Fantasy Football Podcast 2016 - The TRUTH About Fantasy WR's in 2015, Part 1

16 game season. It's just one of those things where I don't know if I can ever get it out of my head. What you think is that Alan Robinson, and he's great, but you don't know how great he can be. The odds might be 1% he could be as great as, you know, Brandon Marshall. Brandon Marshall. But sometimes we just like that. We just like the 22-year-old. You like the young guy. The unknown is a very alluring.

quality in fantasy football. But I'll have Brandon Marshall. He's a top 10 guy for sure. So on the board as of right now, neither of you are buying into the age narrative as the reason why he would be worse than this next year. No, assuming that Ryan Fitzpatrick is back, I think Brandon Marshall, well, I don't think he will duplicate this year. 1,500 yards and 14 touchdowns. That'd be pretty tough to do again. But...

Still a top 10 guy. Here's the thing that is very different between him and the guy that we're about to talk about after him and Alan Robinson. You have two very different narratives in the sense that you've got the old guy and the young guy. But you also have, Brandon Marshall had 109 receptions. When we go to Alan Robinson, the next player we're talking about here, Alan Robinson only had 80 receptions. And that's great. 80 receptions, you can have a great year that way with that.

But it's misleading. You know, you look at everyone else around him from Hopkins with 111 or O'Dell Beckham with almost 100 and a game less. He's kind of an outlier here to me when I was going through and looking at these stats saying he should not have had as good a season statistically as Alan Robinson had with only 80 receptions. I mean, Doug Baldwin had 78 receptions and was irrelevant for half of the year.

It's a good point, and I was going to bring it out, and we'll talk about Alan Robinson now. He's number four on the list. I'm not fading Alan Robinson as a talent, but I'm fading projecting him this high because not only is that true what you just brought up, the total reception total, but he played much better against bottom 16 defenses, too. He didn't show that he could come out and be a matchup-proof type of guy. He averaged...

Eight fantasy points less, almost. One of the widest margins of these top players on the entire list is Alan Robinson. Beat up on those easy teams, struggled against the good teams. I'm looking at a crazy disparity here between Brandon Marshall and Alan Robinson. So it's essentially a 30 reception gap, 80 to 10. A 30 reception gap, only 100 yards less.

With 30 catches. That's some big plays. The exact same amount of touchdowns. They both had 14 touchdowns, but one guy caught 30 less balls. I'm going to bank on more touchdowns going to the guy that gets over 100.

That's very fair. And so, again, not fading Alan Robinson extremely, bringing the truth to light about his numbers so that you can break that down yourself and decide what's that worth to you next year. I think Jason said it right. I would take Brandon Marshall over Alan Robinson. I'd probably take Odebuckum Jr. over both of those guys. And so, you know, Robinson was the third most consistent. Twelve performances in the top 25. I think that surprised people this year, certainly. Robinson was kind of the banner guy for our preseason draft.

preview shows where he was one of the guys that we just loved. No, Blake Bortles is not a future Hall of Famer, but we love the potential of Robinson because he's built to be a premier wide receiver, and he showed he could do it. He only had one kind of crappy game. By the way, Brandon Marshall, number one, inconsistency, 14 of his 16 games in the top 25. That's just bananas. That's not too bad. All right, let's talk about, let's move on then. Odell Beckham Jr., number five.

I tried to shortcut. When I tried to figure his age out, by the way, he's 23. I typed in ODB age real quick. And so I got old dirty bastards age on Google. And by the way, apparently I'm older than Larry Fitzgerald. You are? Yeah. That just makes you feel kind of bad about the success rate of your life.

Your trajectory is going upward, though. You've got a lot of years left in your industry. I'm just getting going. So O'Dow Beckham Jr. Odo. O'Dow Beckham Jr. so incredibly young. So incredibly talented. He's so young. I feel like these are pot shots at me. Yes. He's far handsomer than you. One of the youngest players he's ever seen play. I have never. Yeah.

He's 16 years old. Odell Beckham Jr. is 16. Just got his license. Odell Beckham Jr. to me, and I don't know if you guys agree or disagree, but he is my number two wide receiver. He showed that he... Behind Brown. I would take him over Julio Jones. I'm fine with that. I would take him over Hopkins and Brandon Marshall, Alan Robinson. Odell Beckham is so special. I worry a little bit about his soft tissue issues, but he still played every single game.

other than the suspension. So, you know, he was on the field, 1,450 yards, 13 touchdowns, 96 receptions, on 158 targets in 15 games. Very little to complain about. Watching that Cardinals game last night, I had some tissue issues, too. I was tearing up, crying all over the place. Oda Beckham, Jr., what can you say? Like you said, special talent. Now, if you...

You can't say that Julio's not. So what are you, are you putting more confidence into the offense in Eli Manning? Is that basically what you're stating? Yeah, you've got McAdoo, their offensive coordinator, getting promoted to the head coach. So you've got that consistency that's actually going to push further. But the other thing is you've got Odell Beckham Jr. still growing and coming on to his own. If you look, the first four games of this.

last season. O'Dell Beckham actually had two of his worst games all season in that first month, and then really just came on super strong after that. To me, I see Julio really had his best year this past year. You haven't seen it always, and I don't expect the Atlanta Falcons to have the same kind of schedule where they just get to play easy teams.

