10 Tips & Tricks to Win Your Fantasy League - Fantasy Football Podcast for 8/14

Okay, player types, archetypes, I want one of these. And I look at who fits into that delicious box within the draft early, mid, late. Okay? So for instance, mobile quarterbacks with upside. That's what I want to leave my draft with. I like those type of players. And so I'm going to look and I'm going to be prepared. I'm going to know, well, I can get Anthony Richardson in the fifth round. I can get Kyler in the sixth or seventh round. I can get Jaden Daniels in the 10th round. Okay, so like I've got... So all three guys, those three are in your... They're in my delicious box of mobile quarterbacks with massive upside. Got it. Got it. So other boxes for me, there is a good friend JJ Zacharyson of the show. He did a study a long time ago about, you know, nebulous wide receiver cores that don't have one being drafted high. A lot of times, there's value to be had there. And so when I look at unknown...

wide receiver hierarchies, like we're not exactly sure. You're going to build another box here. I'm going to build another box, but I want them from good offenses. Okay, where you've got, you're not sure necessarily who's going to be the dude, but you know it's going to be good offense. I got Tank Dell in the fifth. Unknown. That's, well, I'm, I get it. The hierarchy is unknown. He's the last drafted of the three. I mean, he's behind Nico and Stefan Diggs. I already know the hierarchy, guys. Oh, okay. You know, look. Time machine. Yeah. Uh, Jaden Reed. of the Packers. Packers are going to be great. Is it going to be read? I don't know. He's in the six. I can get him a couple rounds later. He's like almost, he's a six 11, so almost seventh rounder or Rushie Rice. I think the Chief's offense is going to be great, and you can get him a little later. Like I want to leave with one of those types. Quickly, touchdowns, super important for fantasy football. So look at touchdown, 10 touchdown potential tight ends.

Leporta. He did it last year. Mark Andrew is a touchdown machine. Later in the draft, Jake Ferguson. At the running back, you got Derek Henry. You know he's going to get double-digit touchdowns. David Montgomery later in the sixth. Rahim Morris late in your draft. Yeah, not the coach. Not the coach. I don't, I think he's a zero touchdown potential. I've given one. I think he, I think he could sneak in. We are the only podcast that projects touchdowns for coaches. You can find that in the ultimate draft kit. Or, you know, rookies usually prove to be good picks by the end of the year if they're quality players. So, you know, later in the draft, Malik Neighbors, Ladd-McConkie, Kian Coleman. Like, I just want to- Oh, I'm so happy Coleman made one of your boxes? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's potential, right? He could be the number one for Josh Allen. He could potentially explode. And-

Be terrible. Is this like the dinner, the pre-made dinner meals that have all the different sections in the box? Yes. And you got that little tiny dessert. Yeah. Well, you always eat the little tiny dessert first. Right? Is that what we all? Yeah. Isn't that what we all eat first? Is the little tiny dessert? I mean, when it was the brownie or the apple one. Oh, the apple. The apple, like the little apple. Oh, baby. But yes. So, so what, and you don't have to be these players in these boxes. But take a look at your draft and be like, this is the type of player I want.

who qualifies through the draft and so that you've got a game plan. Yeah, makes sense. Number eight. I want to talk about finding the late round running backs that can turn into starters for your team. So every year, we have running backs who are not drafted in the top 24, but they finish in the top 24. And I wanted to see, is there a path or just some information that can help at least give you an edge at figuring out. Who are these targets that I need to go after? So over the past five years, we see eight and a half teams without a top 24 running back drafted, which, I mean, it makes sense because some teams have two guys slip into the top 24, and then there's the other eight. However, from those teams that don't have a top 24 running back drafted, we see an average of just over five running backs finish inside the top 24. Does that make sense?

So I want to make sure everyone's following. So like teams who are, guys who are not drafted to be in the top 24, we see five of them on average make it into the top 24. So it's trying to identify or find some signals to identify players that could be the ones that move up. Exactly. And this is why it starts at team level projections. How good do you think an offense is going to be? Last year, DeAndre Swift, who we mentioned he had a hot start. It wasn't great at the end, but it's still a really hot start. Oh, he was a value for fantasy players.

