Playoff Preview: #5 JGPB vs. #4 EMP

In lieu of further power rankings, I'll be posting previews of this weeks post-season games throughout the week.

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#5 JGPB vs #4 EMP

These two titans matched up in Week 8, with EMP taking the victory in a low-scoring affair. The game ushered EMP off onto a 6 game winning streak to finish out the season, and sent JGPB spiraling to a 2-4 finish that put them in danger of missing the show. Well, JGPB made it anyway but if they're going to make any headway in this tourney they'll have to go through a fortress called EMP.

EL MUNDO PEQUENO - Over the last 5 games EMP has averaged a beastly 134.28, scoring over 110 in each game. That's a spicy chili pepper. The soul of the team is the 1-2 RB punch from Foster and Charles, both of whom have tougher-than-usual match-ups next week (Baltimore, San Diego). But if you thought they were the only reason to fear this team, then you haven't been paying attention. Greg Jennings leads a stacked WR corps followed by Mike Wallace and Mike Williams. Even looking at EMP's bench is could easily be half a starting roster on half the teams in the league. They made the moves, spent the time, and no doubt everybody thinks that they'll do the crime this week, B3@sTm0d3 style. They're the reigning champs, the home team, and the most storied franchise in the league, and despite being the 4 seed, Vegas is giving them 3-1 to go back to back. But that's why they play the games, because you just never know...

John Grisham's The Pelican Brief, like America, stands for crime-porn, idealism, and break-neck spending. Still, like America, they should not be underestimated. At an average of 100.1 pts scored per week, they're not too shabby for a #5 seed and they have every reason to believe that they can upset this powerhouse (they've put up over 100 for the last three weeks to finish out the season) Led by fantasy superstar Aaron Rodgers at QB, they've got two of the top 5 WRs in DJAX and Wayne. JGPB will need big games from the Law Firm and Gates in order to hang in this one, come to think of it, they'll probably need big games from everybody in the line-up. A seemingly diminishing role for expensive free agent BJAX may be worrisome, but his presence in the GB passing game makes double titration an option, and one good screen pass could make up for that. Their zero cash level should reduce their stress this week rather than raise it. They've got the team they're going to play with right now, win or lose.

Regular Season Champion Crowned

For the 2nd time in three years, the el mundo pequeño (formerly psychdog) franchise has taken the regular season championship for conspicuous excellence.  The regular season champion is determined by a season record (disregarding divisions) and then by points scored.  The RSC is a way to reward the season long exploits of the league's most consistently titrated franchise.  EMP finished with a 10-3 record and a fantastic 1,444 points scored or a season average of slightly over 111 points per game.  After a mediocre start, EMP won its final 6 games (including a record setting performance) to take the regular season crown.  In an odd twist of fate the highly charged Eleatic School took the two top slots in this race and because of division records, EMP will actually enter the playoffs as a #4 seed, behind the division champion Phat Girls at #1 seed.   In an even more bizarre statistical anomaly, EMP actually had the fewest points scored against (nearly the exact reverse position of the lowly The Thanatoids).  Take a look at exactly how close these two league blue chips were:

el mundo pequeño

10-3-0

.769

1444.00

1129.40

Phat Girlz

10-3-0

.769

1400.60

1188.60

Over the course of the season that's less than four points difference. Some will  say that it's unfair, that EMP clearly had the more favorable schedule.  But the fact remains, that early in the season, PG had a chance to run away with this one, and instead they dropped back to earth.  They take the division, and the #1 seed, but this RSC defeat has got to be a pebble in their shoe on a snowy day in Harlem, when you don't want to take your shoes off because a junkie will steal them.  It remains to be seen if EMP and PG will get a chance to settle the matter once and for all in Week 15, but you can bet they'll be some extra security on hand for that potential giantomachia! 

Phat Girlz Management Fears Agenda

Owner Mo'Nique was outraged Monday that PSAS officials failed to suspend Andre Johnson for this weekend's match-up between the San Francisco Ferries and her Phat Girlz. Johnson's antics in a fourth quarter brawl with Cortland Finnegan last Sunday were widely criticized over the past week. (pictured: Phat Girlz' owner at a press conference Monday morning)

"Baby, I know I'm not the only one with a little Mary Jones in me so I think you know what I'm talkin bout on this one," Mo'Nique explained. "My man David Akers might be Fabulous and Thick, but he's no Sista Big Bones, baby," reflecting her distress upon finding her star kicker sharing the field with Johnson Thursday night.

After Akers' exceptional performance vaulted the Girlz to a narrow victory last week vs. divisional rival Grossman Sachs, some in the Girlz camp expressed concerns that Akers might be targeted to undermine the Girlz' tenuous position as the #1 overall seed.

At a Brooklyn rally Sunday evening, Rev. Al Sharpton led calls for an inquiry into why Johnson was allowed to play on Thursday night. "Many in our community already have to live in fear of both the cops and the robbers, and now they also have to live in fear of Andre Johnson breaking David Akers' golden legs, too. And apparently with the league's blessing."

