Fantasy Football 2017 - 10 Tips & Tricks to Win Your League

you're allowed to not have to continue being in love with him. That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. And what I see happen a lot to fantasy owners is, okay, Jamal Charles won you a title. Right. A couple years ago. And you have now drafted him every year since. That was great when I...

dialed up on my AOL connection when Jamal Charles was winning me championships. It's basically like you're rewarding that player with a contract on your roster. And you don't want to do that in fantasy football. You don't want your real team to do that. I really am tempted sometimes to do that exact same thing. That was part of why I traded for Greg Olson last year. And then he let me down. But despite how Greg Olson led you down, you're not going to let that sway you for saying Greg Wilson is a top five tight end. That is absolutely true. I'll put his picture up on our bathroom wall to commemorate what he did.

But if he's at a good value, I will absolutely draft him again this year. All right. Let's move on. Number nine. All right, number nine, we're going to call it quarterbacks. You can take a number. Take a number. Draft a late round quarterback, or you could say it another way. Some reasons why you might be taking a quarterback too early in your draft. I want to make the case for you. I'm going to make it as quick as I can, but I want people to really understand why we subscribe to late round quarterback theory here on the show. Now, there are reasons why fantasy owners.

There are reasons why fantasy owners take quarterbacks too early. The first reason is because they make the quarterback score of the most points argument, right? And they're right. Quarterbacks last year, 2016, Aaron Rogers, Matt Ryan, Drew Brees, scored 380, 347, 32 fantasy points. That's in standard league formats. That's the most in the league. If you go look at a guy like LaShaul McCoy, he scored 248 points. So people...

Look at that and they say, well, why wouldn't you draft the guy that scored the most points? That's 132 less points than Aaron Rogers. So why would you take them? And the argument, what you got to realize is this comes down to position scarcity. Position scarcity. You cannot compare quarterbacks to running backs because you've got one quarterback on your roster. You got two running backs on your roster. And look, let me break this down for you. In 2016, the fourth ranked quarterback was Andrew Luck, who scored 307.

0.7 points. The 12th ranked, so your last QB1 was Andy Dalton with 260 points. So there's a gap of 46 points between Andrew Luck and Andy Dalton, right? The fourth ranked running back in 2016 was Lev Bell with 242 points. The 24th ranked running back, your last starter, was Terrence West who scored 137 points. That's a gap of more than 100 points.

More than double the gap between QB4 and QB12. So points are relative, you got to understand, points are relative to the position and to how many at that position you need to start. So if you opt for a quarterback too early, you sacrifice total points on your roster. You've got to be looking at gaps, right? You've got to be looking at position scarcity. The other argument that I would make is one that Mike's brought up recently, the fact that you don't, there are 40 quarterbacks. 40 quarterbacks finished with the top.

12 week. You know, that's more quarterbacks than there than teams in the NFL. Look, Matt Moore put up a number two week. Robert, you guys remember Robert Griffin last year? Oh, he still put up a top 12 week. You put these quarterbacks in the right position against the right defense. You know that they're going to score points. The league is friendly when it comes to rules for passing. The quarterback literally touches the ball every single play unless it's a...

one of those trick plays, and it's a direct snap to the running back. But even the plays where they're going to give it to the running back, the quarterback touches the ball, and nearly every quarterback throws the ball 20 to 30 times a week, and they're going to get yards. So it's just do not fall into the trap of seeing what Aaron Rogers does on a weekly basis, because you can piece together. You can Frankenstein a quarterback. Well, it may not feel as glamorous.

as having Aaron Rogers there in the starting roster when your opponent looks at who are they playing? Oh, crap, I'm playing Aaron Rogers as opposed to, oh, crap, I'm playing Colin Kaepernick, who wasn't even a starting quarterback to begin the season, but doesn't matter. And you can crush them there. I mean, last year, every year, and this coming year, we will make our picks for streaming a quarterback off of the waiver wire. We go by the ESPN leagues when we go, hey, what?

What quarterbacks are available in more than half of the leagues out there on waivers and who could play and start. And when we tracked this, our amalgamation of quarterback would have been the quarterback number six. The sixth best quarterback. Just from the waiver. Just from the waiver. Do that with running backs. You can't. Try to play running backs off the waiver every week. You get the running back 44. Yeah, if that. You know what wasn't glamorous? You talk about it glamorous.

Starting Drew Breeze at the end of last year wasn't glamorous. You would have been stuck doing it, and somebody like Sam Bradford finished the year with three amazing weeks where Breez struggled during his end-of-season run. So three quick caveats to this. If you're in a two-quarterback league, throw it out the window. The position scarcity argument's gone. You need two quarterbacks. You can still wait because there are a lot that produce, but you've got to realize you need to start two. The second caveat.

Value is still king. This does not mean you take this strategy and you punt quarterback to the end of your draft even when Aaron Rogers is there in the sixth round. That would be foolish. You still want value to determine what you're doing. And then the last one is your goal is still to find a great quarterback. Yes. If you draft the late round quarterback, you still are looking to get somebody you could start the majority of your weeks. Your goal isn't to find like have to.

put it all together. If you have a guy that can finish in the top three, you know, Cam Newton, Carson Palmer, guys that finished in the top five that you drafted really late over the last couple of years. Finding one of those is great, but you can only find one of those if you wait and you evaluate and do it like that. It's great to wait. Take a number of quarterbacks. Take yours a little bit later in the draft. Jason, it's your turn. Number eight. Be a stalker. Yeah?

