The TRUTH About Fantasy WRs in 2020, Part 1 + Stafford/Goff Trade - Fantasy Football Podcast for 2/2

I've probably had like two calzone's in my life. You don't know why? Because where you get calzones is where you get pizza. Honestly, that is the problem. That is the biggest problem with with calzone. Yeah. They're not pizza. Because I would rather have pizza. I mean, it is. It's just you took a pizza and folded it in half. Like I could do that any time I eat pizza. I could grab two slices and just make it into a pizza sandwich. But that's a, that's not a calzone. That's a pizza sandwich. Yeah. Unless you seal the edges. No, I've, I've bought. Yeah. Are you crimping them? Are you crimping the edges? You can do it with an iron.

No, I've had calzone's, and I'm telling you, there is, there's a legal amounts of cheese in those things. I mean, like, you could drink it like a cup. I mean, it's gross. Is it gross? No, it's delicious. DeAndre Hopkins comes in at number five, but we have our first huge disparity here. Number five in fantasy finish, 13th in consistency. And yet I look at this season from Hopkins.

and you compare it to the season from Ridley, I'm not sure which season I'd rather have. And this is a playing style thing for fantasy. Hopkins, almost every one of his good weeks was not just a good week. He had 25% great weeks. He had top 10 finishes almost every single time he was great. Now, do you prefer 25% or 27%? Is that what it was for Ridley? Yeah, I'm just, you know.

Well, yes, by our classification, that's a little different than top 12 versus not. But yeah, I get what you're saying. Better for Ridley. That's why he's more consistent and finished higher. But what a weird year. I mean, 25% bust rate. Yeah, that's similar to Ridley. I mean, Ridley is a 20% or 25%. But like if for good games, would you rather have 73% or 56%? I understand what Andy is saying, although I am very much enjoying.

you shooting holes in the argument. But the, you know, Hopkins was more boom bust, but the boom was higher. Yes. There were five times this season that Calvin Ridley finished inside the top 12, five times. Okay. DeAndre Hopkins did that eight times. Okay. That's what I meant when it jumped out. So now the lows were lower. And because for some reason, the Cardinals forgot how to play about.

I don't know, seven times this year. We all know what happens. And it rhymes with Schmiff-Schmingsbury. It's Kyler Murray, too. Look, Cliff Kingsbury doesn't throw the football over his receiver's head every third game. Kyler lost his accuracy seven times this year. But you did have games where they were running out Hopkins like the same route for 100% of time on one side of the field. Would you dub that?

The Route Bush. We are extra critical of Arizona. In fact, we don't necessarily know what we have in Kyler sometimes because we watch these games and we expect, you know, Cliff to call plays that are better than what he's putting out there. Look, this is the most receptions that DeAndre Hopkins has ever had in his career. Whoa, really? Yeah. So. Wow. And also his highest catch rate.

So, like, the metrics by which you measure success are very strange sometimes because Cliff just produced, okay, we always say, use your best weapon. Ah, career high-in receptions for Downing Hopkins. 160 targets. I mean, you can't really use a guy much more than 160 targets. Use them in important situations. Oh, he led all wide receivers with first down receptions. Yeah, but six touchdowns. That's your problem. That is the problem.

He had a shot at number one. I mean, he had 1,400 yards. He had 115 catches. If he ends the year with 10 touchdowns, then he's phenomenal. Some of these games are better. But that's because Kyla runs the ball in around the end zone. So that's not going to change completely. No, that is fair. You get down at the 10-yard line and in, and you've got Aaron Rogers, the amount of times he's throwing instead of running and going right to, you know, to Devante Adams is like 60% of the time.

I'm going to tell you something right now. I've been playing a lot of Madden with my son. He likes to challenge me every night, you know. The dude ran a read option and ran it in on me with Tom Brady. How did that feel? That did not feel good. And then I tried to run the read option on him with my homes and he stuffed me. And it did not feel good. The fact that you can even run the read option.

With Brady? No, that, no, that you know which button to push to actually hand the ball? I know. You're blowing my mind over here. I'm telling you. I fire that play up all the time, but I don't know. There's no option. No, Mike. It's just read. It's just, it's just, oh. It's.

It's Reed sack. The Reed sack, yes. Because I have no idea what I'm doing. Oh, my gosh. No, but when Brady comes tronson into the end zone at one mile an hour and I can't get to him in time. That's really funny. And he's cackling at the top of his lungs at me. Anyways, when you mentioned the odds of Aaron Rogers running it in, I thought of Brady. And I was just like, man, that that is a variable that it was always present with Cam Newton's teams. It's present with Lamar Jackson's teams. Stefan Diggs.

Had eight. Yeah, no, that's a good point. All right. Anything else you want to talk about with Hopkins? Only thing I would say is another year for Kyler, another year for them together. I think that what we established this year is he is the clear dominant one and going forward his talent with this offense should be good. No chance that he falls off a cliff next year. No, I don't think so. Okay. All right.

Justin, Jefferson. Oh, man. Be still my heart. Now, he has a wide disparity. He finishes the wide receiver six here. And consistency-wise, he is the wide receiver 19. Now, that's a little not fair. This one's skewed because of the rookie. Because of the first two games. Unlike, we don't count injury, and this is all kind of done.

via, you know, an algorithm that kind of does it automatically. And so when they miss a game, they're not in there. But those first two weeks, he was on the roster. He played in the game, but he was not a starter. He was not really involved in the offense. If you were to remove those games, I've done this manually. Thank you. He would be the consistency of wide receiver nine, the ninth most consistent. Okay. That's better. This is an outlandishly good rookie season. I mean, you couldn't argue, and I

I think it would be a pretty easy argument to say this was the best rookie wide receiver season of all time. Outstanding. Unbelievable. Massive talent on a run first team. Big plays. Great hands. Incredible dances. Oh, man. Oh, man. That end zone dance. And really, I mean, you have to view the year through the rookie lens. I mean, you do. Because from week 10 on, it was very consistent at the wide receiver position.

