2002 Season - Week 22

The Pro Bowl is over and we have got two months until the NFL Draft & another six months until the BUMS Draft. What will we do in these dark months - thank heavens for Madden on the PS2! So let’s look back before we look forward. Offence, Offence, Offence 2003 has to go down as a scoring frenzy, with the once elusive Hall of Fame becoming an almost weekly venue. We had 12 entries into the Hall this season doubling the previous best of 6 in 1999. In week 12 Daz set a new highest ever weekly score amassing 64 points only to see it beaten 2 weeks later as John Botten piled up a staggering 67 point week. Over the 17 weeks the 16 owners totalled 7130 points (519 more than the highest total set last year). That equated to an average of 446 points per owner second only to the 1996 average of 459 our inaugral year when there were just 6 owners to share the best players. Promotion and Relegation The split divisions worked well keeping many owners on the edge of their seats until the final week. The architect of the system John Botten was cruelly robbed of promotion on the final weekend when he was passed by Ron who’s Jets won the AFC East on the back of 4 TD’s from his QB Chad Pennington, and in a cruel reversal of fortune Cheryl was relegated with the very last points of the season when her beloved Rams beat San Francisco and the 6 points Mike Martz was awarded saw Mark climb ahead of her to safety! A week is a long time with the BUMS To finish our look back at the season attached is one of the favourite charts of the year giving a graphical view of your position in the league table each week. Congratulations to Phil, now that’s domination. How high did you fly- how low did you go? Franchise Players and Draft Picks And so we look forward and attached is a list of the owners in draft order together with their two Franchise players. Rookie Ron (and that’s the last time we can call him that) will have an extra pick at the end of the 3rd round and Marcus will have an extra pick at the end of the 5th round as he cut his 1st year franchise man kicker Todd Peterson due to injury. In the same way the play-off seedings work the draft order is based on lowest scorer to highest irrespective of division. Therefore Dave G has the first pick and Gareth will have the 16th. A number of top scorers become available for the draft after serving their two years as a Franchise player. These include Quarterbacks Daunte Culpepper, Jeff Garcia and Donovan McNabb plus Running Back Ricky Williams. Who will you take? It’s time to start planing!