Larry Johnson is in fantasy news for all the wrong reasons. What has he done that could make his owners even more angry?

Larry Johnson’s season is currently off to a rocky start. His offense has had a hard time moving the football, and Johnson has suffered as a result. He has been averaging under 50 yards a game with zero touchdowns. A holdout could be the blame but most star running backs do not handle carries anyway in preseason.

What surfaced today on a hip hop website is an audio link of the aforementioned, Larry Johnson. This link is not about Larry Johnson complaining on his teammates or demanding more carries. It’s a hip hop hardcore rap song by him that seems to have been done a few months ago during his holdout. Who knows if a buddy of his leaked this or what, but it can not be good for Johnson.

In the song he takes a shot at Priest Holmes trying to come back, and says he is embarrassing himself. There is obviously not a friendship between the two, even though they’ve been Chiefs together for years. Dropping rhymes about guns and such does not seem to be a smart move. He also rhymes about getting money or he’ll never come back. Well he got his money and now that this is out, he may be giving some of it to Roger Goodell.

It’ll be interesting to see if anything happens at all from this. You be the judge and have a listen for yourself. Rapping didn’t work for Terrell Owens and shouldn’t be a priority for any other athlete.

http://allhiphop.com/blogs/multimedia__music/archive/2007/09/14/18589887.aspx

Browsing ten televisions at once and watching player after player have career days was something special. For owners that drafted LT, Drew Brees, and a few other high profiled players, you just wanted to throw up. This week was truly a magnificent fantasy football week. Owners that didn’t get over 100 points, something went terribly wrong with players you started below.

Glancing at games and stats you had to of been jumping out of your seat or saying to your buddies, You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me. First and foremost, everyone would like to thank the Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Browns defense. A great performance that brought tears of joy to owners of almost ten different players.

Quarterbacks

Derek Anderson
Nothing to take away from Derek Anderson, but can he match these stats overall in his next three starts combined? You talk about a wonder week. This was the ultimate. At least the Browns have something working and too build forward with. They may not light up the scoreboard or have an offensive display like this in the next twenty years. Having a solid young team with players such as Braylon Edwards and Kellen Winslow is enough to raise fantasy owners interests.

Josh McCown
Maybe you shouldn’t have started. What should have happened was him being yanked. How that didn’t happen is stupefying. This has happened to the Raiders defense before, and has to change. They did to good of a job to have that little of support from the quarterback position. No one expected McCown to put up crazy numbers but that performance was ugly.

Donovan McNabb
It’s sad to see this day from McNabb. He has performed so well for a long time. The days when he could carry a team on his sole shoulders with poor receivers is gone. He needs some receivers and Philly doesn’t have them. Brian Westbrook is the only threat on this team. A good one but if has to be overworked injuries occur frequently. If McNabb has the hold the fort without Westbrook, McNabb might as well decide to bench himself.

Rex Grossman
How dare he make the pathetic throws he does. Whatever trail Grossman went down towards the second half of last season he has gone further on that road. Heading back to the early games of last year does not seem a possibility ever again. It’s almost getting so bad that the Bears would have to think about bringing in Kyle Orton. At least Orton didn’t throw games away. The Bears had to get an interception in the end zone and block a field goal to keep this game from getting too close.

Alex Smith
Where did his preseason performances go? He has been a non factor thus far and after week two he has no excuse. Hopefully this adjustment is just an early rust phase. If winning ugly has never been seen before the eyes two weeks in a row, it has now.

Running Backs

LT
Number one pick in every draft and he is being shut down. Good for the owners that were able to face him the past two weeks, and bad for the rest of the season for all other opponents.

Jamal Lewis
Where did this come from? Lewis has been nonexistent for quite some time. No, he doesn’t creep back on the fantasy radar with a good stretch of games. He blasts in your face with a 200 yard day.

Reggie Bush
Looking like another player that should have been drafted a few rounds later. Everything in New Orleans is on a slide that should get back in gear. Sean Payton will figure things out, and it starts with getting Deuce more carries.

Maurice Jones-Drew
The tease of touchdowns galore last season is losing the battle on repeating his success. Jacksonville is under new offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter’s system, and they’re obviously struggling to adjust under it as a whole. If this lingers much more, Koetter may end up being the shortest tenure of a coordinator.

Wide Receivers

It was the week of receivers but one made the list.

Lee Evans
As long as Losman doesn’t want to throw the ball, then Lee Evans will continue to suffer. The big play threat of last year has had few balls his way. The lone ball that was almost a clinching touchdown against the Broncos in week one, was over thrown. It’s frustrating but Evans and Losman have a knack for connecting in bunches. Lets hope it’s soon.

