Fantasy Football Podcast 2015 - 10 Tips & Tricks to Dominate Your Fantasy League

For the Young Bucks, that was a movie from the 1980s called Wall Street, where there was a character called Gordon Gecko who was ethically questionable. He worked on Wall Street, and he was all about greed is good, buy low, sell high, get it done, make money any way you can. Why I say buy low, sell high, I'm talking about trades. Trades are crucial to your fantasy health.

Now, when I say... To your roster. Things to do with trades, when you have just a nobody on your team and they explode and they have a good week, you don't usually want to shop him right away because if you repeatedly do this, people are going to get annoyed. They're just going to start ignoring you altogether of any trade requests. It generally takes two to three weeks of...

a strong performance before people around your league are starting to help. Maybe that guy does have value. Now, the dangerous game that you're playing here is you start to buy into the hype of the value where you think, oh, maybe he does have value and I don't want to trade him. However, you're playing for first. If you're not first, you're last, which is the most ridiculous statement. But in fantasy football,

it's very true. If you're not first, your last, the last thing I'll say is I love making two for one later in the year. I love making two for one trades where I get the one better player. When it's towards the end of the year, you can move some of your depth as you get ready for the playoffs. However, with saying that, be careful at the beginning of the year, getting rid of all your depth for just start players because then you then one injury in your,

You're done. But generally speaking, two for ones, I am always on board for whoever gets the best player. Well, and I think later on in the year, it's nice to get rid of a couple players and open up your bench spot for tip number two that's coming up later, right? The Boy Scout, that might be it. What does that mean? Well, we don't know yet. Let's get on to the next one. What's the next one? Is it mine? Yeah, it's you, dude. All right. I guess I'll talk.

So I would say draft with tiers in your eyes. No Sean Moreno-sized tears. They call droplets. Huge tear drops. And by that, that is T-I-E-R-S. Tears not rankings. And I'll take this a step further because a lot of times what people will do with their tiers is they make their rankings. They order their players. They get their cheat sheets. And they print them off. And then they draw a little line.

between where they see, I think there's a break between this guy and that guy. And that's it. And that's great. You've just recognized where you see value dropping. But I think that it's even more important to take a look at the types of tiers and types of players. So for instance, there might be a guy that kind of goes out.

of my rankings because I specifically see him as a good wide receiver two or a good wide receiver three where where he might be either higher or lower in my rankings but he's this type of player for me and I'm going to make sure that he's grouped in a tier with that so that I know what I need on my team and when I'm looking the point here of drafting with with tiers

is that the value is not just, this was my 15th ranked guy and this was my 16th ranked guy, and I got someone that I liked, it's a matter of how many guys are left. And this goes great with the voyeur. How many guys are left at a certain value that I see, you know,

When you've got those tiers separated, you look at your tier list that you bring in and you go, there is only one guy left who I think can be my wide receiver one. I know that because I was prepared before I came in. I have to get this guy. Versus just saying, well, if I don't get that guy, I'll move on to the next. I'll move on to the next. It lets you essentially draft more importance from a positional standpoint on your team. Yeah, exactly.

I use tiering especially for to match up with my running back hoarding where I keep taking running backs and I'll wait on that wide receiver two or three until that tier is nearly empty and then I'll cash in on the wide receiver after I've grabbed a bunch of running backs. So you might say it is a strategy to maximize value because you're going to let that bucket or tier get near empty and take the next one higher in another.

position before you would go back and finish that off. Yeah, tight ends this year are the perfect example because I feel like once you get past the first three, I mean, you've got just a bucket of a million, you know, you've got just this group of eight or nine or ten or twelve guys that are just to me,

pretty much the same. And so, you know, if I've got that group, then I can just watch the group be depleted, and I don't need to spend the higher draft pick on. I'll do the running back hoarding as long as I can with the higher picks that I can, and then when I see it getting low, then I pull the trigger, because they're all in the same tier. Is there anything to be said about, you know, this is very strategic, but what about the heart aspect of when you draft and you just like a guy?

Do you guys ever draft the pick just because you want to see him play? Do you ever jump ahead? I feel like it depends on the league. If I'm in a paid money league that the whole point is just win the championship and nothing else, then I probably would try to take my heart out of it. But in a league that is fun, there are so many guys that are near each other.

got to draft the guy you want to watch that you want to you know the guy that's on your home team every everybody's draft home team players are more valuable and i think that's legitimate i would rather have you know some guy that is you know when i'm watching the cardinals games that i don't have to root against my team i get to root for them if if they're in the same ballpark i want it's hard for me because when we get on here we have these shows and we have we start to have our guys that we love right

You know, whoever it might be, whether, you know, for me now it has to be Jeremy Macklin, apparently. That's gross. Good luck. Not really. But, you know, whether it's C.J. Anderson for you or somebody else that becomes your guy and then you want to really, you know, plant your flag in the ground and get them on every one of your rosters as opposed to maybe being as smart as you want to be. But I'm going to have to be careful with that.

