Fantasy Football 2018 - Explain Yourself! Ranking Debates & Hot Takes

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to the fantasy footballers podcast coming to you from draft.com studios with your host, Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Ah, welcome in. The show is about to begin. Tuesday, May 22nd, Andy Mike and Jason, your best friends are back. Happy to be with, you best buddies out there. This is going to...

Can I just interject for one quick second and say, what a great show I think this one is? You can. Please do. I can't wait. Your show starting voice is like, I wish we lived in the era of the answering machines again. Because I feel like you would be one of those guys that left one of those real goofy ones, you know? Oh, well, you always got to start with the, hello. Hello?

Oh, oh, you're that guy. Oh, you know I am. The trick. Yeah, you don't know that. Gotcha. Nope. I was the guy of the, uh, I would play music from my boom box. Oh, really? And then I would just interject with things, hey, this is Mike and I'm not at home. No, it was, it was more of like the offspring, you know, like the do, that one. And then I would have something very clever about this is my answering.

We are all so young and hip. Welcome in. Great show for you today. That's what Jason has told me. It really is because today we get to fight with each other. Yeah. We have the Explain Yourself episode. We'll do a few of these, I'm sure. But this is the first one. We just launched our initial 28 rankings on the website. 28. Yeah.

I said 2018. No, you did not. You said 28. Our initial 28 rankings. Yeah, we do our top 28. We've ranked 28 players. 28 players. It took us a long time. Other sites, they give you the top 100, 150, 200. Not us. Not here. Top 28. Would you rather have 28 great rankings or 200 men? I think I'm going to. I'll probably take the 200, man. I have to go to 200. Yeah, well, you're not playing in my three player league. Mike. Fair.

Eight team, three players each. All right. Well, that was a distraction there. 2018 rankings. What we did today was Brooks identified the outlier of the group for a number of players. So there are certain players that two of us might have them in a certain position in the rankings and one of us has them completely different. And so we are forced to explain ourselves today. As we should. Yes. Yeah. We should be accountable to these. Jason.

I can't wait to be accountable to these. I'm going to change your guys' minds on a couple of players that you've got ranked stupidly. Okay. We'll see. You're probably not going to change my mind, but maybe. I'll leave the door open. Here's something exciting. You can actually buy tickets to see this show live. Fantasy for the people tour brought to by draft tickets on sale now. Right now. Ballers.

Live.com. Oh my goodness. I'm so excited for the live tour. We're going to be in Minneapolis on June 21st. Dallas, July 13th, kicking off the NFFC. We're going to be in Philly on July 26th. Then we're jumping over to New York City. New York City. July 27th. And then back home, Phoenix, Arizona. We're going to close out the tour in August 24th. It is going to be sensational. It's going to be incredible. Inspirational.

It's going to be motivational. Ooh, motivational. I believe Jason just said sensational again. He did. Oh, is that what you led with? Yeah, that's what he led with. I'm such a loser. But you can see that loser live in Minneapolis. Watch me be an idiot in person. This is just something people say sometimes when they say, oh, tickets are going quick. But we got the ticket numbers today, and they're going very quick.

Minneapolis, that first show at Cedar Hall on June 21st is filling up fast. So really, go get your tickets, come hang out with us, be a part of a live show, hang out with us afterwards. Get it done. You know, Jason's doing the... One skull clap. That's what you get. You give one skull clap. Based on how you rank her cousins, I think you owe them another 30. There we go. All right. A reminder. Signed Lev Bell, signed Alvin Kamara.

merchandise. We're giving it away free at footclang giveaway.com. Check it out. On Twitter, you can find us at the FF Ballers. Find us on YouTube. If you want to watch the show, you want to see the skull clap live on, not live, I guess. We might have something on YouTube. We might have something a little special and new for the YouTube audience today. We'll just leave it there. That's true. That's true. Quick question of the day before we jump in to explain yourself. All right, this one comes in off of Twitter.

Ethan has a question for us. How much do you take into account divisional defenses when valuing an individual player? It's a great question because we just walked through each and every team as we each projected their entire offense, right? Every position. You projected them based on strengths and schedule, things like that. So how do you value divisional defenses? You know, I really don't look at the divisional defense.

by itself. I feel like it is already baked into all of the strength of schedule that I do look at. Now, oftentimes I break down the opening strength of schedule and I wait that, right? Because I want to draft guys that get off to a good start. I really care about those first four or five weeks. We're moving players around, trades, things like that. And I want people that have a good, you know, opening schedule. So.

