Breakout Picks + Player Questions, SOS

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Coming to you from pristineauction.com studios with your host, Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Oh, welcome in. Welcome to the show. It's Tuesday, August 20th. Another great podcast coming your way. We have breakouts. Oh. Now, we're not talking any old ordinary. I mean, we've got our ultimate draft kit.

And it's awesome. No, we're talking major. And we've got breakouts in the ultimate draft kit. Well, you should just define it. The ultimate draft kit. At least two-thirds, usually all three of us have to sign off on that player before they get into the ultimate draft kit breakouts. On the show is where we're allowed to let that personal bias seep out. Yeah, we're doing our own breakout picks on the show today. Some of our favorite guys. So we got.

Got some breakouts. NFL season is coming quick. Got a good quick question. We're excited. I mentioned it, the Ultimate Draft Kit. If you need help on draft day, we've got an app this year. You can check it all out at Ultimate DraftKit.com. A reminder, a dollar of every UDK sold goes directly to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. All the proceeds from this Saturday's live show on Phoenix going straight to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as well. Been a great partner this year. And we know, look.

We know the time of the year. You are consuming all fantasy football content that you can. If you've never been in the ultimate draft kit, this thing is jam pack. It is bursting. Is there an IV in there? Can you hook it up? You might need one after you're done going through all the information. I'm telling you, you log into this thing, and it's a research tool. This isn't just us saying.

Well, pick this guy. That's how you win. You know how to win? You pick that guy. I mean, we're letting you research trying to figure some things out for yourself as well. Absolutely. You can follow us on Twitter at the FF Ballers. The Fantasy Footballers.com's the website. Here's the quick question. It comes in from Corey in Hawaii. Oh, bonjour, Corey. Really? So non-continental, you're throwing the non-continental bonjour? I can totally get behind that. They're far enough away.

Bonjour. Mike didn't even think twice. No, I don't have to. Look, whenever I see... You need your passport, Mike? You don't need your passport to go to Hawaii. Whenever I see the commercials letting me know that good deals are happening, they're like, sorry Alaska and Hawaii. Oh, so you want to give them that foreign flare? That's right. Okay. You also, you can get the ultimate draft kit for the regular price.

It's not raised. Okay. How much do you guys factor in strength of schedule in your fantasy football rankings? Does it play a big role when it comes to fantasy success? What say you? I do not. It's something I've learned over the last few years to utilize less and less. I try to get more accurate, more predictive strength of schedules. And I do look at that when I go into every team. But over the last several years,

I mean, if you're just picking and choosing, you can be like, oh, look, this team did really well and they had a great early season strength of schedule, but then you're just picking and choosing because what about the teams that did great and had a terrible strength of schedule every year? That's one of those data points that are wrong. So when it comes to the schedule personally, I don't put too much weight on it.

Obviously, you know from before the schedule comes out what divisions they're playing against. So you can tell if it's a little bit easier, a little bit more difficult. But I don't factor it in crazy. Where I do factor the schedule is week one defensive pickups. That's like, you know, I look at the early season schedule and think, how is a team going to get off to an easy start, a difficult start? Like I've mentioned, I'm not drafting the Jaguar's defense. Great defense. They play Kansas City week one. Not like I don't want to play them.

You're not taking that chance. I don't want to roster two defenses to start. So the Ravens who are at Miami, the Eagles, home against the Redskins, Seahawks, home against the Bengals, Cowboys, home against the Giants. Those are like, I look at week one to make that determination. I factor them immensely when you talk about in-season rankings. Preseason draft rankings, I don't because of the fact that many times the players that I draft are not the...

That's not the team I finished the year with either. So if I'm trying to over-emphasize the season schedule, number one, I have to make assumptions about the fact that every defense is going to be the same thing that I think they're going to be, which is never the case. Number two, I'm going to keep those guys throughout the season so that I can utilize them in this dynamic, amazing playoff schedule. So no, when we do in-season projections, that's what defines your week-to-week projection. As you start to see more and more about what these defenses can do,

That affects the way your week-to-week rankings at the running back, the wide receiver position. Obviously, that plays a big role. I still look at early season, though. In the UDK, we break down full season, and early season is included in that. And guys like Mark Ingram, he's not really a running back that I've been super interested in this offseason. I feel just okay taking him. But they have a great...

schedule to open things up. So maybe when I'm in those rounds where I'm looking at guys like Mark Ingram, I'm going to use that as a tiebreaker to know that Ingram should get off to a pretty nice start. So you play against Miami, then the Cardinals and the Kansas City Chiefs. Yeah. So I do look at the early ones. It's people want their fantasy playoff rankings, strength of schedule right now. That part is going to be so different. Well, and in.

