Sleepers + Undrafted Gems, MEGALABOWL! - Fantasy Football Podcast for 8/20

You have an awesome fantasy football league, and that league deserves an awesome fantasy football trophy. Head over to Fantasychamps.com. They have tons of incredible gear and swag to celebrate championships, and even better right now. Buy that league a trophy. Toss in one of those $60 rings with the promo code free ring, and that ring will be free. A trophy in a ring. Can't beat that. Fantasychamps.com. The Fantasy Footballers Podcast with your host. Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Welcome in. Send a little old-timey ganks over there. Yeah, the start was a little weird. Yeah. See? Welcome in one and all. Tuesday, August 20 at the Fantasy Footballers podcast. It is prime time. It is draft season. It is our job to get you ready to go.

for your drafts. And they are coming soon. I am in the middle of two drafts, two slow drafts right now. One for our family league and then one for a point per first down league with some of the industry's best. And that's been a wild draft. It's been fun to finally kind of put your money where your mouth is. Forget. You're on the clock right now? Yeah. I think you've been on the clock in our family league for a little while. I got the notification last night and I meant to talk to the boy because we're co-managing. That's right. That's right. And then it just slipped my mind. We have a fun show for you today. We got sleepers, our individual sleeper picks on today's episode. We've got undrafted gyms on today's episode. We've got news that we've got to talk about. But I guess.

We have a very large, aggressive, prehistoric announcement to make. Go for it. The megalaball! It can only be contained for so long. Yeah, it's like two minutes I had to wait for this. The megalobole. It's a lot like indigestion. Here it is going to give you acid reflux. It is open. The megalobole is the largest. Fantasy Football League in the known universe. It is for the Foot Clan. It is awesome. Listen, we just talked about yesterday that we had all these submissions for our listener league, which is awesome, wonderful. Thank you. And almost all of you did not make it. But if you win the Megalabole, you are in the 2025 listener league. What is the Megalabole? It is our fantasy league. We're all playing in them.

We have the entire Foot Clan playing in these leagues. It is 12 team leagues, our scoring format that we use in the league of record. It is better than ever this year. In the past, I don't know why, probably because I'm stupid. We've had like the top three teams from each one of these leagues make it into the playoffs to the big, you know, journey at the end. And what that does is it's like, I don't know, I feel like early in the season, You kind of know if you're going to be one of those top three. But in all of our leagues we're in, you know, our league of record, the top six make it in. So we're doing that. Half of your leagues getting in the playoffs this year. Last year, for the sake of our commissioners, because, you know, we got 20,000 plus people in these leagues. We didn't have trading. And you want to know what that did? Made people sad. Yeah, it sucked. It's like, we don't want, we want this to be the most fun league.

out there in the world. Trades are back on. The waiver wire is on. This is an awesome regular league, except this is with the Foot Clan. These are with your people, with our people. People have made lifelong friends in the Megalibol and this year, in addition to making the winner receive. an automatic entry into next year's listener league. We are giving away a UDK for life to the winner two. If you win the Megalibol, you're just stamped. You are in. So megalobole.com is the easiest way, or you go to the fantasy footballers and just, you know, go to the Foot Clan tab and you can see the Megalabole there.

All the rules, all the details, everything about the Meglabel is at Megalobol.com, but we want you in. We want you playing with us. The drafts are going to be held from August 31st through September 4th on the Sleeper platform. So go to Meglabel.com and sign up and join a league. I'm not telling you which league time slot I am in, which draft slot I'm in, because I haven't signed up yet. I am signed up. Oh, yeah. I tested the system. Nice. I made sure. I did not. But I'm not telling you either. We're all being in it. I already drafted. People, I know you did not. No, you didn't. August 31st through September 4th are the draft times. Go get your spot. People have asked about whether the Megalobole is back and how they get in for the last couple of weeks because they are eager and ready to go. We mentioned it on the footcast for our supporters. But megalobole.com. Head over there.

