470: Prepping for Fantasy Football Playoff Contests

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Speaker 1: This is the Label Podcast with your host JJ Zacher Resa Jay Jake Zacher reson what's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at FANDL and at number fire dot com in this episode four hundred and seventy of the Late Round Podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast Network A twenty twenty one Thanks for tuning in. I know a lot of you are on the fence about off season content. To a lot of you, fantasy football is a four or five month thing, not a twelve month thing. And I can respect that. No one's forcing you to be fantasy football obsessed for three hundred and sixty five days a year. Now, with that being said, I can confidently say that the off season episodes of the Late Round Podcast they're the most important. They set things up for the season by helping you refine your process and by helping you understand the details of the game at a deeper level. So I hope that you stick around. I hope that you're here throughout the off season. Today's episode not exactly a deep dive that's gonna help you dominate your fantasy leagues for years to come. We've got a whole offseason for studies. Instead, I do a show every year, This show where I dig into strategy for your fantasy football playoff contests. If you've never played postseason fantasy football, you're not alone. It's not nearly as popular as the regular fantasy football game that we all play, and there are lots and lots of variations. With some formats, you draft a team with your league mates you keep throughout the playoffs, just like a normal draft, except teams get eliminated with others, you just choose a different lineup every week based on the players who are available that week. The most common, or one of the most common, is one where you pick players to fill a team each week. But the catch is you can't use a player more than once throughout the playoffs. Sites like Fantasy Postseason dot Com run contests with this one and done format. That's the format I'm going to focus on today because it gives you a high level understanding of the playoffs and how to approach it from a fantasy football perspective. Now, I know some of you be playing that type of format, or any playoff format at all. Maybe you're not that interested, but I can guarantee you that with this specific episode, you'll learn at least something, even if it's not specific to fantasy, because with playoff fantasy football, you have to look at real NFL information, not just fantasy information. You have to not just predict how a player is gonna perform in an individual matchup like we do every single week throughout the regular season, but you've got to do your best to predict how well a team is going to do throughout the playoffs. There's an interesting little twist to things now before we really dig into all of this. With the NFL regular season officially a thing in the past, you may want to shift your focus to daily fantasy football. Over on FanDuel. For just four dollars and forty four cents, you can enter this weekend's Sunday Million contests and compete for your share of the one point five million dollar prize bowl, including a three hundred thousand dollars first place prize. There's one running on Saturday and Sunday because there are two separate slates, so definitely check it out for more details. Was at fandle dot com or download the fandel app today. Eligibility restrictions apply Okay, so let's look at this one and done format at a high level. You need to strike a balance. You can't just use players from good teams to kick things off because good teams will advance in the playoffs. You don't want to get to the super Bowl and not have anyone left to play. At the same time, you don't want to play it too safe and not be in a position to win once that super Bowl hits, even if your super Bowl roster looks good. It's a delicate balance. If we knew exactly how the playoffs were going to unfold, this whole task would be a lot easier. But just because we don't know exactly what's going to go down doesn't mean we shouldn't try to predict it. This is where the regular football analysis comes into play. Over on number five or We have a metric that we use. It's appropriately called NERD. NERD tells us the number of points we'd expect a team to win by against an average one on a neutral field. So a team with a NERD of two, let's say we would expect them to beat an average team or a team with a NERD of zero by two points on a neutral field. If that NERD was negative too, we'd expect them to lose by two. They'd be a bad team or a below average team. Throughout the season. Number fires algorithm updates NERD scores, and they're not just based on record. In fact, according to number Fire's numbers, and this is going to be different depending on the formula, but number fire had Tampa Bay as the best team in the NFL this year with a NERD of nine point nine to two. This doesn't mean that I agree with it, for the record, it's just what the algorithm spit out. And also for the record, I'm not the one building that