Fantasy Football Podcast 2017 - Frequently Asked Fantasy Questions

And the people ask us, well, where do you like to play? We like ESPN because a giant part of that is because of how the IR spot works. In ESPN, if a player is, once they are ruled out, they're not going to play this week. They get the O designation. You can move on the two IR and then add a piece for the weekend, a replacement piece. Other sites don't do it like that. NFL.com. You can only use the IR spot.

if your guys on the pup or the i are and at least at one point it was suspended guys could go on there as well which was weird was was fantastic if you knew that and sucked if you didn't know that but so so that's why we like espn is because you can be while our benches are small like that you can be you can still do tweaks without

Maybe you don't have to drop that guy. You slide them into your IR and then add a piece for the weekend. And while the IR doesn't necessarily emulate the real NFL and sometimes I hear people go, well, but that's not how the IR works. Look, I like more movement in my leagues. I like where this is why I prefer a redraft or a keeper over a dynasty because there's more waiver wire action. We like active leagues where there's trading and waiver wire pickups and roster moves and shifts happening all the time.

Absolutely. And so let's talk about the scoring, the fractional scoring conundrum. A lot of leagues have fractional scoring. Do you guys prefer fractional scoring? Conundrum. Yeah. I don't know why this is a conundrum. If you're not using fractional scoring, please, please. We have the technology. It's not 1991. Right. And that's why it didn't exist back then. Yeah. I've seen, I've seen arguments for.

full point scoring, not fractional scoring. And they're all really dumb. Let me give all of the arguments. Really, really quickly. I'll let you continue your rant. But just to clarify, traditional scoring is if Julian Edelman has nine yards receiving, he will not receive a full point until he hits the.

10-yard mark. In a fractional system, he would have 0.9 points when he has 9 yards receiving. Continue your range. No, my rant is just all of the arguments based from, and here's the reality, whatever the argument they're actually making, people that say no, whole point scoring is better. What they might not even realize of themselves is that the only reason that they think that way is because that's the league they play in. Right. And probably the only reason they...

playing that league is because it's been around for a while before it was easy to do for actual scoring. It just makes more sense for everything that happens to be rewarded with a little bit of points and not have arbitrary thresholds you have to get to to have anything.

One of the reasons we're doing this show at this point is so that if you are in one of those longer running leagues or if you're starting a new league, you can make those tweaks and adjustments without it being some sort of desperate race to the clock before the draft day. You can make those adjustments now. We are...

Definitely proponents of fractional scoring. You don't end up with ties almost ever, almost ever. Let's shift gears to that keeper league format. Our league of record is a three keeper league. That's one that we've played in for a while. One of the reasons we're big proponents of keeper leagues and dynasty leagues is because of...

the history that you build, and because of the fact that you have activity in the league, Jason just talked about liking moving pieces and parts, you get activity throughout the year. You can trade draft picks, you can trade these keepers, and so let's talk for a minute about maybe a basic format for a keeper league, and then we'll get into the details about maybe how we can select keepers in a keeper league. So let's start with like a basic format. How do you guys...

Do you prefer the three keepers? People ask that a lot. Should I be a one keeper league, a five keeper league? And how does it contrast to your preference in dynasties? I think two or three keepers is the right amount. Because if you're in a keeper league, you still have drafting. You want the draft to be extraordinarily important, but you want some holdover pieces. If you keep too many guys, then the draft is not that good.

You should just go all the way to a dynasty league where you keep the whole roster. So I prefer two or three. And there's two ways to do it usually. You either just say every team in the league, you've got to pick two guys or you've got to pick three guys. And then we're going to start our draft. You can pick whichever guys you want. Or you say you get to pick them at the value at which you drafted them. So you can...

you know, if you were wise and you got David Johnson two years ago in the 10th round, you would actually get to keep him super late and have an awesome value because you were such a great drafter the year before. I don't have a preference between those two systems. I love both. I like more of an option you didn't talk about, which is keep a guy for what they should be valued for moving forward into the future. So, I mean, you don't.

get those unbelievable bargains where. So how is that determined, Mike? So it would be this year's average draft position. And there's, I mean, there's average draft position everywhere. We love using fantasy football calculator. Your game provider always has a ranking list. And so if a guy is, let's say, ESPN, oh, this guy's ranked 14th. Well, he would cost you a second round pick to keep that guy.

Or if you want to reward someone for being a better drafter, you know, just sliding them back one round. The danger of with the Keeper League's is guys like David Johnson and Odell Beckham where they skyrocket from absolute just waver fodder into this guy is the top three player, and it can just shift the balance a little bit too much for me.

for keeper does that change for you if you place a restriction on the amount of times the player is kept no because i like rewarding people for finding those yes and that's what i'm saying like but i just i don't i don't think it should be a 10 round reward give them one to two rounds of uh of a reward and it that as far as keeping a player forever uh it's it's pretty infrequent to me where you see these guys just go on a jerry rice level tear right now so who's who is the best

fantasy wide receiver in the league right now. Antonio. He's only been that for three years. Right. It feels like forever, but it's only been three years. And before that, it was, it's other guys. And so, like, a, I feel like players, you're a reign as the fantasy dominant player. It's not a 10-year stretch anymore to me. Very rarely. Maybe Odell Beckham could because he came out.

