Bad beats are as much a part of fantasy football as first-round busts and running back committees. If you haven’t had a bad beat, keep playing; one will find you soon enough.

We’ve all been there. Your sure-fire win evaporates with a garbage-time touchdown from a bye-week plug-in your foe was all but forced to start. Andy Reid opts for a field goal down seven with four minutes to go and no timeouts left—and your opponent has David Akers.

Or maybe you score the second-most points in your league for the third time in four weeks only to lose to the top-scoring team yet again because Antonio Gates can’t make one more freakin’ catch or the Eagles can’t get one more freakin’ sack so you lose by half a freakin’ point.

Um… hypothetically speaking, of course.

I’m sure you feel my pain. So as the realization that live scoring didn’t screw up—now there’s another fun way to lose a game; go to sleep with a W, wake up with an L—sinks in, I’ve taken the liberty of adapting the five stages of grief to better fit those suffering through a bad beat.

1. Denial

The sure sign you’re entering this stage is bellowing “Are you kidding me?” at the action on the television if you’re tracking the action or at your computer screen if you’re following live scoring. You hold out hope that you can squeeze another point out of your roster somewhere, that live scoring has mistakenly given your opponent an undeserved point, that Knowshon Moreno and half the Steelers defense takes ill so that Correll Buckhalter can give you 100 yards and a touchdown on Monday night.

If you’re in multiple leagues, you check all your other teams first and avoid what you know will be bad news. If it’s your only team, you turn off football for the day and find another division. Anything except look at that losing score, mocking you with a meaningless Saints defensive score that can’t even be reviewed because the Panthers are out of timeouts and the play happened before the two minute warning.

2. Anger

You’re angry at your players for underperforming. You’re angry at your opponent for the Secretariat-sized horseshoe they have lodged in their backside. You’re angry at Kris Brown for missing wide left, at Andy Reid for taking the three, at Ted Thompson for surrounding Aaron Rodgers with revolving doors and turnstiles.

You can also be angry with yourself for any roster moves or lineup decisions that might have altered the outcome. Those are the most painful, because at one point they were actually within your control.

This stage is usually accompanied by a great deal of swearing, with the occasional throwing of the remote control, and is best experienced in solitude—especially if there are any young children in the household. Padded walls wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.

3. Bargaining

In which you seek a deal with the fantasy football deities, the karma gods, or the religious entity of your choice; agnostics, you can appeal to Roger Goodell, but I don’t like your chances any better.

Personally, I prefer the preemptive strike here—for example, stopping at a kid-run lemonade stand en route to a fantasy draft is a sure-fire winner for wooing karma to your side of the ledger. But at this juncture it’s too late; now you’re left to negotiate with the fates.

The bargaining stage can range from “If you let me pull this one out I’ll never start Matt Hasselbeck over Matt Schaub ever again” to more serious wagers such as “If you knock Brandon Marshall out of this game—nothing serious, just something that keeps him off the field the rest of the way—I’ll stop taking my neighbor’s morning paper on the way to work.”

What the heck, might as well go all the way: “I swear, if you just let Slaton stay in the game at the goal line I’ll never complain about having to watch ‘Dancing With The Stars’ with my wife again.”

Yes, that’s worse than selling your soul—and not even Daniel Webster can pull you back now.

4. Depression

And then, reality sets in.

The unofficial live scoring results go official, and your loss column total increases by one. You can’t gloat at the water cooler—if you’re even up for going in to work at all—or on the message boards, if you feel like venturing onto the innernet. Depending on whether or not you reach this stage before or after noon (somewhere), there may or may not be drinking involved. You actually contemplate never playing fantasy football again.

The key to this stage is getting through it quickly. It shouldn’t be that difficult because let’s face it: it’s a fantasy football game. Put it in perspective with something one of my high school teachers once told me: no matter how big you think your problem is, remember that there are 800 million people in China who just don’t care.

If nothing else that should tell you how long it’s been since I was in high school, seeing as the current population of China is something north of 1.3 billion.

