It’s time to start monitoring the vibes around the league because they will give us a good glimpse of fantasy’s future in 2010.

And right now, the vibes in Pittsburgh are pretty bad.

Not only is QB Ben Roethlisberger out 4-6 weeks – and possibly hurting overall team chemistry as well – they have now lost RT Willie Colon for the season. There’s no easy replacement for the Steelers, so this is yet another strike against their team this year.

This is particularly bad news for their passing game because, not only was it looking shaky to begin with after losing Santonio Holmes, you have under center possibly the worst QB in the league in terms of handing pressure in Byron Leftwich. Leftwich’s issues against pressure aren’t mental, they’re physical. He’s slow as molasses, and when he’s forced to move in the pocket and reset, you sometimes feel you can watch the Godfather Trilogy in the time it takes him to reset (okay, maybe just the first two films). Losing possibly their best offensive lineman will only make Leftwich’s problems worse. I seriously wonder now if this will help the more mobile Dennis Dixon’s chances of beating Leftwich out. I’m kind of hoping [...]

All last offseason and summer, I asked anyone who had a chance to answer intelligently the following question: what will be the Chiefs’ offensive identity in 2009?

No one had a good answer, and as we know the team never did have an offensive identity. It was really bad for most of the season, as QB Matt Cassel proved to have serious limitations, and head coach Todd Haley failed to effectively make the jump to head coach.

It’s easy to second-guess their judgment now, but it was ultimately a mistake to keep Jamaal Charles under wraps for about half the season. Really, had Larry Johnson not made his idiotic comments midseason, we still might not know what Charles can do in a featured role. Haley also had his run-ins with WR Dwayne Bowe, which didn’t help the offense. The OL was also brutal and WRs Bobby Engram and Bobby Wade were busts.

Fast forward to this year and things are really looking up in KC. While this offense is certainly a work in progress and will probably need another year to develop, and while Cassel is still a guy with some issues, I see a ton of reasons to be optimistic about the [...]

It took a long time, but our new site design is finally done, pending a few final tweaks and fixes.

The goal of the new design is pretty simple: less scrolling around for content, and less busy.

Let’s start at the top and let me give you a quick review of how this new Subscriber Homepage works.

Note: I HIGHLY recommend using the Firefox Browser for our site. That’s what we use in the office, and if there are any problems we know right away. This new homepage has no reported issues using Firefox. There might be some java issues currently with this new page for those using IE 7.0 or older, so if you insist on using IE, I suggest updating to version 8.0. In the meantime, we’re looking into any other issues.

You can still see our top headlines where you always did, but you can also click the Recent Articles tab and quickly see our latest articles posted by date

Right at the top, you’ll see the feature article, so that hasn’t changed. Across from that you’ll see our Top Headlines, which also hasn’t changed. The one change in this area is the recent article tab we’ve added. Just click on [...]

Whew. I finally got done editing and posting our initial 2010 player previews. They are the beefiest yet and contain more analysis and information than we’ve ever had (I don’t miss the magazine and its space restrictions at all). Contrary to what one blog respondent wrote here recently, I think bigger is better when it comes to these previews/profiles. In fact, while these things are massive, they probably could have been 15-20% bigger and still contain zero fluff. I do realize some people have shorter attention spans, so you do have to draw the line somewhere. For those who are simply looking for 1-2 sentences on the players, check out the comments within the projections.

For everyone else interested in reading these, consider it assigned summer reading – and your deadline’s about August 1st. There’s no way we can realistically re-write and update all these in the summer, so what we do on the player profile page going forward is include all subsequent updates on each player below his profile on his profile page. So what I’d recommend, if you’re interested, is to read these profiles from now until the start of training camps (in about seven weeks) to get you [...]

Last year, we ranked Bronco RB Knowshon Moreno #20 at RB. And in terms of total fantasy points (which is how we rank players) in 2009, he finished 16th in our default scoring system. But we didn’t underestimate him; we really overestimated him. Moreno was definitely solid down the stretch, but I was still disappointed in him.

From when the season ended until now, I’ve said the same thing about Moreno: he needs to improve and he needs to show a measured improvement on the field.

Apparently, he has.

One thing that helps is that he’s healthy and that knee injury last summer definitely slowed him down, so that’s a good thing to know with Moreno in 2010. The biggest issue I had with Moreno was his lack of action in the passing game, since he was considered a very good blocker and a productive receiver out of the backfield. We’ve speculated all offseason that Moreno probably wasn’t ready to handle the challenging protection duties in Josh McDaniels’ offense, and McDaniels recently said as much. But the good news is McDaniels also said Moreno’s improved dramatically this offseason, so his effective blocking and receiving skills could come to the forefront this year, which [...]