Fantasy Football Podcast 2016 - The Overreaction Episode w/Special Guest Chris Harris

Listen, if the charger offensive line's bad again, this is going to be a bad call. And it's been bad for years. But I think eventually you fix it little by little. I think Melvin Gordon's legit. Well, and you look back, I think we were looking at these numbers this morning where when Wizz and Hunt was the OC three years ago, they were 13th in the running game. The past two years have been basically dead last. I think there's so many opportunities for him. And improving upon a zero touchdown number seems very likely. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like...

You know, this comes down for me to, if you're going to put a good player in, like, the worst situation in the league, of course, he's going to disappoint you, and he's going to do it again next year too. And I don't know that Wisenhunt himself can suddenly make that offensive line great, right? But lines do change from year to year. They haven't for the chargers. But typically they do, right? We get surprised by five or six offensive lines that suddenly look good or better than we remember or whatever. Like, are we going to be shocked if the lion's line makes Amir Abdullah look like a human being again?

It seems to me that stuff does change. And what you want is the player who's talented enough to take advantage of it when it does change. I think that makes Gordon a pretty interesting buy. I think we agree on that one. So what's the last name you got for us? So it's Doug Baldwin. And, you know, again, I got to pick the first three. I kind of knew that with Freeman and Gordon, I was probably hitting a sweet spot where most people would go.

Yeah, I can kind of see that. I'm not sure how you guys feel about Baldwin being on the overvalued list. I think you're about to go into fisticuffs here with Jason. No, definitely not fisticuffs, but I will say this. We here have been, I think, torn on it between myself and then Andy and Mike. I think Andy and Mike are more on your side that Doug Baldwin, we've seen who he is for years. He's not the guy that he looked like the last half of last year. But for me, I believe...

personally that, you know, after week nine, after that week nine by from the rest of the season, he was the, he wasn't a good wide receiver. He was the number one fantasy wide receiver from that point on. And yet, I actually, I wonder how much overreaction there's going to be because he's Doug Baldwin, and there are so many sexier names above him. You know, I think he's going to fall in that fifth, sixth round, and I am fine taking him there. But what is your take from a film perspective?

So my take is that I never see him line up anywhere about the slot. And it's just so – I mean, Victor Cruz did it, right? Victor Cruz had a year where he mostly lined up in the slot and was fantastic. But it's not easy to find players of his size, you know, 5, 10, whatever, you know, way less than 200 pounds, who provide year-to-year constant fantasy value out of the slot to say nothing of whatever that Seattle offense is going to wind up being. And that's a great question. Like I think you have to bake in the risk the idea that we don't –

at all know what that Seattle offense is going to be. Like, okay, yes, you can logically say, listen, Baldwin picked up when Jimmy Graham got hurt. I don't think anybody expects Jimmy Graham to be a factor next year. And so maybe that's a stroke in Baldwin's favor. But then again, they didn't have a running back. They trusted at that point. And Thomas Rawls will be back. You know, I think in his career, 75% of his routes out of the slot, I think last year, 80%.

of his routes out of the slot. The reason he was the number one running back from week, what I had receiver from week 12 on last year was 11 touchdowns, which is insane. Right. Five of them were red zone touchdowns. That just doesn't feel like what Doug Baldwin is. You know, and we remember, you know, it's not typical red zone plays. It's, it's a bunch of rollouts and misdirections and throwing against the grain. And that's what Russell Wilson is. So maybe we could say Baldwin is your non-traditional.

Red zone target who doesn't look like one, doesn't really play like one, but because of the plays that they're running in the red zone, you know, maybe you could make an argument it recurs from year to year. Boy, it feels to me like that's a sucker bet. Yeah, I do just. I do feel like if defense is really keyed in for, you know, an entire year on Doug Baldwin and game plan for that, he doesn't have the physical tools.

to be able to handle, you know, he hasn't spent his career being double-teamed or, you know, having coverage role to him. So it could be a struggle. I just wonder what the overreaction will be from an ADP perspective. I'm also going to, go ahead, go ahead. I think the overreaction winds up being fourth, fifth round, and that's too high for me. I'm like eighth, ninth round. I don't want Doug Baldwin. I think I would, I mean, I would take Tyler Lockett before I'd take Doug Baldwin. That's exactly what my question was. I was going to.

take this opportunity to get your Tyler Lockett take. Because somehow I just felt like even though Baldwin did what he did, at any moment, that could have been a Lockett game in the same capacity from what I saw in the field and where Lockett's heading as a receiver. So you like Lockett more. I think I do. You know, again, I don't have receiver ranks because I don't, until the draft, I usually don't put together like super, you know, I'll think about the first round, but after that I'm sort of waiting for the free agent drop, you know, guys to fall and then the draft picks to fall. But yeah, I think.

