The Overreaction Episode! + April Fools’ Hate, Love Hurts - Fantasy Football Podcast for 4/1

extremely happy were you with Lamar Jackson last year. He's an MVP who runs better than anybody in NFL history. Now, I don't think any of us think Jalen Hertz is a better runner. No. Then Lamar Jackson. Lamar is a clear better runner. But to answer your question, thrilled. Well, you were because you traded for him in the second half of the year. Don't submarine what the point is. You know how. Champ, champ.

Jam. People that drafted Lamar Jackson last year were disappointed. And tons of middling outside the top 10 performances for Lamar, who's a better runner. There aren't past catching options that get you enthusiastic in Philadelphia. And let me put a bow on it for you. This is just cursory. Don't overreact to Jalen Hertz is the next big thing. Here's his home schedule. You already know the division he's in. I think Philadelphia is dead last in that division. I firmly do. I've said that all offseason.

So this is the Gardner-Minshoe problem. If you're not a great team, you're going to run into some issues. Okay. He plays, he's got Washington at home, number one against, in passing yards for a game. You got San Francisco at home, fourth, Los Angeles, fifth. You've got Dallas. They were sixth. You get to play the Super Bowl champion, Buccaneers, and then the Chiefs at home. You get to play the Saints, eighth against passing at home. I mean, an improved Giants defense, okay, whatever. What about against running quarterbacks, though? I don't.

Look, if you don't have both of those pieces, you're not getting that quarterback from Jalen Hertz. The way the teams will get to play Jalen Hertz changed over the end of last season, and they will change next year if he cannot throw the football. So I am just throwing out there the, if this keeps creeping up, if this is the QB7, the QB6, the QB5, everybody wants the pack to come with the perfect card. I'm just saying it can go sideways. That's all.

I think people are overreacting. I'm not necessarily talking to Jason. I'm just saying. I feel like you're talking directly to Jason. I'm saying that people have overreacted with Jalen Hertz. Is it my turn yet? No, you have another overreacting. You had your turn. You had your overreaction. To react. All right.

This is, I saw this here. I knew before he put it in, he was going to have a Jalen Hertz don't overreact. And to his credit, he was absolutely right on Gardner. If Philadelphia is a terrible team that struggles and is a basement dwelling option in that division, then yeah, it's probably not going to go well. I believe Jalen Hertz is good. I think he will be a top quarterback. So I have a proposition that I don't see how you turn down here, Andy.

A water bet of a top eight quarterback. I think that's, I mean, he's quarterback nine. You're saying there's some overreacting happening. Water bit. I don't mind it. Let's do it. Yeah, I definitely, definitely don't mind it. Water bet. I don't want the water bet to submarine the message of the show, though, okay? Where it's like, this is not boom and bust. This is not like, I'm picking.

a bust season. I'm picking disappointment proportional to overreaction. I think people are not seeing what's there in front of them. This was not a smash, you know, draft this quarterback, top of the board type of player. There are a lot of holes in his game and they came out in the completion percentage over the entirety of the year. And I don't see the pieces around him that are going to make that.

change, especially in that division. He certainly does not have a, well, a receiving corps right now. Jalen Rager hasn't proven anything. They let Alshan go. They let Dijax go. So it's Greg Ward and Jalen Rager that does not inspire confidence. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. But it's exciting, right? It's exciting to not know what's going to happen. And sometimes we take that over what's rest assured. Just the, my only.

reaction to it is if people are still in the FFPC are taking him at QB9, I would say that they are not overreacting to the possibility and the promise of Jalen Hertz. So can I kind of speak to that? Sure. When you draft in those leagues, you are drafting for big money and big potential. And so you're not necessarily approaching it the way that.

a redraft league might approach consistent play at the quarterback position. You're looking at Jalen Hertz and seeing prolific running numbers and saying, boy, if I catch a Lamar Jackson year with Jalen Hertz, I win the entire FPC. So I think that that threshold, like I would have liked to see maybe what the temperature is like in redraft world, because if it's further down from six, there's not a lot to lose there. You just pivot. But, you know, I don't know if it speaks to the same thing at a redraft league. All right.

I'll go with my first one here. And what's interesting about this topic that I want to bring up is I have two players because they're going back to back. I looked up some consensus rankings. And I don't know which player is being overreacted to. All right. And I alluded to it. That was going to be a Cowboys show. But Amari Cooper and C.D. Lamb are being consensus ranked.

right next to each other. I found that really fascinating. I did not know that until I saw this today. Which is wild to me. And I guess that my overreed, what I think the overreaction is people bailing on Amari Cooper too long or too quick. And if you've listened to this show for any length of time, you know that if I have a chance to take a shot at Amari Cooper, I'm going to take it. This is delightful, Mike. We're seeing a.

Pro Amari Cooper take care. Maybe. Maybe. It's April 1st. Maybe. Maybe it's an anti-City Lamb, but that also sounds ridiculous because I love C.D. Lamb, the player. In the first four games, similar to Zeke, Amari Cooper with Dak Prescott was averaging 13 targets a game. He was averaging nine receptions and 100 yards per game. Now, granted, the Cowboys opening schedule was weird, where they kept...

blowing leads and they would have to come back. And Dak Prescott was putting up insane numbers. And C.D. Lamb, to his credit in those first four games, was averaging five for 77. Now, according to pro football focus... And those were his actual first four games. Yeah, those were in the NFL. His actual first four games. According to pro football focus, C.D. Lamb took the highest percentage of his snaps in the slot of any wide receiver. 101 of 109 targets of C.D. Lam's targets.