Can I have to be careful. All right, this number three on our list of tips and tricks to win your league is a, it comes from all of us. It's quarterback without a name. It's something we've talked about a lot. Mike is the kind of commander on this ship when it comes to a quarterback without a name. He's actually got a big article. You looked at tons of statistics, and this deals with streaming quarterbacks. Yes.

And you looked at a bunch of numbers from 2013, 2014. What does it mean to stream a quarterback? So, thank you for the plug. Andy, the article will go live on fantasy pros either today or tomorrow. I'm not quite sure when it's going to go up. So the way I look at quarterbacks is when I'm in the draft, I have the tiers, right? I have a tier of quarterback who I know from the ADP is going to go late.

but I believe he has the possibility to be a higher-end quarterback. A top five type of guy. That's who I, and I wait, and I wait as long as I possibly can. That's my starting point. Now, because I've waited so long, I don't lock myself into that quarterback if the wheels come off and it doesn't work how exactly as I thought it would. Then I can look to start streaming quarterbacks where, like a defense, I'm looking at matchups.

Now, in my article, I break down the actual weekly value of quarterbacks. I looked at last year in 2013 of how often did a quarterback actually produce quarterback one numbers? Because we all get obsessed with final rankings, especially when we're drafting for 2015. We're going to look at 2014 and say, oh, man, look this quarterback. Andy Dalton was... He's the great example. So, 2013,

Andy Dalton, the number five quarterback, he was... Even higher in some other league, in some league scoring. He was a quarterback won six times. So six weeks of a up to 16-week fantasy season, he gave you good numbers. The other 10, he did not. There were several quarterbacks, much better than him. Same with Cam Newton. Cam Newton finished as the number three quarterback in 2013.

He gave you six weeks of top 12 quarterback numbers. Now, what, and I break all this down in the article, I don't want to get super into detail of things. But the one thing you point out, too, if you don't mind me interrupting. Sure. The one thing that I thought was really great, too, is you pointed out how many times these top, you know, the top 10 ADP, top 5 ADP guys actually busted out. You know, there are four or five busts a year from that group. Guys like Drew Brees last year who you think.

by name, maybe even by end-of-year ranking are stalwarts at the position, but they're actually not because of the inconsistency week-to-week. And the fact that I think the other great point that you briefly brought up is when you draft a quarterback late, you don't lock yourself in, and you're not committed to a Drew Brees like somebody would be if they took them in the third round who said, man, man, I've got to play them every week. It's been a huge pick on him. The perfect recency bias example, last year, this last year, Peyton Manning.

Week 13, the red flags were going, the sirens were flashing. Everything was saying, you should not be playing Peyton Manning. There is something very wrong. His numbers have gone completely in the toilet. But then how do you not play Payton Manning? And you get to your chance. Let's say you locked into your championship week, and you're like, how do you not play Peyton Manning? I spent a first or second round pick on him. I know he's had a month of horrible performances, but...

But he's Peyton Manning. Exactly. You are locked into that player. It's going to take some great intestinal fortitude to actually have the courage to say, I'm going to pick up one of these streamers. Now, Peyton Manning Championship Week was not a top 12 quarterback. I'm trying to find my guys who are... Neither was Andrew Lutt. Right. Neither was Drew Brees. And so I think the gist, if we want to summarize...

a quarterback without a name. It's the fact that if you wait on these guys, you're going to have the ability to, and you want to read his article because he breaks down a lot of the week-to-week. It's a great article. It really is. It took him a lot of time. He does not how to write very well. It took him a lot of proof, proof reading, spell check, all that stuff. He did it all.

But no, you got to check this article by the fantasy hitman. It's great. It'll be on fantasy pros.com. Break it down. You'll see the benefits to maybe taking a different position high in the draft. Because you can get one of the, we talked about running backs and how important they are. And if you're not, you know, you'd just be surprised. You'd be surprised at how inconsistent some of these guys are. And the bust myth of running back versus quarterback. Yep. Yep. He breaks that down as well. So let's go on to number two. This is mine. And it's called the Boy Scout. All right.

I've won more leagues using the Boy Scout than any other tip on this list. And what that means is you always need to be prepared. Be prepared, especially heading into the playoffs. Utilize your bench to stash, especially streaming defenses. Because that's the biggest one. Weeks ahead.

of your playoff matchups. I do this every single year. My bench looks ridiculous, okay? Towards the end of the year. Because I've maxed out the amount of defenses on it. And the defenses aren't even always that great. They don't look like for the week you're playing. They don't even look like good options. But then it's a guy playing the Jaguars in week 14, and I'm going to need them. And I was going to talk about this before. A couple years ago, Mike and I were playing each other in a title game. It's something we do.

Quite quite frequent. But I basically lost because Mike had signed the San Diego defense probably four or five weeks before the championship game. I think week 12. Yeah, week 12 because he knew they played. I think it was Oakland. It might have been Oakland. I looked it up. It was the Jets. Oh, okay. It was the Jets. And in our league where, I mean, a normal defense is.