The “My Guys” Episode! - Fantasy Football Podcast for 8/20

Yeah, I'm a big fan. I'm glad you went with Cooper Cup, Andy, and I think it will work out. I love having him on my team. The upside is there. By the way, your My Gay Award is in the mail, Cooper. And I think he's a listener of the show. He follows me on Twitter. We'll get your award out. Is that the reason?

That you selected him as a my guy. We got to dig deep on this. I only select players that follow me, yeah. Okay. So that's why you have Kyle Eustech coming up. Oh, my guy, Kyle Eustech. All right. This next my guy I'm super excited to talk about on the serious XM show a couple weeks ago. I talked about how he is criminally undervalued. He is wide receiver Tyler Lockett, aka Hot Lockett.

Thank you, Mike. Oh, that was very nice. Look, Tyler Lockett finished as the wide receiver 15 two years ago. And then his targets go up and he finished as the wide receiver 14 last year. And now he's being drafted as the wide receiver 21 in the fifth round, two spots behind D.K. Metcalfe. Jay, so D.K. Metcalf, which you take personally. I take it personally. It's nonsense. It's criminal. And I like D.K. Metcalfe.

an anti-DK Metcalf take, as you'll see. We need a history lesson on Tyler Lockett's 2019. Oh, goodness. No, no, no. This is just a one season. We're okay here. Here's the thing that we talk about all the time. Don't look at a player's end of season rankings and forget the context of how it happened. That's part of why we love these guys is because we remember and we're reminding you of this is how the season played out. Do you guys remember how Tyler Lockett got injured in week 10?

Do you remember that he injured his leg so bad that he was hospitalized? I do now. Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Here's a quote from Pete Carroll. What? Here's a quote from Pete Carroll from that game. He said. That was the bruise, the real bad bruise. Yes. It was Tyler Lockett.

Got a really bad lower leg bruised contusion that caused some issue we're working on. But it's a pretty severe situation right now for game night. They left him in the Bay Area Hospital as the team traveled back to Seattle. That's not normal. That's a pretty serious thing. But if you look at the game logs, oh, he didn't miss any games, right? Because their buy week was next week. And still finished as the wide receiver 14? 14. Here's his next two. Compelling. Here's his next two weeks.

after the hospitalization for a leg contusion. Ready? In the next two weeks, when he got back, he finished with one reception. He had one pass that was caught in those two weeks. In the two weeks span? In the two weeks span that he was back from that leg injury. He was hard. But he missed two games. But people don't know it. Yeah. Do you know what he was going up to week nine, the wide receiver before the injury? I would love to know. He was the wide receiver four.

He was flat dominating. But Jason. Oh, no. He's talking to himself. I'm leaving. Yeah, you guys take it. I got it from here. Okay, Metcalf. Here's the thing, those first nine weeks, D.K. Metcalf was the wide receiver 16. They were both dominating.

Tyler Lockett is part of what makes this passing offense go. The rest of the season, Tyler Lockett was the wide receiver, or D.K. Metcalfe was the wide receiver 49. But Jason. Yes, voice of, low voice of public opinion. Siltry. We don't know what D.K. Metcalf's ceiling is. They can both.

be wide receiver ones if they let Russ cook. They will both be at least wide receiver twos no matter what happened. And the thing is, is he finished the season that last month he was back. He was a wide receiver two. Then in the playoffs, if you don't remember, he absolutely dominates. 13 receptions, 196 yards, and a touchdown in two playoff games. So look at the two, he had two playoff games. He had two games that he was basically injured not on the field. That's 16 total healthy games, not an extrapolation.

actual games played. And in those 16 games, there was 123 targets, 94 receptions, 1,200 yards, nine touchdowns. That would have put him wide receiver 5 on the season. Tyler Lockett is a superstar. He dominates reception. In his last 180 targets, got there. Got there. And this is thanks to Clutch Fantasy on Twitter. He pointed out, Michael Thomas in his last 180 targets, 149 receptions,

1,700 yards, nine touchdowns. Julio Jones in his last 180 targets, 118 receptions, 1,600 yards, 9 touchdowns. Tyler Lockett's, 139 receptions, 2,022 yards, and 18 touchdowns. Tyler Lockett's a superstar. He's a hidden superstar. And the nice thing about that target metric stat that you have is that it does not illustrate passing volume problems for Seattle, which is why it's an illusion that Tyler Lockett's not at top.

talent viewed through the lens of the NFL. He's also not as enormous as DK Metcalf, which causes people to doubt things as well. And it's perfect that he's a my guy for you. I'm so glad that you and Tyler could come together in this moment. I love you, Tyler. All right. One my guy left. All right. No history lessons. I'm going to jump in here. I'll try to keep this one a little bit more brief. It's a player from Washington. You know what's about to happen.

Antonio Gibson. I love that right now, we don't know who you're going to say. I know. We still don't know who you're going to say. No, that's what I say. Antonio Gibson is not the actual my guy. You know that he is. Everyone you already know it. Gave me the credit. I want to talk about Terry McLaurin. I am madly in love with the number one wide receiver for Washington. As a rookie, a rookie, he finished with 93 targets.

Over 900 yards, seven touchdowns. His rookie production is incredibly similar to Andre Johnson, Julio Jones, Juj, Deshawn Jackson. These are great wide receivers in the league. He played two fewer games than the aforementioned D.K. Metcab. You know who finished higher in fantasy? Terry McLaurin, and he's being drafted behind D.K. Metcalfe. Oh, is he really?

