No really, what happened to this week? It flew by. While I will accept the fact that my advancing age is contributing to this feeling at an ever increasing rate, this past week seemed particularly quick. I was scrambling last night to check my starting lineups and get my pool picks in prior to the Browns-Ravens kickoff, as I could have sworn the day was only Wednesday. We couldn’t have shot past Wednesday already, did we? Oh yeah, we did.

Now it is Friday, midday, and my kids have one of those teacher conference days where the kids don’t go to school. If you have school age kids but haven’t heard of such a thing before, just think of it as a randomly scheduled annoyance for working parents. I hate those days. Love my kids, but love my work too and need time to concentrate on that work. Clearly, I don’t need to miss a work day since my brain is losing track of whole days as it is.

Anyway, lets do some quick hits to basically sum up what is going on with Fantasy Throwdown at the quarter-pole of the 2012 season. We have some exciting stuff we are working on, but nothing concrete yet for a big announcement, so consider this a snapshot of what has happened and a sneak peek of what is on the horizon.

• First, let us say THANKS! for playing Fantasy Throwdown. For many of you, you’re back after last season’s beta year. We still aren’t promoting the site heavily (although you are more than welcome to promote it as much as you can). It wouldn’t take much to convince us this is an extended beta, or beta-2 year, but great to see so many returning members, plus some new ones who found us and are trying the Throwdown experience for the first time in 2012. Welcome and welcome back!
• We definitely did have a stats problem in Week 1, and hopefully this is the last time we ever have to mention it. We apologize for that long delay getting the stats as a result of our stats provider service severely dropping the ball. They apparently dropped the ball, kicked it out of the stadium where it landed on a boat and was taken out to sea. We are on to a new stats provider and we feel much better about receiving accurate and timely stats going forward.
• User Scott Kuff sent me an email earlier this week letting me know he and seven buddies formed the first ever – as far as I know – Fantasy Throwdown league! Wow, very cool. They created a 17-week schedule, each playing three Throwdown games per week. The schedule includes different formats they must follow depending on the week, such as standard scoring or PPR, team defense or IDP, bench players only, etc. Here is a shout out to all of the guys in the inaugural Throwdown league:

  Airbus79 Dbrand77 Gmyers Kevin7742

  kuff42 PurpleCurse Scott Kuff Terminalkennedy

  Watch out for Terminalkennedy if you get matched up in a challenge against him. He is in the driver’s seat right now at the top of the league standings at 8-1.

• It didn’t take long until we weren’t happy with how players got ranked on the Leaderboard last year, so this year, that old Leaderboard formula and methodology is out, but as of yet we haven’t finalized the method we want to use for 2012. We are close though. We have something we think is going to work well – a secret formula, if you will – but I want to finalize numbers and make sure all of the calculations are correct before updating the Leaderboard on the website.
• Throwdown t-shirts! They do exist. I’ve been rotating through two of them and I can only guess Matt’s wife Alicia wears one while working on her next big house project, but otherwise not very many Throwdown players have one of these rare commodities. How does one get one? Well, you need to be the “first” to do something to help promote or improve or enhance the Fantasy Throwdown experience. It is an open-ended challenge to earn your own t-shirt.
• Some of the things I’d most love to improve with the website experience, both short and long-term, include the following:
  • Finalize the Leaderboard
  • Redesign the Lobby, so it is more of a landing spot with Site News and forum posts right on the main Lobby page
  • Turn Facebook auto-posts and Twitter auto-tweets back on for connected users, for things like challenge results, but limited to perhaps one per 24-hour period.
  • Add injury report info to the available players list
  • Adjust some backend programming and database design to allow for improved game history results
  • Mobile friendly!

  Of course many of these things are a big project just on their own, so we’ll plug away at them as we are able.

• Taking a lead from Scott and crew, I’d like to start my own Throwdown league. I’m thinking a 6 to 8 week format instead of the whole season. Love the idea about the different game setups each week, too. Hopefully I can get this rolling soon.

Okay, lets call it a day with that. Best of luck in your Week 4 Throwdown matches. Frank’s Flops returns next week!

Hanukkah is underway and Christmas is fast approaching, and for many of us, that takes a back seat or perhaps side seat to fantasy football championship games being played this week. This is an annual struggle for me managing my football watching with family time around the holidays – a family with little to no interest in football, although I am successfully getting my wife on the Tim Tebow bandwagon.

I’ve got one championship game this week, in the Dirty Dozen Expert’s League, which is a for fun and bragging rights, three player keeper league in its 9th year. It should be a good battle against Smitty from Fantasy Football Xtreme, who won it last year. I last won the league in 2009.

I am slightly concerned my team went bonkers last week posting 175 points, a good 40 points higher than the top average score for the season, and in fact the highest score for any team all year. Hope they saved some for the finals.

As for Fantasy Throwdown, we are rolling right along for Week 16 and Week 17 of the regular season, and you will be able to continue to play Throwdown through the NFL playoffs. There are four games Wild-Card Weekend, and the Divisional Playoffs round, so those weeks will be business as usual – pick three of the four games to form your player pool.

For the last two rounds of the playoffs, the Conference Championships and Super Bowl, we are going to tailor Throwdown specifically for those weeks. What that means is, essentially, there won’t be any picking of the games, and the draftable player pool will be smaller. Otherwise, it will be the same head-to-head draft challenge.

We are extremely excited to have people play Fantasy Throwdown through the playoffs including the Super Bowl. It should be a ton of fun with so much riding in the playoffs and we still get our fantasy fix. While we’ve decided to scale back the special events like the Turkey Day Event and our recent tournaments for the final two weeks of the regular season, because of the holidays, expect announcements early in New Year about one or more NFL Playoff tournaments or competitions.

In case you missed the announcement, our Fantasy Football Writers Tournament and Players Tournament each wrapped up their championship round in Week 15 after the Sunday games. Congratulations to MtgProHammer for winning the Writers Tourney (ringer!) and KevinShockey for winning the Players Tourney. Nice job guys!

These two proved their dominance outlasting the 16 competitors in each tournament to take the virtual trophy. Yeah, no prizes awarded in these tournaments because frankly, we don’t have anything to give. However we hope to acquire some t-shirts in the very near future!

We continue to appreciate any feedback people can provide to us so we can plan and execute necessary changes to Fantasy Throwdown in the off-season. We are dying to rip the “beta” tag off this website and really hit the ground running in 2012. Testimonials are also greatly appreciated to help us promote the game to new players.

The number of Throwdown games being played is down in Week 16, which was to be expected with so many of us running around doing last minute shopping for the holidays. If any of you Dads out there waited until the last minute to get a specific Monster High Doll for your daughter, like I did, good luck. You’re going to need it.

Best of luck to all of you who are still competing in your own fantasy league playoffs, probably with the title on the line this weekend. Good luck in your Throwdown matches! Well, excluding unstable, DLFootball, FBGWILL, jrnall2, Frenchie, bsanders_06 and especially Matt, Rick and patwat, and anyone else who wants to take me on between now and Sunday.

Everyone have a Happy Hanukkah and a Merry Christmas!