algorithm. A lot of people think that the projections on number five are mine. They're not mine. They're good projections, but I'm not the one who's building them. This doesn't automatically mean the Buccaneers or Super Bowl favorites, not at all. Because of their bye weeks and the advantage that that brings, the Chiefs have a nineteen point eight percent chance to win the Super Bowl. The Packers are at eighteen percent, and then in third it's the Saints at ten point nine percent, So the Saints actually have the best chance to win it all among teams playing this weekend. The Buccaneers are seventh when including the teams with Buys, so you might be wondering why that's the case. The Buccaneers are really good in nerd, but they don't have significantly high odds to win the Super Bowl. But it just has to do a seeding in the path that these teams have to take to win the Super Bowl. The Buccaneers aren't a very high seed, they won't have home field advantage, and the chances they play Green Bay in round two is decently high. So it's good to have your head wrapped around those two things to start. The first is how good these teams actually are, and you don't have to use just one source like number fire. I think number fire is a great place to start, but you can search around. Other places will post their objective analytical scores for teams, and the Bucks might not be ranked as high in their algorithm, but once you have an idea of that, look at their paths to sticking around for a while. In terms of Super Bowl odds, number fire has the fourteen teams listed as follows. Kansas City is first, then Green Bay, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Buffalo, Tampa Bay, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tennessee, Indianapolis, Washington, Chicago, and then Cleveland. Meanwhile, Tennessee, Indianapolis, Washington, Chicago, and Cleveland they have less than a three percent chance to win the Super Bowl in a one and done format, You'll likely want to use players from those teams early and often. Now. One of the obvious differences this year compared to previous years is that there are more playoff teams. There are more games happening in the wildcard round. One thing that that changes is that there's going to be a team that played during Wildcard weekend that's going to be in the Conference Championship, which means you have to be even more strategic about the players that you're choosing here in the first week. The easiest way to sort of combat this and work with this is to look at the Wildcard round and pinpoint teams who are most likely to lose this week. According to Fandels Sportsbook, those teams of Chicago they're nine and a half point underdogs, Indianapolis there's seven point underdogs, and Washington they're seven and a half point underdogs. Now, usually bad teams are teams that lose big there's not a ton of fantasy relevance on those teams, but each of those teams have studs or usable players for purposes of a one and done format. My approach each year is define these wild card round underdogs and pick off the good players on those teams and put them in my lineup, because chances are this is the only time that you're gonna be able to use those players. So for Indianapolis, it makes sense to go with Jonathan Taylor. For Washington, you might want to consider Terry McLaurin or Logan Thomas for Chicago, Alan Robinson, and maybe David Montgomery. And look, there's obviously a chance that one of those teams wins this weekend. There's actually a decent chance that we see in upset. But considering there's such big underdogs this weekend, what does that say about next weekend? You can't really bank on those teams making a run, and you shouldn't unless you're in a massive contest where you have to be incredibly contrarian. But even to that point, it's probably not worth it. Now. Of course, you should be analyzing the matchups for these good players on underdog teams. Don't just play David Montgomery because he's been a good fantasy asset throughout the season. The Saints haven't been very friendly to running backs, so it's a matchup that's not necessarily ideal. It makes more sense to go with Alan Robinson since the Bears are likely to be in a negative game script and the Saints are slightly more advantageous as a matchup for wide receivers than running backs when looking at adjusted fantasy points allowed. Now, while you're looking at these individual matchups for this weekend, it's not a bad idea to take a step back and look at the really good and the really bad matchups throughout the entire playoffs. Let me explain what I mean by that. The Rams this year, for example, they've been amazingly good at holding wide receivers in fantasy. You don't want to play wide receivers against the Rams. So not only does that mean the Seahawks are off limits this week, but it means you should be cognizant of future matchups that the Rams might have. Now, they're not favorites this weekend, so you may only have to worry about the Seahawks facing the Rams, but if they were to win, they'd more than likely get Green Bay in round two because the NFL recedes. The