Week 3 SSStakes
League,
We put a lot of effort in this league into ensuring that a game that has so little
meaning for our real lives receives more of our attention and emotions than anything else, so it’s not surprising each week when we find ourselves successfully embroiled in hollow celebrations, absurd sadness, and futile controversies.
However, there are certain weeks where the ssstakes sous vide themselves. Championship and playoff weeks go without saying, but every so often a week hits us unsssuspecting — when the pigeons are angling, the fawxen are backpacking, the icarusses are “parenting”, and the mambas are trembling — a week that punches above its weight with the vigour that plow punches down.
It is at the precipice of one of those weeks that we now find ourselves: Each of the six matchups this week is about as significant as early regular season contention can possibly get: Two matchups of 2–0 teams (hags-plow and dead-yumy), two matchups of 0–2 teams (fawx-mamba and robo-piss),
a 2–0 points leader (guns) against a 1–1 league favorite (chod), and a 0–2 struggling champion vs a 1–1 clam.
Let’s take a brief look at what’s a ssstake for each team:
The baffling outcome here is that one of these seemingly competitive rosters will end up 0–3, all but crossed offfrom the division title race and starting to think about a full tank (which will be tough for piss given his
recent exit from NAFTA). Both teams have been projected for ~130 weekly, more than enough to get hot and move towards the front of the pack, but apparently not enough to avoid 0–3.
The FAWX side of the coin here may seem obvious but upon hearing that no team has ever gone winless in the SSS, he’s heads-down with his bone conduction headphones on trying to find a win on that schedule. Lucky for him — mamba comes along in week 3. Mamba chose Amari over Tyreek, Jared Cook over Logan Thomas, and RHCP over DMB. How is that working out for him?
Icarus has no trouble cooking up ssstakes week to week but it’s the other league members who usually aren’t convinced. But not this week — he’s 0–2 without much in the way of future assets or the willingness to ever conclude this isn’t his year. A loss this week would put him in likeliest-future-sacko
territory not to mention that his bitter bird rival owns all his picks. Jamm seems to have convinced the digital world (Fantasypros.com, clamalytics.mollusk, etc.) that he’s good this year but this 2-time
sacko is in danger of a trio.
Two of these teams will emerge from week 3 at 3–0, setting themselves of to ease into the playoffs even if they just scrape by the reamining 11 games at 5–6 or 6–5. The league is well aware that the relationships between these teams is suspiciously close, with one always upvoting the other’s posts and one continually upgrading the other’s roster, but maybe they can find it within themselves to actually battle for one week.
This heavyweight matchup somehow went a full week of SSS content without being recognized for what it is: The SSS version of the NFL’s bucs-rams, with a powerful former champion (complete with Gronk) going against a team that has been expected to win a title for the last few years. Both squads are stacked, both have something to prove, and neither one is plow, so there should be broad excitement around whoever comes out on top.
