Late-Round Perspectives: Andy Behrens

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Andy Barns is an analyst at Yahoo Fantasy and the president of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association. He's a dad, he's a novelist, he has an amazing collection of loud shirts, and he loves Iowa football more than you do. These are his Late Round Perspectives. Well, you have the honor of getting the Perspectives episode the one week of each season where you get sick. You know, like every fantasy analyst has one week where they're borderline deathly ill, but they have to still do content, right, you know.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: It's how it goes, how it goes.

00:00:44
Speaker 1: But this is my promotion for people to view some of the clips on my YouTube channel, is that I have conjunctive itis in both eyes right now, and so you can you can go view that over on the Late Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel.

00:00:58
Speaker 3: Oh man, good for you not wearing like Welder's goggles or anything like that.

00:01:01
Speaker 2: I did that. So that's the thing.

00:01:02
Speaker 1: On living the stream earlier this week on Tuesday, I wore sunglasses during the episode because I was so embarrassed, like this right now is bet And then and then later that night with my patrons, I had a live stream and I saw I was literally like like like covering my eyes throughout the live stream because I was so embarrassed by how ma just just deathly I looked. But it's one of those things where it looks worse than it actually actually feels.

00:01:27
Speaker 3: I'll try to I'll try to carry us.

00:01:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna need you. And you're you're You're the true You're the true pro here man. I mean, you've been doing this for so long. You've been with Yahoo for a really long time.

00:01:37
Speaker 3: Now.

00:01:38
Speaker 2: I wish that you know, I listen to other podcasts and stuff.

00:01:41
Speaker 1: I'm guilty of being someone who who loves Armchair Expert by Dak Shephard his show and the beauty of like having celebrities on shows. This is isn't to say that you're not a celebrity, Andy, because we've all seen you in the Yahoo you know, the draft room whenever we enter that room. Quite fantasy analysts don't have Wikipedia pages, man, like we don't. We don't have the Wikipedia page like understand each other's backgrounds and to see where we came from. We have LinkedIn I guess that kind of sort accounts, but it's you know, it's not giving you like this detailed information on our lives and probably incorrect a lot of times too. But you've been around, I mean you you started Yahoo I think in what two thousand and seven, yep. But I'm really curious as to sort of what your background is, how you got to that spot, and how you're still thriving and crushing it today.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:02:32
Speaker 3: So pre Yahoo I had been I had been more of a mainstream sports writer. I was kind of a like I feel like I was kind of a ground floor, you know, journalism was just venturing out online, like to nineteen ninety nine, two thousand and two thousand and one, That's when I started to do a lot of freelancing around for at first just sort of around Chicago, like mostly print publications, but also a little bit of online stuff, and uh, pretty quickly got picked up, you know, like it was. It was much easier to get jobs like in in online journalism, which now is just journalism back then, right, So, like it was, it wasn't that long before I was doing I was producing some sports content for ESPN and you know, the old the old viewers out there will remember page two, page three. I was writing. I was writing features for for those sites you know, once every once, every couple of weeks, I was part of some really fun email chains. It was like it was a great environment at ESPN back then, and I was doing that for a while, and then I dabbled a little bit in on the fantasy baseball pages there and I was like, I think I was the Montreal Expos correspondent for Eric Carabell for a little while. And then one of my one of my older friends, in one of my oldest friends in the in the fantasy industry is Chris Harris, one of my one of my absolute best friends, and he had, I hope I have the details of this right. He had won the Talented Mister Rodo Open Pen contest, which was just a way to get cheap labor for Talented mister Rodo. Like kudos to them right where they like, you know, you win their contest and then you get to you get to write a piece of recurring content for you know that either appears on their site or appears elsewhere. And I believe what they assigned Chris was was something for Sports Illustrated that was covering fantasy basketball. It was like a particular contest that the NBA had devised and like Chris was going to have to write fantasy basketball and he was like, please help. I have no idea what I'm doing. I yeah, like Chris at the time would like dabble in fantasy baseball and who was obviously like like pretty football obsessed, but they assigned him like the one sport. I don't know, it'd be like assigning you like golf for curling or something that you just have no foundation in. So he was like, please help. So we like co wrote a story because I was already covering the NBA and I was pretty familiar with it. So that was that was probably the first taste of fantasy I got. And then at some point at like a an f SGA then the f STA conference, I bumped up against, rather bumped into like Brad Evans and Brandon Funston and we just hit it off and had like kind of an interview dinner over pizza in Chicago, and and was hired not too long thereafter. And so yeah, I've been I've been a YAHU now since two thousand and seven. That I mean, like the fantasy like what is available to you as a fantasy analyst is so different now that it was like the amount of information that's available to just casual players is so different. It's been it's been pretty wild, but it's been obviously it's really fun.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's great.