Every single member of the Foot Clan gets a free entry into the Mega Bowl, one entry per person, and it's an opportunity to compete in the largest, most fun league imaginable with some really cool prizes, upgrades this year. Now, I said you get a free entry if you are a member of the Foot Clan. The Foot Clan is our, they are our people that gets you access to the Footcast, an extra episode every week. that is a way to support the show, gets you all of our in-season tools and resources, something we've been upgrading over many years. And for a long period of time, in fact, the entire duration of the Foot Clan, that has been hosted via Patreon. Many of you are familiar with that. If you're a supporter of the show, that's the platform you've used to become a Foot Clan supporter. This year, we have made some very big changes to our Foot Clan membership.

Yes, yes. Worthy of a horn. That seemed twice as loud. Okay, all right. I thought it seemed really loud. That was twice as loud. You can't edit that in post now. You got to leave because that was so loud. I'm sorry if you went careening off the freeway. But here's the deal. For many years, we've been hosted over on Patreon with the membership. And if you're over there right now, all of your membership will still work. We're super thankful for you having supported this podcast. and all of your access to the Footcast and everything. It works. Now, what we've done is we've had the request for many, many years to make things easier, make things simpler. A lot of people want to support the show. They want to access to all the premium features, but they just want like one way to do that. Like I don't want to buy the UDK over here and then like pledge to the support the Foot Clan and have two memberships.

So we have not only brought the entire foot clan membership in-house, our own system this year at join the foot.com, but we have added the ultimate foot plan subscription for the very first time. This is the first time we've announced it on the show. And so you can pledge to become a member over at join the foot.com or if you would like everything in one subscription, one time a year that you pay for it, making everything easy and getting access to 100% of everything we do, which is. Buddy, Andy. The price of public opinion. I already got the UDK, so what do I do? Well, we did consider all of you amazing UDK purchasers out there. If you would like to become an Ultimate Foot Clan member, which means you get access to the UDK every single year, DFS pass, DFS pass, a brand new tool we're building out this year called the Ultimate Dashboard, which will be an in-season tool to import your roster, optimize your lineup, find spot starts.

custom to your league, waiver wire, team news. So an in-season tool, we've never had this. That's also a part of it. We'll credit you, dollar for dollar for what you paid for the UDK. So if you just want to transition that right into an ultimate membership, join the foot.com is where you do that. And that credit's automatic. We know if you've got the UDK. So just when you go, you'll see it taken off. We want to make sure that the foot clan, you're our people. We want this to be seamless, smooth, awesome. We've been working on this for years. Our in-season app is getting a giant renovation. We're really, really excited about this. This is just the way it should have always been built. But, you know, we started as three dudes in a bedroom upstairs and needed to use an off-site third-party resource. And now we're making this the right way. So I hope everyone's as excited about this as we are. Yep. So, and again, all members, whether you're an ultimate member, Premier, regular member, you get a free entry into the Megalable. So these things kind of run.

part and parcel. They're connected. And you can sign up at join thefoot.com. And if you bought a UTK, you'll see those credits in there. If you're an existing patron and you want to switch over to become an ultimate member, you can do that as well. We will give you that credit. And our team is ready to help you out with that. So join thefoot.com to become a member, get access to everything and get into the Megalobole. And megalobole.com is where you find that link to join. I think we did it. I think we got through all of that. Very excited.

Let's jump into the waiver wire. Welcome to the waiver wire, presented by NFL Sunday ticket on YouTube TV. Now, before we jump into the waiver wire, just for a moment, I just want people to understand that there is a debate going on actively in the studio between the premium deucer over there, Al Borland. Oh, wait, what? And who named him premium? I think Andy just out. Well, and Mike, you can take that away. The premium deucer? And our premium audio guy, Mike. Yes. And we're in an active debate about whether or not. Oh, now see, that sounds. Oh, that's regular. That sounded quieter. Totally different. That was a totally different sound. About whether it was louder the first time. Now, Al, let's, you're an honest man, a man of God. Yes, I am. Did you adjust the dbs between those two button pushes? I did not.

