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!