Fantasy Football Podcast 2016 - Fantasy Mailbag, Injury News, Review-a-Saurus

I would pick, if it were me, I would pick at the fourth spot. Because to me, Leveon Bell at Pick 4 is incredible value. That's who I'm hoping for at Pick 4. If I get any of the other three top wide receivers in Odell Beckham, Jr., Julio Jones, or Antonio Brown, I am thrilled. So, you know... So 4 is a spot you're thrilled no matter what. No matter what. And I...

Do you play the game? I used to say, well, maybe I'll go like five and hope someone else takes, you know, I don't want that game. Because I'll tell you what, as soon as you pass those four to me, I drop off a cliff in a PPR. I'm just like, oh, I wish I had. I was so close to tasting that. You get to pick your spot, pick the, however many guys you love, whether you don't like Levi-on belt, well, then go for the third. Let me ask you this.

You are well documented in your risk aversion for your first round pick. It surprises me that you are so locked and loaded, ready to go with Levion Bell as a top four pick. Two years, catastrophic knee injury. We still don't know what his status is for the upcoming year. The way you're talking about him is you have...

No concerns over his knees. I have no concerns over his knees. You are correct. I am a risk-averse person. There's a difference, I think, between having an injury history and having, if you watch the play, right, where he got his knee wrecked on. That was just a monstrosity of a play where he just got his knee wrecked. Any running back.

Any running back you take can have that play happen. But it wasn't a reoccurring injury. It wasn't like he went to cut, and all of a sudden the knee that he had injured got re-injured, and now there's a worry there. And the fact that he's had it before came back and was dominant. But wouldn't you expect that you, there's only so many times you can have these ligaments in your knee patched up before they, things get.

worse and there's a degenerative effect and you're more susceptible to getting hurt. Well, I mean, yes, but I'm assuming this is a redraft league. I think he's going to be fine week one. I don't see him as a huge risk. Maybe that's foolish of me. What do you think, Andy? I don't think that's foolish because I fall into the same camp. You know, if you've seen our Instagram, you know, Jason and I, we can play basketball with the best of them and we watch Lev Bell go and dunk the ball.

On Instagram a few weeks ago, we went out and did the same. You know, on that video, I got, I got, oh, I was, I was, I was just an inch off. Just a bit outside. An inch off of the ground. But I got criticized for my double dribbling. As you should have. But the thing is, is like, I was just there. I was tired after game. Dude, dribbling's my jam.

Oh, don't you dare. I will not apologize. My dribbling is excellent. Par excellence. I need another Instagram video tomorrow. Yeah, I'm going to need to see the handles. Yeah, you're going to need to see the handles. You go on to our Instagram and follow. We'll put an Instagram video of me breaking Andy's ankles tomorrow. Apparently we're going to set the camera up for the entire workout tomorrow. No, we're just saying, I'm going to drive on you one time, put the camera on, and I guarantee it'll happen. Oh, I thought he was bringing a large hammer.

That's the only way you're breaking his ankles, my man. There you go. All right. Yeah, go check that out on Instagram. Watch Jason's Sean Kemp-style dunk. That was delightful. All right, shark. Shark himself. Ooh. A shark in New York City. Dangerous. New York City. There it is. I want to, someone asked us to get, pretend Sam Elliott to say New York City for us, like Pace Baconte sauce. I want to start a Keeper League.

What rules and team composition would you recommend? It'll be a 10-team point-per-reception league. I guess you got those rules figured out. The league that we are making into a keeper league is a two-quarterback league. We kind of want to keep that. Any advice on a keeper rule set up?

Thank you, gentlemen. So he really just wants advice on the keepers themselves. There's two ways you can go for keeping guys, right? You can say we're going to keep three guys, and essentially it's not for picks. You just keep those three guys, and you can make rules about, you know, you can't keep the same position or something like that. I find that the more common approach, which also is fun for finding value on draft day, is to have however many guys you keep. I prefer three. I think, Mike, you've gone on record a...

I like two, yeah. I like two. Is basically where you draft them the next year. You get to keep them at that draft number. If you keep them another year, you, you know, minus two rounds or something like that. But I would say two or three keepers. And I would recommend probably a draft pick. And my main piece of advice, I can't even believe this wasn't first out of my mouth, is if you get a guy off of waivers, public service announcement.

please do not let that guy be picked or kept for the last pick in your draft, like a 16th rounder, and you keep that for a waiver guy. I hate that. If you want to be able to keep waivers, then make it go based on ADP or something, ADP minus around, something like that. Any concerns about a two-quarterback league maybe limiting positions because of that? That was going to be my one piece of advice is make sure you limit the...

positions if you like want you could keep one in every position yeah and not necessarily i don't that that becomes difficult when you're talking a three position uh or three keeper i guess everyone's probably going to keep a quarterback along with a running back and a wide receiver but i would just have a uh one you can only keep one quarterback i like in a in a ten man league the idea of starting with two keepers can't be the same position i like that a lot

