Fantasy Football 2017 - Top 10 Quarterbacks + ADP Predictions

As the 18th quarterback off the board, you might not even have him drafted when you're done in your league. You can't do that because you know that Andy or I will touch him. Well, sure, yes. We will grab him as probably the 12th or 13th quarterback off the board in whatever league we're in. Look, one of the craziest stats about Andy Dalton, and I love him. I have him at eight. That's the highest of the three of us. So I absolutely agree with you. I think he's this year's Matt Ryan. Last year, Matt Ryan threw a touchdown every nine completions.

Andy Dalton threw a touchdown every 20 completions. So you're talking about a 2x for Matt Ryan and how efficient he was. Dalton was down in the case Keenom-Alex-Smith range. And that's not normal. No, it's not. That's the point. It's not normal. And when he has effort, the touchdown totals have been much higher, 1.65 TDs with him versus 1.11 without. Well, he threw a touchdown on 3.2% of his passes last year. His previous four years.

5.3. So a huge, huge dip in his normal career trajectory. Has shown he can finish the season as a top five quarterback in 2013. He was number five. And in 2015, he was in the top three before his injury. And that is what is built into this beautiful draft price is you have him going in the 12th round, a free quarterback.

All the weapons back. AJ Green, Tyler I for Geo Bernard, now Joe Mixon. Brandon Lafell and Tyler Boyd are. And John Ross. We don't even talk about John Ross. And so I think he's the best value sleeper, whatever you want to call him.

the best quarterback value in all of fantasy football. When you have to rely on changing pieces that are negative changes, you know, negative changes, I really don't like, I really don't like when a quarterback has to deal with, you know, departures of people they're used to and fresh faces. That's what Dalton had to deal with last year. Last year he had to deal with that when Sunu left and Marvin Jones left. So now he has that rapport built in with Brandon LaFelle.

with Tyler Boyd. Obviously, he's got it great with AJ Green and Tyler Eifert. Go ahead and throw in, you know, a couple rookie awesome pass catchers. But he now has a team that he has experience with and, you know, an explosive offensive opportunity here. I think there are, I just love when there are noticeable reasons for why he was inefficient last year that are now different for this. Everything lines up for.

to be easier to project a step forward for him. All right, 9 and 10 on the list from our quarterback rankings, first top 10 rankings that we're breaking out. Dak Prescott, Philip Rivers at 9 and 10. Let's talk about Dak. I mean, it's, it would be unfair of me to look at the season Matt Ryan had and all of the career highs and the weapons.

and the opportunity that I think he has to not repeat every number, but have a very good fantasy season and not try to apply some of that logic to Dak Prescott. I mean, you look at third best pass rating in the league, 72% completion percentage, six touchdowns for every interception, only eight turnovers on the year. I mean, that is so impressive for a rookie. Also ran the ball 44 times. My hesitation with Dak has been, look, that efficiency number, we haven't seen it for multiple years. He was fresh into the league.

But it's hard to really make an argument against them other than the fact that, look, he didn't have a huge touchdown total. But he got the job done week in and week out. He wasn't giving you number one, number two, number three quarterback weeks. He was giving you number five, number six, number seven, number eight. But he was doing it almost every week. So look, Mike, you buy in the most. You have him at nine. I haven't at 13. Jason right in the middle at 11. I want to hear from Mike, and then we'll move on and we'll talk about Philip Rivers. I think that deck.

proved it last year that he's incredibly smart. He's efficient and he's a, what are the multi-threat quarterback. You can't just worry about keeping Dak Prescott in the pocket or he's going to make you pay in the running game. He has one of the best wide receivers in football and Des Bryant. I'm projecting a big step back for Dallas's secondary. So a game script that's not as friendly for.

Zeke or Darren McFadder for the running game for Dallas. And there were five quarterbacks last year who were a QB won at least 10 or more times. And four of those names you would expect to hear. The fifth one you would not expect to hear is Dak Prescott. Now, I hope that Dak can give you more of those boom weeks, more of those top five, top three type of performances. Because I think that he is more than capable.

Six rushing touchdowns last year, and these were designed runs. This wasn't him scrambling because a play broke down, and he made it to the edge and scored. It was a play-action read, or a read-option play, or the second read was to run. So I'm projecting improvement for DAC, and he was tremendous last year. Let me ask you both this question. Did you adjust Dak Prescott at all with regards to Ezekieli at six-game suspension?

