The TRUTH About Fantasy QBs in 2020, Part 1 - Fantasy Football Podcast for 1/19

Mike, you can send it back and you get a refund. That's a fair thing to do. That's a fair thing to do. I think Houston wants a refund. Fight camp is a new way to work out at a home, make a change, and join the community that teaches you the art of boxing while following the most intense workouts that are as quick as 15 minutes. To get free shipping on Fightcamp, just go to join Fightcamp.com.com slash footballers. That's join Fightcamp.com slash footballers.

You want answers? I think I'm entitled. You want answers. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. All right, we're into the truth at the quarterback position for 2020. Always fun to talk quarterbacks because it is, you know, on this show for the last five years, we have been proponents of the late round quarterback solution for your fantasy team. You only start one of them.

And every year we like to bring up one specific stat. Now, Mike, I'm sorry to tell you. I know. It wasn't 40 plus this year. It was only 38 different quarterbacks who registered a top 12 performance on the year. There's still a lot. That is more than the teams in the NFL. And the truth is this year, other than DAC and Jimmy G.

Quarterbacks stayed relatively healthy this year. So it was down a couple. But generally you have around 40 different quarterbacks who register top 12 performances making streaming the position viable, right? That is correct. And it's hard to repeat at quarterback. It's hard. I mean, like Lamar Jackson, you know, I mean, Patrick Mahles was still very good, but you had to draft him.

in the second round and he you had to draft him like as the first the second quarterback he did not finish there that's what we talk about that margin for error of draft price and guys who go in in the those later rounds those have been the ones who have been have been breaking out and coming through for for top finishes yeah and the teams that keep winning with the top quarterbacks are the ones that get them late i mean uh this year number one is josh allen we'll talk about him momentarily

He was a later round pick. He was. He was the quarterback 11 off the board in the late 8th round. This is the same refrain each and every year. To the point where you're almost, you know, we can recognize which quarterbacks in those 7th, 9th, 10th rounds had the possibility of being that breakout candidate. That's what we put into the ultimate draft kit. Those are the names that we want to bring your attention to because if you get the guy that finishes 1, 2, or 3 and you get them in the 8th, 9th, 10th round,

You have a value. If you draft the quarterback in the second or third round, you have to get a top performance from him just to break even. Yes. And I'll let you in on a little secret. It's much better if they are running quarterbacks. Some pretty crazy stats about the running quarterback touchdown totals this year. 20 different quarterbacks had three or more rushing touchdowns this year. There were only 12 of them last year. It's almost double. All right.

and nine different quarterbacks had five or more rushing touchdowns. And there were only three with four or more last year. So this is something that is coming up and is very important for some kind of baseline at the quarterback position. Yep. All right. Josh Allen, when we evaluate truth data, what we're doing is we are. Is there an excellent drop there was? I heard it sneak through. All right. Josh Stallion, Josh Allen.

was the number one quarterback. We are looking at the numbers according to four point per passing touchdowns. That's the truth that we're looking at. We also categorize each of their games into three categories, either great games, which is more than 26 fantasy points, good games are more than 20, and we're classifying a bus game at the position as one in which they score fewer than 15 fantasy points. And we do not count missed games against their consistency score. So...

Josh Allen finished first at the position. His consistency rank was fourth. He finished with 4,500 yards, 37 passing touchdowns, another eight rushing touchdowns. Like I said, he was drafted as the QB11 in the eighth round. Josh Allen ended up with 50% great games, 56% good, and one bust game, which I'm going to actually let him off the hook of.

because that was week 17, in which case. That was his bust? That was his bust. That's the only one that I'm seeing. I thought it was the New England game. Oh, you are right. I apologize. That New England game was the bus game during the year. We probably didn't hold the week 17 against him. Well, that's what the season of Josh Allen was very interesting because he opened up absolutely nuclear, him and Kyler Murray, where, so Josh Allen, QB3, 3, 3, 6.

And then you had this stretch where he wasn't bad, but it looked like, okay, that we returned to Earth. We had a little bit of a mirage there. They're going to not use Josh Allen the same way. But then he bounced back in a huge way and was a league winning type of quarterback. So hopefully Josh Allen was, Josh Allen and Kyler Murray were the two guys that we really pushed on this show over the offseason. Thankfully worked out.

So if you held on to Josh Allen and weathered that storm of mediocrity there in the middle, you were rewarded handsomely. Yeah, this was just a mind-blowing year for him. He'll probably finish runner up in the MVP race behind Aaron Rogers, which is incredible for a guy that, you know, I think he, his 45 total touchdowns, that was 16 more than his previous career. Hi. The insane thing is the completion percentage.

that we've talked about before, but Josh Allen. It's not teachable. It's not teachable. I still, I still will stand by that and I will bet on that every single time. Not everyone has the Josh Allen turnaround. In fact, very few do because he was 32nd in completion percentage. Thirty-second. Yeah. Yeah. Second best. Thirty-second and 23rd in passing touchdowns. And he didn't just take a jump.

He took the elevator. He took the Willie Wonka great glass elevator and then busted out of the building and finished fourth in completion. And fifth and passing touchdowns. He went from the worst in the league to elite. And he looked apart consistently. He looked amazing. And, you know, Stefan Diggs plays a huge part in that transformation. But it was a career from Cole Beasley. John Brown.