only way the Packers wouldn't face the Rams in round two is if the Bears beat this Saints, and it would be unlikely for both of those things to happen anyway. Be cognizant of this, Be aware of which matchups could be upcoming that might be advantageous and not advantageous to give you an idea when looking strictly at playoff teams and when looking at adjusted fantasy points allowed, the advantageous matchups in the playoffs would be quarterbacks facing the Titans, Seahawks, and Browns, running backs facing the Titans and Packers, and wide receivers facing the Seahawks, Titans, and Browns. On the other end, Pittsburgh and LA have not been kind to quarterbacks. A whole lot of teams have been good against running backs. That's not that big of a surprise because there are good teams in the playoffs and game script likely went in their favor that limits opposing running backs. And then the Rams and the Packers are two teams where using wide receivers against them is not the best idea in the world. It's a little bit tough. So, for example, to that last point, it's interesting for Seattle, You're likely better off waiting to use Seattle wide receivers after this week because they number one, have a better chance to be forced to throw the ball more in games against Green Bay are more than likely New Orleans in round two, and then number two, they get a brutal matchup this week against the Rams. In the regular season, no wide receiver ranked higher than wide receiver thirty one and weekly scoring for the Seahawks when facing the Rams, so you should save them for round two. Okay, so I know I've thrown a lot of information at you, but let me recap really quick before I get more specific without I'm attacking these contests. Step one, understand the landscape, find teams who might surprise, and understand team odds to make a true run. Step two. For the teams not likely to make it out of the first round, make a list of the studs on those teams. You're likely going to use those players in the wild card round. Step three, make a list that helps you define the outlier matchups, the matchups that you'd want to avoid or attack. And then step four look at hypotheticals. See where players may or may not hit those matchups and adjust accordingly. Then this might seem super high level, and it is. It's a high level look at how to attack these games. So maybe you want to know how I jj am gonna play these contests, So I'll talk through that to end today's show. I already mentioned players like Jonathan Taylor and Alan Robinson. I think they make a ton of sense this weekend. I'm gonna fill my lineup up first with players like that. I'm then probably gonna have in my mind that I'm gonna save the Chiefs until at least the conference championship round, maybe aside from a running back. That may change if they get the Titans in the divisional round, but they're the safest bet given their odds to go all the way. And I'm also gonna utilize a lot of Baltimore Ravens this week. They get arguably the worst defense in the playoffs in Tennessee, and they'll likely not be in this good of a spot moving forward, no matter if they face Kansas City or Buffalo or Pittsburgh. And there's also the chance that they lose this game even though they're road favorites, So I think going with Ravens this week makes a lot of sense. And if you want to stack that game a little bit, I think that makes sense as well, given it's got the closest spread among all the games this week and according to Fandals Sportsbook. So that's my overall strategy for these contests this year. I know some teams weren't mentioned, like the Steelers and the Browns. It's mostly because there's nothing glaring about those teams, about their path, about their matchups this weekend. There's nothing totally totally obvious. I wanted to point out the teams and situations that do seem obvious to use right away because it's so important in these contests to get off on the right foot. But check out number fire dot com. Go to the NFL tab, then rankings, and then team power rankings. You'll get a lot of information that can help you with these contests. And again, I know that some of you are playing in other contests, that you're playing in leagues where you just draft a team and go from there, or where you're picking new players each and every week. It's hard to capture every variation here, but I think there's at least something in what I just talked about that should help you in any type of league, not just a one and done format. That's going to do it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to Late Round Pop, make sure you are by searching forward pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks. Everyone. Will be back in your ears on Friday with the weekly mail bag show. That's the cadence for this show moving forward during the off season, one show every Monday or Tuesday, and then the mail bag every Friday. If you have questions for that mail bag, feel free to at me on Twitter, especially when I ask for those questions on Twitter, or you can email me questions during the off season at jjat number fire dot com. I'll talk to you then