He started as that, so he could end up being that kind of a player. But even running backs, I mean, their careers. It's been since like Ledani and Tomlinson. Right. For how great Levian Bell and David Johnson are, I mean, their shelf life as that peak elite fantasy running back, it's not that long.

All right. Staying in the starting of league vein, let's talk waivers. Two questions for you guys. Two frequently asked fantasy questions. One, how should waivers work in a regular league? And number two, what days should waivers process? So let's start with the first one.

How can they work and how should they work? They can work one of two main methods. You either have a waiver priority system. So, you know, there's 12 teams in the league and then it's like based on your record in reverse order. The worst team gets the first pick at a guy. So if everybody wants this guy, then I have the highest waiver priority. I get them. And then you have strategy built in there of like, do I spend my high priority pick on this guy or do I wait, hold it for another week hoping that there's some fun to be had there for sure.

The much more fun system in my view, and I think all three, I know all three of our views, is the FAB system, the free agent acquisition budget system, where at the beginning of the year you get whatever, $100, it's arbitrary and it's fake. It's not like you're putting your real money on the line here. It's just you get a pool of 100 units of credit to spend throughout the year on whoever you want. And everybody does. There's no, you know, there's maybe a tiebreaker.

priority list based on, you know, it's probably a record of your record. But if there's a guy that drops on to waivers and you think he is going to rock the whole season, you can spend your whole hundred on him or you could try to get him for $2 or $5. And it's a blind bidding system. And every single week, every single day of the week once waivers open up is exciting. And there's there's so much more strategy and so much more action on those waiver systems.

So we definitely prefer Fab. What day should waivers process? How should they process? We have it set up so that the waiver period runs at whatever time it is. It's like 10 o'clock in the morning for us. You need to make sure that it's early enough that on Sunday morning, you can have that go through and then make your roster. Because once the waiver period runs through and the bids go in, players are required.

The free agents are shut again. You can't just go scavenge the rest of the remaining free agents. And we have this happen every day except for Tuesday. And so yes, people think, well, what if Sunday morning comes and I get some really bad news from my team? Well, that's unfortunately one of the risks that you have to take with this system. I don't think that we've ever really come across a...

just a catastrophe in our league since we've been running the system for the last few years. And you want to leave it open on Monday. Some people think, well, I don't want waivers running Monday. Games have already happened Sunday. Don't freak out because whoever played on Sunday, they're locked. You can't add them. And occasionally there'll be some Monday night games where a fantasy owner needs to make a move on Monday. And then you shut it down on Tuesday to give everyone a chance to recuperate.

from the insanity of the week. And put in all their bids. Now, one of the reasons we really like this type of a format is because it evens the playing field for, you know, let's be a realistic here. Not everybody's on their computer at six in the morning or five in the morning or whenever your waivers go through. It was a good life when we were, we had a tech job. There were days like that. We had a tech job in the free agent. We had it for a little bit where it was always open after the waiver period ran. And that just meant as soon as breaking news hit.

First one there, got him. Pretty much Andy or I would be grabbing them because we'd get an alert. Because the firemen friends in our leagues were too busy saving people from their houses. And I'm too busy saving my fantasy team. And when it goes through every day, what's great is you have a new topic of discussion for your league. When you see that, you know, for example, let's say Mike.

wants to spend, I don't know, 35 bucks on Tori Smith. And so he bids silently $35 and I bid, you know, 13 for him after a big week. And Mike figures out that he overspent by a lot. And that's what makes it fun. Or when someone foolishly drops a Jordan Howard in their waiver on that main day, then the next day you got a whole other day of like everyone's bidding on Jordan Howard. All right. So we are going to talk some commission issues, commission issues.

But first, some playoffs. The, oh, and before we move on, I want to make sure if you're doing a fab system, super important that you activate zero dollar bidding. Okay, because you don't want to run out of your money and then not be able to make transactions. That's just the worst. And that is a question. We get a lot. Yeah, always 100% have zero dollar bidding. Because we always want the zero dollar bids. You're going to, oh, sorry, Brett Hart. You will most likely run out of money and.

In leagues that have restrictions on how many moves you can make, I hate it. I hate having a restriction on how many moves I can make. Don't stop my fun. And if you say, well, you have to bid at least a dollar, then you are putting restrictions on how many moves I can make. I see a theme that has come through this entire discussion so far, which is. Selfishness? Well, certainly. But that's built into fantasy football. It's what Jason said earlier about, I think better leagues or leagues were more happy.