Sharpton's comments were delivered to a fanbase that is increasingly skeptical of whether or not hte rest of the PSAS will actually allow their upstart team to reach the mountaintop. An Amsterdam News poll conducted last week found that 73% of Phat Girlz fans believe that the PSAS commissioner's recent expressions of support for the Consolation Tournament represent an effort to undermine the acclaim that might be garnered by the Girlz in the event that they do win the championship.

Mo'Nique said that she plans to monitor the situation closely throughout the playoffs. Some sources report that in private, she is threatening to remove the Phat Girlz from the league's current TV broadcast agreement and take her franchise's home games next season to OWN, the new Oprah Winfrey Network that replaces Discovery Health in January.

League officials and Ferries' management were unavailable for comment.

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Breaking News *** El Mundo Pequeño Under Investigation for Allegedly Hiring Child Hitman "El Ponchis"

Disturbing news today from Mexico, as reports have surfaced that PSAS franchise El Mundo Pequeño may have contracted child-hitman Edgar Jimenez, known as "El Ponchis," for services unknown. Pequeno's ties to Latin cartels have been under investigation before when a Senate sub-committee called into question a trip to Columbia paid for out of a league slush fund. As commissioner, Pequeño used his broad emergency powers to tie the investigation up in committee until after the November elections. Jimenez has claimed that his controllers fed him a steady diet of cocaine and tequila, urging him to participate in their grizzly murders, including four beheadings. Speculation over the potential target has been rampant, but it now appears that "El Ponchis" may have been headed to the San Francisco Bay Area, to contact or possibly to terminate former league enforcer alias "G-man" who went underground after amnesty-for-testimony talks with The Thanatoids' administration went South. Even more disturbing is the possibility that JGPB (PSAS' most prominent West Coast franchise, and consistent gadfly to the old administration) might have been intimidated to stay out of the playoffs. JGPB's decision to start the Patriots D/ST did nothing to alleviate these fears, since the Pats rank in the bottom third of the league in every defensive category.
"El Ponchis" capture may bring a clearer picture to the tangled web of league finances, in which a "PSAS triangle" between Florida (el mundo grande), Mexico and Columbia (el mundo pequeno) that cycles guns, cash and drugs. EMP was formerly believed to be allied with the Gulf cartel, but "El Ponchis" involvement suggest that his power has grown to the point of asking favors from the Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels as well. Already under league scrutiny for "play rental arrangements" an unnaturally large waiver wire contract for Westbrook this week, may have acted in part as a payment to "El Ponchis", when he arrived at his destination. The Pequeño squad was clearly having trouble coping with the gravity of the situation on Friday when they changed their team slogan to "La muerte es lo que vemos cuando estamos despiertos; cuando estamos durmiendo son sueños" roughly translated "Death is what we see when we are awake, when we are sleeping dreams."

Whose deaths haunt EMP's waking hours? those victims of their cartel army's brutal torture? the countless inner-city victims of America's cocaine epidemic? Since playoff teams are immune to investigation while still alive, we may have to wait weeks to find out the full story.The PSAS reserve chairman could not be reached for comment by press time.

Necronauts spokesman: Friedmanite faction within PSAS practicing "disaster titr8tion"

In response to the recent release of upwards of 200,000 PSAS cables by Wikileaks, a spokesman for the Int'l Necronauts organization, L. Mortimer Bland, Jr., questioned the quality of the information contained in the leaks:

"It seems to me that, given Assange and Wikileaks' high profile, it's not out of the question that PSAS elites are strategically feeding Wikileaks information. If you look at the pattern of disclosures on the PSAS league blog throughout the 2010 season, it's actually pretty obvious that an elite faction within the league is practicing a form of 'disaster titr8tion,' in which the PSAS masses are fed stories about impending league collapse that leave them shellshocked, numbed, and pliable--and thus less likely to question the elites' radical free market fundamentalist agenda (an agenda exemplified by the highly questionable EMP/Ferries deal from earlier this season, alluded to in the AP story about the recent leaks).

"What's really amazing to the Necronauts organization is that you have these elites with God knows how many PSAS dollarz still tied up in AAA-rated CDO's consisting of nothing more than bundled bets that Brett Favre and Randy Moss's fantasy points would show unlimited growth throughout the 2010 season, and they're still racking up victories with impunity. And you have this situation where all this populist rage is being funneled toward the Thanatoids administration by media outlets like the PSAS blog, with relatively little of it directed at the league financial elites who are laughing all the way to the playoffs while the other half of the master/slave dialectic winds up in the consolation tourney.

"I mean, you wind up with these nameless fuckers riding around with bumper stickers that say 'Guns, League & Logos,' and it just makes you wonder."

Bland's sentiments were echoed in comments to reporters from Necronauts president Tim McCritchley, speaking from his office on the north side of Chicago:

"It's a classic example of how these people will stop at nothing to advance their teleological master narrative, in which everything that happens on a football field is raised up and transcended in the all-encompassing knowledge-system of the perfectly leveraged Market. They want to ingest all of fantasy football into a system of thought, to eat it all up, to penetrate and possess it. This is what Hegel, the Marquis de Sade, and the PSAS elites have in common," said McCritchley, adding, "It's like what Lenin said... you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh...," before trailing off and turning to ask an aide whether Toby Gerhart was still available on the waiver wire. (Pictured: Int'l Necronauts owner Tim McCritchley)