Starts of the Week + Week 16 Breakdown, Touchdowns or Revolt! - Fantasy Football Podcast for 12/23

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Message and data rates may apply see terms for details. To the fantasy footballers podcast with your host, Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Oh, welcome in. Oh, it's football time again. It never ends. It will never stop. No, this is week 16. We're looking forward to this. Week 15 is behind us, Mike. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you, God. Week 15 is gone. It's championship time. Semi-chance. Yeah, I may have been on the path. Yeah, okay, yes, yes, yes, yes. On the pathway. And my path goes directly through Al Borland Avenue. Oh. I've got to go right through, and that starts tonight. All and I. Streets close, buddy. All right. You're going to need a detour.

I don't have a choice. It would have been more fun to match you in the finals, but more painful for you at that point. No, it'll be a good time. For those of you that survived, and for a lot of you, that was, like, we did the Spotify Green Room show yesterday, and I asked the question, I was like, give me a thumbs up if you made it through. And there were a lot of, like, you know, like three thumbs up, one thumbs down, or two thumbs up, one thumb down, because you play in more than one league. And that was your solace. You survived some.

of your leagues. Yeah, hopefully you got some playoffs going. We are joined once again by a cardboard bear extraordinaire, Jay Gris. This is playoff time for Jay Gris right now. Yes, he's got a lot of information about Chicago that he wants to share with everybody. And I think we've learned one thing, because Jason is, if you've been following the show all week, his house was absolutely bombarded with the flu. Yeah, not good. So we can say this about Jason. He's not Michael Jordan.

Oh, okay. He did. No flu game for Jason? No. No, his flu game was sleeping it off. Yeah, we were like, are you alive still? Lazy. Are you alive? I mean, we were talking in Slack. We're trying to get some info from him and crickets yesterday. But he is doing better. And I heard that the kids, the kids are doing better. Which is, that's good news as the big holiday approaches. Well, look, Scotty Pippen's going to carry. And that's what, uh,

The Big Bear is, the Scotty Pippin of the show. So we have a lot to talk about today news, which is, I mean, there's a lot of big players in COVID speculation, and we need to figure out who's going to be in there. We have the fantasy forecast. We'll get through some of the matchups, starts of the week, and the boom, boom kicker. We're going to let Al deliver the boom, boom kicker this week. Oh, my. And that's a, that's a prestigious honor. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's something you want to tell your parents about.

It is. I mean, this is the segment that I certainly look forward to all week long. So we do have Never Not Working coming up as well. I want to let people know. I know that the most successful shirt we've ever sold is the Muth is Luth. Well, it's because he's Luth. If you go to shopballers.com, we have put up the 2021 Foot Clan title gear. So you can get the championship shirts and things like that. The mug. The mug.

So in the coming weeks, you'll need it. And we're going to get a nickname shirt up here soon as well. So we do a nickname shirt every single year. And that's all at shopballers.com. Let's get it going. Never not working. Presented by Head and Shoulders, Scamp Shield Technology, available at Walmart. We thought about working in a not working segment, brought to you by Jason Moore. Yes, always not working. But he didn't pay for it, so we didn't do that segment.

No, I can tell you this, though. Seriously, like Jason, it's killing him that he's not here. Yes, it is. He's literally like, he thinks. He calls us crying all the time. I know. He's like. Guys, I'm so sorry. He did call into the green room show yesterday. He sounded awful. Sounded like that voice. Yeah. All right. Never not working this week. Because we try to bring you some.

information that is outside the norm in fantasy football so that you can get an advantage over your league mates you know this year has been a roller coaster that is for sure there are a lot of people that are just you certainly cannot rest you haven't been able to just lock a lineup in or a roller coaster is not a good place for a nap no and there's no way to do that and i think the two big things that and i'll bring you some information on some trends that are happening here

with teams in the NFL and with fantasy this year. But the headline to me is no autopilot and that pride will kill you in fantasy because you have to isolate each week. We were talking about this on the green room show yesterday and it does you no good.

