Fantasy Football Podcast 2016 - 10 Offseason Tips & Tricks

That's right. That's fair. He had a very good year last year, broke down, got hurt. David Johnson came on the scene, exploded, and Kime, the GM of Arizona has come out and said David Johnson's the foundational back. We expect a lot of work. But Chris Johnson could get, you know, if the Cardinals are ahead in the, you know, there were a 13 and 3 team last year. If they're ahead in a lot of games, Chris Johnson could mop up and be a really good handcuff. Or you're like halfway through the year, Johnson goes down, or David Johnson goes down. Chris Johnson has fresh legs. He's...

Could carry your fantasy team. All right. Roger Goodell said that they will be looking at the Josh Gordon reinstatement in the next week or so. So good news for you making decisions out there. It seems like it's going to be a more near-term decision than a long-term one. We just talked about this on Tuesday. Also, the Rams are next year's hard knocks team. Oh, yay! Now, they have moved.

to Los Angeles. And obviously this is Hollywood, baby. This is, apparently they have updated the intro music to hard knocks now that they've added. The epic, the super epic hard knocks. It can get better? It can get better. And with, you know, the Rams, obviously being the focus, Jeff Fisher, they've released the music. Did you hear this yet? No, we have a clip? I want to hear it. It's, yeah, it's pretty extensive. It's amazing. Here it is. Okay. Come on.

You build me up. Jeff Fisher and the Rams will be the focus of the new series Hard Knocks in eight and eight season. We will get to watch a lot of behind the scenes footage of punting practice, formations of taking that long snap. It's going to be very fascinating. Now, we decided, right, that we can.

We can kind of attack the Rams a little bit more viscerally today because we decided they don't have any fans. Well, they don't have an established fan base now. They're in transition. They're on the buses, and so you can mock them a little bit on the ride. I got to think people in St. Louis are unhappy, and they would be mocking them. And Los Angeles hasn't really come all the way on board yet. So, yeah, mock away. I have to feel that the majority of the Rams fans would actually side with us on the coaching decisions made by Jeff Fisher.

Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. I would agree. And it'll be interesting. Hard knocks is good no matter what team's on there. It's a great show. Keena versus Foulds, get ready. You'll get to see Todd Gurley, and that is exciting. Yeah, that's a good point. All right, what else do we have here? Jordan Matthews, they say they're going to try him out at outside receiver to see how he looks. Honestly, is it the devil you know or the devil you don't know? Like, what do you want from Jordan Matthews here? Like,

If you move him to the outside, you lose the stability of what you know he could do on the inside. Maybe he gets less overall receptions. He's less of a PPR value, makes more big plays. If they kept him outside, it worries me a little bit. Because he hasn't done it in the NFL. Sure, but let me ask you this. In general, just positionally, do you look in fantasy football to have the outside wide receiver or the slot guy? Yeah, it's very hard to put up a fantasy season in the slot. Exactly. And so now you've got to keep in mind, he's 6'3.

6-3. I mean, that's 6-2 is a great height. That's Des Bryant. You know, that's a good outside wide receiver. I love the fact that they're going to be trying him out on the outside and that they're doing it early in the OTAs. And if it doesn't work out, they'll put him back in the slot. They're just going to test this and see. And I think that's where he can provide more value. All right. There have been a number of rule changes. We're going to actually discuss those in the show after the show on YouTube. But there are two specific rule changes we want to bring up on the news.

today that will have an impact on fantasy players in some capacity. The first one is that touchbacks have been moved to the 25-yard line, making it even less tempting to take it out of the end zone. So who do we have to say goodbye to in fantasy football relevance? There's a few types of players, but the one who comes to my mind is Cordarelle Patterson, you better work on those receiving route running skills, my friend.

It's just another step for safety, I guess. And it's going to limit guys. Like if Amir Abdul is not really a running back that can deliver, like if he doesn't early in the season, his value is on returns. His value is on the return game. So those returns are just going to statistically go down in quantity. Now punt returns are still alive. They let you do those? Yeah, Jeff Fisher will ensure that there are plenty of plenty of people to return puns.

I have a feeling JJ Zacharias will love this show. His arsenal of gifts for Jeff Fisher is going to go through the roof. He has tweeted so many Jeff Fisher gifts that the first thing I think of when they were named on Hard Knocks was him. Oh, like, what is the late round QB saying? Yeah, is how happy he must be. It's like his birthday.

All right. What else do we got here? The IR designation to return. What is the story with that, Jason? So that has changed a little bit this year. The way that it's worked is you can always put a player when they're injured on IR and they're done for the year. One per year. You can put one on IR designated to return. Well, it's still the same that way. But what used to happen is you had to, when you place them there.

You have to say, okay, I am putting them on IR designated to return. So we know right when they're injured, okay, they can come back in eight weeks. They're not gone. Which for fantasy owners means maybe we invest a late pick in them. You stash them on your bench. Yeah, you keep them on your IR. Now you do not have to designate that when you put them on. It can be six weeks into the season. Yeah. Well, when they get injured, okay, I'm just putting them on an IR and five weeks later, oh, they're healing a little bit.