James Cook, Isaiah Pacheco. It's hard to remember, but last year those guys were the RB 28, 29, and 30 in ADP. They were, because it wasn't, you weren't rock solid of, is Pacheco going to keep the job, James Cook? There's questions here. There's questions about the players. You know what there was not questions about? The team. The Philadelphia Eagles, the Buffalo Bills, and the Kansas City Chiefs. Those are great offenses. That would be a delicious box. Exactly. You know what I'm saying? Sure. And I looked at it, and the thing in common of these guys who make the jump into the top 24, their offenses are finishing as top 14 scoring offenses. So it's identifying these guys, trying to project which offenses are going to be in the top half, and then look at the running backs who aren't being drafted like that. And right now, to me,

There are three teams that I'm looking at that I know that they're going to have a high-powered offense. I'm just not sure about who it's going to be at the running back position. The Cincinnati Bengals. We got Zach Moss. We got Chase Brown. Which one is it going to be? I don't know for sure, but they're both being drafted outside the top 24. The Dallas Cowboys. I've been pushing for Rico Dowdo. You guys are a little bit more on the Ezekiel Elliott name, the brand side of that. But I think we're all in agreement. The Cowboys are going to be a very high-powered offense. And then the Chargers, that one sounds a little bit more strange, but Harbaugh and Gero, they put up high-powered offenses, and they do have a top-tier elite quarterback. So it's just those are three teams that I think are easy to look at. They don't have- Say them again, the three teams? The Bengals, the Cowboys, and the Chargers. They don't have a top 24 running back in ADP. And yet all bet that.

A couple players from those teams are going to finish easily in the top 24. I'll bet that that is a good bet. So you second? All those in favor. Can you bet on bets? Do they let you bet on bets? They let you bet on anything. I will whisper it because I have just like, okay, what if he actually is okay? J.K. Dobbins, I have abandoned. I thought you said you were going to whisper it. J.K. Dobbins. All right. I've had to abandon him because he's coming off the Achilles injury. But things that are progressing, at least the way they're talking about death charts over in the Chargers, it's those are the two guys like listed. I think they're even listed as co-starters. The Kamani Vidal Sassoon, the hope of this late round guy. As of right now, the people watching the team, he's projected to not make the team over Jared Patterson. Yeah, working in a salon soon. So.

I'm more and more open to the idea that Dobbins is a worthwhile pick. It's a good one. Number seven. All right. It's going to be a little bit of a follow-up of a discussion we started yesterday on the tight-in rankings. I'm going to title it, re-roll your tight end, but we'll get into what that means. We discuss a lot of the times. The off-season, those conversations are around end-of-season rankings. And... Sometimes we're even surprised, especially at tight end. Oh, wow, that guy was a top 10 guy. At tight end, top 10 really doesn't mean a lot. No, it doesn't. Just being inside the top 10 because you're in a 10 to 12 man league. And that means you've got one of the worst options if you're at the bottom of that group. There was a year I loved, who was it, Trey Boo Boo Boo?

Yeah, Trey Burton. Trey Burton. Oh, unmitigated disaster. Unmitigated disaster. He finishes the Titan 6 that year. It's like, you can make it sound good, but he was terrible. So a lot of the discussion yesterday was like, okay, you know, Jason in particular, he loves those top five guys. He wants to take the best of them in the in the draft and maybe, you know, part of that's going to be waiting to grab the fourth or fifth guy. And that also means. you might not get the guy you want. You might have somebody pull the trigger sooner. And you're like, wow, I need to punt the tight in position. I might miss my guy at tight end. What I'm saying with this, this whole like re-roll, redraft your tight in is something that would have worked really well last year. And that is sometime during the middle of the season. Once we get data on strength of schedule and how teams defend the tight end position.