I think that when it comes to looking at the division, it's just kind of already baked into everything else I look at. I don't avoid, you know, a cult because he's going to play Jacksonville twice in the year, but I might lower someone, you know, if their opening schedule gets started with Jacksonville followed by someone terrible. Yeah, that's interesting. There have been teams in the past, right, like Seattle of yesteryear in Denver.

has been that in the past. And Jacksonville kind of takes the cake this year on how much impact they've had on opposing quarterbacks where I do think about it. Now, you know, the only thing I would, I guess I would play devil's advocate to your early season schedule thing a little bit. Okay, let's hear it. And the devil's advocate isn't so much when it comes to Denver and Seattle and Jacksonville and these teams that we really know, like we know Jacksonville is going to have a great defense, right? How confident are you? 100%. Yeah. Okay.

But the early season schedule outside of these guaranteed and with the turnover of defenses, that's the period of time in which you actually have the least track record to know which defenses have gotten better and gotten worse. So I think it might be, you know. Certainly. It could be one of those things where it's good to plan that way. So I would avoid, you know, a player that's going to play Jacksonville twice in the first four weeks or something like that. But at the same time, I wouldn't over-emphasize it either.

No, I mean, despite what I said, you're actually preaching to the choir. Because when I look at opening schedule and even strike the schedule on the year, I really only care about those top five and bottom five defenses. That's the way to think about it. Those usually have a much higher chance of repeating year over a year, especially when you're looking positionally, which is how we look at it here. We don't just look at like.

How good was their schedule and how did they do? We break down, you know, how good was this team against this position on a week-to-week basis? And, you know, I look at the top five, bottom five. And, you know, like Eli Manning to me this year with the weapons they've gathered. I mean, he looks like he's a great late round value sleeper. 100% completely undrafted. But I'm also never going to draft him in a normal redraft league because he starts off the year with Jacksonville. So I'll scoop Eli up off of waivers.

you know, after week one. Yeah, I think, I guess the answer to give an answer to the actual question would be as a tie-breaking type of equation. Because you factor so many things when drafting a player. I've talked about the fact Patrick Mahomes, I like him as a sleeper quarterback, but I acknowledge the fact he goes on the road to Los Angeles to play the Chargers Week 1, goes on the road to play the Steelers Week 2. Those are two tough opening season matchups and it's worth...

you know, letting that be the tiebreaker. Because if you take a guy with the 14th or 15th pick in your draft and they bomb the first two weeks, you're probably going to end up dropping them anyway. You're not going to be excited about what you got. I don't generally in division, I'm not going to freak out about one team where I let things like a tiebreaker come into play is when there's two. So I would prefer my players are not playing against the Chargers DBs.

and playing against the Broncos defense. And, of course, that's not going to stop me from drafting Tyree Kill at the proper spot in the draft. But you get on the fence about guys like Derek Carr in that division where you're like, okay, what's the probability of him having a bounce back year? And all of a sudden you have to stack, you know, two of the top. Four games against two great defenses. And the chiefs should be fine because I believe in Andy Reid. I know they've had a bunch of turnover and everything. But.

You're talking up to what it was at six games, but for sure in that division against the Chargers and the Broncos. Those are going to be two excellent defenses, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Make sure you subscribe, review the show on Apple Pindcast and wherever you're listening. Check us out on Instagram. Instagram.com slash fantasy footballers. All right, guys, it's time. It's time to make your case. All right. Quite well. Thank you. No. Clearly you are not.

No rational person would do as you have done. Explain yourself. I really, really enjoy that drop. I'm just going to sit in the glow. I don't need to say anything. My work speaks for itself. I thought I was first up on the docket, so I was trying to leave it there. Oh, I see what you're doing. But no one's helping. I'll jump in here. I will jump in. Mostly asleep around me. Okay, I'm quiet. This is the Explain Yourself episode as we have mentioned.

highlighting a player where there is a large discrepancy with one of us. Two of us generally agree on the value and the ranking of this player, but one of us has them either much higher or much lower. And just to also add to that on Twitter and everyone that's listened, you've had a chance to look over the rankings on the website. And we've seen these questions come through on Twitter. Yes. Directed quite pointedly at us individually when we have a player that is ranked a different way.

than the consensus in this room. So player number one got off to a poor rookie season. He plays for the Tennessee Titans. He should be the de facto number one wide receiver was drafted extremely high, was drafted to be the man in Tennessee. Corey Davis. Andy has him ranked as a wide receiver too. Jason and I have him nowhere near that. Just buried.