Fantasy Football Podcast 2015 - Week 17 Matchups, Starts of the Week, News

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to the fantasy footballers podcast with your host, Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Good morning. Vietnam. Fantasy football players of the world. It is Thursday, December 31st, the final day of 2015. I'm highly doubtful that we have a lot of listeners in Vietnam. Yeah? You think?

Football's huge. There might be a few. Shout out to the listeners in Vietnam. Yeah, shout out to Robin Williams. RIP. Robin Williams was a good name. The late, great. Interesting start to the show. That's a downrobo beginning. Didn't expect any of that. We are back again. As I said, this is the final day of the year.

This is the final show of the week. We've got our fantasy forecast, the second half of the games. We've got our starts of the week on today's show, got some mailbag, all the news and notes, injury reports, getting you ready for week 17 championship games. And, yeah, we're ready to go. We're back. Let's do this. Yeah, like Andy said, this is the final show of the week. We are taking off of New Year's Day. Correct. Because, I mean, everyone knows.

that with all of our children, we will be out late until like 10.30 p.m. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 10.30 p.m. and then we're going to hit it. 1030, guys. Are you excited? I'm going to watch that ball drop in, like, Russia. I'm going to go to bed. You're going to watch the Australian feed. Yeah. I can go to bed. That's more authentic. It's more legit. These people staying up until midnight. It is the future.

Remember Y2K? And we were watching Australia. Like, uh-oh. Uh-oh. You're going to be wiped out. How old were we when Y2K happened? That's math I don't want to do. Okay. I was young. I was very young. I remember how paranoid my... I would have been 17. I remember how paranoid my mother was about Y2K. The toasters are coming. Like we're all looking around. The microwaves.

It's like lay on the ground, make sure nothing happens. All these drive-bys happen on Y2K apparently. Drive-by cyber attacks. That's right. You never know what was going to happen. And now it's 2016. We did it. How did that happen? We did it, America. We made it.

All right, well, let's get going here. You can visit us on the web, the fantasy footballers.com, or join in with us on join thefoot.com, become a part of our official foot clan listenership. We love you guys out there that have supported us the entire year as an independent podcast. So check us out on join the foot.com. You'll see a lot of great content on there. We'll have an extra 50% of shows this offseason over on Patreon. Again, math I don't want to deal with.

Yes, we are recording all year long, and we're recording Patreon mailbag shows every week, so you get an extra show when you're over there. Check us out on Twitter at the FF Ballers. We're on YouTube. You can subscribe, watch the show on there. What else do we got going on? We've got our iTunes. You can subscribe on iTunes to the podcast. Oh, I thought we were launching. We've got a brand new version of iTunes. A direct competitor. It's about time they had a competitor. Yeah, yeah, we got it out there. We have five songs available. Yep.

Total. That's our entire music catalog. Yeah, we've signed a couple of Mike's old bands. We got them on board. All right, quick question. Fantasy football, what is your New Year's resolution? Your fantasy football, New Year's resolution. How are you going to change? I mean, Jason, I know in our league of record you won, so your resolution might be. I changed nothing. There you go. You change nothing and you die. No, I've got my change. I got my resolution.

Who wants to go first? I will go first. And I resolve to hold the higher upside running backs, the backup running backs. I'm going to hold them longer. Now, that was already something you tried to do with the Ryan Matthews of the world. It's very difficult to hold these guys until fruition. I was able to do it two years ago with Jeremy Hill. I held him all year long, and it paid off huge. And this year, I mean,

I had David Johnson in a couple spots. I had him available in other spots, but I just didn't hold on to him and paid the price when it came to the waiver time. I think I only had him on my bench in one of the leagues, and then could I afford him? Similar thing with DeAngelo Williams. We saw the first two games. We literally saw it. There was no speculation of what DeAngelo Williams can do on that offense. We saw it for two games, and yet I wasn't holding on to him.

in the leagues where I didn't have Levion, which was just a mistake. We talked about it. In our league of record, there was a guy in our league who every Sunday would add him to his bench, which, and somehow I didn't even notice it because he's not announcing he's doing this, but it was just so smart of him to do. If you have a wasted bench spot, throw a really high upside running back on there because you never know.

I mean, especially this year with all the injuries. So I'll piggyback on that. That's a good resolution. My resolution is this, and every time I had momentum this year, I kind of got punched in the face a little bit. And so my New Year's resolution is to become better at depth on my team. I have always been a fantasy player that has prioritized elite starters.

over depth on my team. But whether it was Dionne Lewis, John Stewart late in the year, my Rawls injury, Arian Foster, my team at times looked amazing. I'm not sure you can more depth than that. I mean, that's four RB1s. Well, no, those weren't, that wasn't depth. That was reaction, right? Yeah, I had guys, then I had to go get others, then I had to go get others. What I'm saying is by the end of the year, despite having that levels of depth, it's more proving the point.

