Fantasy Football Podcast 2015 - Draft Day Tips & Tricks, Fantasy News, Mailbag

is vastly different when you compare running backs to wide receivers. You've got to get them in the draft. You know, we talked about Leonard Hankerson last week and the value that he provides, and maybe you can get him late because he's free. But then it dawned to me, like, I probably wouldn't draft him right now. But he's just one of many people in his tier that even after the draft is done and all your flyers on all rosters are filled out, you still got quality guys on the waiver. You are not going to have that with running back. So at the draft, make sure you stock up on them. And I've heard the...

the reasoning of, well, you know, backup running backs are easy to find in the waiver because if a guy gets hurt, you know exactly who to target. You and 11 other people in your league know exactly who to target. Have them on your bench before the injury happens. Yeah, that's a very good rule, and obviously it changes if your league format is vastly different. But at the same time, the position scarcity doesn't really change for running back. So they are a valuable commodity, and as we saw this week, wide receivers get hurt too.

Yeah. So. People have feelings. So running back to get hurt and people think that they're the only ones, but no. They're all humans. So Eye of the Tiger here. What is the Eye of the Tiger? No, no, no. Is that Katie? That was Katie Perry. That was the Katie Perry version of Eye of Tiger. I do have a daughter. And factual information in that music video, there is a tiger named Kitty Perry. Kitty Perry. That's a pro tip. Moving along. Pro tip.

Here's how you draft. Gross. Here is how you draft with the eye of the tiger. You look at other rosters in your league while you're drafting. If you're using the software, before you make your pick, go and click, you know, if you're in an online one, click through the other rosters and be like, especially when it comes to the single-digit roster positions, like tight-ins, quarterbacks. Even, you know, I guess.

defenses are going to be at the very draft. Well, what I often do to make it easy and quick, because sometimes people can't really monitor every team, obviously. That's a hard thing to do during the draft while paying attention to your list. But like Jason said, I'll just have team names down, and I'll have QBs written down, and tight ends written down, and I'll just cross them off. One, two, three. And then what happens is if you're like us and you wait for tight ends and quarterbacks, and you know the guy's drafting behind you, you can see, oh.

Two teams left don't have a starting quarterback. One team left doesn't have a starting quarterback, which lets you decide which round to draft those guys a little bit easier. And it also allows you to play probability of, say, you're at pick, I don't know, you're towards the edge of a draft, you know, and there's two guys you like. You like a running back and a wide receiver. Take a look.

at what teams are rostering and knowing that maybe there's going to be a little mini run on wide receivers here. So there's a higher probability that the running back I like makes it back. Well, and it's a lot easier when you're at a specific spot in the draft where you only need to look at the two teams between this pick and the next pick. So look at those two teams, and your draft will work out a lot better. All right, I want to take a break. We've got three more that we want to share with you, but I want to talk a little bit about tops.

Huddle. Topps Huddle. Now, I grew up... The app. The app. Yeah. Now, I grew up collecting cards. Who did it? Like a crazy person. Who didn't? Basically, all my best memories for, like, Christmas morning, when I woke up and got a box of sports cards and got to open those beautiful packs and see what insert cards they got and all that stuff. That was, like, one of my best memories as a kid. I'm completely with you. And now, Topps has brought...

that hobby to the digital world with their app, Topps Huddle. Exactly. The magic of collecting the cards. Now, Huddle, they feature officially licensed NFLPA. You think Aaron Rogers has a dreamy face? Wait till you see him on that iPhone screen. My goodness. Retina. He is gleaming at you in high definition. But it's, you get to open the packs and they've created a very...

satisfying experience when you open those packs and they have, you get the rare cards, you get that rare Andrew Luck card and your phone shakes. That J.J. Watt in there? Yeah, and your, your heart quakes. And it's, it's really an exciting experience when you get, when you open up the packs. And the cool thing about Topps Huddle is that it's not just opening and collecting and trading.

Yeah, and trading. But in addition to all of that, they actually have made it into a fantasy football game. So you can, during the real games, when the games are going, the cards you have, you can play them and earn points based on how the players perform every game day. So you're actually getting a little bit of fantasy football with your card collection. It's kind of taking card collection to next level. I'm looking forward to the week one. And basically, if you like collecting cards, you want to check this out. You have to check it out. Topps, digital. They've opened.

300 million packs have been opened with that Topps Huddle app since they started in 2012. And so basically a pack a second gets opened on there. So it's really satisfying, really fun. You can download it for free right now in the app store and you get 10 free packs. Yeah. Or Google Play as well. Yeah, Google Play as well. I am super stoked to play my teams to play against my friends and some digital card trading magic. The thing I'm also very excited for, live.

NFL. Is that coming? Real football. And I'm not talking just the television, which is a great experience. Live. There's not much like going to an actual NFL game. No doubt about it. And so we want to tell you about the Seat Geek app. It is the single best app to get the most amazing deal on football tickets. So a lot of the times you want to bring the family, you want to bring some friends. You know, it costs a pretty penny to go to a football game these days. But if you check out the Seat Geek app, you can find the absolute best.

deal. And it's an awesome app. You can go on there, search for your favorite team, order tickets at the very best price, and we're giving you some free money today. Yeah, they have really unique things that are exclusive to the seat geek app. One of the things that Andy's kind of talking about is...

You know when you go flying and you've got to search all those different sites for the best airplane rate? This is what Seat Geek does. They actually take from hundreds of different other places where people are selling their tickets, and it's like a one-stop shop. That's one of the cool, exclusive things of Seat Geek. So if you want the best deal on tickets, use Seatgeek. Also, they make it really easy in the app. There's a deal score thing where when you're looking in the app, there's a color code to what the best deal is. So it's like, oh.