00:05:44
Speaker 1: And you're a great ambassador, you know, in someone who's like helped pave the way for so many other people and helping them realize that this you know, like you said, back then, there weren't many jobs where you could just do this full time. There's far more them now, but it's also super saturated now too. There's just a lot of people that want to do this thing and want to do it full time. But we should all be thankful for you, for sure, just given what you've been able to help out with. I'm always really really interested whenever I bring people on and sort of digging into two folks evaluation processes, right, you know, some people like me a little bit more data heavy, others like Chris you just mentioned, obviously much more of the quote film grinder. I say that like it's like there's like a negative connotation to it, you know, Like I feel like, depending on how I present the word film grinder, the words film grinder, you could take it one way or another. I have nothing, I have nothing against people who watch film, just to be clear, but some mix a little bit of both. Right, But what's Andy Barron's process, Like, what are you doing on Sundays? You know, early in the week, especially when we're really looking into that stuff a little bit more, and then obviously, you know, later in the week, it's more kind of spewing all the things that we've learned and stuff and ready for that next week.

00:06:59
Speaker 3: I would say that, first of all, I am not I'm not the film snob that Chris is. That's probably how I would classify him. He's a he's a he's a grinder, and more than being a grinder, he's a film snob. He he's great at what he does. I do consider it really important to see, you know. I do view every game every week, which is which is hard and sometimes gets punishing. And I'm like, but I'm also not going to like Orlovsky my way through the film, right, like, not everything is the all twenty two version of every game, and I'm not illustrating the hell out of it, and like it's not it's not like that. But I do think it's really important to see every game because you pick up on, you know, being able to marry like actual game context and things that you've seen to to the data that you're going to pour through on a Sunday or a Monday. I think is really important. Like there are players who have low usage who really pop when you see them. You know, they might not jump off the page if you're just looking at box score data, but they really jump off the screen when you're actually why games there are there are all sorts of hidden things in games that you see that you know you're not gonna you're not going to necessarily pick up from like a big data dive, right Like all the there's all the negated plays, all the forgotten plays. There's all kinds of stuff that you that you're gonna find, all sorts of little nuggets. So I think that's really important. I also won't, like, you know, we're coming up on the holidays, and I might decide that I don't need to see the Giants for a fifteenth time or something like that. So I don't want to, like, I don't want to make it seem like I've never missed a game in you know, seventeen years or whatever. It's not like that. But I do think it's a really important part of the job. I also think it's you know, like as somebody, as somebody who used to like cover this stuff in the wilderness. Right Like, again, I started a Yahoo in like two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, there wasn't anything out there. They're like nobody, You couldn't get target data. You certainly nobody was counting snaps, nobody was telling me where anybody's lining up, right Like. That was all stuff that you had to if you cared about it, you had to you know, you had to note it for your self watching games. And there's so much super useful of available data now, so I I do spend a big chunk of my Monday and my Tuesday going through the things that not only like inform the analysis that you're going to provide the rest of the week, but are also just really important in terms of understanding the NFL. I It's it's funny. When I started at Yahoo, I was, I messed around. I had like a little in season projection model, right like, I was, Yeah, yeah, that was that was part of my stick originally. Again off of no data, off of no relevant information, like the things that you can pour into something like that now are so different than than what little we had then. But then like you know, Clay came around, and You came around, and Ratcliffe came around, and like, what the what the hell's the point? Also, like the the the sort of sequence of our of our of our week became such that, you know, we went from getting ranks live on a Thursday or something like that to getting them live on as soon as we could on a Monday or a Tuesday. And at that point I was like I was ranking before I was actually able to like run anything. Yeah, and it used to provide a really nice framework for like thinking about how it was going to rank players, and then it got flipped and then what is even the point of like running the model on a Wednesday when I ranked two days ago?

