Fantasy Football Podcast 2015 - Week 15 Matchups, News, Playoff Mailbag

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Indy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Happy Friday. We are back, sort of. Well, yeah, we are definitely back. The important people are back. It is a two-man band. Hey-oh. It is a two-man band. What are we? Which two Beatles would we be? Oh, we're definitely ring, or, Ringo. No, Jason is Ringo. Jason's Ringo. We are Paul and John. For sure. As I was going to say. For sure.

We're here. Over Under on disparaging comments made towards Jason. 18. I'll take the over. Yes, yes. Jason is out today. He is spending time with his children. They have some very important Christmas performances. Absolutely. And so we have let him off the hook. He is with his kids and his family, and that is fine. And we are here. It's the season, man. Yeah.

It's also the season for children being ill. Yeah. As another one of my children fell this morning to strep throat. We got two streps and one cough in the house. So fortunately, you can't catch that through a podcast. That's beneficial. And the parents are okay. Me and the wife. If our listeners could catch the diseases that the children have brought into the house.

That's the worst part when we had our first child. It was like the first two years. He caught everything and we caught everything from him. Oh, yeah. Because wherever he was with other kids, it was just, let's just fully give him every disease that exists in two years. Once school starts, I decked my house out like E.T. Where it's just hazmat it out. And so I don't want to touch anybody. Put a button on the wall that sprays Lysol in the whole house like every 30 seconds.

Well, welcome to the show. It is Friday, December 18th. We are finishing up the fantasy forecast for week 15 of your playoffs right now. We're going to go through the injuries and kind of give you our read on the injury situations and who's starting, who's sitting. We will have a little bit longer mailbag today answering some playoff questions and some questions from the listeners and try to get those out there for you. And then we, I don't think Chris Meaney's going to join us on today's show.

If he doesn't, if we don't get him on the show, we will absolutely tweet out his information. We just, we felt the mail bag was pretty important today because people are trying to win. We are, we like to give the daily information, but we're clearly a season long focused show. So we want our information the best it can be.

uh semifinals man it is or semi it is big time and uh jason got jason got a big game from mike evans last night against me yep i unfortunately i mean it's very rare when i don't see a primetime game last night i did not get to watch that game live because i was with my children watching star wars sometimes you got to go to star wars and so no spoilers don't worry about that

Mike would probably run out of this room. I'd be doing the show by myself. That is accurate. But I've got a good comparison for it, which should encourage people. It was a very good movie. Very, very good movie. LeBron and Michael Jordan. Oh, there we go. Okay. That's my comparison. I feel like some people, if some people think LeBron's the best player in the world, then what are you to argue with them, right? That's true. But if you like Jordan, that's okay. They're both pretty good. You do got to be careful with the overhype, though.

Because then the people come in. No, I know. Or can, I don't know, can you overhype the new Star Wars movie? Probably not. Based on the people that were around us last night. Man, I wish I could have gone. It would probably have been awesome. Yeah, we stood out in their robes. Stood out in the cold, froze our toes off before they let us in the theater. But the kids had a blast. We had a blast. ate too much food. It was good stuff. So, hey.

If you want to follow the show on Twitter, you can just do so at the FF Ballers. We're on the Fantasy Sports Network. We're on YouTube. You can watch the show. Real quick comment on YouTube. I made a mistake yesterday when we were recording the video portion. And it was the worst day to do that. Like, I've never done that before. But I hadn't, I wasn't recording the beginning of the show. And so we missed about five, ten minutes of the show before I started. AKA the best part of the...

And it just happened to be that that was the part where Jason was wearing the Darth Vader mask and doing jazz hands at the same moment. And so if you, if that's an important part of your life, I'm sorry, we couldn't give it to you. It did happen. This is not a, it's not a situation of if the tree falls in the forest, does the make a sound? No, we saw it. Yeah. We saw it. It did happen.

All right, so quick question. What are the fantasy implications of last night's game? I think a different game than people expected. Obviously, a really good game for Case Keenum from an efficiency standpoint. You saw great production from Tavon Austin if he was a spot start for people. What else did you get from that game? What I wanted to see from Tampa Bay was I want to see Mike Evans force-fed the ball.

We got that. You did. And a lot of the game, though, unfortunately, James Winston was getting highly pressured, and you could see it in his body language and his demeanor of overthrowing. Jason was clearly watching very carefully because he has Mike Evans, but he kept writing. He's like, wow, if Mike Evans were eight feet tall, then James Winston would be having a great night. Yeah, yeah. Because that's how badly he was overthrowing him.