All right, let's talk to, let's see, James and Burbank here has a question. He's heard us say that you should draft knowing what kind of scoring system your league uses. Can you break down the types of players I should be drafting for each scoring type? That's a very long question, James. No, look, the subject of this question, too, was fantasy basics, right? And we try to be thorough in the fact that we explain some of the basic tenets of fantasy football to...

brand new players. This is such a popular game anymore. There are so many office leagues that people, you've got Elliot in accounting, right? And Elliot doesn't know a thing about the league. I don't know why I picked him. But you have a different tier of knowledge in these office leagues. And people want to, you don't have to be the best in the universe and know every player's stats, but you'd like to take an incremental...

uh knowledge jump up in your fantasy football knowledge and so he he had titled this fantasy basics so how okay so let's explain scoring types briefly and everybody else who already knows this information just indulge indulge this few minutes here i think you can do it pretty quickly of you saying you have standard scoring where a reception does not count for a point you have and then you have half point and full point

PPR, which is a point per reception. So just the act of catching a ball is worth a point. So let's say I catch a ball and I go down for two yards, Julian Edelman style. Well, I just got...

1.2 points. In a PPR league. In a PPR. And so it's... Whereas in a standard league, you would have scored 0.2 points. So it's all about your preference. And the biggest difference is PPR was introduced because running backs were so dominant. And that's how you won your league. Wide receivers seem to have less value compared to running backs. The league has changed since then, where receivers are now the new normal. And running backs...

score far less. Less work horse backs in the... Exactly. What I like about a half-point or full-point PPR is it expands who is useful. These third-down backs, who their specialty is catching the ball, you bump their value up so they're actually usable. It just opens the pool of players.

that you can use with not just like, oh, crap, I got to put this guy into my flex and he's going to stink. You can put someone in and at least get a couple points and a half point or a full point PPR. Yeah, I don't think that it really, I mean, in a PPR, you're going to value, like you said, past catching backs, and you're going to value wide receivers a little bit more than you normally do. So they might be, you know, on par with running backs. Other than that, the other most common thing is you've got six point.

or four point per passing touchdown leagues. And in that, a lot of times people think, well, I'm in a six point per passing touchdown league. So the quarterbacks do matter in my league. And there's no difference between a six point and a four point when it comes to how do quarterbacks rank up against running backs and wide receivers? And especially quarterbacks against other quarterbacks. Yeah. However, within that area, it does change. If you're in a...

within quarterbacks, you're going to bump up the guys who rush for touchdowns more than other guys in a four-point league. In a four-point league. So I would say that's most of it. And then last piece of advice on this, because I know last year I heard a couple people say, I tried streaming and it just didn't work in my two-quarterback league. And so I just want to constantly remind people, if you're in a two-quarterback league,

quarterbacks are every bit as important as running backs. The whole thing goes out of the window. You're not streaming quarterbacks in a two-quarterback league. And James, you can also visit our website and see each of our rankings for each scoring system. So you can kind of see which guys are moving around a little bit and which ones aren't. We talk about certain players having more or less value based on the league scoring type. And you'll see the fluctuations in our rankings themselves. So you can take a look there as well. All right, this one is

Erlich, Richard, and Daneesh, three people in California. Okay. He has picks 8, 11 in a 10-team league. I'm thinking about targeting two elite running backs such as Todd Gurley, Ezekio Elliott, David Johnson, or Adrian Peterson. What is a good strategy to draft with these two picks? Can you get...

any of those four guys with picks eight and eleven i can say this if you can grab two of those guys at eight and eleven that is a great strategy um you know we try to tell people stay water don't go in with you know i got to get two running backs or i got to get two wide receivers because you never know who's going to be on the board that being said if if you say i'm going to get two of these guys if they're both on the board well then yeah sure that'll be great and then you and you look for wide receivers later you just want

At those two picks, what you want is elite guys. You don't want to say, I want a running back, and then all the elite running backs are gone, and then you still draft a running back. If all the elite running backs are gone, then elite wide receivers are still there, and vice versa. I talked about this on Tuesday's show of busting, and what happened with running backs, where it was kind of an anomalous year for the bust rate was much higher.

then the last three, the last four. And people overreact to these things. So these high-level running backs could drop in your draft, which then don't pass on the value of a monster running back dropping to you. And then the final note, apparently these names are characters from Silicon Valley, the television show, which I do not watch. I see the preview to that show at the very end of Game of Thrones every week. And...

Or maybe it was actually them. Maybe they wrote the question into us. As their characters. They're very dedicated to their craft. So let's just take one second here and think about some of the important dates coming up for the NFL. You know, we're heading, it is May, or as you would say. It's going to be May. Yeah, that's terrible. The NFL, what do we got going on here? It's the 18th of May today.

You've got the rookies had come in in the beginning of May, right? And then on June, we have some restricted free agent deadlines. Rookie Symposium is the end of June, June 19th through the 25th. And then training camp. And then training camp is kind of the middle of July. Is that right? I think it's, they stagger when they start, but you know the end of June. They start firing up. Yeah. End of June, early July is when you start to see some of that. And there are some different deadlines with like.