We're from the slot. Now, CD-Lam, it is an incredible player, and you can be a productive fantasy player if you are a full-time slot player. It's not impossible, but it is very difficult if you are a full-time slot player to really be a fantasy superstar, which is where it doesn't make sense to me that he's being drafted right next to Amari Cooper. Interesting. The top 10, here are the top 10 slot snaps, or wide receivers taking their snap from the slot.

Juju, C.D. Lamb, Greg Ward, Tyler Boyd, Cole Beasley, Anthony Miller, Keelan Cole, Larry Fitz, Tyler Lockett, and Zach Pascal. There's not... Superstars! There are not a lot of superstar fantasy wide receivers sitting in that list. And Amari Cooper's not old, just like Zee. Well, and Michael Gallup, didn't we just have the stat where he took literally no snaps from the slot? Exactly. Gallup is an outside wide receiver. Amari Cooper will move around, which...

And you want your wide receivers honestly to move around. You want your, you want Julio Jones to sometimes go into the slot. Like it's part of the game. Get a mismatch. But if you're there all the time, that means you're getting those, you're getting a low average depth of target. It's just, it's far more difficult. Amari Cooper will be 27 this year. He is not at an age where he is going to be automatically surpassed by the new hotness.

Who doesn't get to play on the outside. Exactly. So. Do you know what the overreaction is here? No, I don't. Please tell you. I feel like the overreaction is overreacting to Chris Godwin and Calvin Ridley.

These players who, they were the young hotness, they were on a team that already had a star, and both of them overcame and became the number one for their team. Two years ago, it was Godwin over Evans. Last year it was Ridley over Julio. And so now it's like, I want to get the next one. Call the shot. I want to have that next one. C.D. Lamb is right there. He is unbelievable. He is great. But I think you're right. If we're just talking redraft here, Dynasty, I would take C.D. Lamb ahead of Amari Cooper. That's fair. But.

In a redraft, looking at this season, the most fantasy points, you've got to go with the primary first read target who plays on the outside, who's always been good in Amari Cooper, who also has $100 million to his name. So, like, I think Amari Cooper and C.D. Lamb going right next to each other is a little weird. I think Tyler Lockett might be the fair comp for C.D. Lamb's type of season this year. Like your ceiling for Cidiam could be.

some explosive, you know, it's not like T.Y. Hilton, Tyree Kill, they move into the slot, they run deep, they catch a touchdown. Lamb's going to do some of that. Yes. But the Tyler Lockett, what I wanted to start him versus somebody more consistent, that's where that decision may be more difficult. Lockett was one of the names you brought up as frequently playing from the slot. Yeah, so I think my official verdict is that people are just. I heard my guy, Amari Cooper. Did you hear that? I think the official verdict of the overhand. Stop! Stop!

April fools on me. It is. I am getting myself. I think the reaction, overreaction is that Amari Cooper is being drafted too low or is being ranked too low. Okay. Well, look, Jason made the point. I vomited in my mouth just now. The new hotness is very attractive, especially when it works out with a consensus like Godwin and Ridley. It's the girlfriend meme of the guy turning over the shoulder. Yeah, and it was a tough year to watch.

Dallas without DAC on the offensive side of the ball. And you look in like the Julio Calvin Ridley thing. It's not one of the ones we're talking about today, but that's in the honorable mention is the Julio Jones has done. Calvin Ridley is all there is. Like Julio has potential to drop to the point where the reaction to last year is inappropriate. It could be. All right, Jason. I believe you are, you're up. All right. And I read this one.

And I was shocked and then persuaded. All right. Well, I am telling everybody the foot gland, especially people that have listened to this show and they're up to date on what has happened in Seattle to not overreact to the whole news about Seattle wanting to run the ball. They do. They want to run the ball. They want to run the ball so desperately that they fired Brian Schottenheimer, who is like Mr. Run the Ball.

because he didn't want to run it as much, right? The whole let Russ Cook, we saw the splits. I hear Bill Callahan turned the job down because they didn't want to run that much. Yeah. You know, we all know the splits last year where Russell Wilson, MVP shoe in the first half of the year, throwing the ball left right and center. You, you know, the first eight weeks at the break at the halfway point in the season.

You had D.K. Metcalf as the wide receiver 2 and Tyler Lockett as the wide receiver 4. Russell Wilson on fire. They started to turn the ball over to lose games. Pete Carroll said, no, this isn't how we play football. We're going to change. And so they ran the ball more. They passed less is the is what.

people think happened. They fired Brian Schottenheimer and they brought in someone to really get back to defense and running the ball. Here's what happened the second half of the season. This great D.K. Metcalfe, the number two overall, he was only the wide receiver 17 from week nine on. Disappointing. Tyler Lockett, even in his inconsistency, big games, bad games, was the wide receiver 24, the second half of the season. So these aren't great options. And I think people might try to overreact and take that second half stretch.

and say that that's the truth about DK Metcalf, that that's the truth about Russell Wilson, that that's the truth about Tyler Lockett. This is a team that's not going to throw the ball that much. They're going to have, you know, their opportunities to get a big play over the, you know, over the top after the defenses has sucked in. But this is very similar to how I feel about last year with Mike Evans being left for dead in a lot of places.

Tyler Lockett is good. Say what you want about his consistency, but he's a great wide receiver. Seattle thinks that he is good as well. I had this in here before the news came out that he was going to get a $69 million extension. You know, you look at the data of when Russell Wilson's targeting Tyler Lockett, he's basically a perfect quarterback. DK Metcalfe is far better than Tyler Lockett. These players are great, and they will.