Ultimate Draft Tips + Eye-Popping Insights - Fantasy Football Podcast

Let everyone know. Yeah. Make the world a smarter place. I totally agree, Mike. And some of the players, I mean, to be honest, they might help get things moving. Right. Yeah, it needs to be flushed down. I mean, not everybody's a winner. There's some season. I mean, some players had seasons that were, you know, flush worthy. Yes. It was already my favorite part of the UDK. But now, now that it's on the party? There you go. Yeah. All right. All right. Here's my second ultimate draft tip.

We've had the consistency charts as part of the draft kit for a couple of years. But we've taken steps to really improve the way they function. It's more of a snapshot tool at this point. And what I'm talking about, if you don't know what they are, it is a one quick glance way to look at the season, look at all the different players from last year, and really get a gauge on...

where they finished each and every week and we color-coded. So if you're in, you know, you had a top five week, you're a certain color, top 10, top 20. And you can look at players like Christian McCaffrey, and it's just covered in green because each and every week, you're not getting variance in that production. You're getting consistency. What you can do now with the consistency charts, with the snapshot tool, is you can grab a small chunk of the season, first few games, middle of the season, after the buy.

last five, whatever the case may be. Right. And it will not only show you just that part of the season and how these players performed, but it will rank them. You'll see how they ranked in that span. And you can actually, you know, through that filtering, you get a good idea of players that, for example, ended the season on a tear, right? They had a really strong back half of the year. And while your league mates are spending all of their time looking at that end of season ranking, you know, 17 weeks.

You can look at a smaller sample size and maybe find some insight. Find some things that, you know, there's a lot of rookies. They might take a little while to get going, but you can get a picture. Try and take out a stretch of a player. You know they were hurt. You know that when they came back, they were still dealing with an injury, and it's clear when they were actually healthy again. And so you're not going to hold those injury games against them. Find out how they are like Barkley. Barkley, it's a weird year for Barclay.

But then if you look at once he was finally healthy, you're like, oh, yeah, he's Sequin Berkeley. There's no need to be concerned. So I sorted it by week eight on, and I wanted to pull some insights out for you. From week eight on, back half of the year, Daniel Jones. He was the quarterback six in points per game in that span. He can put up big ones. That's a pretty profound number. Points per game, QB6.

Melvin Gordon, somebody that we've debated on this show a lot. You know, you kind of look at last year with this, you know, he didn't start the year, the contract, it's just got stink all over it. He was the running back 10 in points per game from week 8 on. And then this one, which, you know, if there's one player that we disagree a lot on this show, we don't disagree about the potential of Calvin Ridley. We talk about him like.

You know, this coming year could really be the breakout season, the Chris Godwin season, will be. Yeah, I mean, he's in our breakouts in the UDK. Spoiler alert, you just got that for free. But Calvin Ridley was the wide receiver eight in points per game. So that was a breakout. From week eight on last year, it just wasn't.

You know, when you look at the total season and where he finished, it wasn't wide receiver 8. So those are some insights on the good side. On the other side, a couple of negatives, if you look from week 8 on, Nick Chubb, who finished the year as the running back 14, he was the running back 25 in that span. He got careamed. Yeah. And then Alan Robinson. This was a surprise. Don't say this one. But just sorting it, filtering it by that back half of the year, he finishes the wide receiver 10.

but he was the wide receiver 23 over the back half of the year. So how does that make you feel, Mike? It sounds like he was just so awesome at the beginning of the year, and he could probably do that for a whole season. Okay, that's one way you can interpret the data is Mike's very rose-colored Alan Robinson way. But, you know, I didn't approach this with any biases. I approached it looking for outliers and players that...

As I'm scrolling down, I'm going, oh, Alan Robinson, what's you doing way down there at wide receiver 23 despite finishing the year where you did? So it's kind of neat to be able to pull out those little insights and take advantage of them in your draft. Yeah, and I would just add to that, not just the stretches, but just seeing a player can finish somewhere and not help your team. You can hurt your team often. I love just looking at that tool and saying, I'm between these two guys in my draft, let me pull that up and be like, oh, this one is just, he's not going to hurt me.

two out of every three games to get that end of season ranking. And a shout out to our man Brooks, who is the originator. I always got to give you a shout out, Brooks, because you are the originator of that tool. You created it for yourself, for your drafts, and I was like, this thing's awesome. I'm stealing it. I had completely forgotten that. Yeah. Well, thank you for bringing that up. No, thank you for the originality in creating it, because it's a tool I have used to make myself better at fantasy every year. So for that, you're not fired yet.

My next ultimate draft tip here is something I absolutely love. And I'm going to give a couple pieces of insight. I've learned a lot in our injury report. You forget guys that were injured. Now, we know the big names, right? A.J. Green missed the season. What's his injury status? How's he coming back? How's he looking right now? But there's like Mark Ingraham or Evans and Godwin or Jarvis Landry. Like you forget that these guys ended the season injured.

And I, you know, it's, it's nice to read through that report and remind myself like, okay, this guy's coming off of this or this guy was dealing with this. Now he's not. But here's the three biggest takeaways that, that I see. And Matthew Betts.

He's one of the best around at coming up with, you know, the quality results from, you know, a medical perspective when it comes to injuries and fantasy football. He's a board certified orthopedic physical therapist. He knows his stuff. He's the bets. He's, oh, yeah, that's good. He's the bets. Oh, my. It's not good. Look, Matthew, I'm sorry. Oh, he's doing a cartwheel right now.