To your point, I don't mind you looking at them. I think that's why we break it down like that in the UDK. We talked about streaming quarterbacks on the ranking show all the time. You don't want to – same logic behind the defense. You don't want to go grab a quarterback that's got terrible perceived matchups. But even you looking at that, even what you believe about Ingram's schedule, could be wrong. Of course. Defensive turnover and the expectation. So, I mean, we saw that last year. Certain games you expected –

amazing top of the season and it didn't happen for some players. So you just got to, those first six weeks of the NFL, you're starting to learn about what defenses are what. Yeah. People ask, you know, what's a, is there anything, any time of the year where it's harder to rank? Week two, setting projections for players is extremely difficult. You might think, well, week one, no. It's week two when you have that week one data, which is a,

Nothing. That is a nothing sample size. And it starts infecting your brain. I'm like, okay, well, I'm just going to draw a conclusion that this team is washed based off of the opening schedule. Yeah, that's a good point. It's a good point. We're going to get right into it today. No news segment on the show. We don't want to give a shout out to Sleeper. Check out the Sleeper app. Let's get into the breakouts. Breakouts. All right.

We get to bring a couple names each to the table here today, players that we're excited about, players that there's a wide range of conviction when it comes to a breakout, right? Everybody throws this word around all the time. And you kind of have the, you know, the way Twitter is and with social media, and it's hard to fly under the radar and be a breakout. With the coverage that fantasy gets now, yes.

So I think it's more important than to kind of qualify our breakouts more by our percentage of certainty. How strong do we believe in it? Because let's face it, there are a lot of players that could break out. Maybe they got a 10% chance or a 20% chance. But, you know, how sure are you? When you talk about your guys, talk about how positive you are that these players are going to have that breakout season. And it's not, all breakouts are not created equal.

that we like you can say oh he's going to break out but that just means now he's going from absolute nothingness where you've never even heard of this player's name to now they're a wide receiver three they're not burning down the house with fantasy points but they are usable on a week to week basis that's how i look at a breakout is someone who had no value and now almost weekly that this person has value

I think it's fair, and I think a lot of the times it also represents a tier jump. Sure. Does the player move into a tier that we'll be talking about them completely different in 2020?

Yeah, and I'm, I'll kick us off here because I am pretty darn confident and bullish on this player. I think the breakout is as likely as it was for me and my acne in high school. Oh, we're talking complete breakout. Oh, gross. You're welcome. You're welcome, everybody. Were you a full face? Oh, yeah, full face back. Sorry, my former colleagues, friends, family.

Present company excluded. We pulled through. We pulled through. We got here. Good for you. Super handsome now for those just listening. Yeah. Look, early in the off season, I talked about. Thanks, guys. I talked about Chris Godwood a lot in the early off season because I really, really believe in both the talent.

And the situation, when you bring those things together, I think you tear jump. I think you become a very reliable player. But we haven't really brought his name up that much in the last month or so. Obviously, around that to everybody else. Right. I was going to say around the community, plenty of buzz around Chris Godwin. But he's someone that I personally believe is a...

is a great wide receiver. So coming out of college, Matt Harmon said he was basically the best contested catch player he had ever tracked. In the UDK this year, Matt Harmon's reception says he's the easiest breakout to spot from a distance. He literally on every single route. He is above the NFL average by a wide margin with the exception of one route. He's a tactician. He's got a great, you know.

ability to grab the contested catches. And if you look at, he's entering his year three, right? Last year, he became relevant. He was the wide receiver 25, a top in wide receiver three. And that was while you had Adam Humphreys and Deshawn Jackson taking a bunch of targets away. Now,

Those two guys are gone. He's going to go way up in targets. And you have the addition of Bruce Ariens installing his offense where we know from a large sample of history that the slot guy for Bruce Ariens is great.