75% of the time. Well, if he played harder teams, he'd have better numbers according to the ratings that we have. Well, but that's just such a small sample size. He only had four games against those. So if you put up one great game against a good defense, then that skews it. And one of those games was against Josh Norman, where he was being shot down until Norman got pulled. I think we're splitting hairs on those guys. If you're in a dynasty and you want the four extra years from ODB, I think that's the way. Here's the thing for redraft. Think about it.

Will you pay the top five pick for O'Dell Beckham Jr.? Because that's what is going to take. It's going to be a top five pick. I probably won't. Okay. I probably won't. And I probably will. Okay. I probably won't, and he probably will. Next. Coming soon to a draft discussion near you the next six months. All right. DeAndre Hopkins was number six. Coming to Sundance. And I like to call DeAndre Hopkins the forgotten man. Yeah. Because.

He burst onto this. I mean, let me just say one number that you need to know. There's one. And it's 192, 192 targets from a variety of college quarterbacks. That is incredible when you get targeted at that level on a team that could score inconsistently, but when they did it was him. 11 touchdowns, 111 receptions, 1521 yards.

really carried fantasy teams in the beginning of the year. I call him The Forgotten Man because he didn't do it in the second half of the year. Well, and here is the slight worry with DeAndre Hopkins, and I love Hopkins, so please don't read in that I am down on him. I would rather have Hopkins than Alan Robinson as of this point for next year. So I love Hopkins. But what you saw with Hopkins was it mirrored.

What you saw with the Texans. In the beginning of the year, the Texans were terrible. They were playing from behind. They had to throw the ball a lot. Their defense didn't have it together. I mean, their defense was atrocious the first. You remember that Miami game? Oh, they didn't even know how to tackle. It was absurd. That was great. And during that. Lamar Miller had 1,800 yards in that game. During that time.

DeAndre Hopkins was the best. He was better than Antonio Brown, better than Julio Jones. Incredible. He is still just as talented, but as soon as the defense got it together, which I expect next year, they're going to have it together. They're just going to be better, not worse. They are a good team. The Texans are a good team, and the better they are?

Look, Hopkins had a fine second half of the season. He wasn't terrible. Huge difference. But he was not that elite number one in the league type of wide receiver that we saw when they were stinking. So I think he's going to be a very good wide receiver one, but I'm not going to pay a premium for Hopkins the way I would pay for O'Dell Beckham. That's because of that. I think it's a hot take. That's a perfectly accurate statement. Take a picture. So by premium, here.

D'Andre Hopkins next year, in my opinion, will be a back of the first. I think he will make it all the way up there. He will not make it on my team then. That's what I mean. So you're going to have to pay a top five for Beckham. I think you'll have to pay a first round or at least the swing pick of the second to get Hopkins on your team.

Yeah, Jason hit everything perfectly on point there. When you're a team that plays... We need to write this down. Well, I made that joke already, so good. We're piling on Spud web here. I guess I got to tell that story. They don't know the Spud Web story. So we were gone last week. We were at the Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference in Dallas, Texas. Got to listen to Mark Cuban, got to talk to a lot of the people from the industry. And on the way back, now we left Mike there.

Because Mike... Abandoned me. Yeah, we left Mike in Dallas. He's on the no-fly list. Right. We didn't want to go through security with him because they'd make him check his beard. And so Jason and I were on the plane and there was one other spot next to us and we're on the back of the plane. And we got a guy whose name, he shared the same last name as me.

Ironically, which is weird because I thought for sure his name was Mr. Texas. No, yeah, Mr. Texas would be more accurate. This is a gentleman who we enjoyed... Nice to meet you. We enjoyed speaking with very, very much. This is great. But the highlight of this, and by the way, and when we say Mr. Texas is because, I mean, he collects guns, coins, and Texas flags, he lived on 100 acres, he's got five shooting ranges, he's buying a cannon. This was Texas, man. This was Texas. This is true.

But the best part was that his nickname for Jason, for no good reason, really, was Spud Webb. Yeah, because I was so short, he kept saying. I'm so short that I'm Spud Web. I'm pretty confident. How tall are you? You're like, I'm 511 and a half. You've always said the half. So you're just under average height. I'm confident I was actually taller than this gentleman. But I was Spudweb and Andy was. You were Spudweb.

Spudweb was 5-7, just so you remember, if you remember Spudweb. Oh, I remember. My nickname was, he called me Squantomontomontobon. Yeah. And he offered free of charge, if Mike ever wanted to come by, he would shave Mike's beard right off his face. Yep. So anyway, that's why. So he watched my beard and you are Squanto Montoban. Yes. And all of this, just because I called Jason Spudweb in the middle of the show. Because I'm keeping that thing alive, my friend.

You're so short. Now, Spide Web, just to, here, listen to this. Spide Web was somebody who overcame the obstacle of height. That's true. Doug Baldwin has overcome the obstacle of not being a prototypical wide receiver one. Thank you, Mike. That's a transition. Number seven. That's professional. Number seven wide receiver on the year is a man named Doug Baldwin. Doug Baldwin.

So we got to project him forward. I think I know Mike... He's the same height as you, Jason. There you go. We'll call him Spudwell, too. He's very short. So I know Mike and I are in an agreement. I don't remember your take on Jimmy Graham, Andy. Mike and I both do not think Jimmy Graham's going to be able to come back and be anything relevant this next year in a...