% up, or down... without fail. Standing there with my girlfriend I turn to her and say something along the lines of, " Do you want to see how psychic I am? " I'm pretty sure I got a minor eye roll in return, but being the wonderful girlfriend she is, she obliged to my child like request. I told her I would find Randy Moss in the wide receiver rankings, and predict within one, how many touchdowns the writer of the magazine projected he would get for this year! Being a stat freak, I knew Moss had 13 last year. So I told her the number for this year would be 12. Flipped a few pages, found him, and proclaimed that I was absolutely right, proving I was in fact, an amazing psychic! ( She was not impressed ). But I wasn't done there, I explained to her that these writer do nothing close to what they claim to be doing, "projecting" they simply enter numbers within 10% of last years total, and call it a day in most cases. I told her I would bet the next 10 players following Moss would all have equal too, or less touchdowns then last season. With complete thrill washing over her, I began to rhyme off numbers. 12 last year, 12 this year, 10 last year, 9 this year, 11 last year 10 this year, 14 last year 13 this year... I was successful 6 or 7 times in a row before the magazine "prognosticator" finally had a player achieving more touchdowns then he had in the previous season. Disgusted that people paid 10 dollars for this kind of material, I went home sick to my stomach knowing that a better job could be done. Bottom line is, most of these writers, write to not be wrong, rather then writing to be right! Yes you put yourself out there when making a projection, but as a reader, I want that. If you're basically going to tell me generally speaking, most things are equal with relation to last year, I don't need your magazine.

The look on my girlfriends face after all of this further proved to me I was on to something, she looked just as sick as I felt! Surely from the realization that football fans were being ripped off, not from the realization that she had been dating a 14 year old sport nerd for 18 months now! None the less, I knew what had to be done, so I did it. I hope you enjoy each feature that I will be posting, 5 parts in all!

Also! I quick point of interest! Our Indianapolis staff writer, Jamie Preston, will be returning soon with his take on the upcoming Indianapolis Colt season, be sure to check back for that!

Tim.