Yardage was up there. I mean, 1,400 yards is a rookie, seven touchdowns, 88 catches. Unbelievable. So the future is very bright for Justin Jefferson. I mean, like Jason said, those first few weeks, Ola B.C. Johnson was out snapping him. So the wide receiver four from weeks three through 17. So that says it all. And I think more, you know.

Would you have rather had Jefferson from Weeks 3 on or DeAndre Hopkins last year? That's a pretty tough one. I mean, I guess I lean Hopkins a little bit from the pure volume standpoint, but it's close. What happens if they trade Kirk? It changes. It definitely does. I mean, obviously your production at wide receiver is tied to who your quarterback is. And if they trade Kirk, it's going to be who they get back. If they got Jimmy Garoppolo back.

I don't think you really will. It makes no sense to trade Kirk. I think it's absurd. If you trade Kurt, you're not trading Kirk and getting a better quarterback. Therefore, you are giving up. And if you're giving up, you know, with. That's not what Zimmer is doing. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense to me. And now you already know you've got Detroit in that division. One team's out of the way. Sorry, Detroit. All right. Seven games over 100 receiving yards. That is the second most along with Adams, Hopkins, and Diggs.

Do you get concerned with any bus percentage because of the rookie season? No, I don't. So we'll move on. D.K. McCaff took the world by storm through the first half of the year. 63% good games, 25% great. Ended up with 1,303 yards, 10 touchdowns, 83 receptions. Much better at home. Six points better. Much better against bad defense. 17 points per game versus 11. You know, he came out and talked about the season.

And we saw the offense drop off a cliff. And he said why? He said they figured us out. We were going deep all the time. Then they decided we're going to take the deep ball away over the second half of the year and we didn't know what to do. That's basically what he said. And you saw it on the field because he was a big play guy in every game, multiple shots. Now they still had shots and he still had some big plays down the stretch. But it was a humongous difference.

Yeah, I mean, once you got to around that midway point, Weeks 10 on, in the beginning of the year, you thought D.K. Metcalfe was the clear-cut number one wide receiver, the best dynasty draft pick you could make. They're letting Russ Cook. And from week 10 on, which is a significant, I mean, that's almost the entire second half of the season. He was the wide receiver 25 over that. He wasn't a wide receiver 2 in total points. So it's really difficult to...

You know, when you're talking about the truth about him and about Tyler Lockett, now that will get to him in just a second, which is pretty fun. But you have to talk about what's the truth about the Seahawks? Because they got figured out. They changed to be more run-oriented when Russell Wilson started turning the ball over a lot. They were losing. They switched. They started winning games, throwing the ball less. And then...

Going into the off season, they were, you know, Pete Carroll met with Brian Schottenheimer. They were expected to continue that relationship forward. But there was apparently in that meeting some disagreement where Pete Carroll wanted to get back to running the ball more. And there was such a disagreement that Schottenheimer's gone. They left and he's been replaced as the offensive coordinator. Obviously, you have to assume, regardless of the tendencies of the person they're bringing in.

They want to run the ball more, which hurt both D.K. Metcalf and Tyler Lockett, but Metcalf is a otherworldly human being. So what do you do with him? Look, he's going to be a touchdown guy. Russ has always been efficient with his touchdown totals. Metcalf is the size of a house. He's going to be a double-digit touchdown.

wide receiver probably for the next 10 years. I mean, that's the honest truth about Metcath. But consistency-wise, volume is not going to be there. Look at the first half of the year when he was wide receiver 2. It was a 16 touchdown pace. When he was a wide receiver 25, it was a 4 touchdown pace. It all came down to the total receptions, the pace between those two spans, it was the same, basically, 85 receptions.

So that didn't change. It was the touchdowns. Some of the deep ball targets, 18 deep ball targets in the beginning of the year, only 11 over the back half, hyper talented player, better than lock it in terms of fantasy value or fantasy production moving forward, but a team that is going to unfortunately force us to roll our eyes more often than not. Yeah, but is there a chance that they get that running game going better and then it looks like.

the Minnesota Vikings where they're a running team but they still have two high level fantasy wide receivers that produce and are consistent because that's just how they believe that the offensive philosophy is they have to go through the running game but it does branch out

when their running game is going, that the wide receiver should be better. Obviously, neither one of these wide receivers are going to be left for dead. You've got the same thing has happened for years with the Rams when they were run first and Todd Gurley and all that. And then that opens up the play action game. And when you've got a great quarterback and Russ is a great quarterback and you've got D.K. Matt Kaffetatello Laka, who are great wide receivers. And great deep threats, both of them. Yeah, there will be plenty of fantasy opportunity, but it's not going to be.

the consistent opportunity that you want for your wide receiver one. This is going to be the upside opportunity that you want for your wide receiver. Do you want to draft D.K. Metcalf as a top 10 wide receiver? No. Yeah, I agree with that. I would say no. No, I would like to have D.K. Metcalf as my wide receiver, two, not. The Vikings are the perfect example, Mike. Both Thielen and Diggs for years, very viable in fantasy. Now, Thelan had some more sealing years, but like, you know.