Don't underestimate Nick Foles...

I've seen Foles do a lot of great things over the years.

Actually I've hardly ever seen it, I've just seen the box scores roll in, and collected the money.

In the 2013 fantasy season we (co-managing with a friend of mine -- not the "royal we") had LeSean McCoy and Desean Jackson, both Eagles at the time, and a questionable quarterback situation.

The Eagles had the "high-powered Chip Kelly offense" that year, and when Michael Vick got injured and this Nick Foles character took over the starting job, my spider senses were alert. I shot an email to my co-manager friend about possibly adding him, and he quite fairly believed that Nick Foles kind of sucks.

My visions were shot down, but a few minutes before gametime I went rogue. I found a player who was clearly kind of expendable and wouldn't be that controversial to drop, and I stashed Foles.

Nick Foles threw 7 touchdowns that day, and the rest was history.

In fantasy football, having players from the same offense is a thing that works well sometimes.

If you have several players who compliment each other and who will generally rise or fall together, then you increase your upside and also your downside. And given that the goal is to win (to be 1st out of 12 or whatever amount of teams, and 5th is no better than last), you generally want that tradeoff. You want the high variance upside.

So it was kind of like "ifff he's good, combined with McCoy and Jackson, then all of a sudden we may have a juggernaut". (And if he was terrible, we were probably a failed team anyways, since he'd bring down McCoy and Jackson.)

And apparently I'm still pretty proud of myself 4 years later.

Little known facts

Nick Foles threw 27 touchdowns to 2 interceptions that year.

Finished the season with a 119.2 QB rating, which is the 3rd best all-time. (Sure it was a shortened season because Michael Vick played some of the games, but still.)

He threw seven touchdowns in one game!!!

He threw a "perfect" game, which landed him on a list of only 60 or so other quarterbacks to have done it. And I may or may not have written this section of the Wikipedia article which seems to illustrate his perfect game as the greatest of all of them (which it was).

Foles graduated from the same high school as the great Drew Brees.

Carson Wentz injury

So the Eagles are in a weird situation, where they're the number 1 seed and playing at home, but regarded as an underdog, now that they're using a "backup quarterback".

It's possible Foles just fit in to Chip Kelly's offense really well, or caught the better part of variance. But for all we know he has some ability to dig deep and zone in, and we'll see how he does later today!

A small little bet

For the most part I'm done sports betting for now. If anything I'll bet on the Super Bowl, if the Patriots make it. Anything I bet now is just gonna be a little nibble, but I'm not gonna sit here and watch Nick Foles make a title run and not have a little piece of it.

So I actually have all the underdogs this week (besides Titans/Patriots):

I have a little nibble on Saints (moneyline), a little nibble on Jaguars (+7, and also some on moneyline), and a bigger nibble on Eagles (mostly moneyline, and a little on +2.5).

Good luck to all the competitors.