Through the hole in the floorboard near the gas pedal of the baby blue Buick Skylark, The Joey Wright and The Mick Ciallela watched the pavement pass underneath, mile by mile. The sky was the color of toast, burnt on both sides. 

“How much gas we got, Mick?” Joey asked, his hands jittery on the wheel and his eyes on the horizon. He had heard Nebraska was flat, but he had never heard about how the crows –thousands of a crows aloft in the sky — flew in mesmerizing patterns. He felt they were waiting for something. For them. 

Mick licked his finger and rolled down the window, feeling the wind’s force. It reminded him of being younger and carefree, rather than on the run. “Bout six miles left.” Maybe fifty, he thought to himself, but he really wanted to stop at the next Flying J’s for a slice of pizza and maybe some sunglasses. “Better pull off at the next truck stop.”

Joey groaned. He knew they could be anywhere. Maybe not the middle of Nebraska, though. Phone service wasn’t so great out there. “All right,” Joey grunted, “but you know the drill. If they mention anything about fantasy football…”

“We run, I got it,” Mick said.  “Get in the car, and run.” Joey took the next exit off the interstate and pulled into the Flying J’s, the flock of crows seeming to follow the Skylark. Their cawing was mechanical, sounding more dead than alive. 

Inside the station, Joey went to the soda fountain and started mixing flavors: a bit of Coke, a bit of Cherry Gatorade, and a bit of Diet Sprite. Mick grabbed his slice of pizza — Candian bacon and pineapple — from the serving station and then went to grab some sunglasses.  The display case was closed. He looked up, an employee suddenly standing in front of him, as if knowing he would be there.

The employee smiled. Mick looked at the name tag. “Devine.” Mick smiled back, gesturing with his pizza slice held on increasingly greasy cardboard. “Hey, did you know that Devine Ozigbo went to the University of Nebraska?” Mick started, “I can’t believe people drafted him before James Robinson.” 

The employee reached out a hand to Mick’s shoulder. It was forceful. It wasn’t human. The employee’s eye…it was red! Mick dropped his pizza to the floor and shouted “OMAHA!” From the far side of the store, Joey snapped to attention, taking his soda mixture in hand. 

The two crashed into each other at the door, and they watched as the employee moved towards them, the red eye looming. Joey took his soda, opened the top, and hurled it into the employee’s face. Sparks flew. The acid from the pop combined with the B-vitamins and electrolytes in the Gatorade tore through the android’s exoskeleton. The red eye blinked, more noise than signal.

Joey and Mick got to the car and started it up. “Check the back!” Joey shouted as he revved the engine. Mick peered over the vinyl bench seat. It was still there. The Razzbowl trophy that they were running away with. “It’s there! It’s there!” Mick shouted. 

Joey put the car into second gear and floored it out of the truck stop, back onto the interstate. In the rear view mirror, he saw the crows fly up. The sky, the color of a cookout gone wrong. “I don’t know how much longer we can keep the lead,” Joey said, more to himself than to anybody in particular. He knew they were listening. He knew they were coming. But still, he’d be the driver for as long as he could, until the horizon was more fantasy than reality. 

OK Razzbowlers, I’ll give you two guesses as to who remains atop the Razzbowl leaderboard (hint: if you’re the kind of person who skips the lede, maybe you want to read it today). 

For the third time in this, the year of the 2020 Razzbowl, Joey Wright stands atop the Razzbowl leaderboard. Meanwhile, two-time Razzbowl leader Mick Ciallela remains in second place, with a scant 7.8 points separating them. In third place, aspiring fantasy writer Jerry Janiga trails Mick by a mere 2 points. So! Where my math majors at? With one week to go before the cuts, the top three Razzbowlers are separated by 10 points. And — the extra-emphasis means you should be reading it in Grey’s voice — two out of the top three Razzbowlers are fans. That’s, as the French say, incroyable. 

Here’s where I usually do a little spiel about the teams that are in the lead, but I’ve written that out like three times now, so I don’t want to keep throwing leftover content at you (WE NEVER DO THAT AT RAZZBALL). Instead, I want to focus on the very, very, very — it’s pretty important — Cutline that we have coming up after Week 9. 

The Cutline

The rules of the Razzbowl are right here, but I’ll quickly summarize for you: after the games in Week 9, the top 3 scorers in each league go to the main event championships, the 4-6 scorers in each league go to a wild card event, and everybody else watches from the sidelines. After Week 9, players are responsible for setting their own lineup. In addition, the scoring in the manual lineup setting period will be buffeted by one’s average weekly score during the best ball and each subsequent playoff scoring period. Baffling? Yeah, but let’s reframe this in other terms. 

Right now, Joey Wright would carry a buffer of 182 points — his weekly scoring average in the best ball period — with him into the Cutline portion of the tournament. 

Meanwhile (finds random player) Donkey Teeth (hey, that’s not random…) would carry 156 points per week into his playoff Cutline tournament. 

So, Joey starts with a 26 point lead compared to Donkey Teeth, who hovers around the #100 rank. That’s a pretty significant advantage. However, with the tournament moving into a manual lineup setting period, you can expect managers to make mistakes. 

I can provide the observation that many of the top teams are similar in composition: the best ball successes would naturally gravitate to the top, right? 

So, players may — I repeat may, because this is your team — want to treat the Cutline portion as a DFS GPP. Because so many top players have similar roster construction (and because they get a significant head start), managers in weaker positions may want to aim for “low-owned” players to provide leverage in the playoffs. 

All free agency has finished. I tweeted out this fact shortly before the deadline, so hopefully you got those bids in. Your roster going into Week 9 is your roster going into the playoffs. That said, last year’s winner, Mike Beers, won the Razzbowl without using any FAAB. 

Unfortunately, with the end of the FAAB period, NFFC took away my ability to look at the most-FAAB’d players. It was probably Darnell Mooney, anyway. 

Qualifiers

There’s even more players in the the Razzbowl qualifier than there are in the main event, and don’t think I forgot about you. Trouble is, the NFFC doesn’t track the overall standings of the Qualifiers, so you’re going in blind. When the NFFC passes the Cutline, I’ll hopefully have access to the championship data and can help identify who is in the lead. 

If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below, or ping me @everywhereblair on Twitter. 

Good luck everybody!