Welcome to the "Original" Dynasty Rankings Fantasy Football Blog

This blog was born out of a Dynasty Rankings thread originally begun in October, 2006 at the Footballguys.com message boards. The rankings in that thread and the ensuing wall-to-wall discussion of player values and dynasty league strategy took on a life of its own at over 275 pages and 700,000 page views. The result is what you see in the sidebar under "Updated Positional Rankings": a comprehensive ranking of dynasty league fantasy football players by position on a tiered, weighted scale. In the tradition of the original footballguys.com Dynasty Rankings thread, intelligent debate is welcome and encouraged.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Quote of the Day | March 7, 2008: The Great Arboreal Tragedy of America

While flipping through Charles Kuralt's America, I found this interesting passage on the doomed American chestnut tree:

And standing beside the stone steps that led up to the door was a single, doomed chestnut tree. All American chestnut trees are doomed. This one was about twelve feet tall, the size when they are afflicted by the chestnut blight, and this one was---covered with scale on the trunk and rotting at the junction of the branches. Chestnuts are the great arboreal tragedy of America. In the nineteenth century, they blanketed the land and amounted to about one-fourth of all the trees in the southern Appalachians. They grew a hundred feet tall and lived five hundred years or more. They provided a lively timber business, food for settlers and animals, and shade for many a dwelling. (Remember that it was "under the spreading chestnut tree" that the village smithy stood.)

The blight struck in 1904, and in the next half century killed virtually every chestnut tree in the United States. Researchers have been at work for years in Maryland, Virginia, and elsewhere, trying to breed a blight-resistant chestnut. I hope they succeed someday. It would be wonderful to think of our grandchildren roaming through the woods as our grandparents did, coming home with a hatful of chestnuts.

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