Dude, that first button push was louder. Something happened. In Slack, I was saying it was no louder. The decibels were the same and no, no way. He said back there gaslighting us like it didn't happen. Interesting. I would not lie to you. No way. No. That's fine. But just accept that it was louder. All right. For today's waiver wire segment, we are looking. Premium deuce for my butt. I'm sorry. I was being very complimentary. Undrafted gyms. We're going to each pick. A player. Jason's head flies back into the air. I just saw Andy's. Oh. Yeah. Okay. We are each picking a player that we don't believe will be drafted that you should pay attention to and maybe pick up. For week one, you're going to be maybe regretting not having this guy on the roster. Sometimes you pick somebody at the very end of your draft on speculation and then you go into week one and you're like, well, maybe I don't want this guy on my roster.

These are some undrafted players we think you might want to pick up that will feel a little bit better after week one gets done. But I'm not going to go first. Mike, I was in the studio with you. You were watching the film on this guy. Indeed I was. So let's bring up this name. Darnell Mooney, wide receiver now of the Atlanta Falcons previously of the Chicago Bears. He's been one of the, we've talked about like there's these invisible players who just maybe there's a blind spot to it. There's. fatigue, I don't know, you just, you don't really want to either talk about them, buy into them, realize that, oh, maybe this player will have some fantasy value. And Darnell Mooney has kind of just been one of those guys as I'm looking later at ADP. And I thought, I'm going to go check this out. I'm going to go watch every single target that Darnell Mooney got last year. And dude, he's, he's still Darnell Mooney. I got.

I'm not saying he's... Wait, is that good? That is good. Yes, it is good. I'm not saying it's a superstar wide receiver, but he is a good player and he has true after burners and he can make really tough catches and watching the film. Oh, buddy. The thing that stood out the most about watching Darnel Mooney was, holy crap, the Chicago Bears quarterback play last year was, dude, you would, you could go six targets in a row for Darnel Moody and go. The man was wide open. What is going on here? Someone gave him the ball. He was open short. He was open intermediate. He was open down the field. I rolled over when Mike was in the middle of going through every target for Darnell Mooney. I watched six consecutive plays. There were zero catches. It gave me a new appreciation for Justin Field's struggles. Reading a defense. Some of them were the secret agent man as well. You know, it just shows you how hard it is to qualify a player.

simply by the statistics. What you saw on film was Justin Fields not able to read a defense and let go of the ball at the right time. Mooney would be breaking open and there was no anticipation in the throws. So Mooney just kind of got deleted. I was sitting next to Mike. He's watching this film and I hear just a hearty, real, genuine laugh. I'm like, what? And I roll over and he was like, check this out. It was a Tyler Bejant throw. Beautiful play design. Darnall Mooney. wide open. No one within five yards, and he's in the end zone. And both Bejant and Mooney rolling to the right, just in sync, just a layup throw. And Bejant throws into the stands. Like, that's not a joke. I think the ball went into the stands. I'm like, so what happened? So Mooney's still Mooney is your message. Yeah. Point being, Darno Mooney, in my opinion, in my study that I just did, I think he is still a good, capable player. And so did the Atlanta Falcons. They gave him a three-year

$39 million contract, 26 of that guaranteed over the next two years. And it's just, what do you believe about the Atlanta Falcons? They're going to be running three wide all the time. And if Kurt Cousins is back to health, you can get sustained production, not just a couple spike weeks. Darno Mooney might be a player that goes into your flex or your double flex and you're content with the production you're getting. And he is going extremely late in drafts. most often not even drafted. Yeah, no, I think that's a great name to pick up. And the point of these waiver wire pickups is if you're done with your draft, look at who you grabbed at the end. And you might want to just consider dropping that dude and picking one of these guys up, at least mine and mics. We'll get to Andy's last. My pickup is who I drafted with the last pick in our last mock draft. It's Dontavian Wicks.

uh second year wide receiver for the green bay packers he has had a lot of buzz if you're not on the the the twitter sphere of fantasy football i'm not familiar with twitter but whatever you are the the the x sphere of fantasy football that sounds like fear of the letter x well yeah i mean it's it's it's wicks is wicks has got popularity among the de gens yeah yeah i mean He's a really good football player. He passes the eyeball test. He also passes a ton of the metric test. If you look at, there's only 26 wide receivers since 2011 who have hit a two yards per route run as a rookie with at least 200 routes. And Wix is in that group. You look at how he's performed when given the opportunity. It's been really, really good. Now, he was a rookie last year.

