Fantasy Football - 10 Tips & Tricks to Win Your League + MEGALABOWL! - Podcast for 8/19

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Sign up now. Games not included with DirecTV requires separate paid app subscriptions. Service renews monthly unless canceled. Local channels vary by market, blackouts, and other terms apply. All right, our top 10 tips and tricks continue. Number four. All right, this one I'm calling the battle days. The battle days. This one was... Not B-A-T-T-L-E. You going to battle?

No, bad. Bad space. Old. Days. It was O.L. Apostrophe. Because there's a phrase. People say, the good old days. Right. Yeah. So this one's like the... These are the battle days. These are the battle days. The battle days. I hate you guys. All right. This was my... This is my favorite one because it was a journey to discover these numbers on my own. Like, I was very curious. So I took a look at the last 10 years.

at the 10 oldest players drafted each year in fantasy. Okay. So that's a lot of, a lot of players. And I wanted to look which ones were what I'd consider a win that would be exceeding their ADP, a loss much worse than their ADP, or a push, kind of met their ADP. So 10 years worth of data, the 10 oldest players each year, here's the numbers. 30 wins, 50 losses, 20 pushes.

So a true hit, like winning on that pick, has a 30% hit rate. But I was like, let's look at it by position because maybe age has a correlation more with a position. And it did. The worst bet you can make, and it's ironic timing with the Evans News this morning, is on older fantasy wide receivers. In that 10-year span, they went 7, 19, and 8.

So that's seven wins above ADP. So seven, a 21% of the time above ADP, 19 losses below ADP and eight pushes. So the receiving age cliff seems to be very steep. Like when it goes, it goes. We've been there with the Julios and AJ Greens. We've been there with, you know. So who is that this year? That's Devante Adams. Yeah, I'll give you them all. I'll give you all those. So old tight ends in that span did the best.

But you kind of. Yeah, that's Kelsey. You kind of know why. That's just Travis Kelsey. That's not fair. I mean, he wasn't old. He wasn't in the sample for, you know, 10 year ago sample. But they were six, two and one. But if you weren't Kelsey, if you weren't a Hall of Famer, they were horrific. So if you were a non-elite, you were 0 and 5. You never outkicked your ADP. Also, one of the things I think that was interesting looking at it is that over the years we've had Hall of Famers.

that were older, that performed super well, and it kind of made us think that old guys perform better than they do. If you look at Brady, Breeze, Rivers, Big Ben, Fitz, Gore, like those were these older, elder statesmen that always performed. But that's what scares me about like... Kelsey even? No, no, no, like two years from now, Dak. Because I love Dak. I love them forever. But it's like, we look at these guys who are playing at 40.

Brady and Stafford and go, well, Dak's going to freaking crush when he's only 37, but it's like, is he, is he that level? Is he a Hall of Fame level quarterback? Because they, because most people don't. Well, look, I'm going to try to tell you what to pay attention to to try to figure out who will perform if you're an older player. One thing to know, half of the losses were availability not declined. So in other words, injuries were prominent.

For older players. I can attest. One thing you can pay attention to, and we've seen it with some of the older guys recently, or one of them, especially, the encore effect is actually real. If a player was old and already performed old, they're more likely to do it again. So Derek Henry, Travis Kelsey, those guys, if you did it once, if you broke the mold, if you outkick the 30%, you're more likely to do it again. That's something to pay attention to if you don't want to take.

Derek Henry off the board. Which I won't. Yes, exactly. So I will give you, here are the oldest players. I'll give you the oldest players being drafted this year. But the TLDR is basically that over the last decade, drafting one of the 10 oldest players in the first nine rounds lost you money half the time. So it's just something to keep in mind. And profitability, doing well with the pick. Old quarterbacks did well. Travis Kelsey did well.

But this year it's Matthew Stafford. He's 38 years old. It's Travis Kelsey, 37, about to be. It's Devante Adams and Mike Evans. Travis Kelsey is 37. 36.9. I'm just saying that the fact that he is still out there. So like Matthew Stafford is by, so these are drafting the first 12 rounds this year. Stafford, Kelsey, Adams, Evans, Kittle.

Yeah. We kind of were like excited about him, but we forget there's an age component on top of the injury. So availability for Kittles is going to be a question. Stefan Diggs. Okay. Derek Henry and Aaron Jones. So to Jason's point yesterday when his sleeper was Jordan Mason, Aaron Jones at running back, that's a tough one because I would not say the encore effect is in place for Aaron Jones. No, he hasn't been special at an old age. Henry it is. Henry it is. Stafford it is.