Give yourself a chance to redo your tight-in position. If you look at the top five tight-ins last year by stats, like the end of year top five was Leporta, Ingram, Kelsey, Hawkinson, Kittle. That's how they finished. The top five tight-ins over the back half. So from week nine on, it was Leporta and Ingram. Okay, cool. They're still there. The next three were Njoku, McBride, and Ferguson. over the second half of the season. You even had players like Isaiah likely, had monster weeks. Schultz had huge weeks over the back half of the season. If you played Najoku over Kelsey from week nine on, you got four and a half more fantasy points per week playing Najoku over Travis Kelsey. So if you miss your shot on locking in that position, I'm saying make it a point in your brain to say midseason, I'm going to make my move for a tight in. Because what we're not saying in our tight end ranking show is,

You don't need one. That's not the message. Just because you miss the top five is, oh, well, I can settle without a tight in. You win leagues because of great tight in performances. The problem is you think you missed the boat. And I'm saying, let's re-roll that. Go back to the drawing board. You know, it's not another draft in the middle of the year, but through a trade, you can identify somebody, take another shot. And that is kind of a luxury you get when you don't draft the top five guy in the regular draft is you get the luxury of now I get to pivot.

You don't feel obligated. Like if you had Kelsey, you're playing them 100% of those weeks because you have to, even though Nojoku was going to outperform him by five points. So it gives you some flexibility. You can go back to the drawing board. You can re-roll the tight end. This is also a great tip for long-term dynasty players. You know, if you listen in the offseason, you know, I don't like drafting rookie tight ends and dynasty. They're much further down than the ADP on my... you know, my strategy, but I love trading for him later. You know, you, you couldn't trade for Kyle Pitts early. You could later when he didn't, you know, Trey McBride. Trey McBride was like, you know, you could have gotten him so cheap after his rookie year, even a little bit into his sophomore year. He was undrafted last year. Yeah, and so it's like, yeah, trade for these guys. I love that tip for both redrafted. Just being conscious of it midseason to make a move for a league winning tight end?

I think is important. Number six. I call this one. Stacks on stacks, on stacks. On stacks. On stacks. Yeah, baby. This is a tip and a trick for the Foot Clan because we want the Foot Clan to win championships, not just have a great season. We want you to have a great season, but we want you to win championships. And stacks are an advantage. A quarterback wide receiver stack. It's often thought of for... DFS and best ball formats. But people don't think about that for redraft and dynasty enough. It's becoming a little bit more common. It needs to be more common. Stacking increases your ceiling and it also gives you something you desperately need. Correlation. Correlation is your best friend and no one correlates better with your quarterback than the pass catcher on his own team. We did a stick to stacking article. What's that? A stick to stackin article.

It looked back at that over the last 20 years looking at over 5,000 games played in the NFL and a stacked quarterback wide receiver combo 15.3% chance of booming, which is hitting 40 combined fantasy points. An unstacked quarterback wide receiver combo only 12%. And that might sound like a small edge, but small edges matter. You know what they do? They stack up. Boston. That was a swish, Mike. You didn't call it. I didn't call it. I didn't call it. I got it busted. I'm sorry. I don't want third place. I want to win a championship. Stacks help. The best scores often come from a stack lineup. Just look at last year. The cowboy stack of DAC and CD Lamb last year had a higher percentage of fantasy championships than any other combination, which I don't like because Andy had them. How to work out?

Every championship, I've looked at this in our League of Record, every championship I have with one, two, three, all three championships. Yeah, you could stop counting there. I can. I know. It was actually on the back of a stack. Yeah. I mean, it was, you go way back to Peyton and Demarius. You know, last year, Dak and Citi. I remember going back to Peyton Manning and Dallas Drake. Like the stack, it's fun. The correlation is so powerful. You want to know why it works? Because when you get into this. Dallas Clark. Yeah. Okay. I thought there was a player I didn't remember. You said Dallas Drake. I said Dallas Drake. Did it? Yeah. That's fine. That's a former NHL player. Dallas Clark tied in for the Colts. Shout out Dallas Clark. Yeah. Dallas Drake. Hey. Last year they, when you get to the playoffs, you're playing the best teams, right? It's like, oh, you've got to play the other team that puts up a bunch of points. That combo last year in the.

