Fantasy Football - The Overreaction Episode! + Pickens Trade Reaction - Podcast for 5/8

And you were the 32nd ranked in yards per game as a rookie, 28th and points per game, dead last and expected points added on first down. This team was bad. And so do I think they'll be better? Yes. But there is a lot to worry about and a lot of mouths to feed. You have, you know, we've gone through our projections. I've looked at the bears. It's like you're throwing the ball to Loveland and DJ Moore and Burden and O'Donzee and Komet's still going to be. in the mix a little bit, and you've got Swift out of the backfield. And, like, there's just a lot of players where I don't think it's going to be easy for us on a week-to-week basis to sift through who's going to produce if this team is a middle-of-the-pack offense. Like, I think everybody wants to project Ben Johnson making them a top-10 offense. But the more realistic outcome is that they'll be middle of the pack, and that's a huge improvement for this team. So to me, the overreaction is just the optimism.

I think we've been here before. We've awarded them the offseason, but we need to temper expectations. And it was kind of something we had to try to do last year. Last year, there was tons of excitement around the wide receiver room. Well, last year, I mean, what, would they have three top 3680P wide receivers? Exactly. And it was. Yeah, and DJ Moore. Guys, this is not possible. I mean, DJ Moore finished at wide receiver 17 last year. And he had been coming off a wide receiver six season before the trade. You know, I do worry a little bit about adunes A and more, you know, ping ponging back and forth as being the most relevant receiver on certain weeks with how it goes. So I just think that that's the overreaction of the offseason. I, that doesn't mean it can't be your optimism for the off season. I'm fine with that. I'm optimistic too. But the numbers say that this doesn't happen in.

one offseason in a division where it's brutal. Like that's a tough division. Green Bay, Detroit, Minnesota, six games against those teams. They know who you are. And they know Ben Johnson too. Yeah. So it's just one of those things where I think we need to temper our expectations. You heard it here from Andy Holloway. Bears suck. I know a couple friends that will, that's what they will have heard. Yeah, for sure. If you, if you're a Bears fan, that's the only, despite you saying you're rooting for them, everything, all they heard is that they suck. I didn't hear any of that. It is worth noting that usually like that the true bell of the ball, you know, biggest landing spot, which if I think what, what was that for this off season? It, it was, it was this.

I mean, we waited two coaching cycles to get this man a new job because we believe in him. And when you have that kind of hype, I mean, sometimes, you know, the generational talent is Andrew Luck. Sometimes it's Trevor Lawrence or worse. So it's worth noting like, let's not overreact because people were already overreacting last year to the Bears. I like that argument. Okay, so my. thing to not overreact to. And this comes from the fact that right now we are staten out players. We're going through their projections. We are making their lines for next year. And I'm seeing it over and over and over with the best of the best, the guys who were awesome last year. Don't overreact to players who had an abnormally high touchdown percentage in 2024. It's so hard. Like the recency bias makes it so hard to look at guys who were awesome. Baker Mayfield. Laser Mayfield.

uh later where is there we go laser may feel so so clean lamar jackson was unbelievable i want so patrick mahomes is like the poster boy it used to be uh used to be erin rogers for this i feel like that's almost too dated now now he's an old man we don't remember how incredible he was for fantasy but everyone remembers how great patrick mahomes was you know throwing 8.6% of his passes for touchdowns and then the next year was Down to 5.4. And it's like, oh, whoa. And then it's back up to 6.5. And then down to 5. Touchdowns are not a sticky stat. We say it all the time. But sometimes, I mean, there are a few players. And literally you can count them on one hand where you go, I know that player is a double-digit touchdown machine. But what we really think is we think of like a quarter of the league that way. Oh, he's a big body guy who's had touchdowns in the past. So he has it. So I've got a handful of players that I just want to bring up exactly.