This is the best deal, and you just look at the big green circle or whatever, and it's like, and you look and you compare those, and it's so quick and easy to get it. And you can do that through the app itself, download the app or do it online. And here's what you do. You download the free Seat Geek app. You enter the promo code footballers. Footballers in the Seat Geek app, they give you 20 bucks, man. 20 bucks to use on some tickets. Yeah, I love it, because it'll mean going to more than just one or two games this year.

It'll mean going to a bunch of them. So check that out. The Seatgeek app. Let's get back into some of these draft day tips. So the next one here is don't forget about me. I was, I wanted to sing again. Go ahead. Don't you. Yeah, that's what I thought. Talking about me. All right. So, and so this one comes with the warning. When we say, don't forget about me, we're talking kickers and defenses.

I'm not saying... First round, baby. I'm not saying, go Oakland Raiders, selecting Janikowski in the first round. Wait for the second for him. You're still looking the last two rounds of the draft, but have an eye on a group of teams that have a great week one matchup. Off the top of my head, I know the Jets have a great matchup. The Bengals, even though they looked a little rough, they played the Raiders who... Oh, yeah.

These are good matchups. You don't need a top tier defense right out of the gate. You can get, just worry about the week one matchup. Check this out. We actually did the work for you. We've got an article we're posting on the site today that has the week one matchups for the best defense week one matchups for you to pay attention to. So this is kind of the key. You know, people wonder. Someone asked me the other day, like how much does strength of schedule matter right now? Yeah, we actually get asked about that a lot. Do you assemble your team based on strength of schedule in the playoffs right now? And I said no.

because you don't actually know what the strength of schedule is going to be like. It looks fine on paper, but teams, I mean, there's a high turnover of good and bad teams every year in the NFL. But...

Week 1, strength of schedule with defenses is something you can pay a little bit of attention to. For sure. Week 1 and defenses matters. That's probably the more important thing than getting the best defense is getting a defense that, I mean, we're going to stream the position here at the fantasy footballers. If you listen through the year, you're going to get the advice as to which defenses to pick up, so start with one good. And also, when it comes to auction drafts, auction drafts, people forget that you can nominate a kicker.

or a defense, nominate Seattle early so that people overspend for a defense. You know, we're so used to pushing them to the end. But, you know, sometimes if you actually want one of those yourself and you nominate them for like a buck. A buck. Nobody wants to bid more. And so you just get the best guy because you were the first one. It's kind of win-win. Yeah. If you nominate them early. And make sure you pay attention to Vegas, too. This is something we've talked about on the show a little bit with some guests.

Look to Vegas. Look at those over-under numbers for defenses. And I have a question for you guys of how do you like to go about getting a kicker? Do you like a kicker on a high-scoring offense, or do you like a kicker on a team that struggles in the red zone? I almost always personally go for the high-profile offense. And I am agreed. Always, always, always. I want the better offense. It seems a lot easier to predict.

a team that averages a lot of points than it is a team that, oh, they're going to struggle in the red zone. But they're going to move to the red zone a lot. But those teams do surface. No, they do. You're right. And those are the kickers that I try and find with years back that up in Seattle. I feel like Baltimore, Justin Tucker, has been a situation like that. Right. I mean, I guess they've been high profile at times. That's also something that matchup streaming can do. Like, I remember the Patriots for a while where...

a quintessential bend don't break defense. And so they would let people move the ball, but they just couldn't punch it in. That's a good way to look at it. Yeah. But Steve Godkowski. Goscowski is the only one that's been predictable for years. All right. Let's talk about avoiding the runs, something that Jason. We should all do. We should always avoid the runs. You know what you need. You need your fantasy emotium. That's right. What is that? Fantasy emodium. So in every draft, we've all been there. It's a new app.

No, I'm just kidding. You find it in the grocery store under the adult diapers section. So how do you avoid the runs? What are we talking about here? You avoid the runs. We've all been in a draft where all of a sudden you don't have a tight end yet and three tight ends just went off the board in front of you and you're going, oh man, do I have to grab one? Is he going to be back? And so you and many other people in your league oftentimes fall into the run. And so you just take them based on fear.

How do you avoid it? Because sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes you have to pay attention and grab them. But how you do a good job is by having your players based in tiers, not just rankings. So you've got your rankings of players, but you need to actually look and say, look, this group of guys, these 10 guys are all about the same to me. They're going to score the same. I might like this guy more than that guy as a tiebreaker. But this group of, you know, 12 through 22, I'm happy with all of these specific guys. And so that means...

When you're in the middle of a run, you go, oh, there's still like seven guys left in here. I can wait till next round, or you can go and see, oh, there are only two guys left that I'm fine with. So I can tight ends. Tighten runs happen every draft. And the truth is, when you tear your guys, you're going to see that almost everybody's the same after the top few. And so don't get fearful in those runs and don't draft a guy just based on other people's drafting. You're playing into their strength. Yes. Tears allows you to draft with.

the strength of Antonio Gates from his suspension, if you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, we know what you're talking about. So, so strength. They're draft PEDs. Strength is, yeah, there you go. Tears is like a drafting PED. That's exactly what I was trying to say. This is how I've been approaching my drafts for years. It has had great success for me. And it, like Jason said, it really lets you know, okay, I don't have to freak out here. I know that people.

Everyone's snaking up a quarterback. Yeah, don't get caught up in it. I can still wait right here. All right. Let's go to the next draft day tip here. Stream it like it's hot. Streaming like it's hot. Everything is a song. You didn't know I had that in there, did you? No, I didn't. I'm so disappointed right now. That was the best we could come up with. Dude, I got to get through these. It sounds like a... Streaming it like it's hot. Streaming it like it's hot. Sounds like an STD. Whoa.