Semi-finals and finals scored 51.5 points and 63.9 points. That's why you won a championship bandy. So my favorite stacks this year, there are a couple ways to do it. You can either get your quarterback first. I like double-tapping Jalen Hertz, Devante Smith. If you're at that 3-4 turn, boom, bam, baby. I just made my stack, and I don't have to guess if I get it later. I love both players. I also think Patrick Mahomes is slightly undervalued this year compared to, you know, last year at least, and you can get Rushi Rice cheap. My backdoor stacks would be if I take T. Higgins, I like combining him with Joe Burrow, Jaden Reed and Jordan Love later in the draft. And then if you're lucky enough, you know, I'm not targeting Tua or DAC personally in my leagues. But if I'm at the beginning of the draft, if I'm at the two or the three and I end up with Tyree Kill or Cee Lamb, you're darn right that when I'm later in the draft, I am now targeting.

the correlating DAC or Tua. Yeah, that's a nice separator for those guys in that middle tier is to know you have the powerhouse wide receiver. Yeah. All right. We'll take a quick break and come back with our top five. All right. We are going to jump in here. Here we go. Number five. All right. I want to talk about quarterbacks and their ADP and the history of that because the quarterback position for fantasy football, it has been. There's been an evolution in the past 10 years. It's quite the timeline. Because when we first started the show, it was late round QB, which that's another shout out to JJ for opening my eyes to that. You could get a quarterback late. It was actually detrimental to your team to draft a quarterback early when you could just get a guy later, a guy that you know that runs, and he's just going to give me points, or I can stream.

against bad defenses and make up points. And over time, the fantasy football community, they're getting wise to this, especially wise to the fact that a quarterback that runs, it is a true cheat code. And now those guys are moving up. Plus, the NFL is changing. And guys that run are now also airing it out. It's no longer Tim Tebow where it's, I need all the running because the passing won't be there. You get guys like Alan Hertz where. You're getting a combination. That's why the guys are the super stud. So I took a look back at the past four years because things have really been changing recently. And I wanted to look how safe has quarterback drafting actually been? It's still tough. It is still tough. The hit rate of a top 12 quarterback in ADP is at 48%. And when I say a hit rate, I mean a guy finishing within one spot of his ADP. So.

Like your quarterback 3. If he finishes the quarterback 4, I'm not going to hold that against him. That's fine. That's a fine pick. But if you're a couple spots, I counted that as a bust and you were hitting at 48%. So then I said, well, is there a better way to look at it where it's not just top 12? Broke them down into three tiers of ADP. QB 1 through 4, 5 through 8, 9 through 12. And the reason I did this is because the point, the expected point threshold is pretty close for those and they kind of separate. Drafting a top 4 QB.

hitting at 44% okay that's for the margin of error that's that's very good quarterback five through eight that dropped down to 37 and a half percent that's that is not so great and then quarterback nine through 12 much much higher at 62 percent granted that's not what you want no that's not what you want and just the expected points for them is it's lower it's easier to hit a like If they hit their ADP, it's not like a quarterback five hitting their ADP. And then I thought, well, let's look at this through the lens of ceiling, right? Just sealing. And I want to see these buckets that I put together, QB1 through 4, 5 through 8, 9 through 12, how often are they finishing as a top 4 guy? The top 4 ADP quarterbacks, that jumps up to 56%. So it just, it kind of secures that, yeah, these quarterbacks that we've identified at the top.

They've been coming through for us more often than they haven't. QB 5 through 8, that drops to 18%. But then here's where it gets weird. QB 9 through 12, finishing as a top 4 quarterback, 25%. So over the last four years, not only has that range of quarterback giving you a safer outcome, a safer floor, less likely to bust, they're also giving you a slight edge of actually jumping into the top 4. 1 and 4? Yeah. So it's like that's what these QBs 5 through 8 when we're talking about them. It's just this range of QB where it's so it's nebulous. They're not in the past four years. They haven't hit as often as the later guys. So it's just, it's just again, these are slight edges that we're looking for. And it's the quarterbacks who are in that range. It's Dack, Jordan Love, Brock Purdy, and Jaden Daniels. Like this is a four pack of QBs.

that align with this historical data of three pocket passers, one with the mobility. Right. And it's, but just the point being, those are quarterbacks that I wanted to target. And this data is just backing that up even more of being willing to bypass those middle tier guys excluding. I'll take Kyler. He's at QB8. But it's just, you know, a slight edge to consider historically. Isn't that nice, man, when you have, you've got your ideas. Yeah. You know, your priors and you just get to confirm them. That's nice. Yeah, it's pretty much what life's all about. Number four. All right, we'll call this build a dynamic duo. And so our ultimate draft kit, we highlight the risk rating for a player. And we talk about upside ratings for a player. And we also talk about the benefits historically of having volatility on your roster, the ability to have a player go out and win you a week.

