Why Michael Vick Isn’t Worth It in Fantasy 

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there; so I drafted Michael Vick.

There’s that point in every fantasy football draft where you have the “Oh shit” moment. You picked late in the first round, so the top shelf quarterbacks were gone, the running backs carry some amount of risk and you just take Megatron or Larry Fitzgerald, or even Gronk or Graham and don’t look back. Low risk, top shelf talent. But in round 3 you realize you need a quarterback and you don’t want to have to root for the Raiders so that Carson Palmer emerges as a fantastic sleeper.

So you sigh, roll your eyes, take a draw from your beer and you say it; “I’ll take Mike Vick.”

[By the way, when did we start calling him Mike and not Michael? If it was the prison term, we would be calling him “Tiny” or “Bubbles”, “Sweet Potatoes” or some other incarceration-granted nickname.]

You take Mike Vick because you believe in second chances. You take him because he did his time, and you can’t afford to have a morality complex about your fantasy teams. Otherwise we would draft only placekickers. And Curtis Martin. Even in retirement, he gets more fantasy points than Shonn Greene will.

You also take Mike Vick because Plaxico Burress pasted you in a must-win Week 12 matchup last year and you formulate a theory about players who have been given some “prison loving” and how Chris Kluwe will defend their rights. Just thinking of that makes you drool at the possibilities of inappropriate team names that will make your opponents cringe, then laugh, followed by an admission that they wished they thought of that name. (I personally believe leagues should give annual trophies for best team names. For that reason, I chose the name “Multiple Scorgasms” for my team and used a picture of Ruxin’s vinegar strokes at my team’s logo)

If you didn’t understand that last sentence you don’t watch “The League.” If you don’t watch “The League” you are not a serious fantasy football player. And you can’t be my friend. Period.

Back to Mike Vick. You take Mike Vick because he is tantalizing. He scores mad fantasy points with his arm. He scores crazy fantasy points with his legs. Hell, in the big house he even scored fantasy points with his junk. But he has that amazing potential to almost single-handedly win your fantasy team’s Shiva (again, watch “The League.”)

But potential is always accompanied by reality. And the reality is that having Mike Vick on your fantasy roster rots the lining of your stomach. With every snap.

Let me count the ways:

• Every play can be “the play.” We’ve all seen “The Joe Theismann Play.” Anyone who’s ever owned Mike Vick knows his Theismann play won’t be in the pocket; it will be scrambling like a short order cook at 6 a.m. And Clay Matthews waits for him like a brick wall. You know the rest. It ain’t pretty.

• The ribs. Mike Vick wears a military grade vest to protect his ribs. He hurts his ribs with a particularly strong hard count. Hell he gets hurt just eating ribs. He has the most famous set of ribs since Adam, without the beginning of mankind clout.

• You also have RG3 or Cam Newton. I’m in a 2 QB league and grabbed Newton just to get an upper-tier signal caller. When Vick lingered I grabbed him as my QB2. Then I realized I had to two most likely to be injured quarterbacks. I’ve found I like the pink Tums the best. With Scotch. Single malt. Always single malt.

• He’s really not that good. The truth is he’s been a huge disappointment after his “I’m better than Kevin Kolb even when I’m blindfolded” season. And he’s going miss a game somewhere along the line, so you end up drafting Carson Palmer anyway.

• The dog fighting thing. He bet on dogs. Fighting. Not even those goofy greyhound racing dogs. That’s just disgusting and having him on your roster makes you a little sick inside. Until he scrambles for a 37-yard touchdown, at which point you remind yourself that you’re a cat person anyway.

As for me, my insurance policy is Jake Locker. Well, it was Jake Locker. I made a move to get Matthew Stafford hoping his status as the 2nd-most-often-injured-quarterback-besides-Mike-Vick somehow changes. It doesn’t make me feel good. It just makes me hungry. Now I’m going to go check to see if my barbecued smoked ribs are finally done. Don’t tell Mike Vick, he might go on IR.

About the author: Thomas J. McFeeley

Thomas J. McFeeley is a former award-winning journalist and a current Jets fan. He is a Jets fan because his dad was a (typically dispassionate) Giants fan. He is a fantasy football junkie because he is a Jets fan and wanted to experience meaningful games in October.