5. Acceptance

It’s still there in the rear-view mirror: the Westbrook slide; Vinnie Testeverde’s phantom touchdown plunge; the Monday night game John Elway called in sick and left your fantasy team high and dry, two points shy of a win. The bad beat will go down on your permanent record.

But with every passing day, bad beats become a little less painful. Today they may feel like a popcorn husk lodged in your gumline; in a few days it’ll be a faded bruise on your elbow. And eventually bad beats go the route of old yearbook photos in that they still induce a cringe but also let you laugh just a little—even at the one of you in second grade after you opted to cut your own hair.

Besides, if you win this week you can still get a wild card spot and a chance to avenge that bad beat. And this time, karma’s on your side.

My second of three auctions wrapped up Tuesday evening, and it’s no surprise that for the second time in as many auctions I did not leave with the team I expected to get.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

You can’t go into an auction without a plan; I’ve tried “winging” it, and you wind up with a team that lacks focus. You spend the whole time in scramble mode, which leads to poor choices. And that, in turn, leads to playing catchup on the waiver wire the entire season.

So prior to each auction, I sit down with my projected player values—based on previous year’s auctions, other auctions I’ve been in, mock auctions I’ve done, and values from The Huddle’s auction cheat sheet—and try to plug the pieces into the puzzle. More often than not I follow a “silo” approach (as opposed to the top-heavy “pyramid” or “studs & scrubs”), and I’ve found that it’s generally cheaper to acquire elite wide receivers than running backs. I also have a tendency to not spend much early unless I see a tremendous value, opting instead to hold money past the first third when I usually find myself in position to control the board.

With all that in mind, I’ll plug in players that I like and see what kind of team I expect to construct. Then I’ll bring that budget to my auction on a separate grid from the one I use to track my (and every other team’s) players and remaining money. When I get a player, I’ll put him in the appropriate budget slot and determine if I need to redistribute the wealth one way or another.

And thus far this year, that budget page has had a whole lot of scribbling and redistributing.

Without divulging too much of my game plan (because I still have one auction remaining, and that group isn’t afraid to quote back to me things I’ve written on certain players when I throw them out for bidding), I can safely say that the elite running backs aren’t going for the premium prices they usually do. However, that means the mid-tier backs—the ones those who spend big on wideouts usually expect to get in the low- to mid-teens in a $100 cap auction—are pricier than expected. You have to dig a little deeper—and incur a little more risk—to get some RB values; that said, spending $8 instead of $12 does free you up to spend a couple bucks more on those elite receivers—turning, say, Dwayne Bowe or Marques Colston into Calvin Johnson or Greg Jennings.

There also seems to be a sharper line between the mid-tier and bottom-tier guys. More owners are inclined to spend heavily on their core group of starters, then rely on $1 and $2 finds for backups. If you’re fortunate enough to fill your core group on the cheap, saving enough for three or four late $2 bids will not only give you the run of the board at the end of the evening—in essence, playing “name your sleeper”—it also drives those who made an early visit to “dollar days” into an absolute tizzy.

And a frazzled bidder makes mistakes—mistakes you can capitalize on.

If, of course, you’ve got a Plan B… just in case.

Wondering who’ll be at the helm for the Bucs this season? So, apparently, are they.

Steve Kyler, host of The Game on ESPN Radio in Tampa, checked in from the Buccaneers’ training camp and provided some information that might have you tweaking your fantasy draft board.

Let’s start at the quarterback position, where Josh Freeman will—to the surprise of no one—need time. At present he’s no higher than third on the Tampa Bay depth chart, with Byron Leftwich second and Luke McCown the winner by default. Leftwich has demonstrated a strong arm but questionable decision-making, which again is unlikely to surprise anyone familiar with his game.

With no one able to deliver the ball downfield—save for Leftwich, though the joke at camp is that if he gets the starting nod he’ll be sacked 50 times before Tampa’s bye week—the Bucs’ game plan will lean heavily on the run. That doesn’t bode well for Antonio Bryant, who is being extremely well compensated this season as the franchise player but might struggle to put up the kind of stats that will fetch a hefty long-term deal in the offseason.