behind a crowded backfield. Dobbs was good. You had the breakout of Jaden Reed. You know, Christian Watson is supposed to be their wide receiver number one. And all those people are still in front of them, which is why Wix is undrafted. But if you listen to the coaching staff and Jordan Love talk about Wix and the talent and the capability and the work ethic, I think he's got a chance to come in here and really, really surprise. You want to attack ambiguous. cores from good offenses. We've talked about this in the context of drafting Jane Reed. And so I think Wix, you saw it in the first preseason game, right? Like Jordan Love just drops back, rolls around, and there's Wix wide open for a bomb touchdown. So I would take a shot on them because the tip to remember on our top 10 tips and tricks episode was take dumps now, not later. You want guys you can cut after week one.

If Dantavian Wix comes out week one and he's 40% snaps, whatever, get rid of him. But if he comes out week one and all of a sudden he's really involved, he's going to be very, very good for fantasy. My turn? Your turn. Hey, everybody. What? Who's that? It's me. Adam. What? I went into this show doc today to put in my undrafted gym as Adam Thielen aged 100 yard or 100 reception wide receiver of the Carolina Panthers. And lo and behold, I find out that Adam Thielen was my undrafted gym on this episode last season. Okay, so hold up. I.

Also, home run on that. Yeah, that was a home run. I mean, you want to talk about starting the season on fire. He helped your dynasty team in immense ways. You're welcome. But I thought for sure you came into the show, Doc, saw that this was your pick last year and went, oh, you know what? He's okay this year as well. You came in to put him in? I came in independent of that knowledge to put Adam Thielen in. And found that out. Now, listen, Thielen. I understand. He's old. He's also one of the only 33 and older wide receivers in history to go over the 100 reception mark. When you look at the offense and Bryce Young and Dave Canales and what they're doing and you look at the options that they have, I'm just going to bring it up. Players of this age, when Fitzgerald was this age, Heinz Ward, they start the season pretty strong. He's also the one that has the rapport with Bryce Young. And if you trust Dave Canales to put his quarterback into a situation where he doesn't make mistakes,

You rely on the most reliable player. And this is also not just, this is not blind. This is also including the fact that Deonti Johnson missed a bunch of time with the groin injury, just came back, limped off the field again. Now he's kind of back out of practice. But he has a couple of injuries already in camp. Xavier Legat is brand new, right? Like this is a player I would expect to make an impact over time. But Adam Thielen, he didn't play in the last preseason game alongside, you know, the starters. Like, Thielen is still there, still reliable, and 100% undrafted. Like, nobody wants to touch that, even though he was the wide receiver 25 in fantasy last year. When you look at buying a couple of weeks, maybe buying six to eight weeks, with, in a deep wide receiver league, somewhere you need reliable, like you just mentioned Mooney, you might be able to just all of a sudden just flex him. Like, Thielen could give you some temporary support. And I, I'm sorry that.

You're such an agist. I just, you know, reliable hands. I'm about to die. Really reliable around the goal line. Let me sleep. He's not sleeping yet, Mike. He's going to be 34, man. Yeah, he's napping right now. You know that. I just want, look, when do you, it feels like you began the Adam Thielen voice at a time that you should be dishing it out to Keenan Allen then. Like. If Thieland gets this voice, then Keenan's not old. Kenan's fat. Keep up. Oh, come on. Kenan's the age that Thielen was last year when you were mocking him. Oh. Is that your attempt of Keenan? Yeah. It's a little deep. It had to be different. It's a little deeper. No, that was great. That was great. All right. So those are our three names that we wanted to bring to light. Thanks again to NFL Sunday ticket on YouTube TV.

By the way, I just saw they have the multi-view this year. They're updating the multi-view and they announced a fantasy view. Watch every game every Sunday when you bundle NFL Sunday ticket and YouTube TV. Sign up today at YouTube.com slash fantasy footballers. Local and national games on YouTube TV, NFL Sunday ticket for out-of-market games, excludes digital-only games, device and content restrictions apply. Into the news we go. News and notes from around the league. Presented by USAA Insurance. Jason, put on your biggest surprise face. Okay. The commanders have announced shocking. Jane Daniels will be the team starting quarterback. What? He did it. You know how embarrassed I'd be?