Yeah, be a stalker. And what I mean by that is track the other teams in your league. Track the league. That is so important. From like the bushes of their house? Yes, you need to sit nearby in the bushes and watch the mock draft to know what they're going to do. Put cameras in your league mate's house.

Whether it's just audio or visual, we need every piece. It's just Santa Claus coming through. Don't mind me. Here's what tracking your league and quote being a stalker. Being a draft stalker. It means at your draft, you.

have to be paying attention to the other team. Sometimes you can get tunnel vision when you're drafting. And even knowing this tip, sometimes you're so concerned about who your pick is going to be and which guys are left that you like, that you don't pay attention to what the other teams in your league have. And you need to match this with where your draft position is, okay, because there's different strategies. Let's say you're at the turn. You're the first or the last pick. You know, you're doing that double up.

pick. A lot of this, you could throw out the window. What you'll want to track is the overall numbers of the entire league. How many total teams have a quarterback? How many total tight-ins have gone off the board so that you can start the run as opposed to be on the last side of a tight-in run or something like that late in the draft?

Or let's say you're near the turn and you, you know, you're picking at the seven or the eight spot in a 10 or 12 man league. Well, now when you're coming up to your two somewhat quick picks, you look at the other teams because you've tracked them. What I used to do is I used to come with a pad of paper and I would, you know, write every team on a different sheet. And I'd mark those things down so that you can just look at a glance of what...

everybody's positions are already filled and I can go, oh, this guy already has, you know, X amount of running backs. He's probably not going to take a running back, so I'll wait there. What this strategy does is it tells you what not to draft. It tells you I need to avoid drafting the wide receiver here because he's going to be able to come back around to me. And if you're not paying attention to the other...

teams in your league, then you're making a terrible mistake. And there's so many ways to do this. If you're doing a live draft, or I'm sorry, an online draft, the software you're using, you know, ESPN, it's already built in. You just need to, you know, click the drop down and look at the other teams and get in the habit of doing that. You know, I used to bring that pad of paper. We've been talking about the draft day app.

I use that now, and you know, you can mark off everybody from there. So if you're at a live draft, you know, get the draft day app. That'll track everybody. But you want to make sure. I love it. It helps you know where you can wait. Exactly. Yeah. Where, and it just gives you better value. And if you're not paying attention to those things, then you'll get tunnel vision. You'll be a little scared when it comes time for your pick. And you won't get great value. So just for clarity, just for the audio record.

Your recommendation is to be a stalker and your name in full is. Jason Moore, I highly recommend being a stalker. Okay, we're moving on. Number seven. Number seven, we're going to talk about leveling up with tiers, tier based drafting, drafting. You may have heard of us. May have heard of us. You may have heard of us. Many leather bound books. You may have heard us talking about this approach.

this approach gets you away from grabbing that 1 through 200 rankings and saying, okay, this guy's 34 and the top 33 are gone. That means I have to take. Don't draft from top 200 rankings. That's what our tip number one should have been that. Don't use top 200. Well, you can, he's baked into this one because if you're using tier base drafting, you're not doing right top 200 drafting. And the way it works. So think of a tier is a bucket. And this bucket holds.

players who are all going to, at least we're projecting, they will score a similar range of points. That helps you avoid the goo-goos of saying, I have to take player X because they're just so amazing. And if I miss out of them, I'm going to tilt on my draft, because you go, oh, well, he's right in the middle of that tier. There's guys who are very similar to him, very comparable to him. And it also helps you then.

When the draft is moving along, some running backs are going off, some wide receivers, it's going to help you find that value where, let's say everyone has gone really running back heavy, which I expect to happen this year because the pendulum is going to swing back too far away from wide receivers. And you see that when people are like, who should I take number three overall? Antonio Brown, I mean, he's still really good. So do not pass on the value if the running back.

Tier 1 is empty, don't draft from tier 2. If that bucket is empty? Yeah, don't go to the second bucket while the wide receiver 1 bucket is still got plenty of guys. So it just helps you prioritize what position you need to be looking at, when to jump in on a tight end, when to jump in on a quarterback. That is a great one to pair with to be a stalker from Jason. Yes. Because if you're paying attention to your opponents and you know, hey, there's three guys in this bucket.

But my opponents can only, the likelihood is they're only going to draft one of those guys from that bucket. You can wait. You don't need to necessarily take it. Or the opposite. Oh, I only got one left in this tier. I got to take them now before my opponents most assuredly are going to take them in the next round. It's also a great one to pair with the late round quarterback because people always go, well, what round? The round doesn't matter. If you're in a two-quarterback or one quarterback, if you're tier-based drafting, then...

then it won't matter. You'll just know, hey, I like this group of guys. I want to make sure I get one of this group of guys. And so when, you know, let's say there's six guys in that group, that middle to late round group that you like, the Staffords and Rivers and Dalton's. And, you know, if there's six guys in that group, well, as soon as two or three or four of those guys are off, depending on where you're at in the draft, now you know when to take them. Yep, absolutely. So let's go to number six. Number six.

Know your surroundings. Know your league. That is what I got for you at number six. This is about paying attention to the little things about your roster, about how your league settings work, about how you can exploit. Yes, exploitation. Legally exploit the things that make your league your league. No, with maximize. Yeah. Maximize. You go maximize. I go exploit. Let me put it this way. Let me give you an example. Let's say your league.