It’s a good thing the Bucs will run a bunch, because they have a bunch of guys to run the ball. Earnest Graham will be the feature back, though Derrick Ward will get carries as well. It also sounds as if Clifton Smith will get touches in the preseason to determine if he’ll factor into the committee as well. No one is expecting anything from Cadillac Williams, who was injured again last season. If he’s healthy, however, that’s four Buc backs looking for touches.

The Bucs have the offensive line to be a force in the running game, even if Arron Sears continues to be absent from training camp. No one is talking about what is keeping Sears away; guesses range from problems associated with the concussion he suffered last year to a battle with depression. Jeremy Zuttah, who was likely to find a starting spot along the line anyway, has stepped in to keep the front line intact and is a great fit with the blocking scheme. But it does bite into the depth up front of a team that will lean heavily on its ground game.

One of my favorite quotes—at least, among the ones not uttered by Irwin M. Fletcher—is “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts: for support rather than illumination.” Near as I can tell, the quote comes from Scottish poet Andrew Lang, though according to the Internet it has also been attributed to Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, A.E. Housman, and Vin Scully.

At this juncture the source isn’t as important as the sentiment, which I use to help bring perspective to interesting stats my research may unearth.

Take, for example, this nugget: last year the Detroit Lions’ quarterback position (an ugly combination of Jon Kitna, Dan Orlovsky, and Daunte Culpepper, with a dash of Drew Stanton and Drew Henson tossed in for good measure) outproduced the Atlanta Falcons’ quarterback position (Rookie of the Year Matt Ryan).

Actually, “outproduced” is a tad aggressive as the margin was six-tenths of a point for the season. Still, that KitOrlCulStanSon equaled Ryan was a bit surprising. It’s also worth noting that the 15.8 points per game produced by Lion QBs (using a standard performance scoring system of 4 points per TD pass, 6 per run/reception, 1 per 20 yards passing, and 1 per 10 rushing/receiving) was within less than one point per game of Eli Manning and the Giants’ QB production.

Then the question becomes, what do we do with this information? And that’s where the differeing interpretations come in.

As I see it, that Giants’ QBs were the 19^th-most productive last year and gutted their receiving corps doesn’t bode well for Eli; his ranking on the Huddle cheat sheets—six to eight spots lower than the three magazines I could reach from my computer—certainly supports that belief.

But that’s the easy one. The Lions have a new system, and Matt Ryan has a new Hall of Fame tight end; how much do those factors offset what we saw last year? One man’s early opinion: Matthew Stafford will be a fantasy helper sooner rather than later, while Ryan will be overvalued (I’ve seen him as high as eighth) to the point where it’s unlikely he’ll wind up on any of my clubs.

Maybe I’ve seen the light. Or maybe I’ve just wobbled over to a lamppost after an evening of tossing back Leinenkugels. And if that’s the case, at least there’s a couple months to sober up.

No professional sports league does a better job of keeping itself in the spotlight than the NFL.

Even during the six months of down time when nary a game is played, the NFL claims a spot above the fold on your sports page or leading the scroll across your television. Free agency, the draft, minicamps… even a mundane task such as letting you know when teams will play each other (we’ve known the “who” since the end of the season) gets national coverage.

And in between the league’s staged events, the littlest stories of the offseason receive just as much scrutiny. The Brett Favre saga has become the Paris Hilton of the NFL: there’s nothing there, and yet we must have full coverage of every step.

Not that I’m complaining. The NBA lost me long ago (shortly after Dr. J retired), the NHL is good for a couple triple-overtime games each playoffs but without the Wild I don’t have a horse in the race, and 20-plus years of fantasy baseball have proven to me that I’m much more of a Twins fan than a baseball fan.

Hey, what else are we going to do, watch NBA or NHL playoffs or the first couple months of the interminable baseball season?