to just lock a player into your lineup based on what they did in week four or week five or what you paid for them in a trade. Like I brought this up with Al's team. You know, he made some great trades in the middle of the year to pick up certain players. But this week, it exists on its own. And so you can kind of kill yourself by just locking players in saying, man, I paid too much for a trade in this. I can't play the waiver wire guy. We're calling this the Tyler Huntley dilemma. Right, right. The Amman-Ross Saint.

brown situation so oh good alliteration so you know fantasy football is a game about constantly adjusting week to week no cruise control here's something very interesting because we've brought up recently like there have been playoff heroes in the past and blake boardles was one of them on a really bad jacksonville team where you could san francisco team what do you mean that was the year that was when blake was on the 49ers what

Yeah. Am I remembering that way wrong? What are you even talking about? Blake Bortles. I'm trying to remember. Maybe, oh, there was the matchup. The matchup was against San Francisco. That makes a lot more sense. Yeah, I know. The brain, uh... That's all right. Week 16. No, I'm glad you cut me off with inaccurate information. But Blake Bortles was a player that, like, there were a number of teams over the years where you could count on garbage time, for example.

But something really strange has happened over the course of the year. And you've felt that when you're watching games, but through the first eight games of the year, teams average 35 pass attempts per game. And the pass rate overall has plummeted since Halloween. I don't know what happened if people got spooked on Halloween, but it's dropped over four pass attempts per game since then. The defensive scoring is up through the board. You know, Kansas City's improved. Dallas has been great. Washington has improved from their first half of the season.

And listen to this. In the second half of the year, here's the touchdown rate over the last eight games. Only six quarterbacks are averaging two or more passing touchdowns per game. That's insane. That's boring. That's generally been considered the floor for fantasy, the old 202. Yep. And there's only six quarterbacks that have even averaged that floor. So the bottom has dropped out for a lot of these elite quarterbacks week to week. Mahomes, DAC, the struggles of Dak, Kyler, Lamar.

I was looking at fantasy points this morning. Like that number one quarterback spot is, it's like highly competitive. It's up for grabs. Yeah, Alan is technically number one right now, but he's eight, he's six points up on Herbert. He's eight points up on Brady. And Brady just put up a seven point week. So this was Brady's for the taking. And the other thing that's been very interesting is that you can't really rely on underdogs delivering fantasy points.

in garbage time because this year teams like Jacksonville, Houston, the Jets, the Giants, Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, they are routinely not hitting their implied team totals. So even when, you know, the sports books come out and say, well, think that they're going to get to this point, right? They're 10.5. 11.5.1.1. Underdogs. They're not even doing it. Trevor Lawrence, two passing touchdown since Halloween. Oh, my gosh. So you look at these game scripts with the historical situation saying, well,

We're just going to lean into the fact that they're going to be down. They're going to be passing. It's a game script that I'm going to love. And they're not hitting that point at all. And so I think the adjustment here or the mindset change. And again, you may be, this may be something to fuel you moving forward into 2022 is that efficiency can be better than pure volume. And you've seen it with players like Joe Burrow and Jimmy Garoppolo who have very low. Those are both run identity teams.

And yet both of those quarterbacks, you know, Debo and Kiddle lead their positions at yards per route run. So you're getting the value of those completions is high. And Burrow, you know, every week it's a Higgins or a Boyd or a chase week. And it all goes to Burrough. So you're looking at efficiency metrics. You're not just looking at passing volume and passing attempts. So it's been interesting. It's been different. But.

At least since Halloween, chasing points on bad teams has not been a good thing. So I thought that was interesting. Yeah, it is. And, you know, it's not been great for watching football because some of these games have been stinkers. A lot. Do you enjoy a nice 9-0 game by the Saints and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? I like it as long as I feel like, you know, the teams are playing well. And it's just it's not that offenses are.

are do-do trash right now. It's that, oh, the defense is, everyone is up for this game, and it's just not working out for points. It reminds me of, or I'm thinking back, remember the Blake Bortles on the 49ers, so got it, got it. Which I did look it up, and that was, it was week 16 against the 49ers. Okay, at least you were kind of right. Yes, like 20%, I'll give myself on that one. At the beginning of the year, we got spoiled by all those incredibly awesome primetime games, and then it set us up for disappointment.