I get a lot of questions about Adrian Peterson.

This week, the focus has been on whether he's worth a pickup with the hope that he might play again in 2014.

First and foremost, I don't have a good read on whether or not that is going to materialize. Those who have attempted to predict the NFL's application of its conduct policies and overall approach to discipline have been humbled by the league's random tendencies in handing out punishment.

More importantly, it does not matter to me if Peterson plays another snap this season, I do not want to win with him on my roster, or because I picked him up and flipped him to an owner in dire need of a potential top-five running back at some point down the road.

I dropped Peterson on Monday, September 15^th, the same day that the Vikings decided to reinstate their star running back after holding him out of their Week 2 game against New England. Within 48 hours, the backlash from corporate sponsors made the potential implications of that decision much less relevant as the league stepped in and placed Peterson on something called the Exempt/Commissioner's Permission List.

The events during that window and in the days since have been thought provoking.

Let's start with my decison-making process, which I shared briefly during the Tuesday 9/16 episode of RotoWire Fantasy Sports Today.

Monday morning I started looking at the possibility of trading away Peterson. At that point, it seemed as though he would play in Week 3 against the Saints and life might just go on, because of "Due Process" and $tuff.

My only share of Peterson happened to be in a league with a total of $10,000 in available cash prizes. Without question, I want every penny of that $10,000 that I can possibly get my hands on. I offered him straight up to Andy Behrens for Arian Foster.

Rejected.

I made an offer to Kevin Payne early Monday night – Peterson for Montee Ball.

After I made that proposal, I was eating dinner with my wife as the Monday Night Football game was getting underway. We talked about the Peterson story, after having a similar conversation about Ray Rice just a few days earlier, and watched Keith Olbermann's take (part 1 and part 2) on the story.

It was the first detailed account of the events that I had listened to, read, or heard, despite having games on for 10 hours that Sunday (I had spent the previous 48 hours with family out of town, and coaching at a high school soccer tournament).

As the thought of what had actually transpired sank in further, I felt even better about my plan to trade away the problem. If I want to run my fantasy teams like a business, I need to maximize the value of my assets.

I was content to sit back, wait and see if Kevin would accept my offer, and simply move on to the next interested party until I was able to rid myself of Peterson. After all I thought, "Why should my fantasy team suffer because of his heinous behavior? This is a derivative game where my actions don't carry any weight in solving the problem. If I drop him, it's going to cause a competitive imbalance in the league!"

My wife asked me a very simple question:

"What would you tell our son to do, if he had Adrian Peterson on his roster right now?"

(It's a hypothetical question, as we do not have any children.)

Without hesitation, I said:

"I would tell our son to cut him."

She asked a very poignant follow-up question:

"So you are not doing that...because of the money?"

Exactly.

Wait, what?

My mind, which was still processing the list of players I would have gladly accepted in return for Peterson via trade that night, finally started to focus on what I was really trying to do.

I was attempting to earn every penny of that $10,000 at all costs – in this case, at the expense of my personal beliefs and values.

After all, if I was truly appalled by the Vikings' willingness to try and continue to make money with Adrian Peterson on the field, how could I be anything less than appalled by my own willingness to profit from him in my fantasy league?

It took me far too long to figure this out. It's embarrassing, really.

I grabbed my phone, opened the app for the league, withdrew the trade offer to Payne, and dropped Peterson.

Jeff and I spent a short segment on the matter during the second hour of the show Tuesday, and I had no idea what the response would be. I wasn't on any sort of personal mission to get people to buy into my view, but instead sharing my thoughts on the inevitable question:

What should I do with Adrian Peterson?

It was surprisingly quiet on both sides, with slightly more support on the side of backing the decision I made. My stance is just that, my stance. I don't think any differently of those who operate under their own system of values, I can certainly level with their mindset because for a long time, it was probably identical to my own.

I started to think about the implications of making future decisions in similar situations, and how that might cause a competitive disadvantage, but I love playing in fantasy leagues and what I do for a career enough to try it, rather than simply write it off as something that can't be overcome.

Inevitably, I figured there would be dialogue within the league, but at least in the open, it wasn't as much as I expected.

Adrian Peterson just got cut in #Stopa10k Owner didn't want him for moral reasons. I'm the commish. Fun, fun, fun.

— Mark Stopa (@MarkStopa) September 16, 2014

The discourse that followed Mark's tweet can be viewed here. Although it was written two days before I dropped Peterson, Chris Liss shared his take on the matter:

Why I would not drop Adrian Peterson for "moral" reasons: https://t.co/OGEkzYnm5w — Christopher Liss (@Chris_Liss) September 20, 2014

I agree with one particular aspect of Liss' post – we do allocate our time to the things that are truly the most important to us, but it completely discounts the simple fact that within our priorities, we have countless smaller decisions that need to be made -- whether those priorities are running a coffee shop, or running a fantasy football team. Further, we should not go about handling our priorities without occasionally stopping to evaluate their importance, and the decisions we make within them.

Like Liss, I am not condemning anyone for how they use their time, but it may be worth a few minutes to ask one simple question:

Why are you really playing fantasy football?

I know for me, if there were no money at stake, the amount of time I would spend digging through the waiver wire, and sending trade proposals would be exponentially less. I suspect that you will find for the majority of folks who play in several leagues, the leagues with smaller payouts (or none) would have a directly proportional lesser amount of time invested in them.

Maybe you play fantasy sports for different reasons, but if I am being honest, "keeping in touch with friends" and "for fun" are nothing more than a veil for my greatest motivation to play.

Money.

Here, "being honest about your priorities" is a mechanism you can use to absolve yourself from any internal (or "moral" to borrow the exact seven keystrokes from Chris) struggle that you might have. It's easier, and optimally profitable to operate without those constraints. Especially, if you think of it this way...

@DerekVanRiper@Jeff_Erickson but you're not profiting off what happened. Only on field stuff. Plus your benefit harms no one In real life

— Christopher Liss (@Chris_Liss) September 20, 2014

I know that my action did nothing to change anything about the real story here.

But I also know that finally being truly honest about my priorities made it my only choice.