Fantasy Football - Preseason Hype + Fantasy Curses - Podcast for 8/14

Yeah, that was a minus one. Actually, minus two because he tried to skirt it with Dropbox. Yeah, blame something else. And then then you got Josh and look, he's always deserving. Always. He's minus two for age and baldness. Age and baldness. And honestly, I'm giving him another minus one for that thumbs up. He gave a thumbs up earlier like, you could call on me. Right. Give me a, yeah, that was annoying. He's annoyingly relevant. He's the annoyingly relevant deucer too. Yeah.

And then we have the Falcon who, I mean, it goes without saying what happened at the end of the last yesterday's show, excuse making. I don't even, oh, yeah. About your video and like, oh, I'm going to take like three days to figure the tracers out. He did finally get it out. Yeah, you don't know why? Because I called him out on the show. And I went, blah, blah, blah. Good work. Yeah, the video's out. If you want to see me golf poorly and give a few stat nuggets. Actually, the video I think is doing well. I'm not too ashamed of it.

Which is so shameful. Right. You should be ashamed of not being ashamed. Yeah. But I actually am not ashamed. I think it was a good video as well produced. And so for the honor of how good that was, it's definitely the Falcon. I mean, what an honor I'm giving you. Mailbag. Oh. We're about to have someone fired on live. Oh my gosh. We are about. Can I explain? Did you not understand that the Falcon was supposed to do that? Okay. So Matt.

Jeremy suggested that all of us do the mailbag together, which we were fine with. Oh, do you guys own the company? Matt DMs me and says, let's not jump in with Jeremy so that Jeremy winds up doing it all by himself. Matt, so I picked the right guy. Jeremy and I were talking saying, hey, we're not going to screw each other over. And then Matt didn't do it because he thought we were all going to do it together. I've got a fix for that.

It would be, it would be, it would be kind of. Is it change of employment? No, no, change of employment is part of it. I got a fix for it. I'm not hitting that drop again, but you're going to be doing it. You're going to do the music. You're going to do the music and the mailbag. Get the camera over there. All right. So we're going to go. You're doing the whole thing. You know how the drop sounds. And this, keep in mind and I, and I, your job might depend on it. So let's go. Let's get into the mail bag. All right. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Mail bag.

Yes. Oh, you know, it's good when you can hear Al Borland probably on our microphones. I promise you are responsible for more than two car accidents right now. All right. We're in the mailbag. We're in the mailbag. We're going to get it started. Lots of questions. Lots of things to talk about. Also, I will say that was terrible. I mean, like you didn't hit any of the beats. You're in here for every show.

He's heard it before. He's heard it before. He heard it right before. And he went, do-da-da-do-do-da-da-da. Real colar situation. All right. Matthew, writing in, The Madden Curse has given many reasons for us to believe it is somewhat true. Can we really be high on Caleb Williams? And then I've got the chart here of the Madden. There's a lot of curses. Well, listen, here's what the Madden Curse really is. And I don't know if we just want the joke answer. Here's what the Madden curse is.

It's called You Can't Be the Best at the Game two years in a row. That's Madden Curse. So was Sequin Barclay curse last year? Because Saquan Barclay wasn't, he didn't win the Super Bowl and finish number one at the position. He was okay. Wasn't good. Was he okay? I mean, I would say he's a medium level of curse. But I'm just saying.

In recent history, let's say we didn't expect him to be, I mean, he was being drafted maybe to be the running back one again, but he wasn't even a running back one. If you want to say he's cursed, that's fine. The year before, McCaffrey cursed. But before that, we had a run of four straight guys. Mahomes. Josh Allen, Lamar. Mahomes twice with Brady. To me, it is you reward the guys that played the best?

by putting him on the cover. Then why did they reward Caleb Williams? That's the real question. Because he had one play that was worth putting him on a cover for, the fourth down conversion. I'm high on Caleb Williams. I'm high on the offense. I like that he lost some weight. I'm high on Caleb. I don't think he's cursed. I think you were already cursed as a bear. Yeah. So this is the uncurced. This is the reverse the curse. Yeah. Put him on the cover.

