10 Tips & Tricks to Win Your Fantasy Football League - Fantasy Football Podcast for 8/18

lead some speculation to say, this could be serious. So look, he's in a situation where you could break out. He was highly drafted. He's very talented. He's on a good offense. He's going into year two as a tight end. But the injury takes him kind of off my board because I do think that there's a lot of people like that. Noah Fant, you know, we talked about the tight ends yesterday. So when there's so many guys that I like... You said Noah Fant's off your board? No, no, no. I'm saying Noah Fant is currently not injured. And he...

checks all those same boxes that T.J. Hawkinson does. Jalen Hurd, unfortunately, suffered an ACL tear at Monday's practice. He missed his entire rookie year after, if you remember him coming out in the preseason, scored two touchdowns in a preseason game, promising young rookie alongside Debo last season. I loved his tape as a running back. Yeah, I mean, he's a big boy. And so they were shifting him to kind of like a tight end wide receiver situation. But he tore his ACL.

and not going to be available to the 49ers this year. And really, in breaking, just startling news. You can see Jason on the video is now lowered his chair to a place where he cannot be visible. Oh, but we can see the top of your head, Jason. Now! Rodney! The Bengals. Your shame has been exposed. The Bengals have waived, obviously waivable running back. Rodney Anderson. Just you wait. He's going to land somewhere. And this has affected Jason in a way.

that is shared by no one else. That's true. That's true. Well, it's not, I get it, man. I've, I've watched the tape on Rodney. Like, he was incredibly talented. Of course. His body just doesn't want to play football. Yeah, you know, it's, here's what's fun about, uh, loving some obscure random player that you recognize fully that, like the, the op. It's a lot. Everyone likes the underdog, the long shot. The path for him to succeed was pretty much impossible. I know that. I knew that.

But it's fun when you plant a flag on that because any Rodney Anderson news, my timeline on Twitter is, if you sent me a message yesterday, I didn't see it because there were too many Rodney Anderson jokes being made. There were people that thought Rodney Anderson was actually Darnell Anderson. There were people who thought that was the joke. That's not a real person. He's not a real person. So that is all that I have by way of news. Brooks, how are you doing today?

Pretty darn good. Any other breaking news that we need to cover before we get into these tips and tricks? Nope. All right. Well, we'll end it with Rodney Anderson then. We will. And before we get into those tips and tricks, want to thank today's sponsor. Folkland, listen up. Are you ready to earn your degree, but you need a university that works with your schedule. At WGU, their programs were built to be flexible. WGU offers a quality degree program that's affordable.

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Let's do it. Number 10. All right. I'm going to start it off at number 10 with what I call contextual healing. Because I get to name these. Healing, baby. This is kind of almost a predecessor to the rest of the tips as well, where I like to remind fantasy football players, and this is something our show has tried to remind them over the last five seasons.

Fantasy football is a lot more than just statistical analysis, okay? You have, look, the stats, the numbers, the analytics, the things that we obsess over the things that we build out our rankings with, those are all fundamental, okay? That's a foundational, fundamental piece of being a great fantasy football player. But they are not the only thing that matters when it comes to actually winning.

from what it comes to being a champ champ. If you want to be a champ champ, there's an element, a contextual element to your skills, to knowing your league, your league mates. And that's fundamental to actually winning. And we try to talk more about our league sometimes, and we limit ourselves to a select few leagues so that we can be in that same boat with you focused on the contextual elements of winning at fantasy. This means things like,

You know, the laundry list of knowing your league rules, when do your waivers run? Who's dropped by people on Waver Day? We talk about drop it like it's hot and paying attention. We say it like that. Look, can you stash players on your IR spot for safekeeping off of the waiver wire? Which league mates that are in your league have a home team bias? Every league has that one or two players that they want all the home team guys and you get that extra.