00:10:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. I mean, look, I say this all the time. I'm like, you know, I published the Late Round quarterback ebook back in twenty twelve, So at one point I was very young within the industry, and now I'm somehow old within the industry, which scares the you know what out of me. But you know, I published the Layer Round Quarterback ebook in twenty twelve, and I tell people all the time.

00:10:43
Speaker 2: They're like, oh, should I check that out?

00:10:44
Speaker 1: Show No, never read that ever, Like, I don't want you to touch that thing. It's horrible analysis. And it's not just that we evolve as analysts and get better, but it's also, like you said, there's so much more and better information out there that back then talking about vorp was like a big deal, like a very very Now people are like calculating VORP as games are happening. I mean, it's just like you know, these like insane in game stuff that people are doing. To the data point, though you've analyzed more than just football, you know, you mentioned that you were doing some baseball stuff shout out Montreal expos, you know, even doing even doing some basketball stuff.

00:11:25
Speaker 2: Do you think that doing those other sports has helped you a lot with football?

00:11:30
Speaker 1: And you know, I do think that baseball in particular is interesting because not only is do we see a little bit more overlap with analysts in the football space doing baseball because of the way.

00:11:39
Speaker 2: That the season's overlap.

00:11:40
Speaker 1: But obviously baseball is just a very you know, one to one binary sort of game where you can analyze via numbers pretty accurately and effectively.

00:11:50
Speaker 2: Where you can't do that as well in a game like football.

00:11:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's interesting. The first thing I would say here is that, especially covering baseball as long as I have it, it makes you appreciate the football audience because they're different, Like the baseball audience is older, like just demographically, they're different. And I would say there are more people in the fantasy baseball space who are accustomed to you know, there are old dudes who are accustomed to getting their way and they will they will, you know, the interactions are not always as friendly with on the baseball side. I'll just say that, so I appreciate, like, I don't know, even people who kind of come at you pretty hard who are football players will like you can get into a back and forth with them. That's kind of fun. And like, at the end of the day, like I got into all this stuff because I enjoy having sort of barroom sports arguments. So like, I really appreciate the football audience and the baseball audience has helped me do that. The second thing I'll say is that I feel like, you know, and you're getting into a little bit with the amount of data that's available in baseball. I mean, shoot, like it's sometimes it almost feels like a solved problem, right, Like we've figured out how to play baseball and the best way to do it, and everybody at the highest level is kind of starting to try to do the same things, right, And that's that's a little it was. It was part of what made the role changes last year so exciting. Is it brought elements back into the game that the game itself was like, no, those aren't important anymore, right, But like, you know, a pitch is thrown and we immediately know, like down to the millimeter, what the vertical movement was and the horizontal movement, and like we know how the batter performs over the last month, in the last three years against exactly that pitch, and like it's just there's a lot known, and like it's maybe it's maybe it's ten years ahead of football in that regard. I don't know, We're like we're getting there with football, but it's a little bit different the the This is something that I've been thinking about a lot actually lately, because I'm I just finished writing like a magazine feature for Lindy's for the Fantasy Baseball magazine, which you know, there's the dirty secret of the magazine industry. They all get written in like November and December nd.

00:13:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's three years prior to that actual season.

00:14:01
Speaker 3: And yeah, like we're probably they're probably going to try to put like shoe Otani on the cover of the magazine. We don't even know where he's gonna play, right exactly. Yeah, so that's but I was just writing a feature for it, and they are the football and baseball play so differently is fantasy games baseball? Like, I mean you know this, I'm just talking season long fantasy football. Yeah, like you can check in a couple times a week and then make sure that you're back on it on Sunday and everybody's healthy and you're good to go, and it's not overwhelming. But like, if you're in a hardcore competitive fantasy baseball league of the of the sort of depth that we usually play in industry formats, it's every day, it's multiple times a day. You got to know who blew a save in the West Coast games, right, Like, it's just it's that is a grind. Also, the teams that you construct, they are they tend to perform as well as their worst players, which is very different from fantasy football, right, Like, it's hard to find a format that is deep enough to say that. In fantasy football, I feel like I've played like some twenty team leagues with like three flexes and they're okay, fine, Like those final two guys on your roster, they might not even be real players, right Like, they're either total zeros, but if you have some guys who are actually getting touches in those spots, like, it's a huge win. For the most part. Though, in fantasy football, as it's played like on most of the big plat like on Yahoo ten team leagues, twelve team leagues, your team is as good as its best player. We're going to hit the end of this season, and like ninety to ninety five percent of the teams that have Christian McCaffrey and Tyreek Kill are going to be in the playoffs. And we just don't see that in fantasy baseball. Like as good as Acuna was last year, he was not a golden ticket to winning your league or making the playoffs or anything like that. So they play very differently.