However, like Andy said, Evans' monster game. So that just builds up a nice confidence moving forward to next week that he will get those targets. Hopefully the line can hold up a little bit better. Aaron Donald from the Rams is a bad, bad man. My goodness. There were some J.J.O.A comparisons with him earlier in the week. He is awesome. Yeah.

Now he didn't sack, he didn't register a sack, but whatever. He was disruptive. It was a main cause of getting in Winston's head. And so to the Rams side, clearly we got to start Case Keenum moving forward. Yeah, going forward one week. Championship week, Case Keenum. Hope you had that Keenum Brit stack last night. Austin, Savarian Jenkins. Oh, we know what he did. Oh, the garbage man can. It don't matter. They count whether they're the first two minutes or the last two minutes.

You know, I was an advocate for streaming, Safarian Jenkins. He certainly didn't get force-fed the ball. I expected everything...

that happened last night to happen, except for the fact that I thought he would pick up the Vincent Jackson slack. It wouldn't just be passes to Mike Evans that he could catch and couldn't catch. And he made some great... Evans made some great catches. For somebody who was maligned for drops, the toe drag on this... I know he still... He still had a monster hands drop, but he had some great plays. Yeah, some good plays. And he was playing... I think Tampa fans should be really encouraged and fantasy owners for James Winston in years to come, because he's shown, I think, that he has...

What would you call it? Like franchise QB flashes throughout the season and an ascending leadership type of... I'm impressed with him. I am as well. I think he's going to be very good. That's great news for the league and great news for fantasy. Absolutely. So let's get into the news. News and notes from around the league.

All right, Sam Shields, the cornerback for the Green Bay Packers, is out again. There was some talk earlier in the week that he was starting. And so I want to make some adjustments to some of the projections I gave out there for, especially Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree. People ask me questions very early in the week. I wasn't really high on those guys or Derek Carr. It wasn't that I was super low on them. I just wasn't excited about the matchup.

My feeling about that game has kind of changed throughout the week. And so with Shields being declared out, I think those guys have upside now, and I just want to make sure that's out there. Do you agree with me? I completely agree. We saw earlier around the middle of the season, when Sam Shields went out now, Green Bay also had some other injuries that compacted into this. But what started off as a great defense, when they got those injuries, all of a sudden looked like a really bad defense.

And you take the best cornerback off of a team, and that absolutely disrupts the defense. You have to shift guys into different positions, and it just opens things up for the opposing offense. So I do agree that it gives a bump to the Raiders passing game. I mean, if you remember the beginning of the year, the Packers defense was a startable, very viable defense, and they got disrupted, like you said. The other point of news I want to bring up, dynasty implications, keeper implications.

I just wrote Calvin in the cap, all right? Calvin Johnson is set to count 24.008 million against the cap in 2016. That point zero eight is the... That's the key. I mean, if it was just like 23.9... A flat 23, 24? Fine. No big deal. But you go 0.008 over, then we got a serious problem. Major issues. So now you've got Megatroni's 31 next season.

A little bit of, what was the word you used? Caution, or was it, uh-oh, is what Jason said to describe him? Yeah, I think I said aging. Aging. Yeah, I mean, he's not the same guy that was the kind of O'Do Beckham Jr., Julio, Antonio Brown-level fantasy player. Now you've got this variable of the cap number being so huge, a rebuild in Detroit potentially. So if they cut him, they'd save $11 million. They still have to take a $12 million cap hit.

But do you think he'll be back? And if he's not, what is, I mean, is Calvin no longer an upper echelon keeper? What is his dynasty, dynasty implication? Man, you can't call him an upper echelon keeper with all the, with all the other wide receivers that are emerging. What's funny is, I mean, we had talked about this way, way long ago in the preseason of,

where we're trying to figure out where is Calvin going to be. Will he have this decline? Will he still be an elite level guy? And are kind of the argument of when he was lower. I eventually moved him back up because I thought he would have a better season. But my argument was everyone else, the other guys, it's not so much Calvin. You're going to have guys emerge like Julio. Well, he had already emerged, but Alan Robinson, Evans, these guys are now rising up.

But moving forward, Detroit has, they have to do something. That's what you know. There's no way you can have a 31-year-old with $24 million as your cap. We live this in Arizona. I was going to say, exactly. It's very, very similar to what happened with Larry Fitzgerald. Thankfully, we were able to restructure. And even more thankfully, is that Larry was recognized where he was, that he didn't have that.

dominant outside presence anymore. And he said, okay, we'll use me as you can. And we've seen he's been great. So a lot might be tied into Calvin's willingness to accept what he is now or what he is becoming as opposed to saying, hey, I deserve to be a $24 million cap hit right now because I'm still elite and I'm still Calvin Johnson. Can they restructure, can they tear that contract up, get some more help in there like the Cardinals have done with Floyd and John Brown?