I still had to start some bad running backs in the playoffs. And so piggybacking off of you with, you've always said this. And I don't know if I bought into it in the beginning, but just at the end of the day, whether they're good or not, you always say, you know, have a couple running backs, extra running backs on your bench. I didn't do that enough this year. I've always been, like I said, elite at every starting position and roll the dice. I think in the modern NFL, rolling the dice anymore is probably foolish. It's probably really, really hoping to get lucky without the injuries.

Whereas before, I think the odds were a little bit better, but now, you know, too many guys went down. We talked about that heading into the playoffs this last year. You had a better group of starters, and I had more depth. And we thought that would go head to head. We both dealt with injuries. Mark Ingram went down.

For me, Stuart and Rawls. Stuart and Rawls for you. And I had the depth to kind of roll in there when Alshon Jeffrey was out. You had another wide receiver that could step up. I had somebody to go in. For me, my New Year's resolution looking ahead to 2016 is to value the high-end elite wide receivers higher than good running backs for me.

I have always been a super running back guy. I'm going to take a Lamar Miller this year over a good wide receiver because I can get wide receivers. I can get them late in the draft. I can get them off of waivers. And I think that's right when you're talking about your average wide receivers. But when you're talking about the high-end wide receivers, I think it's starting to really just be proven that they are safer.

than the running backs. You did some work, Mike, on like the safety of quarterbacks and different positions, the bust factor of how many of these top guys are busting? This year, man alive, if you took a running back in that first round, chances are. Not named Adrian Peterson. Yeah, chances are you got screwed over. We got a listener email me this morning. They survived spending half their auction money on two players.

Eddie Lacey and C.J. Anderson. Half their auction money. They won the title. Wow. But that serves your point. All this money thrown into those.

those running backs that went down. Yeah, and if you look at the early wide receivers that win, I mean, you have Des that went down. That was a bust. Jordy. And, well, Jordy, if you drafted too early. But I would say, I would say of the top guys, the only two would be Des and then Demarius Thomas was a little bit of a letdown. But he was still okay. AJ Green was probably, I didn't own him personally, so I didn't have that roller coaster. I was just watching from afar, but I would.

guess. I had AJ Green on that people were disappointed with Green. It will be something we talk about in depth this off season because this is something that Mike you brought up as one of the trends you're expecting to see because of the injuries this year, right? Yeah, the trend is I think people are going to go wide receiver heavy in the first round. And I haven't, I mean, we still have plenty of time for me. I want to start breaking down some data and all those things before I make a decision on. Am I going to join that or?

or am I going to zag because everyone's ziggin, you know, and grab the best running back available. Better value of running backs then. But it, but that's, I agree with Jason that it's going to be very interesting for us to examine of, do you just go wide receiver, do you punt running back for a couple rounds and see what happens? Jason read me his, uh, MFL 10 roster this morning, one of the leagues he won.

which was impressive in and of itself, but it was dominated by high-end wide receiver play and a bunch of injured running backs were on his team. And I'm starting to wonder, like, people read me their running back lists on those teams or their fantasy rosters, and they're like, man, I got a bunch of bad breaks. But everybody's saying that. It's not just like, I'm starting to say, oh, okay, everybody dealt with running back injuries this year.

So very interesting. We will, as Mike said, we will be looking at all the data and looking at the trends and seeing where we're headed in 2016. Because things change. Some things stay the same. I think late round quarterbacks are going to stay the same. And I have a big, I guess it's not big. That's overstating it. Apparently, there was a DeAngelo Williams stat correction. And we are getting tweets that people have had their championship revoked.

because of a DeAngelo Williams' stack correction. So a shout out to our fallen comrades who have lost their title to the stack correction. That is a bad beat. That's terrible. We feel it. I've never had a title revoked that way. I have had my entrance into a title game revoked that way. It is brutal. I understand your pain. What it looks like is DeAngelo Williams had...

A fumble and a fumble loss point added. So if you're in a league that penalizes both of those, basically a fumble happened. A fumble loss was credited to DeAngelo Williams. So if you, oh, man. So that is brutal. That is tough. Yeah, we've, I've had a few stories. There was a Denard Robinson stat correction that Yahoo did not credit.