What they did and how that compares to normal. First up, Lamar Jackson. Lamar Jackson, the three years prior to this last year, was awesome. But he threw 4.2% touchdowns, 5.2% touchdowns, 5.3% touchdowns, all in his normal range. And then last year, 8.6. He went from 16 touchdowns, 17 touchdowns, 24 to 41 touchdowns. That's not going to repeat. It never repeats. Like these kind of players, Baker Mayfield. Same exact thing. He was awesome. And we're like, well, he's got all the tools there. They added a great rookie wide receiver. He's going to be even better this year. The truth is, yeah, this is a guy whose touchdown rate has been nowhere near, you know, 4.1, 3, 4.9. And then this last year, like a league average guy. Yeah, league average guy, not bad. 7.2. So it's really hard to be like, well, it's going to fall back down to his norm.

Statistically speaking, it usually does. Same thing with Jared Gough. He was up at a very nice 6.9% touchdown percentage. He was outrageous last year. And that is not his norm. So you got to watch out for those guys. A couple other players at other positions, James Cook. My goodness. Last year we were going in saying he can't score touchdowns. Then he tied the franchise record for rushing touchdowns. You know, 43% of his fantasy points came. via touchdown. Over the last six years, every single player who's ever done that has had massive regression the next year. Terry McLaurin, he's one of only 10 wide receivers since 2000 with 13 plus plus rushing. Oh my, they were plush.

They what, yeah. Need a break? 13. Get to a towel. 13. Time out. I call time. I call time. Yeah. All right. We got to take a quick commercial break. Elevator music. What do you want to talk about? I'm calling time. This is my first of four. You're not fogging your glasses, though? No, I don't, I don't think I fog as much when I'm not fat. Turns out. You get really overheated when you're really overreed. Are you just begging Lefco for another chance? Oh, I got to go back. Adam, where are you? Invite me back. I'll sit in that hot room and I won't. Here I am. It's me. All right. Time in. Back to Terry. Scary Terry was awesome last year. The argument is, well, he got a quarterback. And so now someone could get him the ball. He had 13 receiving touchdowns on fewer than 125 targets. That has happened 10 times.

before nine of those 10 wide receivers decreased their receiving touchdowns next year by the average average for all of them five and a half fewer touchdowns that is that is he that's more than he usually gets in a season let's let's make it positive then because I feel like a lot of our overreactions are going to be like don't fall for the trap of the great season My next one is that exactly. But the positive twist there is let someone else overreact to it. Maybe take advantage in a dynasty or keeper league of unreasonable expectations for certain players. Take advantage of the overreaction. Mark Andrews this year had 11. He had his career high in receiving touchdowns. Most people are wise to. Yeah, that one you're not going to capitalize on it. But I mean, maybe you can get so. But like for Terry, right, let's just for a quick thought exercise, he was at.

Basically 1,100 yards and 13. Mm-hmm. Okay, you give him 1100 yards and seven touchdowns. That is nowhere near the points per game that he put up last year. He's much closer to his normal output of being like an 11-point wide receiver. I feel like I'm going to break our order here. Okay. Actually, I'll go to break, and then we'll come back, and I'm going to follow. what you said, Jason, because it ties into it. My second overreaction, it deals with a very specific player. Sweet. And so we'll go to that. And then Mike, you'll take over from there. Roger. And here we go. So look, Jason, you talked about not overreacting to touchdown percentages at quarterback, which are, you know, you do get outlier seasons. You get seasons that let you know what a...

players capable of. I think that's what excites people is you now know that Baker's capable of 40 plus touchdowns. He can do it. And you know Jared Goff, like he could have a big week, right? And that's helpful. Even if you don't draft that player to do it again the whole season, I now know that Baker could do it in a game. He could do it in a series of games. Goff can give you a streaming quarterback performance of five touchdowns. That's nice. So my second overreaction is going to be. An attempt to make the same mistake twice. I hope I don't make it twice, but it's related to Saquan Barclay. And it's simply that we can't overreact to his dominance and believe that this is a repeatable thing, what he did last year. It was a magical, incredible season for Saquan Barclay. But I want to walk through really what happened.

