Fantasy Football Podcast 2015 - Early RB Rankings, Sleepers, Mailbag

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We'll get a $75-sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. To the Fantasy Footballers podcast with your host, Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. It is Thursday.

It is March 26th, 2015, and we are the fantasy... What? Fought? Fought? Fought? Fought? We're a new... You know, it's my birthday today? Yes, I was just about... We are the fantasy footballers. I took a drink, and I'm better now. You know, I'm 31 years old now. It's going. The brain's going. You've peaked.

I peaked at 30. You're out of your optimal fantasy analysis. That was a bad start. Let me try that again. Welcome to the fantasy footballers podcast. I'm Andy Holloway, joined by Jason. Hello. Happy birthday, Andy. Thank you. Mike Wright. The fantasy hitman is here. Greetings. And we are back. We finished up our podcast on Tuesday by finishing the top 10 of our kind of early quarterback.

rankings, which was fun, fun to talk about quarterbacks. Obviously, we'll be revisiting all of those and I've already moved some guys around, but it was fun to kind of get a lay of the land at the quarterback position. Today we're going to be talking about everybody's favorite position, the running backs. Running backs. Jason is fired up. Everyone loves running backs. That's who you want to talk about. That's what you want to hear. You're welcome. Yeah, so we're going to talk about our consensus top five as of today. We're also going to discuss

Guys we really like, guys that we're fading on or we think maybe people should be worried about. So we're going to talk about that today. There's not a lot of news and notes to talk about, but we'll discuss a few things in that regard, and then we'll hit the mailbag as well. You can follow us on the web, www.Thefantyfootballers.com. We're on Facebook as well. You can follow us on Twitter at the FF Ballers. I just want to start today's show and say thank you to all. You're welcome.

I don't think that wasn't directed towards me. No, no. I'll thank you later. I wanted to say thank you to all the loyal listeners that we've got now leaving us wonderful reviews on iTunes. We really appreciate that. We've been moving up the charts there. People seem to like the show. Most of them. Some of them don't. But thank you very much for leaving those reviews. If you haven't subscribed on iTunes and left us a review and you like the show, we'd appreciate it.

And we've, we had a reviewer clarify. He does not believe, he or she, sorry, does not believe that we are bros, but more like sirs. Yeah, why don't you read this one today, Mike? I don't have the thing in front of me. Oh, okay. So today, today's review will read. Oh, is that what you were referring to? Today's review. Is that what we picked? Yeah. Oh, nice. Me, me, me. Today's review of the day from...

Leonard Skinner fan, oh, one. So the number one Leonard Skinner fan in all the land. Right, which is saying a lot. I hope you live in Sweet Home Alabama. I enjoy the podcast, sirs. You are starting to pull me away from the, quote, mothership, ESPN. Keep the two podcasts a week coming. Well done, sirs, not dudes. I was just trying to think, we like ESPN. We have nothing against them. No.

No, but it's nice to put some variety out there. And let's be honest, most fantasy football players have the capacity to listen to more than one show. Oh, yeah, as you should. And they'd like to listen. I mean, he said right here, keep two a week coming. We will be doing that for sure this off season. We'll also probably be bringing even more shows. Even more. And when we get down to draft season, when we get down to the regular season. Maybe June July. We're just bubbling when we're bubbling over with fantasy football news and information. That was bubbly.

Yeah, that's bubbling over. So let's get into the minuscule amount of news we got. News and notes from around the league. And we're done. You want to know the only? No, no, no, no. We're not done. I've got a big one. Darius Hayward Bay was signed this morning. I did not know that. This is breaking news. By, do you even know? No. Either of you know. I did not hear this. The Steelers signed Darius Hayward Bay to a lucrative one-year contract.

and by lucrative, I mean probably incentive-laid in very minorly guaranteed contract. You can't teach speed. Yeah, what is this? Al Davis? You can't teach speed. You can teach how to catch, and he's got bad teachers. And you can also lose speed. So as the years go on, his only quality asset gets worse. Yes. Perennial disappointment, Darius Hayward Bay, given another shot in Pittsburgh. I will say in the...

The Hayward Bay defense, it was when he came out, there was the debate of, I believe he went one slot ahead of Michael Crabtree, and that was just a catastrophe among the football community. The pundits? And, yeah, Crabtree. Seems like a moot point. He actually beat Crabtree to a contract this offseason. Ooh, good point. Chachey. Crabtree, as we know, is very skilled at holding out. That's true.

So Crabtree is still out there. I would not be surprised at this point if we're just conjecturing if Crabtree ends up back in San Francisco. For the veterans minimum? Something. Something like that. Yeah, right now you have a lot of conjecture going on. If you want to talk about news, it's not news. It's a lot of conjecture. It's a lot of coaches saying things like, boy, Zach Ertz is just primed. He's just primed to have a big year. And I hate hearing that because that's pulling on my emotions. Yeah, because everybody's going to have a monster year right now.