Some dumb guy in your league will pay way too much for any Packer because he's a huge Packers fan. Looking at you. Al Borland. Maybe there's a player that has a weakness for that flavor of the weak player. Like the highest score of the preceding week, that player is the most valuable player in the league to that owner. So different players trade differently. And these are all very, very important.

parts of winning your fantasy football league. So you got to know those elements to win. You can't just be as simple as taking a cheat sheet, drafting that roster, and moving forward. So that's my tip. It's contextual. It's about your league, your league format. And let's say you're getting into footclanleagues.com right now, you know, and joining a new league. And so you don't know these people.

When a guy has that big blow-up week that just, you know, monstrous week one, it was unbelievable. It's probably more Sammy Watkins, you know, than it is prescriptive for future success. Go and offer him to everybody and find out, find out who is the person. And then remember that. Keep a note. Yeah. So that's my first tip. Jason? I refuse to go until I get a number. Oh, you're right. Number nine.

middle me this as Jim Carrey would say would he well he would say riddle me this but I say middle me this the middle rounds of fantasy what do we do in those middle rounds and for this purpose I wanted to name it middle me this so I call it middle rounds but I'm specifically talking about rounds three through six what do you do I'm going to make the argument here for you today

that rounds three through six are made for wide receivers. Okay? Now, don't hear what I'm not saying. We stay water and we let the draft come to us. If I'm at the 12 spot and Michael Thomas has fallen to me, I'm drafted him there and I might need a running back here. But my point, you know, and if a great tight end falls, the point that I'm making here, and I've been talking about this for months, talking about how these middle rounds.

It is so difficult for me to take one of these running backs over these great wide receivers that I'm seeing there. It just feels foolhardy at this point to do it. And I wanted to go and do a little bit of research. See if I could back this up. And I found some great research out there. I've got to give a shout out to Jack Miller of RotoViz, Hayden Winks of Roto World for all the research backing up what, you know, we've been saying for a long time. And we've seen really for years now.

This last year, if you remember last season, there were a couple of great running backs in that range. Derek Henry, Aaron Jones. This last year was actually okay if you go back and look. Talking about the middle rounds? Those middle rounds for running back. Absolutely. It was a bang-up year. But the previous four seasons, okay, here's a statistic. And this is all coming from best ball because this.

Best ball is what we need to look at. We're talking about draft season. This is, you know, we say you don't win your championship at the draft and you don't. But you do in best ball, because that's the entirety of the league is you have a draft. That's a great point, Jason. So in best ball, over the previous four seasons, wide receivers that were drafted in rounds three through six.

They outscored the wide receivers drafted around 7 through 10 by 4.2 fantasy points per game. You'd expect that, right? 67 more points on average through the course of the year. But over those four seasons, running backs drafted in that range outscored their counterparts in the next three round by 0.9 fantasy points per game. Basically, it was no different. If you draft these running backs in that range versus waiting for running backs later.

Whereas wide receivers were bigger. But here's the thing. Even with that crazy hit rate last year of these running backs in that range, they still underperformed their win rates. Last year, people that drafted running backs in that range had a lower than expected a below expectation win rate. And that's five years in a row that it's been true. And five years in a row, people that drafted wide receivers in that range posted an above expectation win rate.

Now, that's all the historical, analytical, factual data. But let's, that's just in the past. That doesn't mean it's true for the future. But I came at this from this 2020 outlook and saying I don't like the running backs there. I like the wide receivers. Here are the running backs in rounds three through six. Todd Gurley. Out. You're out.

Chris Carson. I hope he's healthy. I'm all in. Leonard Fournette. Is he going to catch the ball? Melvin Gordon. How's that air up in Denver treating you? Jonathan Taylor. James Connor. Can he stay healthy? Lev Bell. You know, he stunk last year. Maybe he'll get better. Mark Ingram. These are all giant question mark. Actually, the guy I might like the most there is at the end, you know, near the sixth round. Mark Ingram. But look at the wide receivers in that range. Kenny Galladay.