Flour Power

As if World of Warcraft wasn’t enough, I got myself dragged into another game that has the potential to waste quite a bit of my very precious time – Fantasy Premier League.

The rules are quite simple. You are given a budget of €100 million to create a team of 15 players (11 + 4 substitutes) from the English Premier League. Every week, each player is awarded points depending on his performance that week. The “manager” with the most points in the end of gameweek 40 is the winner.

As simple as it this may seem, there are a lot of variables at work here, which turn it into quite a complex, and thus intriguing, game. For starters, €100 million may seem like a lot, but after Lampard, Gerrard (the obvious choices), a big gunner and a good defender, it’s easy to realise that the remaining euros must be spent carefully. Then there’s the matter of looking at the fixtures. Having the poor defender (the one chosen as filler, because the budget was already low) playing against one of the big four is not desirable, just like having the substitute forward/midfielder against a solid defense is not likely to bring any points from goals and assists. Add the injuries, transfers, the variations in players’ value and, of course, the unpredictability of football (of the “soccer” kind, because I don’t know a lot about the other one), and this Fantasy Premier League promises to be quite fun.

With the help I’ve been getting from people that know a lot more about this than myself at the FISO forum, here’s the team I’ve built so far:

This will probably still suffer some changes before the season start on Sunday, so any suggestions are welcome.

I’m guessing there will be a lot of talk about this little game at work, and some of it might transpire here to the blog. I apologise in advance to the girls that read it (all 3 of them), as well as to those who happen to stumble upon this…

Apart from that, who wants to start a private league?

The NFL Fantasy Files were created by the NFL and Reebok in 2006 and 2008 to promote and drive traffic to their Fantasy Football game. The series consisted of a few short videos starring high profile NFL players performing some absolutely fantastic acts, crossing the line of possibility, in order to get picked. The result was a collection of pretty awesome clips, that quickly became viral on sites like Youtube.

The video below is a compilation of those clips:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ymkoh-vKzM

While some of the stunts seem kind of doable, others are just too unbelivable to be true. They remind me of Ronaldinho’s “Crossbar Challenge”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tFdTp_qanE