No. 1 seed Denny Boyles (9-4), one of The Bee's trusty news reporters, got lucky when he took Rodgers in the 10th round. And yes, we mean lucky. Boyles didn't draft Rodgers as his starter, he took him as his backup behind Eli Manning. Sometimes you just never know.

Bee assistant features editor Fran Fried, the No. 2 seed at 8-5, took Brees with the second pick of the second round at No. 14 overall.

Aside from some luck Boyles proved he was smart, too, taking Brandon Marshall (fourth round), Anquan Boldin (fifth) and the Steelers DST (11th).

Fried survived troubled picks in Willie Parker (third), Plaxico Burress (fourth) and Jeremy Shockey (sixth) thanks to some help from Marshawn Lynch (first round, No. 11 overall), Greg Jennings (fifth), Leon Washington (seventh) and the Giants DST (eighth).

A common theme among the top three seeds -- former Bee assistant metro editor Matt Kreamer is the third seed and the league's points leader -- is they had the least amount of transactions with 10, seven and seven.

Notable pickups were Michael Pittman, Peyton Hillis, Pierre Thomas and Brandon Lloyd.

We know we're not offering any real groundbreaking insight, we're just more or less reemphasizing the need to do your draft homework. If you study well, then good things should happen for you next year.

The playoffs, round 2

Kreamer and his third-seeded team remain the hottest bunch around, scoring 118.58 points in the first round of the playoffs. And, Kreamer needed just about every point he got out of Peyton Manning (29.08), Chris Johnson (22.6), Marvin Harrison (13.8) and everyone else to beat No. 6 seed Chris Molley, a friend of several Bee employees. Molley scored 111.86 for the hard-luck loss 28.46 points from Philip Rivers and a big 16.6 points from recent pickup Tashard Choice.

The 4 vs. 5 matchup also was close, pitting Bee sports copy chief Dave Cooper against his predecessor, John Romero, with fourth-seeded Cooper pulling out the 94.54-85.04 victory. Again leading the way for Cooper was Jay Cutler with 23.04 points.

This, however, was a matchup of what could've been for Romero, who had Matt Schaub (28.56 points), Jonathan Stewart (23.5) and Vincent Jackson (20.8) on ... his bench. Yeah, and in the starting lineup were duds from the Moores, Mewelde (5.8) and Lance (3.5) and a less-than-stellar Donovan McNabb (15.64). Any one of those switches -- at QB, RB or WR -- would've overcome the 9.5-point deficit Romero lost by. Ouch!

The victory earned Cooper a matchup against Boyles. Let's see if Boyles can, at the very least, not take himself out of the mix. Kreamer is up against Fried -- who only got 15.38 points from Drew Brees but a whopping 26.6 from Pierre Thomas in New Orleans' loss Thursday night at Chicago. By the way, Kreamer only got 12.3 points from Matt Forte to go with 13 points from the Bears DST and nine from Robbie Gould. That puts Kreamer behind Fried 43.98 to 34.3.

Got any thoughts or stories for The Fantasy Buzz? Did anything similar to this happen to you? Go ahead and send your tales to us by leaving them in the comments section on this blog or e-mailing sports@fresnobee.com and you might see them in Sunday's edition of The Bee.