Each week, one of the participants in the 2010 Blogger Fantasy League is responsible for a recap. Week 7 is my turn as the deep man responsible for bringing it back.

In case you hadn’t noticed from the massive apocalypse-sized orange bags of candy at your local supermarket or the spackling of fake cobwebs lining your neighbors front porch, Halloween is bearing down on the country like a Clay Matthews pass rush, complete with the stringy hair resembling a Crypt Keeper wig. In keeping with the recent trend to move every holiday up (Christmas decorations on sale before Labor Day, anyone?), this week’s recap will take on a Halloween theme, in the hopes of utilizing the concept before a week’s worth of Halloween-themed sitcoms and a weekend’s worth of costumed dancing Fox Sports robots have officially retired what little patience we all have left for America’s favorite holiday dedicated to candy gorging and sanctioned cross-dressing.

Sure, I’m jumping the gun in stealing a construct that the Week 8 recapper should have owned like Eagles receiver/FoT (friend of Tebow) Riley Cooper snagging an underthrown ball from the Tennessee secondary. But it’s only fitting, as Week 7 in any fantasy league is officially when pretend time comes to an end.  After six weeks of mistaking a lucky week or two for a trend, by this point in any season, teams have typically been unmasked and the contending wheat has been separated from the pretending chaff.  (For those of you wondering, my team, the Febreze Freshness, managed to overcome bye week limitations – not to mention my own aforementioned draft day woes – to pull out a victory against the stinky mess that the injury-laden Team Gunaxin has become, maintaining sufficient freshness to hold onto the hope of being part of that contending class.)

All that being said, let us kill the proverbial two birds with one stone and run down Week 7 in fantasy football AND the seven costumes you’re most likely to see this Halloween season.

1.) The Lady Gaga Meat Suit
Everybody’s seen it.  They’re all talking about it. It seemed like an ok idea at first, but now it’s just starting to smell like something is rotting. Is there any more fitting costume to describe the arc of Brett Favre‘s season? As others noted this week in more direct and PG-13ish language, Favre’s legacy has, in the eyes of the media at least, earned him the right to have it his way, playing down injury pain and soldiering on when he’s rolling, then playing that same injury up when he needs a fresh excuse for that latest interception toss. Could we see an end to the fabled streak, either at the hands of the league’s disciplinary committee or due to ankles cracked like a hastily-split full-size Crunch bar from the bachelor neighbor down the street who forgot it was Halloween until half an hour ago?  Does anybody who doesn’t have him on their team even care any more?

2.) The Jersey Shore Character
Celebrity pretenders you used to enjoy but now you’re just ready for them to fade away — come on down, Roy Williams and Donald Driver. Williams might as well be prancing around with fake abs lifting up his shirt, because just a couple weeks into his supposed comeback, he certainly wasn’t busy catching footballs during the Cowboys loss on Monday night.  And while he probably deserves better, Donald Driver’s looking thoroughly beat up and past his prime, not unlike Snooki on the hunt for smush smush. 

3.) The Blue Things from Avatar
Blue-clad beast that seemingly came out of nowhere to absolutely dominate the league — is there any doubt that this is Kenny Britt?  Earlier in the week he said he thought he “finally got out of Jeff Fisher’s doghouse.” Talk about your understatements. Britt’s monster week helped owners everywhere – including the BFL’s own Fuzzy Gullets – riding him to record-setting weeks and begging for sequels while looking to make a hair braid love connection with the second-year wideout from Rutgers. While the likelihood of a follow-up performance on a similar scale is significantly lower than it is for the Na’vi, Britt’s 225 yards receiving and 3 touchdowns are sure to put him into heavy rotation in fantasy lineups everywhere for the foreseeable future.

4.) The Nicki Minaj
Not unlike Nicki Minaj, you probably never heard of Steve Johnson until very recently. In fact, if you’re like me you still don’t know who the heck Johnson or Minaj is, and you probably wish it would have stayed that way.  Of course, if your past couple days have been anything like mine, you’ve had to come face-to-face with Johnson’s out-of-nowhere performance and Minaj’s work narrating Kanye’s epic “Runaway” video, and now can’t get either out of your head.

5.) The Iron Man/War Machine
It seems unfair to recognize just one seemingly indestructable fantasy performer this week, between Hakeem Nicks‘ two touchdowns and 100+ yards receiving with a bum hammy on Monday night and Peyton Hillis continuing to get it done in Cleveland despite being limited in practice for yet another week. Everybody expected big things from Nicks at the beginning of the year, while Hillis has been the Don Cheadle to Montario Hardesty and Jerome Harrison’s Terrence Howard, stepping in and owning a role that someone else originated. Not unlike Cheadle, Hillis has watched his supporting cast fall apart around him, and has quietly emerged as one of the steadying forces of Eric Man(boobsnomore)gini’s offense.

6.) The Giant Bedbug
Every year there’s that one surprise costume that makes you say “why didn’t I think of that?” and gets all the praise at the party. It’s only fitting that this year that role will be filled by a vampire-like bug that hides in your mattress, only to emerge and suck the life out of you in the middle of the night.  Oh, hey there, Darren McFadden. After burrowing deep into Al Davis’s Sealy Posturepedic, McFadden crawled out this week and latched into the Broncos in a record-setting way.  Unfortunately for fantasy owners (or fortunately for me, since I played Team Gunaxin, who had him on their bench) in all but the deepest leagues, chances are McFadden went overlooked and racked up his fantasy feast on the bench.

7.) The Sexy Anything
It’s obvious, it’s easy, and 9 times out of 10 it gets the job done. Everybody may talk about the friend in the Gaga meat suit, but Adrian Peterson continues to be the one you want to end up with at the end of the night. Some may have turned their back on him (like the three GMs in the BFL2010 who opted to NOT pick him up with their first rounders), but he continues to be a pretty guaranteed ride to the promised land, proving that originality isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

- KB

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The P&G Blogger Fantasy League (BFL) is a group of 12 digital sports influencers competing on the NFL.com fantasy platform for the chance to win P&G product, a donation to a local charity, and a trip to Super Bowl XLV, all furnished by P&G. The NFL Entities have not offered or sponsored the sweepstakes in any way.