There was a play in the first half of Monday night's Raiders-Broncos game that may have said more about the current state of fantasy football than any other play in any Week 1 game. But I know you have no idea which play I mean; I barely remember it myself. The Broncos had the ball. The Raiders blitzed. Kyle Orton completed a pass. Not a touchdown pass, nor a pass that shifted the momentum of the game in any way that mattered, as the Raiders wound up winning.

So what was it about this play that said so much? This not-much-of-a-play in not-much-of-a-game, this perfectly ordinary moment that came so late in the weekend -- well after the kickoff of the sixteenth game, which itself came hours later than usual -- that many of you weren't watching at all?

Orton completed his pass in large part because third-year tailback Knowshon Moreno, a 200-pounder with a reputation for being something of a wimp -- a player I nicknamed Knowshow last year -- picked up the blitz. Both announcers took notice of this and praised him effusively. This, I think, is where fantasy football stands right now.

You may recall that last year I wrote a long two-part column advocating a draft strategy unlike the one so many of you have followed for so many years. You pick a running back in the first round, another one in the second or third round, another one not long thereafter. I said you should be picking quarterbacks and wide receivers and even Antonio Gates instead. As I wrote then, even the top-scoring running backs of each season are scoring fewer points nowadays than they did five and ten years ago. And meantime quarterbacks and receivers are scoring more. The NFL is increasingly a passing league. That was true a long time before Drew Brees and Cam Newton were passing for 400 yards, and Tom Brady for 500, in Week 1.

My theory a year ago was that the best way to draft in most formats and most leagues was to take a running back in the first round only if your draft slot gave you a shot at one of the top guys. After they were gone, you should shift your focus to other positions, and plan on coming back to running back down the road -- when there would still be decent backs available, and your leaguemates would be stuck picking from quarterbacks and wide receivers and tight ends who were all meaningfully worse than yours. I executed the strategy about as well as it could be executed in my most competitive draft league in 2010. We start two QBs, two RBs, three WRs, two TEs and an additional RB/WR/TE. I selected both Peyton Manning and Drew Brees before any running back. Then took Arian Foster (my idea of the ideal come-back-for-him-later RB) third, then Roddy White, then Antonio Gates. My second RB was Clinton Portis, who gave me next to nothing. But I kept piling up WRs -- Jeremy Maclin, Johnny Knox, Mike Williams Southeast -- and even took a third QB (Ben Roethlisberger) I might eventually be able to trade for an RB.

By season's end I'd dealt Roethlisberger and a few other pieces for Michael Turner and Hakeem Nicks, had FAABed BenJarvus Green-Ellis, and my team was an absolute juggernaut. We finished 11-3 in a league in which one other team went 8-6 and no other team was above .500. We scored the most points in the league and won the Super Bowl. I'm not selling you snake oil here.

Of course, having Arian Foster available as an I-knew-and-my-leaguemates-didn't star helped a lot. I took him as my third player because I expected him to finish as a top 10 runner; one leaguemate told me confidently that I had "reached." Didn't look like it in retrospect.

But this year there was no Arian Foster. As I told you last week, the closest thing to Foster in my view was James Starks, who was the ninth player onto my roster this season, including my keepers. Foster had been my first running back; Starks was third, after Jahvid Best (a keeper) and Moreno (drafted three rounds ahead of Starks). And I don't even much like Best and Moreno as players. I kept and drafted them, respectively, for the same reason I had drafted Portis in 2010: they were solid values when you compared their upside to what they were costing me (in the way of keeper penalties and draft picks). Neither was a money-in-the-bank pick in my view, as Foster had been. Both were more like lottery tickets.

It was only after the draft, when I sat down last Thursday to try