Early Top 10 WR Rankings + Mystery Boxes, Dynasty Download - Fantasy Football Podcast for 4/20

Well, and the reality is two years ago, what happened is you saw how talented he was. Now, you lose the Drew Brees side of that equation, but coming into this year, you assume he is just as talented as he's ever been now that he's healthy and out there. And he's also the clear cut. I mean, you want to talk about...

betting on someone's market share in an offense. Michael Thomas is the guy here. There's, you know, even Jared Kuk is gone. Emmanuel Sanders is gone. You're not buying all the, the, what are we on the fourth year in a row of Trey Kwan Smith is going to break out? I'm not off of Trey Kwan Smith. Is he going to Corey Davis? Look, Trey Kwan Smith.

TBD, but my point is for market share. Did he say Robert Meacham? Is that who you just said? Treyquan is not going to impede Michael Thomas. So when you look at just targets, he's going to have a ton. But I agree he's not going to have as many touches. And I think the reason I'm lowest,

is because if you pay the seventh wide receiver off the board for him, I think you're getting the absolute 100% ceiling of Michael Thomas. You're drafting him where he can max out. The one year, the super year, there's 185 targets that he finished the number one with Drew Brees. Three years before, 147, 149. Give him 150 targets next year. You're probably getting the wide receiver 7. So that would be my only kind of caution, and I'm just scared.

I'm scared of what I don't know about this offense. No, I think you're right. I mean, you look at the three years prior. He finished the season as the wide receiver seven, the wide receiver seven, the wide receiver six. He is as consistent and awesome as they come, but he is not the top. He's not the Devante Adams, the tire he kills or what you hope AJ Brown can develop into. He, he's a, he is a back half wide receiver one, locked and loaded.

you know, assuming he's healthy. Can that change at all if, if you, if James comes in with the, I know James has said he's ready to take care of the ball, you know, but he's still got that gunslinger in his heart. Now, does that change the, the ceiling of Michael Thomas for you? If it's, if it is James. No, I don't think so. I mean, you, you had Drew Breeze when he was getting, you know, the water receiver seven and six. So I don't want to start any sentence with if James Winston comes in and plays well.

I don't, I feel like that's the most. Well, I didn't say if he comes in and plays well. I said if he comes in place. You did say that he says he's going to protect the ball, Mike. Yeah. Yeah, no, but I think. Do you believe him? No. Not for a second. No, I do not. Does he wink when he says that to his own coach? Yeah, I'm going to protect the ball coach. We still haven't seen James with, we haven't seen LASIC James yet. LASIC James. Oh, the narrative street of LASIC James. Yeah.

He hasn't seen LASIC James yet. Exactly. He couldn't even get out there. No, too many variables for me to pay up at least. If he drops, then we'll see. But I'd rather take this guy. Justin Jefferson, I have him at 6, Jason at 8, Mike at 10 ends up as our consensus 8 right now. Last year, rookie season, 125 targets, 88 catches, 1,400 yards, 7 touchdowns. The best touchdown dances in the land. Oh, yeah. Fire.

I mean, this was, let's just be clear, a rookie season. He finishes the wide receiver six, but this was the wide receiver four from weeks three on. And you should, that's what you should look at. Because this was a player, took him two weeks to figure it out at the NFL level. And then he's the wide receiver four on the year, finishing ahead of so many more notable names. Not the most consistent week to week. That is a byproduct of really the system. You know, it's a Delvin Cook offense.

Adam Thielen is still a very effective red zone weapon. So you didn't get rookie year. You didn't get everything from Justin Jefferson. You could ever want. You didn't get consistency at the level of, you know, Adams. But I don't know if you can have a better rookie season than Jefferson did. I don't know that anybody ever has. I mean, 1400 yards pretty dang good. And like you said, those first two weeks, he wasn't really involved in the offense.

The pace from week three on, which is really fair with Justin, is a 1,020-yard pace. He's outstanding. I mean, he was another one of those players when you watch. He's just opened down the field. So smooth. I love everything about him. The knock that I have is that I do think that the Minnesota Vikings defense, which was horrible this last year, which is a super outlier for a Mike Zimmer team.

is in fact going to be the outlier. Their defense is going to be much, much better. They spent a ton of money this offseason on the defensive side of the ball, and that's going to allow them to run the ball more and play defense, throw the ball less, have to be in fewer shootouts, and that obviously does take some of the giant massive yardage numbers that Jefferson can put up when you are involved in those style of games, and it takes a little hit. So I don't expect him to...

You know, because it was a rookie while he had 1,400 that now he's going to come out and have 1,450 yards, I would be projecting him 1,200 yards. But what he showed on film definitely has that anti-Michael Thomas where you go, he could be the number one wide receiver in all of fantasy. He has that kind of explosiveness to his game. Anything to add, Mike? I wanted to give you a...