And what odds you're going to be stacking up against yourself to expect Saquan Barclay to go out there and do what he did last year. He carried the ball. He touched the ball. 482 times. That was 378 in the regular season. Another 104 in the playoffs, which was the fifth most touches all time in any playoffs. And you have to look at the numbers. When a player gets that much work, it's not like Sequin's never been hurt in his career. But if you look at since 2020, you had 10 running backs that have seen 330 plus touches. Mind you, he hit 378. All those running backs in the last five years have seen a decrease of 45 plus touches the following year. And only two of those 10 played a full season.

So it takes its toll on you. It's very difficult. The other things that were outliers in Sequin's season, and he's an amazing player, he will be an amazing player this year, much like how Derek Henry will have a good season. He had seven 40-plus-yard runs last year. That is more than Todd Gurley had in his career. What? Yeah. Seven, 40-plus yard runs, 4-60-plus-yard runs. CMC's... That's how many he has in his entire career. So this was just a magical perfect season. But breakaway runs, especially breakaway touchdown runs, those are not sticky year to year, much like that touchdown percentage. You know, you're talking about he had a magical season, but it's very, very difficult to repeat as the RB1. And look, Mike.

in our league of record you got the number one pick yeah you get to decide between sayquan barclay who's sitting out there and be jean a couple players that drop back into the they're looking good into the lottery um out from the lottery but this is just a matter of not overreacting to expectations for sayquan barclay he is entering his age 29 season over the last decade there have been zero age 29 running backs who have finished in the top five among fantasy running backs um It's very, very difficult to get that amount of work and do the exact same thing in the next year. And it's difficult, even like the Eagles, they bounced back from a few years ago when they made their Super Bowl run, right? We were there. They lost the Chiefs. They had some bumps in the road between that time. It's hard when you've got the target on your back as a team like that to be, you know, we didn't get a tush push ban this year. Still going to be a lot of Jalen hurts. So look, I'd love Sakewon. He's a top five pick. He absolutely should be there. But I think our expectations need to be.

We just need to understand how much work he got last year. There is the answer of a player like if you're in Dynasty and you've got Sequin Barkley and he's the number one running back, you should in most leagues be able to find someone who will pay a haul, an absolute haul because they think they're getting the number one running back this next year and they might be, but he's older. I would take advantage of that for sure. In Dynasty are you ready to like, this is super cash in. This is super cash and he is the quintessential. type of player where he's at an age and a value where you almost have to make that move. You've got to trade him for a haul. It's so brutal. Unless you're trying to run it back. If you're last year's champ, which I'd say once or maybe you were, then sure. All right, Mike, I'm saying any of your contender, he's 29, right? He's 28. He'll be 29. And watching Derek Henry, who.

did it at 31. So it's... That's a really tough one. But this might not be a win your league automatically season. That's what you got out of him. And every running back goes through this. And so it's just one of those situations where, look, what did I say? Two of the 10 running backs with 330 plus touches even finished the full season, that is very difficult to do. Now, the team might not have a choice, but to run them into the ground. But you do have injury risk when you get 400 plus touches on the course of a year in a long playoff run. All right. I'm going to go through a – this is some numbers from a study that I recently did over the offseason that kind of flipped a lot of – I don't even know what to – tables. No, pancakes. No, not tables. Ooh, yeah, might have been pancakes. Scripts. Scripts. A lot of the things that I thought and that I think are general –

agreed upon things in fantasy football. It has assumptions. Thank you, Kyle. It has kind of made me have to re-arranging your brain a little bit? A little bit because when we think about wide receivers, right, you think about the year three breakout or if a player has been good before that, the year three, we're going to hit the ceiling. Like this is the year where everything really comes together. And. I went back and looked at all players drafted since 2014, talking about wide receivers. And it turns out guys who break out in year two, and I consider a breakout is they finished in the top 24 for the first time. Okay? So they finished. So in year two. In season two. And we are really bad then at over projecting those players. As in they're going to continue to ascend? Yes. Of like, well, the breakout happened.