Anyways, he's the bets. He's the best around. Yes, no one's ever going to bring him down. But here are the three when I read that stuck out for you. Stuck out for me. Eliminated, you know, challenged my preconceived notions. First was Big Ben. Big Ben was injured in week two. And he had kind of that that baseball injury, right? That elbow that's very rare for football.

In baseball, pitcher's average recovery time to get back on the field is about 17 months. Okay. And he was injured in week two. So you've seen him throwing the ball right now. You've seen him out there, you know, with juju looking. And when you read the whole write-up on Big Ben, you can see the concerns, you can see where he should be. And it's illuminate because he's one of those cases where you have to say,

Am I going in on Big Ben or am I not? Another player is Darius Geis, who's been injured once, twice, three times the lady. His body does not like football. His body does not like football. He had his ACL injury. And if you remember, the crazy recovery that he had, right? And ACL people come back from it all the time. But he had to suffer with all of the disease and the issue of,

not recovering through the ACL. So he comes back on a way longer timeline and then re-injures a knee, but it's an MCL injury. When I was reading through Betts's write-up, he thinks that that MCL is a blessing of disguise because the MCL is going to basically be healed. That's not something he needed surgery for. He just need a little time off. But by that injury, it allowed him to rest the ACL recovery, which he was pushing that timeline.

So what ends up happening is for the first time in his career, he's basically coming in at his healthiest. He's worried about his long-term prognosis, but he believes that Darius Geis is coming in at 100% healthy right now. And he's got the opportunity to win this job. So I know we've discussed Darius Geis as like, is this a guy who is going to have an opportunity? You two both are pretty much out.

It's a crowded backfield. There's a ton of guys. I'm out from the perspective of will he actually be given the opportunity? He probably still is the best runner on that team. But it's a new coaching staff. It's new people. So that's where I'm more concerned. But it's good to know that at least the body of Darius guys should be good to go. And now the biggest one to me, Alshan Jeffrey. I'm going to actually read.

some of the right up here. So you get an example of what you're seeing. Alshan Jeffrey suffered a sprain in his right foot in week 14, which required season ending Liss Frank's surgery, which he believes will significantly affect Jeffrey in 2020. One specific study that looked at NFL players coming off Liss Frank's surgery found that just over 80% of players did return to the field, but it took an average of 10 months. Jeffrey's surgery occurred in December.

indicating it's extremely unlikely he is ready for week one. That same study also found that offensive players perform far worse than defensive players after surgery, and in general, and all players in the study showed a 21% reduction in performance from their first season back in injury. So you've got an old, oft-injured Alshan coming back on a short timeline. And this is one that, you know, I was not aware that the timeline was that rushed here.

Does that change your perspective, not just on Alshan, but on Jalen Rager? Or opportunities on the outside for somebody else? Yeah, for, I mean, you know, we talk about how Ertz is always the king of the opportunity when wide receivers go down. Maybe Ertz is a little bit safer than we thought, or Rager has more opportunity coming in at the start of the season. And maybe it's the beginning of the end for Alsham. But, you know, those type of insights are so valuable because I'm not a doctor.

I mean, I know you all think, you know, I've probably got an honorary doctor. I've made a mistake to believe that you were at times. Yeah, but Matthew Betts. You do believe you could be a doctor. I know for fact I could be a doctor. It would just take a lot of schooling and go, I would, I mean, I could definitely be a doctor? Wasn't there a question you answered once about could you perform open heart surgery? And somehow you had an actual percentage that was not below one? No, no.

By remembering that incorrectly? I believe that was the question between whether you could perform an open heart surgery land a plane. Oh, of course. And there's no chance. If I perform an open heart surgery, you're just dead. It's 100% kill rate. I mean, I can't do anything for you, but I can land that plane for sure. The heart surgery one would be kind of one of those situations where what do I do with my hands. You wouldn't know what to do next. I'd open them up and I go, all done. Let's close them.

Let's close them up because there's nothing good. You would be the master of the placebo effect surgery. Exactly. Because they do that sometimes, right? I would just get stuck in the wash area. Like every time they, you know, I wash my hands and they're going to put my gloves on, I would like rub my face real fast. Oh, I got to wash again. Oh, sorry, guys. I'll get it this time. Sir, it's been washing his hands for eight hours. Can we get another doctor in you? And that's when you're, oh, I've timed out. Sorry, guys. Lunch. I got to get out of here. Shift change.

All right. So, Mike, do you have one more for us? I got one more feature. We talk about improving the ultimate draft kit all the time. Well, we have, we figured out a way. I think we started this maybe halfway through last year. So it's still very new. And people may not have noticed this. But we give you a free preview to the Foot Clan, aka the Footcast that we put out every single week.

for our supporters on join the foot.com. You get in there and you get access. You can listen to that podcast. Do you want more fantasy footballers? Well, inside the UDK, there it is. You can test it out. You can see how much you enjoy this extra episode. I was going to say you can see if maybe you think it's worth it, but that's just a dumb thing to say because, of course, it's worth it. It's just how, what level are you going to actually enjoy this podcast?

You can't get enough football. You can't get enough fantasy football analysis. Might as well get an extra episode. So right there inside your UDK, you get a free preview of an extra episode. Yeah, and I would also throw out there. I mean, we've got Target Share reports that have been very valuable to us during the construction of all those videos, the player profile videos, seeing what teams are throwing the ball at the highest percentage to the tight-in position or to the wide receiver. Help inform predictions for the upcoming year.