I agree. I'm in on Caleb. Double stamp. You can't triple step and double stamp. You just can't do it. No. I, uh, Caleb Williams should be very good this year. The, the fact that he changes diet, lost the weight, but then the accuracy reports are very good. Everything that I've been watching, like camp videos, not the ones that are like the team puts out the one highlight, but like when I'm watching pass after pass after pass, there's no, it's just.

It's been very accurate. And that's if Caleb Williams could be accurate. In fact, here's a stat that I shared in the golf video is the fact that Caleb Williams, the only two players that were worse in accuracy last year for Caleb Williams was Matt, Falcon, who were the two? Jay J.J. McCarthy and Shadur, Sanders, were the only guys worse. Now, you could say, well, that's really bad for Caleb, but that's also like.

what if he's average? What a step up for this offense if he's not throwing, you know, 58% of his passes for completions. It's a huge growth opportunity for a guy who wasn't bad last year, but still it's like he doesn't need to go from 27 passing touchdowns to 42. No. No, and I think he's going to run a ton. I think the upside of these, you know, a full season of Loveland burden.

Adunzay, that head coach, that offensive line, Swift and Menangai. There are, it may be a lot of bluster for the, for the Bears, you know, their head coach is overconfident maybe, but the personnel are capable of executing it. Bowers question from RJ is Brock Bowers at the end of the first round crazy? I like him better than most around that ADP. I think a funny question or part to throw in here for context, Jay. You got to pick 10 yesterday.

We talked about Jefferson. I mean, I don't see it being out of bounds to draft Bowers over Jefferson. We had a question recently on a different show where it was like, where is too high and 10 was the spot where I said I'm okay drafting them there. Would I personally? Probably not. There's still some guys there that I really like. But if you're taking that tight end, if you believe he's going to be a point different, you know, like two points better than second place, that is absolutely worth the first round pick.

And so, you know, once you get past James Cook, Jonathan Taylor, the five wide receivers and the superstar running backs, I feel like you're at the back of the first, and you could make an argument that Brock Bowers is just as good as any of those guys. So, yeah, the back of the first, it's earlier than you maybe should take him. But if you don't take them there, if you want Brock Bowers and you don't take them there, you're probably not getting. I guess. No, you're not. If you are drafting.

At the turn. At the turn, specifically. Then you don't have a chance. No. If you don't take them or, yeah. And I don't think it's bad to take them at the turn. G. Thorpe writing in my league always has a huge quarterback run after the first one gets drafted. Should I stick to ADP value or grab a quarterback early? So, I mean, you know your league now. That's one of the things that this show is all about is you cannot perfectly apply everything we say to every single league situation. We want to give you.

like advice that you apply to your league context and then you go and benefit. If you know that that's what's going to happen, let me tell you what's going to happen. If there's a huge quarterback run after the first quarterback gets drafted, that means a ton of wide receivers and running backs are dropping further than they should in their ADP. So that's a guarantee. When we did our mock yesterday, I was thrilled when two or three quarterbacks went right in front of where I was able to take somebody because they get knocked down the list. So I wouldn't get caught up in the run.

Right? I mean, I definitely wouldn't get caught up in the run at quarterback. There are certain positions where what happens with the tiers, tier-based drafting, and if you've got the UDK, all of our rankings are in tiers so that you can kind of group certain players, it's not just like, oh, this guy's the fifth ranked quarterback and this guy's the ninth ranked quarterback. If they're in the same tier, they're basically saying the range of outcomes is so similar to those guys.

When you're drafting by tiers, that's where the dictate of you look at which guys you want, like what tiers you're happy with leaving the draft. For me, there are lower tier quarterbacks I am happy leaving the draft with. If you're not, then when you start running out of the tier above that where you're like, this is where I'll be happy, then yeah, pull the trigger even if it's ahead of ADP. But I agree with Andy specifically on quarterbacks.