Next year, they're just, they're going to get better. And I am talking in terms of your average draft position for these players. They go higher than, of course, they're going to go really high because you're excited about this guy, but they end up not meeting the expectation. So when you, the way I'm breaking this down is in ADP, you can average out each wide receiver position should score about this amount of points. And what I mean by that is like, I draft. player X as the wide receiver 14, I expect on average the wide receiver 14 at the end of year is going to have, you know, whatever it is, 10 points. I don't have those points in front of me. Per game. But yeah, yes, yeah, per game. So slotting points per game based off of where they were drafted. You're like, I'm expecting this point return by spending this draft capital on that player. So since 2014, 19 total wide receivers.

finished in the top 24 in their second season, 19 of them. For their first time. Yes. Those players that you would say this is breakout. Yes. The next year, based off of ADP expectations, nine of those players drafted did not meet their expectation. Almost half of those players didn't come back and give you the points that you needed. And eight of those, what are considered by me to be big misses. These guys were at two or more points under what I'm expecting them to give my team. It was a drastically bad, bad pick for me. And here's the names, because these are not bad players. This is Crystal Lave, Michael Pittman, Darnell Mooney, D.K. Metcalfe, Terry McLaren, Cortland Sutton, Alan Robinson. Like, these are players that we would all agree that the majority of this. You're like, no, these are good players.

We just juice them up too much if they break out in year two. It sounds like as fantasy players, what we do is that addiction to potential. Yeah. We want, we don't want what has been. We want what could be. Exactly. And so as a consensus, we may drive up their ADP. Yes. And that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm not saying that their season in totality be a disaster, but I'm saying we. are juicing them up just too much. And so nine guys missed, nine of the 19. You know, so 10 hit. But of those 10, two would be considered big hits who performed two points high. That was my biggest question. That was my biggest question is the 10 that did. How many of them hit the ceiling? Really good. Two of them. So it was, this is a really.

This is turning things upside down for me of trying to be at least a little more hesitant and skeptical. Obviously, if 10 out of 19 returned value, you know, that's not bad. Like that's not catastrophic, but it should at least make you think about things. This year's candidates, Jackson Smith and Jigba and Zay Flowers. Yeah, JASN's like a wide receiver 15 right now. Jason is super juiced up and like. Look, the second half was, it was absolutely incredible for JSN. Would you consider Jamison Williams in that group? No, he broke out in year three. Oh, that's right. He didn't. Last year was year three. Yeah. So it were, but it's like, but Jason, it's a new offensive coordinator. They, they're coming in like, we're going to run. We're going to run. You have a brand new quarterback. There are a, this isn't a completely stable situation that JSN is just, we've transitioned to the next year and everything around him is exactly the same.

No, there's a lot of things that have changed here. And his draft price is going way up. Am I saying that he got a top three NFL draft pick at quarterback. I mean, that has to be an upgrade, right? Talking about Sam Donald? Sam Darnold, baby. I forgot he was done. I was like, what is this game you're playing, sir? So I, it's probably still younger than Tyler Shuck. Yes, I, uh, we all are. We are. Yeah, we all are all. If you're listening, you are younger than Tyler Schock. So last year, weeks one through eight for JSN, one total touchdown despite averaging nearly eight targets a game. Weeks nine through 16 pulls in five touchdowns in that time on nine targets per game. So it's like the touchdowns went way up. Just saying that I think there's there's room for some concern in the same for Zay Flowers of will he take that step. Now he's going much later in the draft. I feel like he's not me in.

as I don't think people are looking at him the same way they look at Jason right now. JSN fits the bill of how I would have felt, how we all felt about Terry McClurent after the second year. And you're like, okay, now it's time. You know, here's the crown, become a wide receiver one for the next 10 years. And that's the thing that goes into question. The combination of what he did at the end of last year with what he was supposed to be coming in, add in the D.K. Metcalf trade. And the Tyler Lockett trade. And you're expecting. him to be a top 10 wide receiver this year. So, but I do hear you on the data and the, there are a lot of negatives in his situation as well. The new quarterback, you know, all jokes about it being number three and Darnold was able to hold Justin Jefferson's value, but he's still Sam Darnold. Right. New office coordinator? Yeah. The, the, the possibility that Sam Darnold comes in and, you know, lands on his face and Jalen Milrow is.