Just preliminarily thinking about it, I think I go Lockett over Baldwin. Now Lockett is an outside receiver. Lockett needs to be Antonio Brown, right? To be successful. I think he kind of can be. He's ungodly quick. He's not the fastest receiver in the league. Neither is Antonio Brown. They're very fast, but they're really difficult to cover on the outside. And Baldwin just, you know, Baldwin's going to play 20% of his snaps on the outside and rely on.

I guess, volume? I mean, do you want to take a gander at like where Baldwin ranked in terms of in this unbelievable year he had in terms of receptions? I think he was 24th. He had one fewer catch than Gary Barnage. You know, like, that's his huge volume year. I think we're going to, I think we're probably going to see all of them progress and all of them frustrate us on a week-to-week basis. So I'm not going to reach for any of them. But I think Locke's a higher upside player.

Yeah, I like Lockett quite a bit. It's interesting, too, because between Baldwin's touchdown numbers and that being unsustainable and what we saw from Freeman in the beginning of the year, I think you can draw some comparisons about the kind of the physical tool argument on both guys, the unsustainable kind of production that you saw during parts of their season. And it just gets me hesitant, no doubt. And he'll, you know, most of these conversations we're having today.

are kind of what you said about, you know, Freeman, where we just won't end up with these guys if this is the overreaction that takes place. It doesn't mean we hate them. It doesn't mean that they can't be productive. It just means that they're probably not going to be in our category because they're just going to go too darn high. Yeah. I mean, what would it take for Devante Freeman, for Doug Baldwin, to be dominators given their skill sets? And they were dominators, right? They were. But what would it take?

You know, it takes extraordinary focus of an offense on them, which is a lot to ask of them physically. And it takes defenses to not realize that it's happening, right? Because you get the inevitable year after a reaction to it. And then suddenly now you're getting a lot more focus and maybe it isn't quite as easy as it was.

Antonio Brown is the, you know, Antonio Brown's amazing. It doesn't matter, yeah. Yeah, just because of the unbelievable quickness, and Baldwin just isn't that player. I think Lockett's closer to being that player. Yep, makes a lot of sense. So, hey, we want to thank you very much, Chris, for coming on the show again. You out there should definitely check out the Harris Football podcast. Chris is one of the best in the industry. We love the show, and you can check them out on Twitter at Harris Football. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, no problem, guys. It was a blast. Always a pleasure. All right. Those are some great names. Now, we've got 12 names out there, overreaction candidates for 2016. I agree with pretty much every one of those names. I think, I think these are good people to have in your brain early on in the offseason. Watch their ADPs. We'll be watching them with you. Figure out.

And when I say ADP, because sometimes people ask that in the office season episodes, that is average draft position. There are a number of resources out there on the internet that you can find out where people are mock drafting players. And that gives you their average position that lets you know values. We bring that number up a lot, so be familiar with them. And we pull our information, our ADP information from Fantasy Football Calculator.

Yes, most often that is our resource. So there is no mailbag on today's show because on Thursday we've committed the whole show to mailbag answering Keeper, Dynasty, league formation questions, commission questions, whatever question you have, we are answering it on the show on Thursday. And make sure you stay tuned after today's show. And if you're watching on YouTube.

That's where the show after the show is going to be. If you're not on YouTube, go subscribe to the show and listen to us spout off about something for an extra five or ten minutes. Yeah. Wow. You guys are excited. This is going to be a good one. I'm running through topics in my head trying to figure it all out. All right. All right. So thank you for tuning into this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll be back, like I said, on Thursday and every week forever.

Or until our wife will convince us to take a vacation or something. Goodbye. Thank you for listening to another episode of the fantasy footballers podcast. Join our fantasy football community on join thefoot.com. And follow us on Twitter at the FF ballers. Football is officially going.

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