If it hadn't have been him after I made him on my guy? Have the Bears announced yet anything about Caleb Williams being the starter? I thought they did that to start. Yeah, I mean, this is this is what. To be fair, the number three overall pick I don't think has been announced as the starter. Unless I miss something about Drake May. No. He's got a shot now. He does have a shot again. He was looking like only Jacoby and now it looks wide open. I'm glad they named him as a starter. I mean, they should have done this a long time ago. Everyone knew it a long time ago. But you kind of.

You have a feel for which rookie quarterbacks, even when they're drafted, are drafted to start week one or draft, you know, like JJ McCarthy and Drake May, they were drafted to compete and learn and maybe redshirt for a while or a couple of weeks. But like Bo Nix, you knew, like, I was talking about this forever ago when Bo Nix was third on the depth chart, on the first Broncos official depth chart, was like, he's your starter and you know it. Well. Yeah, Peyton sucks, so he's doing this thing. Yeah, I mean, it's just when these quarterbacks, like both Jaden Daniels and Bo Nix, they played so much college ball. I mean, they played way more than most of these other quarterbacks, you know, five seasons. And if you play five seasons of college ball and you're not starting week one in today's NFL, you shouldn't have been drafted in the first. Also, if Jacoby Rosset was still on the commanders, you know, that would make a difference in the competition, right?

you know, somebody that can actually compete. Yeah, the Manders literally kicked out Sam Howell. They drafted him and said, no, we don't want a competition here. And Brissette, too, right? Yeah. Yeah, both. Well, I don't like this news. Curtis Samuel turf toe week to week. He missed the game last year with the toe injury. He had an ankle fracture in surgery in 2017. Part of the Curtis Samuel story has always been injured. It has always been injury. It's been a problem making him a reliable fantasy option because he's in and out of your lineup. This is, you know, significant. It changes how I would view the dart throw at the end of drafts on a Bill's wide receiver. If you're deciding, if you're a Shakir or Keon Coleman or Curtis Emil at this point, week to week is pretty ambiguous. You know, from what I looked at, you know, these turf toes based on their grade determines two, three weeks.

or can be prolonged. We've seen Joe Brady and Curtis Samuel or Curtis Samuel in the Joe Brady system before. He is more of a manufactured, short yardage type of player. And that leads me to believe that should he miss time, I was already bullish on your my guy, Mike James Cook and Dalton Kincaid as quality assets. But that's the area of the field that I would expect them to step up to a little bit more. I don't know, you know, it's good for all the other ancillary pieces, but those are the guys that are being drafted right now that I just have even more confidence in. Mark Andrews, missing practice with, quote, a very minor thing. We believe this stems from the car accident last week that he was mostly unharmed in. That was from John Harbaugh. Justin Herbert returned to practice on Monday. That's exciting news for the Los Angeles Chargers. Who?

I believe they're leading the way in the preseason in yards before contact from the running backs. Before contact? If you want any evidence that the system is already starting to work. Wow. Gero. Vidal Sassoon already had a pretty nice game back out on the field. That's not really a news blur, but that is a takeaway of where last week it was. All gloom and doom about Kamani Vidal Sassoon of not him, a day three rookie running back for the Chargers, not even making the team, goes out, has a very strong preseason performance, and now the tune is changing a bit. Yeah. Mike Williams, Jets wide receiver, planning to take team reps and practice next week. He's one of those players that, you know, at some point in the season is going to end up on the waiver wire list.

I don't think he's being drafted anywhere. But if you know that he's going to, like they don't have great competition. They brought him in to be part of this offense. So I'd imagine at some point someone's taking a flyer. Like would you guys, you guys probably wouldn't spend the last pick just to throw him on IR or something. No, I'd be looking to pick him up. That's the, you want to be a week early or so of when you think, when you project that he'll actually start getting things going. It wouldn't be surprising to me if he missed a couple games. Even if he starts active, it's going to take some weeks before he's really acclimated. And then one other situation to monitor at this morning's practice, Tyrique was wearing a protective brace on his right hand, did some off field work. You know, maybe it's just getting used to Tyreek. He seems to have a brace here or a brace there and then he's back the next day. But it did.