Yes, despite the fact that Terry McLaurin is the unquestioned number one wide receiver for his team. He opened, again, as a rookie, he opened the season with three straight top 20 games, was in fact the wide receiver eight through those weeks. And this was on a team that ranked 28th in pass attempts and ranked 30th in neutral situation pass rate, meaning when the game is close, that Washington last year, they ran. They were a very crumogyny.

We're going to give the ball to Adrian Peterson. And now they have moved on to Ron Rivera and Scott Turner, who last year, that combo, between the two of them, second and pass attempts, fourth in neutral game script pass rate. They were passing nearly 40 times a game. So you're talking potentially a huge opportunity bump here for Tara McLaurin. Coach speak warning. I've given the warning here.

Do you want me to push the coach speak by? We really need one. But Ron Rivera talking about Terry McLaurin. He's a guy that could be on the verge of stardom. He really is. He compared him to DJ Moore, who, DJ Moore, this is what happened. That's a better physical comp too. And this is what happened with DJ Moore from his rookie year to his sophomore year with the breakout. DJ Moore went from 82 targets to 135.

DJ Moore was averaging five targets a game and shot up to nine and a half targets per game. Terry McLaren is a top 4% speed score guy. I found this incredible while I was researching Terry McLaurin. You know who asked Terry McLaurin for tips on route running? Odell Beckham Jr. You know what I like about the DJ Moore comp, Mike? What's that? They didn't have any.

quarterbacks in Carolina last year. And it didn't slow the breakout down. I would go with that. DJ Moore still was able to get it done. Now, if you want to talk about his reception, Terry McLaurin had the third best score versus press coverage in rookie history in the entire metric of reception. Who's in front of him? Odo Beckham and Tyreek Hill. He passed the eyeball tests as well all last year. He just watched it. He passed it week one. Nearly 30 percent.

of McLoren's targets are deep targets. They are the really high value targets. I mean, he can take those DJ more screens to the house, the slant rounds to the house, but he can also go deep. He had three games with 100 plus yards and a touchdown. That's tied with DeAndre Hopkins, Mike Evans, Julio Jones. Terry McLaren is a superstar in the making. We just need to get a little bit more reliable play from the quarterback, which I do believe can happen.

on top of the huge volume increase that I am projecting for Washington from last year to this year with the new coaching staff. Being drafted as the wide receiver 23 finishes the year as the wide receiver, what? Where do I have him finishing? Yeah, where do you think he finishes? I think he easily finishes as a top 15 guy and the ceiling for Terry McLaurin is a top 10 wide receiver. Okay, all right. My final my guy, he did not have a great time last year.

Because it was a difficult situation. But this is really the OG my guy of the entire year. He's what? What are you looking at? Are you pivoting back to AJ Green? No, I'm not. No, no, I'm not. Same team, though. Nice. One of my favorite pure runners in all of football, Joe Mixon is my third my guy for 2020. How bad was it for Joe Mixen trying to run the football with what he had in Cincinnati last year?

They graded out 32 of 32 teams in run blocking. 32nd best. This year, oh, by the way, he had a combination of Andy Dalton and Ryan Finley behind center, the worst offensive line in football, the worst record in football. They have Joe Burrow now because of it. How did he respond to that? Watch the tape. He ran harder, faster, more often, didn't break down, broke out. Now he gets Jonah Williams.

Their left tackle. By the way, he ran right more than anybody in football. He just ran away from the absence of Jonah Williams on the left side. It cannot be worse on the offensive line and at the quarterback position than what they had last year. And I was just so incredibly impressed with Joe Mixon, much like Josh Jacobs, my first my guy, who I think is this season-long breakout. You have to see top five potential in a stretch of games.

I think he's one of the best runners in all of football. And over the last eight weeks, with the worst offensive line in football, he was the RB4 from week 10 on. You saw it against Pittsburgh. You saw it against Baltimore. And it wasn't just a burst game here or there. He was top five. He had it consistently throughout the end of the year. So he ran harder. And I love seeing that because this team was losing games. I don't know what they lost to Baltimore by, but they had a game in there where they lost 49 to

12 or something like that. Yet, Zach Taylor recognized something really quickly. And that's why Mixon's snap count started to go up. They started to trust him in all phases of the game. They started to realize and did unleash Joe Mixing. Do you worry at all that what he realized was, ooh, we can get that number one pick. Let's keep handing the ball off while we're down. Well, his comments this off season reflect what I think he realized, which is that.

He says this. He says, and this is from the Brian Callahan, their OC, gets better the more carries he gets. As the season went along, we got better at getting him those touches. When he's getting the ball, quote, 20 plus times the total of the end of the game means his numbers are usually pretty good. He's effective in terms of touches. We didn't see, much like Josh Jacobs, we didn't see the incredible pass catching work from Joe Mixon. His skill set reflects incredible pass catching capability, but we didn't get to see a lot of it.

Joe Burrow is who supplied incredible value to Clyde Edwards O'Lear at LSU. I believe he had 55 receptions. Oh, my goodness. They want to get him. When you looked at the pass-catching metrics for Joe Mixon last year, it was on par with Austin Echler. That's the talent level that you had with Joe Mixon in terms of yards per reception at the running back position. He just didn't have somebody to get him the ball on the reg.

Like he did the year before. When you have an offensive coordinator who wants to give a running back 20 plus carries, somebody who is as talented as Joe Mixon, I am shooting for the Josh Jacobs Joe Mixing combination at the end of the first, top of the second. I think both have potential to be top five running back. So I'm going to make Joe Mixen my last, my guy. All righty. Let's get to my final guy. Shut it down, Jay. I don't think it's going to be a surprise to anyone because.