playing at the end of the year that is that is not unforeseeable yeah that that one's interesting more so just like you know you got the two names for this year but just moving forward it's rational to me why people do it oh yeah i've been doing like a bunch of my my guy whiffs are because it's a guy who broke out in year two yeah and i'm so pumped for next year yeah and then they just they don't meet the ex they don't fall on their face i think i know bring back oh i'm moon i think mooney was

Yeah, I think he was. My guy for me the year that that happened. I think I know why that is happening. And I'm curious because you've got the data. You've been doing the research. I think it is because the truly, really special players are now very often breaking out in year one. Oh, dude. It is a rookie. You want to, you want to go in on rookies from last year who broke out in year one. They're going to crush. So like I said, so the hit rate. And I define that as in they finish at least one point fewer or better for the expectation. The hit rate on, like I said, the guys who break out in year two, about 52%. If you break out in year one, your hit rate on the next one, 94%. Oh, that's got me hot and bothered. Yeah, you've already beaten the level. Yeah. You've beaten the game.

Wow, that is crazy. Okay, well, that goes great into my... And these things, like, they do, it does go all over the place. It's not just high-end wide receivers. It's, you know, Jaden Reed finishes a top 24 guy as a rookie, but then his draft expectation, because he wasn't drafted very high. He actually beat it, despite all the highs and lows of his season. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so my next thing to overreact, it has to deal with rookies as well. Every year is different. And I don't want us to overreact to the amazing rookie draft class we just had last year. Try to stop me. I will hopefully succeed, actually, with you. I hope I do not. We play in a lot of leagues together. But, you know, we saw this in 2014.

If you have been playing fantasy long enough, that wide receiver draft class was just unbelievable. And it was like two years in a row where everyone was just assuming like, no, man, you got to go so hard at these rookies because they were who, you know, they were the O'Dell Beckham's and the people who just won people's leagues. This last year's draft class was way better at some positions than this year's draft class. Last year's wide receivers? They were historically great. Neighbors, Brian Thomas, Ladd-McConkie. All three of them, top 10 in best PPR points per game and rookie seasons over the last decade all in this last season. So three of the 10 best seasons over the last decade were 20-24 rookies. Exactly. And that's pretty hard to repeat. Yeah, that's not going to repeat. And you combine that with the fact that, you know, this year pre-NFL draft.

like we're all hyped on these rookies now i really like you know i've scouted a lot of them i like i like tray harris you know he goes 50 pick 55 to a good landing spot i like this thing he wasn't going to look for that button i liked his talent be a disaster but like he is not as good as last year's draft like these guys this year's class tetarolic mcmillan and and travis hunter they are not like these players we were drafting last year at wide receiver. This is a running back draft class. And so honestly, if, you know, don't overreact to last year's failure at running back either, this class is loaded. Look at last year's quarterbacks as well. You had both Jaden Daniels and Bo Nicks as rookie season top 10 quarterbacks. You know, 29 passing touchdowns.

for Bo Nix. That's the second most all time for a rookie. And Jane Daniels, you can make an argument right now. He is already the quarterback one in dynasty. And so now who's coming in? You know what I mean? Like who's going to come in and be that? Do you believe in? It's the challenge of the, it's the reality that faces NFL executives every year is that you can draft what is there. And so the illusion that all draft capital is equal, right? It's like if you're a first round draft pick, You're a first-round draft pick, so you should play like a first-round draft pick. But there's individuals behind them. Yeah, Cam Ward and Jackson Dart and Tyler Shuck are not as good as Caleb Williams and Jaden Daniels and Bo Nix. We've had Blaine Gabbard years and Christian Ponder years. We've had rookie wide receivers and running backs that go so high because that's just what is available to NFL teams and they imbue of value. Look, I like Matthew Golden.

But the metrics behind Matthew Golden being a first round wide receiver, if you put him in last year's draft class, he doesn't touch the first round. There are so many players, I mean, you named three of them, but like the variables from year to year, it's almost like a clean slate philosophy where you need to look at the player and the talent and the reality of the situation in some cases, as much as you do the draft capital. You know, draft capital tells you a lot about opportunity, but it doesn't tell you that they're going to execute on that opportunity.