Turnovers are a normal part of the game of football, but Sunday may have set a weekly schedule high. Flashing and watching almost every game on Sunday, it seemed to be turnover after turnover. A lot of them were costly errors that not only blew games for teams with chances to win, but cost your fantasy teams those precious points you can’t afford to lose.

This week was so bad for turnovers that we’ve highlighted the top ten players of the week that could not avoid the costly mistakes. Usually we do not break out a list for this sort of article, but this week brings out a special occasion.

1. Kurt Warner
It was supposed to be an easy week for Warner. All of the signs were there for him to have a payback game against his old team. Instead he threw three interceptions, including one that he’ll never be able to explain ever. On top of that he fumbled a snap after the Cardinals had caught a break of a life time in the final two minutes of the game. Cardinals fans are already beginning the Leinart chants.

2. Frank Gore
For the second week in a row Gore fumbled on the opposing teams goal line. Then he got banged up during the game and saw Michael Robinson able to punch it in easily from a yard out. Now Gore’s rise as a fantasy player is sure to take a hit. The 49ers now know that Robinson can be the goal line back, as Gore sure has not proved it. His total yards will remain high but losing his touchdowns makes him a hard back to start on certain weeks.

3. Eli Manning
You’d think a comeback win like the Giants had against the Eagles would inspire a team. That wasn’t the case as Eli Manning came out looking to throw to Seahawk defenders. One thing Manning needs is a healthy Jeremy Shockey. He isn’t 100 percent and he needs Shockey to get that middle of the field back open. Right now he is just gunning towards the sidelines to his receivers that are doubled and triple teamed. It was just a horrific weekend for the Giants offense and defense.

4. Carson Palmer
If it were not for a couple of lucky fourth quarter plays people would be asking what was going on with Carson Palmer. His two interceptions were absolutely ridiculous. One came right after a pick off of Roethlisberger, on a play that Palmer left Chris Henry to get blasted into bits and pieces. He seemed to not have the pocket presence and awareness he needed in the pocket. The ticker in his head to get rid of the football was delayed by seconds every drop back. That resulted in numerous sacks and fumbles that were luckily recovered by the Bengals lineman most of the time.

5. Daunte Culpepper
For the owners that waited on a quarterback to draft by eyeing Daunte Culpepper as their main man, are sitting 0-3 in their fantasy leagues. This comes as no shocker that Culpepper is playing this bad. It’s called there is “No Moss” and “No Running Game”. He did this last year with the Vikings without Randy and it’s carried over to the Dolphins. To barely pull off a win at home against the Titans shows how poor Culpepper is at this state. If the Dolphins would have lost that game they would be announcing Harrington as the starter. We give it another week before a change is made.

6. Mark Brunell
Write it off as a late last gasp for Brunell. People that think he is revived with his record setting completion mark, forget about it. That completion record is fabulous but showing over a Texan team that also allowed Ladell Betts and Clinton Portis to run all over them. Every veteran quarterback has their last “hooray” game and this was it for Brunell.

7. Brad Johnson
Veteran quarterbacks can not have lapses towards the last part of the game. Johnson did a great job all day not turning the football over. So with under four minutes to go, he had to of known the Bears would try to commit a turnover. That game could have uplifted the Vikings more then people would imagine. Instead the defense that was playing great all day, suddenly buckled and gave up an easy deep route touchdown to the Bears.

8. Jon Kasay
Last week it was Rian Lindell shaking up the point board for kickers, and this week it was Jon Kasay. Kasay saved the Panthers from being 0-3 with four booming kicks. None of which were chip shots either. Two were fifty plus and the other two were in the high forties. There may be two or three kickers that would have been four for four on those kicks, and it truly shows how valuable a kicker is. Without those earlier makes, Carolina would have been trying to score a miracle touchdown with a desperate hail mary attempt.

9. Byron Leftwich
The Jaguars let one get away on Sunday and all of the blame should go on Byron Leftwich. Jacksonville was controlling the first half against the Colts, but went into the locker room tied at 7. When a team has chances to put away the Colts, you have to capitalize. On two drives deep into the Colts territory the Jaguars failed to do so. Leftwich threw a pick deep down in their territory one time, and another the Jags couldn’t punch it in inside the ten yard line. What made that drive even worse was the missed 26 yard field goal by Josh Scobee, who was 0 for 2 on the day.