Every coach is talking up every player. Yeah, and what they think they can be, right? And why not? Why wouldn't you do that? But at the same time, as a fantasy football player, it's scary. Because if you pick and choose right now those guys that you think are guaranteed and you don't listen to the rest of the information, you might end up, I don't know, buying into C.J. Anderson or something. We'll talk about that later because you and I are on opposite sides on that. Completely opposite sides of the C.J. Anderson world. Is there anything else going on? Anybody doing anything?

We're still waiting with baited breath over the Adrian Peterson situation. I don't know, man. He's definitely the biggest fish out there that has the potential. The more it goes, I think the higher the probability ends up him staying in Minnesota. If he does not, if he's not moved by the end of the draft, or I guess you could even say the beginning of the draft because it's going to take a higher round to get him, then he's going to be in Minnesota. For sure.

For sure. It seems like every day they're saying, we will not. That's on behalf of us, Cardinal fans. Yeah. Every day they're saying they will not trade him. I still don't buy it, but yeah, he has to go before the draft. Otherwise, won't go after. I don't have a really good gauge. I'm a little biased. I'd love to say that I think he's coming out here. I have been leaning towards him staying the way it's been feeling lately. I don't have a good gauge, though, because you don't know how much of this is posturing in any situation. We were talking with Sean McCoy a long time ago. You didn't know how much.

was posturing from Chip Kelly, you're going to believe in your guy until he's gone. I mean, that's the way it works in the NFL because you want trade value, right? Obviously with AP, his trade value is not going to get changed by that, but you just posture because if he's around, he's around. And to me, he's got to be in that locker room with those players. The trading of LaShawn McCoy, I think, would be, it's a good analogy for what the Vikings, I believe they should do.

where I don't think they're a team on the rise. I think they can get to 500 this year, especially with Peterson on the team. But if they used Peterson and they turned them into assets and money that they can fill into other positions, I think that would suit the team a little bit better. But there's also the, you got to get butts on the seats and you want the.

Superstar running back. I understand that. I think that's a really good point because if they were sitting in Dallas's position coming off a playoff season, you have a lot more justification to keep that big contract and keep your opportunity there. I think they're right on the line. If he's not happy this year, is he happy next year? Yeah, and I've heard some people talking about, oh, well, they can just trade him next year. His value goes down every single year. Yeah, he's a 31-year-old running back next year. And I believe he's owed even more money next year.

coming into the season like cap hit yes or not just cap it just owed because none of his money's guaranteed anymore but i think he's at 12 this year and either 12 and a half or 13 the following year it keeps escalating so that'll be it'll be interesting to see if he does keep pushing do they trade him where does he go everyone wants to say okay arizona's the best landing spot but it can't be the only landing spot so

Those options get smaller and smaller as guys get signed, and as the draft comes, like you said. So that'll be fun to watch. Hopefully, we'll have some more news breaking that isn't Darius Hayward Bay related. I love these guys that are, like, coming up into our news, like Hayward Bay and Beau and... Hey, if you want to be good... Trit Richardson was our last breaking news in the middle of a show. If you want to be a good fantasy player, these are people that you need to know about. You can't win just with superstars. You've got to find the later gems.

Like Duane Bow on the browns. You're not insinuating that Hayward Bay is a gym, are you? No, I'm insinuating that Dwayneboe might have some... Dusty moldy rock is more of the... Whoa. Running back is an important position, and so today we're going to talk about what our consensus top five running backs are. I think we'll get through about five of them today and we'll have another show. That's good to get through five of the top five. Oh, yeah, did I say that? Yeah. Okay. We'll get five of our top...

I think we've statted about 20 of them. So, yeah, we'll talk more. So Lavian Bell is our consensus number one and why not. It was pretty good. He was a little tricky because the two-game suspension, it's going to happen. Yeah, he's going to miss the first two games of the regular season. The question is, does it become a four-game suspension? Because his offense seemed to be a double duty of an illegal substance and a DUI.

So that part is not clear. However, I believe Andy has Bell at one, Jason and I have him at two. So even factoring in the two-game suspension when I put in my projected numbers for him, he still popped up to number two because he is a workhorseback in a league where they don't exist. Not only is a workhorse back, he has great hands.

And he catches a huge quantity of the passes. Out of the backfield. And his touchdowns, he actually went through a tremendous touchdown drought through the first half of last year before finally turning it on. It seemed like Big Ben wanted him to get him more involved in the passing game. Now they brought in DeAngelo Williams.

Yeah, I'm not concerned about it. Well, it's not, yeah, not so much concern, just kind of context for last year we had Lageret Blunt in the backfield when the season started. They're the two that got in trouble together. That scared so many people away. Lageret Blunt was the reason why people won championships with Bell.

because they got him later because everyone's afraid of some time share. But yeah, I've got Levy & Bell as my clear cut number one in a PPR because he's going to be catching so many balls. I've got him number two in standard scoring, but...