But I think what's fundamental to that, and when I say build the dynamic duo, is that you need to make sure that you're maintaining a floor on your roster points-wise so that those volatile big performances mean something, that they're not undermined by an inverse, the bottom dropping out. Yeah, canceling each other out. So you can use the ultimate draft kit to do this, and I wanted to highlight some of the kind of combinations that might make sense when placed together on a roster, roster construction-wise. at different positions. So in the first half of the draft, you've got players that we would consider and rank in the UDK as safer, low-risk wide receivers. Devante Smith has a risk rating of three. That's very low. Michael Pittman at 3.7, Christian Kirk at 3. If you correlate those risk ratings to how you think about those players, it makes perfect sense, right? They are on the field all the time. They have a good history, their kind of possession go-to guys for their quarterbacks.

floor is pretty high. But there are some other wide receivers that are great combos for those names that have more risk associated with him and more upside. Debo Samuel, he's an eight and a half upside in the UDK. He comes with a six risk due to some volatility and injury. So that's a nice player. Maybe if you have a Debo Samuel on your roster, Christian Kirk makes sense later in the draft. Tank Dell. He's a 7.7 upside. We love Tank Dell. He does contain some risk due to the fact that it's a nebulous situation. Stefan Diggs, how done is he? We know Nico Collins got the bag. Also, Tankdale got hurt last year, and that's something you pay attention to. He's a great player to combine with a Michael Pittman, so you have volatility and upside, but you've got the floor. And then another one would be Devante Adams. We know Devante Adams at his best with good quarterback play. Like, if that happens, that is one of the best wide receivers in football.

But he's got a 6.3 risk. He's older, which means that there's a risk due to age, and he's got currently unproven quarterback play or at best, you know, kind of like low-in starter play with Gardner Minshue. So Adams is a player that we saw it last year. He could win you the championship on one week. He can score one point and get shut down by, I think it was, was it legurious need? Yeah. So building a dynamic duel, setting that floor up so that your high-end players. can have success, I think is really important. Same thing goes with the running back position. You can go through the UDK. You can look at the risk ratings in the upside and try to find that balance. And a lot of the times, you're not going to go into a draft saying I'm going to ping pong between these. But as the draft is starting to form, look at those risk ratings at that point. I've got this guy on my team. The ballers have them at this risk rating with not a lot of upside. I'm going to target a higher volatility player later and build that dynamic.

duo number three this one's important guys oh no see i i like this show in particular because i did not look at anything either of you had prepared and it's real highbrow stuff yeah it's intellectual yeah probabilistically you're going to really lean on it it's pretty much trained medical advice yeah and this tip is take dumps now not later it's i mean you could translate this to It's just sound like life. It's applicable to everyone out there. The leading cause of death in America. That's true. You come for fantasy football advice, but you're going to stay for health tips from train medical experts like myself. Is the Falcon still in the studio? He is amazingly. It does appear. He took dumps now. Yeah, we had not later. We had to change his seat because he takes.

He takes the mid-show and he takes this advice very seriously. But here's what take dumps now, not later means. I'm talking about your fab dumps. I'm talking about the difference between holding on to your cold hard fake cash. Also, if you're not playing out in Fab League, there's a free agent acquisition budget. You get 100 fake dollars or whatever. budget your league decides and everyone has that and every week you're going to bid a certain amount on players. This also obviously would apply to a waiver priority system. If you've got a high order early in the season and you know you got lucky with that then yeah you you want to spend that capital early not later. We talk about it you know we we build a foundation at the draft.

to set you up for success, but you don't win your championship at the draft. That used to be a tip we said all the time because people would care so much about the draft and then they would fall away and maybe not make the roster moves and the waiver wire pickups that they needed to in season. And then they're like, ah, I'm always good, but I never win the championship. This is how you're going to win a championship. You're going to spend your dumps early. Okay? You're going to take them dumps and you're going to take them early. We've also got, you know, look, a little peel back the curtain.