I wouldn't have said that Kittle probably fit. Kittles just breaking into the older group. So that was one where we're going to see. But Evans and Adams, I think, are the biggest decisions for fantasy players. There was a part of this offseason pre-substation, Jason, where I feel like your Evans has gone. Yes, I was so high. Down. When he signed with San Francisco, I was like, holy crap. Yeah. I love this. He's perfect for their system, perfect for their quarterback. I loved everything about it.

And then it's just like, man, he's so old and broken. And he's playing next with substation. Oh. The graphic with no sound? That's the second time we've gotten the graphic. But Jason, do it again. What is the sound that a substation makes? Thank you. Well, that's disappointing. I thought Tara McLaurin might crack this list. That's why I was really curious if he was. So he's not one of the 10 oldest. He's 30.9. He'll turn 31.

He doesn't technically fit the age. He's a little scared. It doesn't mean he's fine. It just means he doesn't fit the stat. So there you go. Do with that what you will. We're moving on. Number three. The hangman is back. We are revisiting the dead zone. This is the dead zone. This is the dead zone for running back. We just got a question on that recently. And I knew this was coming. If you've been.

Playing fantasy football long enough, you know about the running back dead zone for years. It was like the rounds four through eight, they were, they were, you know, not great hit rates to draft running backs because usually what happens in those rounds is people who, they've got a lot of red flags, they just get pushed up. It's the desperation. Yeah. It's the, oh, no, I'd have to get a running back here. And so you burn a pick on a running back who is only there because.

the other because supply is running out you're like well well he's a starter so i got to take him in the fourth and you're like you're missing out on on high level wide receivers or tight end yeah you were and then the last couple of years came and it it didn't really work out that way those rounds weren't just a dead zone and weren't terrible but i think we're back this year looking at adp i think we are uh back see what's what's happened

now is you've got a lot of running backs being drafted. I mean, more than half of the first two rounds are running backs. The studs are being drafted very high. But what is happening is that is pushing up the lesser good backs into a range that they haven't been in the last couple of years. I'll give you a couple examples here. The running back 24 in 2024 was in the seventh round.

The running back 24 right now is a mid-fifth round pick. They are significantly higher. An eighth round pick was the running back 36 in 2024. So that's like a fringe flex play. Eighth round, that's okay. I'm sorry, he was 10th rounder. And now he's up in the eighth round this year. Those, those players being pushed up.

really means. I mean, part of this is the correlation to your quarterbacks going a little bit later. Running backs are being drafted. Mediocre, middling running backs are being drafted higher than they should go. And we have a tool on the website, the value scout tool. It's in the UDK. It's a really cool thing we came out with last year where it takes our projections, looks at basically what the true value would be according to

like historical precedent for what you would expect them to be drafted at ADP-wise. And then it compares to where their ADP currently is. And so there's a handful of guys right now that if you look at the Value Scout tool, you just see they're being significantly overdrafted what the expectation of their ADP should have been. Travis H. Chan Jr. right now is being picked 10 spots ahead of ADP. Now, obviously, maybe this changes with Alvin Camara being out for a month. David Montgomery.

Right now, you know, we've got him priced basically 15 picks behind where he's being drafted in ADP. Jalen Warren looks like an eighth rounder according to our consensus projections, but he's being pulled up to the sixth round on Sleeper. And Tony Pollard, another one where he's going, you know, 11 spots ahead of where we project his ADP should be. You can check out more of these players in the Value Scout tool. But this is basically, it's not to say.

Don't hear what I'm not saying. It's not to say that there won't be any good pick in the rounds four through eight for running back. But what matters that you need to know is that when you are drafting the running back 24 through 36, you are paying a lot more right now than you have in recent years. And if you are, it mathematically means that other players at other positions are being pushed down and they are.

A better value than in years past. So you just got to play the market. The pendulum swings back and forth. The health of running backs the last two years has just pushed running backs way too high in those middle rounds. Do you want to know something cool? Yeah, I do. If you take two awesome running backs at the top of your draft, you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about no RB strategy. Just do.

Just draft great running backs. I pretty much require two of my first four rounds to be running backs and potentially three because I love to just, you know. High T. Shotgun those wide receivers for a while afterwards. Yeah. Number two. We're calling this one hot or not. Number two may think of Matt. I remember that. Oh, hot number two is not a place you want to be. Oh, goodness. Been there. Let's not focus on that. This is a PG show, remember?

Rim. What did he say? So we actually, we just fielded the question about this where people were saying, you know, what is the kind of the emphasis on early season schedule? And because we're talking about hot starts. And it does factor in the first month of the season. It carries a lot of weight for fantasy, for emotion. And when also a part of that is like,