If your league pushes quarterbacks up, that is the perfect opportunity to just keep smashing, running backs and wide receivers, getting better value than you should, and then grab the late guys that have the chance, you know, there's a handful of late quarterbacks this year that are... There's a lot of them. There's actually a lot. Yeah, that are really exciting. I mean, there's a world where you're getting Matthew Stafford wildly late, and he's great. I mean...

Golf is another one. Purdy is another one. Dak is another one. I mean, even DART. Caleb. Caleb is another one. Darts going last I saw was in the ninth round. That's an exciting one. The funny thing is there is a... I met my maximum scared at this exact moment, by the way. With dart. Oh, for sure. For sure. I mean, again, Nagy ruins all. But there is a quarterback who was the quarterback seven two years ago, and that was his rookie year. Then he was the quarterback six.

this last year. Then they added a wide receiver one to the team, lost nobody. And he's being drafted as like the quarterback 15. So if you're in a single quarterback league, he's basically not drafted, which is Bo Nix. Yep. And Trevor Lawrence and I mean, the list goes on. So just keep, bear that in mind. Scarf up them running back some wide receivers. We have, obviously we were supposed to do our top 10 tips and tricks show today. Mike is out. We've kicked it back to next week. It's going to be great.

the things I'm going to talk about as a teaser. Oh, no. Oh, tease. Okay, tease is fine. It's a different spoiler teaser. Yeah, well, it depends on how much you give away. Is I'm going to talk about how important it is to keep grabbing those running backs and wide receivers in the context of the last 20 years of fantasy and what you need. That's good. That was a good teaser. I didn't say anything. Honestly, I want to hear it. Yeah. And you're going to. Awesome. If you subscribe. Unless I catch that lettuce diarrhea. Can you get that from another person? I think so.

Yeah. Really? You got a kiss. Yeah, I think he'd have to like, yeah. Yeah. So yes. League tendencies. We just talked about that with the quarterbacks. Let's go to T. Grove here. Dynasty question. Is Devante Adams we're trading a 27 second round pick? No. To get. I don't think so. I mean, if you are, this is the nuance of dynasty. If you're a contender, I'm happy to add Adams for a second round pick. Why? Because that second round pick is going to be late. If you're an actual contender.

And Adams, I think, can give you another year of high production. You need the depth and dynasty. I'm okay with it if you're a top three. If you're, the nuance matters there. If you are really truly a one of the best, not like I'm competing for a championship, but I'm one of the seven, there's seven of us that are in it. If you're like a top three team and you know this is going to be near a third round pick if you do well, okay, you can convince me. But otherwise I do think in general,

Just taking teams out of it. A 2027 second round pick is probably worth more at this point than Navante Adams, who it's not outside the range of outcomes that Devante Adams this season is done. Like he could come out this year and be like, oh, okay, he, you know, he's 33 and 34 this year. He just kind of lost his step. It's funny because I'm like leaning on McVeigh and the Rams.

and their moves at wide receiver to tell me that Adam still has it in some regards. Yeah. But they did that with Alan Robinson. And they were wrong before. I was wrong, but they were wrong. Yeah, you can't always do it. We just make probability bets here. And probability bets say a guy turning 34 this year doesn't have a lot left in the tank. Um.

Help me understand this question on Instagram here. Westbrook writing in Better 2026 for Carnell Tate or any Bears wide receiver. Is that just? Yeah. So, so Tate versus. That's Tate versus round versus Burden in the fifth or Dunezay in the six? Exactly right. That's what it is. So, Tate or the Bears? Yeah. Okay. I know what he's going to vote. I think I'm going to vote it too. I am not. I like Tate.

But I can't imagine that one of the bears don't outperform Tate. I can easily imagine. We have a good imagination. Well, the thing is, is Colson Loveland could very well be the number one target. It could also be Rome. It could also be burden. And should all three be very, very involved, I think that there's a world where you're disappointed definitely with the two wide receivers because a tight end doesn't need to do as much to be valuable at that position.