I'm going to move them to the designated to return. But they still only get one. So we'll just track that as the season goes on. When a player gets injured, we need to know they can always come back so long as the, I mean, obviously not from devastating injury, but it's something to keep in mind for next year. All right. Well, do we want to get into the tips?

Sure. We're ready to go. So what we want to do is equip you on how to think about your fantasy team in the offseason. So we've assembled a number of tips and tricks for this off season, things we want you to be thinking about, things that are important. And Mike's going to kick it off with the first one. Number one, we need to reflect and react to last year, the highs, the lows. Even if you won your title, you always need to be looking back, say, what went right.

What went wrong? And something that I wanted to, I specifically wanted to touch on was the guys who, you know they won't be ready for the start of the season. I'm talking specifically about a guy like- So is this something that you learned last year? So you're giving an example of that? Yeah, it's not so much that I learned it. But last year there was the combo for Todd Gurley where I believe in the talent. However, I let the missing of games combined with, uh,

my doubt in the power of the Rams offense. I let that cloud my judgment of when I should jump in on Gurley, where it was like a fourth, fifth round, and I was like, ah, maybe six. So I didn't get any shares of Todd Gurley. So I let the combo of those things clouded my judgment over the talent and the opportunity that Todd Gurley had. Whereas before, let's say, let's go a couple years back, when I knew Josh Gordon was going to miss two games, I drafted him everywhere.

But this year I let the combination of missing games combined with something else, get in the way of something that I knew it shouldn't, but I let it freak me out just too much and affect my judgment. That's fair. If you ask me what one of the things I look back on last year, the good and bad, because that's what we're talking about, kind of reflecting on the season, I look at guys like Danny Woodhead and Gio Bernard, and they weren't all year round a guy you could lean on.

but they carried teams for significant parts of the season. And for me, you know, you talk about tendencies. I have a hard time investing draft picks into those players because I want mentally, I'm kind of always investing into ones, into ones, or guys that I think will become that and then be a long-term solution, less about the Bilal Pal's, the Danny Woodheads, the Geo Bernards, those guys that actually carried teams for many weeks. I mean, Bilal-Pal carried a team in our league.

For like four weeks at the end of the season, but you don't mentally put them in that place. So when you look back at the good and battle last year, sure, when the season ended, I wanted to stick my head in the sand and pretend that Jason didn't win the championship.

But eventually you have to pull it out and reflect and react on the season. And so that's the first thing that we recommend. And Jason, do you have anything that comes to mind that you saw last year? The thing that comes to mind for me is just the domination of the wide receivers. The top wide receivers were so valuable last year. And so coming forward this year, I'm looking to try to get on my teams two of your top wide receivers and try to edge them out that way. That just seems like something that's really going to work this coming year.

All right, so the second tip and trick, tips and tricks. Tip, yeah, I don't know. I pluralized the wrong word. All right, the second tip is what? The second tip is mock it up, baby. This is the time to do, to mock drafts, mock it up. Mock, mock, mock. You sound like a chicken right now. Mock, yeah. Not mock it up like we mocked up the Rams.

No, but do mock drafts. This is the time of year. Now, I think everybody does, or hopefully everybody that's listening to this show, does mock drafts in a couple months when it's getting close to the season, and they'll hop on fantasydraftwizard.com. That's what we use. It's the easiest tool. It's just so quick. That's what we do for our live mock draft shows. Yeah, every mock draft I do is on fantasy draft wizard.com.

But, you know, that's something that you should be doing now. Just when you're bored, when you're home, when you've watched the last episode of Better Call Saul and you got nothing to do.

I mean, show hole. It takes, yeah, it takes, you know, a couple of minutes to do. But what it allows you to do in the off-season portion is you get to see the changes and the trends of different guys after free agent signings and after, you know, doing it now and then doing it again after the NFL rookie draft. That's going to be a big indicator of who is it that whose value is being too hurt.

or overestimated because of something in the draft. That's what I really like to, you know, you can't do that later. It's just impossible. You either are mock drafting now and then you see the trains later or you're hopping in later and you're stuck there. And it doesn't take a lot of time investment to help you get a feel for the ADP of players over the offseason. It's not like you have to go on and do 20 moks a day. Just do a couple here and there.

and you'll get a feel for how players are trending and moving. There are always movers and shakers in the offseason. You saw Kelsey last offseason, start rising up the boards. Different players that you don't really recognize maybe they're getting hyped, overvalued, things like that. So I think that's a great offseason tip. Make sure you're doing mock drafts periodically. Like we said, we use fantasy draftwizard.com, but there are a number of places you can mock draft. All right, number three, the third tip here that I have is get your house in order.

And what I'm talking about and who I'm talking to are the league commissioners, okay? This is the time you want to sort through.

The minutia of the rules and the things that you don't want to deal with in week three, when everyone's confused at how you handle this type of a trade or this type of a circumstance with free agency. Or when you say to yourself, boy, I really, really wish we had a fab system instead of a regular waiver system. Let's vote in week three. No, no. Don't do that. Get your house in order now. And that may also mean your participants in that league.

If you had guys that were not participating in the second half of the year or a detriment to your league, sort that out now, get people lined up now. Maybe you need a league constitution, something simple that just puts things on paper and lets everyone look to a standard of truth for your league. So you don't have to be, you know, everybody wants to pick on commissioners for power trips. That's what happens.