And this was an offense. We said it before they didn't run the football. This was all Josh Allen. This was just stand back there and make accurate pass after accurate pass. He did it. And they're on the cusp of a Super Bowl birth because of it. Now, from a fantasy perspective, he is kind of the crim della crim of what you would have hoped for in a quarterback. He finished first of the position, fourth in consistency. So like you said, if you survived weeks five through eight, which were mediocre, if you endured.

He probably won you a title or got you to a championship kick. And he did it all from the eighth round. He's going to be very interesting because the rule of thumb, usually when you're playing fantasy, if you've played for any period of time, when a guy finishes it as the number one quarterback, they're just automatically drafted in the second round, maybe in the third round. Do you feel like right now Josh Allen will be the number one drafted quarterback? No chance.

All right, so you still think like Mahomes will go in front of Josh Allen? I don't think that Mahomes will go ahead of Allen. I think that Kyler will go ahead of Allen. Okay. I think that will probably, you could have two more ahead of Josh Allen. I would say you could have Lamar will be the interesting one. You could have Lamar go ahead of him. I think people are mad. Burnt, they're burnt. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. I guess I don't feel like he has vaulted himself up into that position where he's going to do exactly what you said, Mike. Well, if Josh Allen is around in that five, six round area, oh, baby. I'll probably be interested and I'm not normally interested in QBs in that range. All right. The number two quarterback this year, four point scoring was Kyla Murray. He was the.

Number one over the first half in terms of the consistency. It dropped off over the second half significantly. We'll talk about why. His consistency rank on the year was three, however. He was a little bit more consistent than Josh Allen. The first 11 weeks of the season were as good as it gets. He had 69% of his games considered good games, 50% great, and 13% were bus games, both of those happening.

uh over the back at the worst possible time at the worst possible time in your fantasy playoffs and and that was you know you're kind of you're in a tough situation there as a fantasy player because somebody that was that dominant for the course of the year he ended up with just under 4,000 yards 26 passing touchdowns 800 plus rushing yards and 11 rushing touchdowns uh you're kind of pot committed you know are you going to lose

I had to do the playoff Tom Brady, Josh Allen dance. You would have had to make a pretty bold call to put in Orion Tamahill, to put in Tom Brady and play them over who got you there in Kyla Murray. He was hurt over the back part of the year. That would have been the reason to do it, is limitations on the ground, which really provide his baseline. It's tough. He was the quarterback won for the first 16 weeks of the year, and Josh Allen wrestled it away.

at the very, very end. What's your kind of takeaway with the truth of Kyla Murray this year? I believe that Kyler Murray is an elite level athlete. He is a special player, but I am concerned that if they don't get a different offensive mind in there to...

mold structure, it helps structure and mold Kyler and kind of raise that, uh, uh, the base level football IQ, which is, I mean, I'm not trying to insult the man, but like, there's too many times where Kyler Murray in his second year made plays that cost his team and were just like really bad decisions. I mean, like I'll point out, um, there was a game where they, I think they were going to drive to tie it. I can't remember which division, uh, team.

the Cardinals were playing but a play went wrong it was going to be a screen out to the tight end Dan Arnold Dan Arnold did something wrong Kyler got mad and then just threw one of the worst intentional grounding throws you have seen which sent him into the end zone and then the Cardinals gave up a safety and you just you see too many plays of Kyler making like not just a mistake but an egregious football mistake

It's a difficult situation because obviously for fantasy-wise he produced, the team was one of the better scoring offenses overall. And I think one thing that comes to mind when you bring that up, Mike, is he's being asked to run an offense by Cliff Kingsbury, who is a new head coach, who wants to run more plays than anybody in football. And when you talk about the game slowing down for you and yet your initial rookie and sophomore year.

offense is fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. I wonder if it's harder to process some of the nuance to the position and the time management and the clock management. And, you know, I don't know how much control Kyler gets at the line of scrimmage compared to other quarterbacks where Cliff is, you know, he's looking to Cliff all the time. So that might be holding him back a little bit. For fantasy purposes, he provides such a great baseline with the rushing totals 819 yards before Lamar Jackson came along.

That would have been just an otherworldly number we'd be talking about. You know, 11 rushing touchdowns is pretty incredible. Well, and you see that he has the second most total offensive yards ever through two seasons behind, only Cam Newton. Yeah, and that was kind of the recipe numbers-wise when Kyler came into the league, that rookie year Cam Newton. But Kyler's obviously a little guy and still finds his way into the end zone. Right. Because he shimmies and shakes, Mike. He does.

He's like playing my son in Madden. He can make grown men look foolish. Yes, he can't. Now, I am proud to say Josh Allen and Kyler Murray, the number one and number two on this list, were the two breakout picks from the ultimate draft kit back in June. So I'm going to brag about that because I like delivering for the Foot Clan. And when the number one and number two who were drafted in the late fifth and late eighth round end up the number one and two at the position,

I'm happy about it. That's all I'm going to say. And Jason's not here, but he would be way overdoing the bragging about that. All right. Here's the guy that had a ton of question marks coming into the year. The number one most consistent quarterback in football. Number three in overall scoring. Aaron Rogers, the MVP. Just looking like swag daddy on that field.