Fantasy Football Podcast 2015 - Fantasy Face-Off, News, Mailbag

I almost think if Gresham was to sign with New Orleans, it would just muddy the tight-in water in New Orleans because Josh Hill has a little bit of pub. People are still talking about, you know, some writers have come out and said Ben Watson might catch a few passes. And then if you put Gresham into the mix, who's a good blocker, but can still catch passes. I mean, it just might, it might siren the alert of just stay away from any possible New Orleans tied in. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, the Jaguars continue to affirm our love of T.J. Yeldon.

Their website actually confirmed that Yeldin's expected to be the starter as a rookie. It's something we expected, but at the same time, when you start to get endorsement from the team side, not just the beat riders or the kind of fantasy community, it just affirms that he's worthy of a higher pick by far than what his ADP is, and it'll go a lot higher before the draft. He should be a solid volume.

And when I say, when you hear us say ADP, by the way, that's average draft position. Yeah, we say it so quickly, but some people don't know what that means. And so that's where they're going in mock drafts over the last week. He's going at the end of the fifth round right now. Oh, yeah. Which is just crazy. I take him. But T.J. Yeldon, it looks like, you know, he has the opportunity to come in as a rookie and hopefully not be Bishop Sanky. Well, with the offensive line upgrades.

Allegedly Blake Bortles is working on some mechanical issues and not the automobile mechanical kind. So if we can get that going, mechanical, no? Yeah, we got it. Somehow I just started thinking about Cam Newton. Oh, talking about bad mechanics? Yeah. No, I'm talking about his car flipping.

What? What's going? We are out of control. Wait, were you really talking about his car flipping and not his bad mechanics? When he said he had mechanical problems, I started thinking about his car. Wow. We were really out of sync there. Look, man, I'm on medicine. Okay, so T.J. Hold it. Hopefully he can get the touchdowns to be worthy of where he is because he'll get the volume, but the question with him will be scoring. Yeah, absolutely. That's the problem with the running back on any of these. When we looked earlier in the season,

Top 10 running backs, I think 9 of 10 were on winning teams, and the last one was 500. So Jaguars have to improve for Yelden to give you the kind of value that you'd really dream of from a rookie. Well, the nice thing, if his average draft position stays not, it won't stay where it is now. Third round. But there's, see, I think it'll go lower than that. I think you could be. Lower or higher? Lower. I think that he won't be going in the third round. And I think that there's a chance that you could draft him as.

an RB3. And if you could do that, that's fantastic. I think it'll go in the fourth. Interesting. I'm going to, yeah, that's cool. That'd be good. Darren McFadden has fulfilled his contractual obligations. He has, this year he said he's going to injure himself every, what is that? 16 days. Fortnight, every fortnight. And he has a hamstring tweak in practice, proving that he can be injured in any camp for any team at any time.

Because we thought maybe just Oakland. He's always prepared. Just, you know, it doesn't mean much. It's camp. But for Darren McFadden, you know, you just don't like to see it. No, you do not. Not if you have hopes of him taking over that role or doing something with Joseph Randall. And that brings us to the last bit of news, which will lead into our next segment as well. But Carolina has officially signed quarterback Cam Newton to a five-year $103.8 million extension. Oh, man.

Tanna Hill got 96 million, by the way, just so you know. Oh. So which one was valued more, just out of curiosity? Oh, we're not starting. No, all right. Okay. But Cam Newton, long term, doesn't mean much for fantasy other than he'll be the quarterback there, which we know he would be. But it does lead us into our next and most important segment of the afternoon before we get to mailbag before we talk about anything else. And that is our fantasy face-off. Fantasy face-off.

If you listen to the last show, you know that there was a bit of debate between Mike and Jason between who they'd rather have as their quarterback, Cam Newton or Ryan Tannahill. I was surprised to see. There was a little bit of Twitter chatter about the upcoming fantasy faceoff because some people are very passionate about Cam Newton.

And Tannahill. I saw some people saying, sorry, I'm on the, I'm on the Tana Hill side. So I think this will be a very good debate because there's kind of, there's, there's the debate between the two and then there's kind of value in those type of things that we can bring up at another time. But who wants to kick this off? Do I just choose? Yeah, you're the moderator here. All right, so let's see. We'll start off with the Cam Newton take.

Jason, you believe Cam Newton is the better quarterback? He came into the league before Tannahill did, so we'll let you kick it off first. The only thing I'll throw in real quick is we had talked about real life and fantasy. That's especially where the caveat got thrown in, where I was getting questioned that they couldn't believe I was taking Tannahill unquestionably over Newton in real life, not just fantasy.

Well, I think, you know, I think for the most part, and this is not always the case, but I think for the most part, the guys that are better in fantasy are also better in real life. I think that those things go hand in hand when you produce more yards and get more touchdowns and do those things. They're better in real life. Obviously, that is not...

always a universal case. But here I think it's true. I'm going to focus on the fantasy side just because we're the fantasy footballers, but I get that that is where that came up from. So here is some thoughts between them. And I don't think it's really that biggest stretch or really that big a debate to say Cam Newton is the better fantasy producer and the better real-life football player. When it comes to their yards,

They're about the same. And in fact, this year I've got Tanna Hill going about 300 yards more. Did you know that on a 16 game basis yearly, the average difference in yards per game or per year between these guys, do you want, Tana Hill got the edge? Do you want to know how many more yards he got every single game over Cam Newton? Per game. Two. He got two more passing yards than Cam Newton. Two of them.