Okay. Yeah, when you look at, I don't want to leave this behind because the work was awesome, but Kyle mapped out the top 36 rookie wide receivers over the last seven years and said they usually build on their early success. When you look at Beckham's rookie season, he followed it with, you know, his number five finished with number five and then number four. Michael Thomas followed his number seven rookie season with the number six. Looks like the players that failed in that department when they finished top 10 as a rookie was due to injury.

had his number nine year when he jumped up in year two and went down to 64 with injury. But, you know, trust your eyeballs with Justin Jefferson. Whether he finishes at 6, 7, 8, whatever, I agree with Jason. He has the capability physically of being a top 5 guy. Julio's at 9. I got him at 8, Jason at 10, Mike at 7. We can kind of breeze through Julio here. Top 8 fantasy wide receiver in 6 straight years before last year's injury plagued season.

which should speak to the fact that he hasn't been injury plagued. If you went six straight years in the top eight, however, he is older, so you don't want to ignore injury, but you also don't want to overemphasize it and say, well, Julio's done because he missed six games. No, he had 10 targets in the games he played. Yeah, I mean, Julio has been injured 16 times per season every year, but he just doesn't usually miss games. He just has a catastrophic injury on the field, and then he's back on the field dominating. He dominated.

There was nothing we could see on film that said he lost an inch or a step. The only worry that I have is the fact that he's 32 years old, and now will these injuries be harder to come back from and will he miss more games? If you promised me, Julio's playing 17 games. If I knew that and I could look at a crystal ball, he would probably be my number three wide receiver. I would pick him ahead of Calvin Ridley. I'd pick him ahead of a lot of these other guys because he is always just dominated.

32 years old, 10 years older than Justin Jefferson. That's a decade. The math does check out. Thank you. Cut that out. Number 10, our final early wide receiver that we're going to talk about today. D.K. Metcalfe. I have him at 10, Jason at 9, Mike at 12. He is difficult. He will win you weeks. Yes, he will do that. And I wonder.

I wondered this when I was looking over this sheet, and you guys talked to me about this. I wonder if we're going to sound today and through the offseason like we sounded when we talked about Tyreek Hill after his breakout campaign when we talk about D.K. Metcalfe. Because if you remember, there was doubt. There was the, oh, you're explosive, you're not necessarily consistent. Oh, Alex Smith, he doesn't throw the deep ball. Oh, there's, you know, there are some things here.

that, you know, I think we could be wrong about. Sure. With D.K. Metcalfe based on him progressing as a player. I mean, 83 for 1303 and 10. Jason said it earlier this offseason. One of the things he wanted us to remember was like, don't over-emphasize this Seattle switch to the running game. Let's try to stay somewhere in the middle here.

and give the praise that's due for the wide receiver 7 of last season in DK Metcalf. And the fact that maybe there's more, maybe he's a player that's going to have 10 touchdowns or more per season for five straight seasons like Des used to do. Right. It is in the realm of possibilities. We as a show are low on DK Metcalfe. I've seen him in a lot of basketball ADPs going as.

the wide receiver 5, and we have doubled that. Now at the wide receiver 10, the whole Seattle offense is very difficult to decode with, because I know Jason, you're trying to remain optimistic about the balance of the run and the pass, but to me, just following the money is they got rid of a coach who didn't run enough.

They just paid a running back to come in and be the foundation of the team. All this weird offseason stuff with Russell Wilson. I don't know. I have a very difficult time completely buying in on DK Metcalf. The ceiling games are absolutely there, where he will win you the week. But does the number, maybe he finishes?

You know, as the number seven overall wide receiver, but when you have so many weeks of finishing outside of the top 40, is that really the player you want to invest to be your number one wide receiver? Yeah, I mean, you know, if we remember back to last year in the way that the Seahawks season went, you had a locked and loaded, guaranteed...

First time MVP Russell Wilson over the first half of the year. Everyone was talking about it's crazy how he's never had a vote. He's clearly going to be the MVP. And the wheels fell off. And they also had a terrible defense at the beginning of the year, which is pretty abnormal for Seattle.

And then the second half of the year, you know, that's where, you know, in the beginning of the year, I think both Tyler Lockett and D.K. McCaff were top five fantasy options. The second half of the year, they weren't even top 15 wide receivers. And Russ was throwing the ball five fewer pass attempts over weeks, you know, 10 through 17 versus weeks one through nine. And that's concerning. But I do think that some of what happened in the second half of the year.

was anomalous as far as he missed a lot of those shots. I mean, he just literally, they played poor football on offense. And if I have to bet whether or not Seattle's going to play good offense or bad offense, whether Russ is going to hit D.K. Metcalf or miss D.K. Metcalf, I'm going to bet on it working because he's a good quarterback. D.K. Metcalf is as talented and otherworldly physically as anyone in the NFL. And at the end, I'm going to make a bet that...

They find a way to score a lot of moonball touchdowns. He may be a player that were lower on in our rankings, but I really want to have on my team. But are you willing? Over under 130 targets for Matt Caffe in your three. I will take the under. He actually did rank as a consistency score of 68% and that's an A in our metric. 24% target share. He was incredibly solid the whole first half. And then once you can.

The second half is tough. The second half is two times in the top 24. I mean, that's it. And you can see how many points teams are scoring against Seattle in that time. You go the whole first half, they're giving up easily 30 plus points a game. And then over that second half of the season, they're giving up fewer than 20 points a game. I need to stop.

Brooks trained me on this. I need to stop throwing out these bets based on last year's target totals and things like that. I've got to retrain myself with the whole 17 game season. So do we all do. I mean, if I say 130, I'm going to lose every one of them. Well, I took the under. And I'm very wrong. Yeah, yeah, you're right. So, all right, it'll be an interesting player to watch ADP-wise and what the confidence level is. So back to Andy, you were saying.