With the fantasy football playoffs having begun in earnest for most leagues it's that time of the year where we take a look back at the rankings and cheat sheets we brought into our drafts, bright-eyed and ready to dominate the league, and swear under our breath. Things have shifted during the flight—can't-miss stars and sleeper prospects alike have shocked and disappointed even those of us with the most-highlighted copies of the last Football Outsiders annual. Here, then, is what the Yahoo! fantasy football rankings look like today, and how they looked when I thought drafting Clinton Portis was a good idea. Mike Vick—well, I didn't think about that move.
↵Mike Vick was ranked 258th to begin the season in Yahoo!'s fantasy football leagues. He finished as the second-most valuable player in all of football. I couldn't have predicted before the season that he would stop going by Michael, let alone that Kevin Kolb would get hurt and that Vick would turn out both to have not aged at all and to have gotten much better at the actual work of being a quarterback. Philip Rivers jumped from the top of the second tier of fantasy quarterbacks to the top of the first tier, having a better season than easier picks like Drew Brees or Peyton Manning or Tom Brady.
↵The biggest fantasy disappointments at quarterback are mostly injured or Wally Pipped—Tony Romo was having a less than satisfying season before he got hurt, and Kevin Kolb never had the chance not to satisfy. Brett Favre is the most disappointing quarterback to actually play a full season—after one of the very best performances of his career in 2009 he's followed up with the very worst, moving from the 45th-ranked player in the preseason to the 170th in fact, not very far ahead of Romo.
↵As for our own Sam Bradford—he's made the jump from 236 to 55.
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