Two whole passing yards per game more than Cam Newton. And that is basically his upside.

Tanna Hill's upside over Cam Newton is that he gets more passing yards and maybe a higher completion, which won't matter, of course, because Indomacan Su is coming in, and so they're going to slow the game down and do that, whereas the Carolina Panthers have already been doing that game. So the difference between these guys, when it comes to passing touchdowns, which are somewhere near the same, their average literally both are 21 per season, their average yards are basically the same. The difference is the legs, is the rushing. And when it comes to

to fantasy, oh goodness, a running quarterback is worth more because Cam Newton has averaged 8.42 rushing touchdowns per year. Now, if we throw out his first season where he had 14 because that was incredible, he comes in and he's like the greatest rookie ever because he's a phenomenal athlete, then he'd get 6.56 rushing touchdowns a year. Still a fantastic number.

So you might go, well, maybe the needle's pointing down, right? I'm expecting that that's really the only argument you can give, Mike, and I'll rebut that in a second. But here's the truth, is that he was injured in the offseason last year. He missed four months of recovery from an ankle. And so when you look at last season and you break them down by game and you take a look at the last seven games versus the first seven games,

Do you want to know he would have been on pace for nine rushing touchdowns and 662 rushing yards? So his needle, Cam Newton's needle, is pointing up. And when we talk about off-season to off-season, I've got real good reason to say that Cam Newton is going to be better, far better this year than he was this last year. And this last year, he was pretty good. So, Mike, what do you got over there? Okay.

That's good. That was about three minutes. I'll give you the same time, Mike. All right. Well, first off, you were going off of a lifetime average, which skews things a little bit in Ryan Tannenhill because he has improved every single year. In his sophomore year, his completion percentage went up 2%. He doubled his touchdowns. And that's with a higher overall volume, with higher volume and higher completion percentage.

This year, Bill Laser was hired as a replacement for offensive coordinator. He took over for Mike Sherman. Where did Bill Laser come from? Hmm. The Philadelphia Eagles. He brought down the Chip Kelly spread offense. And Ryan Tannenhill thrived with almost 400 completions, a 66.4% completion rate. How does that work with the rest of the league fifth best? You're talking about a guy who had a higher throwing percentage than Peyton Manning.

Aaron Rogers, Tom Brady. Now, I agree. Ryan Tannenhill is a bit of a different player. He's more in the intermediate short zone. So who's the ultimate, that guy? Alex Smith, right? Ultimate dink-dunk guy, higher completion percentage than Alex Smith. He had a two-to-one touchdown to interception ratio. Has Cam No. He's never even come close. Well, actually, from a fantasy perspective, he's done.

Much better than that because if you add in the rushing touchdowns, which are worth more than the passing touchdowns. Let him finish. Let him finish. All right, so let's talk about the deep ball real quick. The Ryan Tannenhill alleged Achilles heel. He completed over the 37.7 targets of over 20 yards. That puts them ahead of Tom Brady and Cam Newton. You want to talk about a quarterback who can throw under pressure, 64.4% higher than Cam Newton.

Now, oh, there's this weird thing. Ryan Tannenhill used to be a wide receiver. He can run the ball too. Last year, 311 yards. He doesn't just throw. He also runs like Cam Newton. No, no, no. Go on. Sorry. But you can't say like Cam Newton. Well, similar. And so let's say, in Ryan Tannenho's career, every year, these major statistical categories have gone up. Completions, completion percentage, yards thrown, touchdowns, rushing yards, passer rating.

Can you say the same thing for Cam Newton? Not even close. Not even close. Now, when you're talking about you think the needle is pointing up for Cam Newton's rushing ability, I have something that says it's not. It's called a $100 million contract. There is no way that after the ankle procedure he had last year, all the injuries that keep mounting up that they're going to possibly allow him to keep throwing his body out the way he has been.

It's just not, you can't have a hundred million guy, a hundred million dollar guy doing that. He's the face of your franchise. I understand that's where he gets his advantage is the running, but I think the running is going to continue to go down just like it has every single year of Cam Newton's career. I think I want Ryan Tanahill to be my quarterback on my regular team and Cam Newton to be my fantasy quarterback today. I think that's what I got out of that because...

You guys both dropped a lot of knowledge on me. I'm a little overwhelmed because I'm on a lot of medicine, so I'm confused. No, that was pretty good. I think for me personally, it's hard to throw my bias off the window. I think I'd rather have Kim Newton this year as my fantasy quarterback. I have one more really important fantasy thing to get to. Okay. I'll let you get to it. Let me just say this, though. The one thing I really like in the Tannahill camp, if I had to make a decision on weighing these guys is I like...

the ascension number mixed with the weapon they picked up in the off season. Bringing Jordan Cameron in and Devante Parker, those guys are different to me than what I see on the weapon side for Cam Newton. So all that means is he has to, you have to be right, Jason. You have to be right that he's going to run enough. That's what I think.

Okay, so when it comes to the needle and some of these things about weapons and that type of thing, do you realize, you say that, well, you know, the needles pointing down for Cam, do you remember last off season for the Carolina Panthers? Do you know that they lost their number one wide receiver? And do you know that they lost their number two wide receiver? And do you know that they lost their number three wide receiver? And do you know that they lost their number four wide receiver? They lost their top four.