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Be 100% sure that you will very soon clearly understand the strange title for our newest weekly feature article. "The Pickup Artist" will not only attempt to thoroughly entertain you, but will also do its best to sneak in an oddball waiver wire snag (or two if you're lucky) for the given week to give your fantasy football team the edge it may need to win, and to help you become a true waiver wire pickup artist.
For Week 12, let's start by sprinting to the waiver wire to pick up the most obscure, and ambiguously junky, backup running back in the entire NFL: Toby "The Stanford Sledgehammer" Gerhart. Owned in a whopping 1% of Yahoo leagues, and perhaps even less-talked-about than Brian Leonard (before the Doug Martin and Mike James injuries), the Vikings "cut-rate" insurance policy to franchise player Adrian Peterson may need to be cashed in sooner than later as we go deeper into the 2013 season and All-Day's aggravated groin continues to earn him an early exit on Sunday. We all know that Leslie Frazier and the lost Minnesota franchise have a lot of question marks, but one thing no one is questioning is who they will be handing the ball off to about 30 times a game for the foreseeable future, as long as those games are meaningful. For the Vikes, that meaningful future starts in training camp next August, and regardless of how badly the best running back in the game wants to play and rack up the yards, it is quite feasible that the powers at be (i.e. Vikings' owners who sign his enormous paychecks) will want to either limit him significantly to avoid a major injury, or just shut him down completely for a couple of games down the stretch.
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In the event that the aforementioned prophecy come to fruition in any way, shape or form , it will mean the emergence of the Stanford Sledgehammer (Toby Gerhart) to step in and continue racking up an average of 9.6 yards per carry like he did against the Seahawks' fourth-string defensive unit towards the end of last week's blowout. OR MAYBE NOT?! Perhaps that is a bit of a pipe dream, but if you are an AP owner, or are someone in a position to be playing in the fantasy playoffs in Week 15 or 16, you may very well be looking at the Vikings' most reliable contingency offensive weapon and second-string running back as a potential waive wire add. Whether it's an insurance policy for your playoff run, or just because you are arrogant like us and think you can predict the injury-filled demise of the best offensive player in the game, you don't want to be that guy who hears us saying "I told you so" in a few weeks. Trust us on this one kids: if you can afford the roster space, get this guy onto your bench before his waiver wire price tag balloons and you are stuck holding your fantasy football pud with that dreadful little "O" next to Yo Adrian's name on one of these next few desperate Sundays.
That's enough trolling and speculation for our debut, but feel free to come back for more of this lovely high-end banter each and every week for the rest of the fantasy football season. Until next time, it's Real Talk Raph saying "I told you so" in advance!