Yeah, I did. I took a touchdown away from him, and that moved him down because I had him a little bit higher as well. I do believe that he is a very, very good quarterback. But I think without Zeke there to open things up a little bit more for him, it's going to hurt the offense as a whole, so I took one touchdown away. All right, Philip Rivers. I'm taking this. Number 10, you just took it. He just took it away. Let's see how I'll give it to. Maybe Andy Dalton.

It looks like he gave it to Philip Rivers. It's like energy. There's only so many touchdowns in the league. You have to just distribute 100 touchdowns across all the players. Look, you took it and you gave it to Philip Rivers because you got them in number seven on your rankings, which is bold, my friend. I've gone in at 12, Mike at 14. It's not like we haven't seen it before, but really hasn't been a top 12 guy since 2013. But I think a lot of fantasy owners don't realize. This was a quarterback who last year had 33 touchdowns.

Number four in the league. And I don't think people thought of Philip Rivers as the number four guy in touchdowns because he had 21 interceptions. He was killing you. Number one in the league. He had to do so much. Jason, why do you love Philip Rivers this season? And I'm curious if you'd take Rivers or you'd take Dalton. Would you rather have Rivers in the 10th round or Dalton in the 12th? No, I'd probably rather have Dalton in the 12th. I mean, Dalton is really at that point?

For me, there's a lot of guys in those, you know, I would say seven through 11 range where the difference to me in having Andy Dalton and Philip Rivers is nothing. I mean, you might say, oh, well, one is my seventh ranked and one is my 13th ranked, but if you look at the actual points projection, there's almost no difference between a lot of these. Rivers has a higher grimaces per play. Oh, man, if you get grimaces per play, you, I mean, you.

Rivers and Eli Manning are first and second rounders. In the grimaces per play? Yes, for sure, especially if there's bonus points for blaming passes on other, on your receiving option. Your gift potential with Rivers is also much higher. It sure is. You do factor these when you're drafting. Oh, you have to. You have to know, I mean, what kind of, what kind of gifts am I going to get? What kind of memes can come out of this quarterback? Absolutely, because fantasy football is fun first. So here's the thing with Philip Rivers.

I think last year we saw because of the decimation of the offense around him. Nice word. The loss of offensive linemen, the loss of Keenan Allen, the loss of Danny Woodhead. There was just so much that kind of forced Philip Rivers to play with a brand new team. I was just talking about this. When you see a guy who has a change for his receiving options and it's, you know,

for all intensive purpose, a negative change. You're, you're downgrading from what you're used to. He had to figure out how, how does Tyrell Williams, blaming those guys? How does Tyrell Williams, you know, run routes? How does Don Trell Inman run routes? How does Travis Benjamin run routes? And, and all of a sudden, you had. Benjamin looked healthy finally. You had Philip Rivers.

you know, go from 13 interceptions a year before to 21 interceptions. A lot of that also was game script because they had these wacky games last year where they were leading and then they, and then all of a sudden the teams were pinning their ears at them and coming after them. I expect the interceptions to.

go down. And I think that's the biggest change between what caused him, depending on your league. If you play in like we do where it's minus two points for an interception, I think Philip Rivers is going to have a pretty big swing this year because he's got his weapons back, healthy, and another year of rapport with the guys that were new last year. He's one of my least favorite opponents in fantasy football. I hate playing against teams with Philip Rivers because you just never know when he's going to come out.

and light it up. He's got the ability to do it. Number one, Aaron Rogers, number two, Andrew Luck, number three, Tom Brady, number four, Drew Breeze, number five, Matt Ryan, number six, Russell Wilson, number seven, Kirk Cousins, number eight, Andy Dalton.

number nine, DAC Prescott, and number 10, and Philip Rivers. And we will be back with more quarterback rankings tomorrow. A little reminder for everybody, the secret to victory is a new podcast from Gatorade and Gimlet Creative about how the best athletes in the world use defeat to fuel a win. And this week, you'll hear from JJ Watt, who by the way, T.J. Watt looked.

Pretty darn good. Oh, yeah, he did. JJ Watt will talk about how he worked his way from college walk onto NFL defensive player of the year. You can go to Gatorade.com slash podcast, listen now, or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. A shout out to the Foot Clan. Thanks to everybody who has subscribed so far to the fantasy footballers DFS podcast. Yeah, baby. Mike Wright, Ben Cummins, Chris Meaney, once a week, all year long, bringing you DFS for the rest of us. The best.

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