10. Willis McGahee
He still can’t find the endzone. Fantasy owners have to be going nuts with the points McGahee is missing out from being end zone allergic. If he can’t reach the end zone against the Jets then McGahee is going to be a sure lock to have the least touchdowns out of the top twelve backs drafted in fantasy leagues.

The You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me weekly column is back. For those of you not use to it, it is a column dedicated to exactly what the phrase stats. Some of the common threads the column always focuses on are busts, overachievers, and crazy happenings that cause your fantasy football team to lose during the week. This is where you can let out that loss.

Week one was something out of this world, with eleven out of fifteen games being won by the road team. Also, the supposed dominating contenders pulled out some close games that weren’t expected to be. All of this will just go down as a crazy week one that, and a start to an adventurous 2006 NFL season.

The first statement we would like to make is to say how awful it was to see owners get beat by the leg of Jeff Wilkins. Yes, the kicker booted six out of seven field goals as the Rams miraculously could not punch the ball in the end zone after numerous opportunities given by Jake Plummer. Everyone can accept the occasional ten points that come from a kicker, and even that comes as a surprise. To have over twenty points from a kicker though is over doing it. Even in the fantasy crazy sports world. For everyone that jumped out this season to grab Rackers, etc, deserved this happening.

Keeping on the same wavelength of the Rams and Broncos game was the not so shocking performance by Jake Plummer. He looked like the good old Jake making mistakes left and right. All of this happened even with a strong running game from the Bell’s. It had to of been ugly to receive that low mark on your fantasy squad with people looking for Plummer to have a back to back solid season. Now if you have Plummer you may want to already think about picking up Jay Cutler. He is only a bad half from Plummer away from seeing the field.

The Monday Night Football game between the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers was nothing but an embarassment for ESPN’s main Monday Night game. We’ve never seen a more horrible game from a quarterback standpoint. Aaron Brooks just showed Saints fans the truth that they held on to him five years too long. Marty Shottenheimer showed that he thinks the Chargers are going to have to baby Philip Rivers like the Dolphins did with Jay Fiedler. It just did not make sense to see the oddity of how poorly scripted that game went. The Chargers did win in overwhelmingly fashion, 27-0, but played like they wanted to win 3-0.

Lets play the game like professionals and not high school athletics. It’s understandable that Rivers was starting his first game but he has to learn from his mistakes sooner or later. It would have been a good idea to let him experiment a bit in that game then against a team where it will make Rivers look horrible in a tough loss.

A lot of people will say that the Raiders offense may have been the worst showcase of the weekend. If you say that, then you obviously did not see the Tampa Bay Buccaneers try to function against the Ravens. They could not muster up a yard, pass completion, or anything positive offensively. In fact, the three shutouts over the weekend were the poorest performances by a non scoring team combined ever. Usually a team will come close to scoring, whether it is red zone mistakes or missed field goals. But for the Packers, Raiders, and Buccaneers thoughts of scoring for week one were left behind in the preseason.

On the amazing side of “You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me” the Jets offense gets that award this week. It was good to see that old connection of Chad Pennington and Lavernues Coles come back to life. The Jets are not going to jump on anymore teams in the near future but will have some marginal fantasy value based on Pennington staying healthy.

Emails with questions or comments can be sent to zack.cimini@notjustagame.com

Mike Shanahan likes to start up controversy. Especially at the running back position, which every year in itself is a fantasy football owners nightmare. We all know that Denver’s running game is consistently going to be great, but which back is it going to be? It was Terrell Davis for several years, but since him it has been a trademark for Shanahan to keep trying to find a running back.

Early in the preseason, Shanahan decided to name Mike Bell as his starting running back. Instant reaction was kind of surprising. Figuring that Bell was undrafted rookie free agent that was just battling for a roster spot. So as fantasy drafts started happening in August, all of the sudden Mike Bell was the hot choice to take in the fourth or fifth round.

Is this the biggest mistake going on in fantasy football drafts? Yes it is.

Shanahan is doing nothing but stirring up Tatum Bell. Tatum is too talented to not be the feature back or at least carry the ball significantly. He had a great yards per carry average last season, and an equally satisfying amount of touchdowns. The only reason Shanahan named Mike Bell the starter was to get Tatum that extra motivation to use his abilities to the fullest. There have been numerous reports about how Tatum’s work ethic is not where it should be. That move should have gave Tatum Bell the boost he needed. If you’ve noticed in the preseason, Tatum has been still getting carries, and in the last preseason game outdid Mike strongly.