And yet there will be a few little nuggets, mere mentions in passing during minicamp recaps, that at the end of the season some will look back at and point to as a sign they should have seen (insert fantasy tragedy here) coming. With that in mind, here are a couple of those tidbits I’ve noticed that might help both you and I avoid those “woulda-coulda-shoulda” blues.

Colts Coaching Changes
Who woulda thunk the NFL’s pension plan could play a role in the demise of one of fantasy football’s most reliable offenses? I don’t pretend to understand what exactly the league is trying to pull with its recent changes to the league pension plan; what I do know is that long-time Colts offensive coordinator Tom Moore and fellow veteran Howard Mudd, Indy’s offensive line coach, have been put in a position where if they don’t retire before June the rule changes will take a bite out of their pension plans to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. As it stands at this writing, Mudd has announced his retirement and Moore is contemplating his. Mix in the transition from Tony Dungy to Jim Caldwell at the helm and that’s a whole lot of newness in Indianapolis.

Sure, Peyton Manning will still be calling the plays. But sans Moore there’s bound to be a fluctuation in the comfort level between Peyton and whomever is talking into his ear. Who could they bring in that a) knows this offense as well as Manning and Moore, b) has the cajones to tell Manning anything, and c) can convince Manning he’s worth listening to? A little wrinkle wouldn’t be all bad, but wholesale changes make me less confident that this offense will continue to match its storied output. Worse, Mudd has been crafting a protective wall around Manning out of second-day draft picks and street free agents; if he goes, what happens to Indy’s front line? Again, I’m not saying Pete Metzelaars can’t do the job, but it’s one more tweak to the stability of a unit fantasy folks have come to rely upon.

Neither coach has submitted their papers yet, so there’s a possibility this won’t become an issue. But at minimum it’s a reason not to doze off when the topic in the sports page turns to pension plans, at least where the NFL is concerned.

The Draft’s Big Winner
The NFL Draft is becoming bigger and bigger every year; next year, there’s a very good possibility the first round will be held in prime time on Thursday night—must see TV for every football fan. And when it comes to fantasy football, everyone at your drauction will know who Matt Stafford and Michael Crabtree and Knowshon Moreno are. The more astute will know names like James Davis, Austin Collie, and Shawn Nelson and how they may factor into the 2009 fantasy season.

But unless you’re a true football junkie—and I have to assume if you’re reading this in May you fit that description—you may not be aware that the biggest winner on draft day wasn’t Darrius Heyward-Bey or Brandon Pettigrew or even Donald Brown. Nope, that distinction has to fall to Jacksonville running back Maurice Jones-Drew. Not only does he no longer have Fred Taylor to siphon carries, MoJo was rewarded with a fat contract in the offseason. Then, to protect that investment, the Jaguars added not one but two of the top five offensive tackles in the 2009 draft class: first-rounder Eugene Monroe, who should start ahead of the shell of Tra Thomas on the left side, and second-rounder Eben Britton, likely to leapfrog Tony Pashos at right tackle.

Spending two early picks on the front line signifies Jacksonville’s commitment to the running game, and sans Taylor MoJo should see the bulk of the touches—though Greg Jones and another 2009 draftee, seventh-rounder Rashad Jennings, are around to make sure he’s not overworked. And another sign the Jags are still all about running the football: Troy Williamson is still on their roster. If there were to be any aerial fireworks, the Jags could have easily drafted Michael Crabtree rather than Monroe; instead, they signed what’s left of Torry Holt to provide some semblance of a passing game—but it’s abundantly clear that won’t be the priority.

MoJo’s fantasy stock jumped the day Taylor was released, but it’s apparently cooled a bit since then. However, the addition of a couple big helpers on the front line have me penciling Jones-Drew into the top three in the first draft of my rankings. Let someone else have whatever share of the carries Moreno and Brown and Beanie Wells will get; I’ll roll with the already proven productivity of a guy whose team thought enough of him to put two stud linemen in front of him.