It’s sad to say, but Shanahan and the Broncos have no investment for Mike Bell. His measly rookie free agent contract leaves him as an easy target to let go whenever. Sure, Bell can be utilized as a change of pace back if Ron Dayne can not do it. Bell is a solid back at running in the tier blocking system of the Broncos. He excelled quietly in the Pac-10 at the University of Arizona, and even had a 200 yard rushing game against UCLA last season. The biggest problem though with Mike Bell that won’t go away, is his fumbling problems. They plagued him at the collegiate level and back then you could see how it affected his mentality.

Entering with the Broncos he has been feeling great. All the media is on him with this great story of being an undrafted free agent to a starter. That assumption was too early, and horrible to put in the mind of this youngster. As soon as things start going down a bit for Mike Bell, he is guaranteed to lose his carries and that confidence will be sucked away dramatically.

This whole scenario is making fantasy owners look like fools by drafting Mike Bell as early as he has been going lately. Shanahan played this perfectly. He gave the media a story to devour a month before the NFL season, and in turn the media over played it to the consumer. Who’s Mike Bell was on every sports channel and that caused unnecessary inflation of his fantasy stock.

Either way you look at it, the Broncos running situation was ugly to evaluate for fantasy purposes. Unless you happened to nab both Bell’s than you very well may be stuck and hurting at running back all season long. Getting the compensation at your other positions will be impossible to make up for that poor draft move. Start working the waiver wire as star running backs and such openings appear.

After the first few weeks of the season Mike Bell is going to be unheard of.

Herman Edwards was quick to dart away from the Kansas City Chiefs without any complaints. He knew the road the Jets were traveling and where the Chiefs are as well. That’s two different directions, and the Jets are the ones pacing backwards. Every year something is going wrong with their offense. Just a couple of years ago their team seemed bright and destined to take on the New England Patriots. Now they’re soon to be a team in a serious transformation phase with questions all over the place.

It all started with Chad Pennington’s injuries. Two years in a row he has went down with a shoulder injury and some think he may never recover. He already had a weak arm before the injuries, and seeing how his arm can hold up all season will be a hard test. They’ll have to lessen the load on his arm which may be hard considering the Jets may not have Curtis Martin.

Martin’s knees are so bad right now that he hasn’t been able to respond to the off season workout treatments. You hate to see a guy leave the game like this but that appears to be where Martin is headed. Unfortunately for the Jets they decided to unleash Lamont Jordan last year after keeping him around for a great length of time. He sure would be great to have now. To find some insurance in case Martin can’t play, the Jets went after Lee Suggs. A capable back that the Jets felt comfortable trading for, only to see the Suggs fail his physical and leave the Jets still searching for a back. There are many names out there that the Jets may go after including TJ Duckett or even a Travis Henry. Whoever it is, may want to come up with an ailment upon physical as the Jets are going to be horrific. The one bright side for any running back joining the team would be the Jets first round pick in Ferguson, who’ll have plenty of runs on his side of the line.

From a fantasy standpoint, the Jets actually have no one worth looking at for the first six rounds of a fantasy draft. In fact, you could stretch it out even further for people still worried about Lavernues Coles and his turf toe problems. As wild as it may sound, the Jets may have zero fantasy value for the upcoming season. At quarterback, the answer could be Chad Pennington, Patrick Ramsey, or Kellen Clemons. None of which should be taken in a fantasy football draft, and may not be considered even as a waiver wire pickup when a starter is named. At running back, Curtis Martin is still being taken in drafts based on his past eleven years, but people need to move on. The likelihood of Martin stepping on the field this season is looking doubtful, and if he does, he will have zero fantasy impact.

That leaves the wide receivers. A group that would be better off with Santana Moss, but , oh wait, they traded him for Lavernues Coles. A very smart move by the Jets front office. Really though, Coles should bounce back somewhat as he has played his best with Chad Pennington as his quarterback. Behind Coles was supposed to be Justin McCareins but he has reportedly fallen off as a starting Jets receiver. Possibly to the point of being traded, as the Jets are extremely disappointed with him. That would move up Jerricho Cotchery or Tim Dwight as the starting opposite receiver of Coles. Don’t we all smell an offense that has 2006 Pro Bowlers names all over it?

Geesh, there is no hope for this Jets franchise. It may be a good thing that the New York fans can continue to have a big appearance at the NFL Draft every year in New York City. As they will be having the top five pick for years to come.

Start filing away a mental note on one thing to remember about this 2006 Jets franchise. We can envision a future trivia question. What NFL team has started the most amount of different quarterbacks? That future trivia question will soon be, the 2006 New York Jets.