00:15:54
Speaker 2: That's interesting.

00:15:55
Speaker 1: And then do you think that the data side has really like helped you in the football world or you cause you know you talk about how baseball is basically solved, and I agree.

00:16:06
Speaker 2: I mean I actually did. People don't realize this.

00:16:08
Speaker 1: I did like two to three years of baseball analysis when I was at number five, and it was when we just kind of needed a lot more content in the baseball space and stuff.

00:16:17
Speaker 2: And I had always.

00:16:19
Speaker 1: Sort of recruited and hired writers to do things that I couldn't do, right, So I tried to always get a lot of basketball writers, well, a lot of baseball writers, so I could focus on football, didn't have to worry about football as much because I could obviously do that thing. But there was a period of time where I'm like, I guess I got to learn baseball, right and so and so.

00:16:35
Speaker 2: I mean, I played baseball growing up. It was like my sport.

00:16:38
Speaker 1: And then you know, I loved it, especially like in the nineties and stuff. It was so much fun during the steroid area.

00:16:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, hell yeah, like it.

00:16:46
Speaker 2: It was great.

00:16:47
Speaker 1: Mois Of Salou was my favorite big baseball player growing up. I don't know, I didn't and it was not I learned about the him peeing on his hands after the second that I already had chosen him as my favorite player.

00:16:57
Speaker 2: But the thing with.

00:16:59
Speaker 1: Football, like, do you think that it's solvable, Like, do you think that we're gonna get to a point where I mean, like, of course, when you look at where we were ten years ago, again, go back to when I published the ebook, you know, eleven years ago, twelve years ago, and of course the data is dramatically different.

00:17:15
Speaker 2: But I also would argue.

00:17:17
Speaker 1: That the data and what it's solving is a lot less accurate than what the data is solving in baseball, right, and so like, we have things like expected fantasy points, which is a great metric no matter who's putting it together. There's a lot of different formulas that you can bring together to find expected fantasy points per game. It's a very helpful metric to spot regression, to see how usage is looking for these players. But it's not even close to a full proof metric. It's not even close to a metric that you can look at and say, oh, this is definitively the player that you want or you don't want. It's just another piece of that puzzle, whereas in baseball it seems like and look, this is me being removed from the analysis game in baseball, for I mean, when I was doing it in twenty fifteen or whatever. It was, like, you know, batting average balls in play was very, very big at the time. And I know it's a very like mundane statistic today, but like it seems like there's a lot more that is accurately being solved in baseball than in football.

00:18:12
Speaker 2: Would you agree with that.

00:18:13
Speaker 3: Oh, I would absolutely agree with that. I mean, I think I think football generally like play to play much more, much more complex system. I don't think it's solvable. We clearly don't have enough quarterbacks to go around for thirty two teams, right, so, like there are just human elements to it that are not going to be easily solvable. I don't think we're ever going to see a point ever is a long time, but I don't think we're close to a point where And it's one of the great things about watching the NFL, and it is one of the things that is, you know, maybe I love the NBA, but we are getting close to a point where the NBA where every NBA team is trying to do the same things too, right, like, and you just can't like, especially it got bad a few years ago when like you're just not gonna be able to do what the Warriors do as well as the Warriors, and that that isn't great. I don't. I don't think we're close to that. In football, we see huge stylistic differences between between coaches, between teams. I don't, So I don't think we're anywhere near the point where like every batter is going to go to the plate and they know the angle at which they want to swing and they know exactly like they know like the math of the of the thing that they're about to do. I don't. I don't think we're close to that in football. And again, again, we just have so many like we we're at this. Maybe we're just in a sweet spot in the history of the game, but I feel like we have quarterbacks who are just fundamentally different from one another and are and are like all of them really good at what they do. I mean, shoot, we're a couple of years removed from Matthew Stafford winning a Super Bowl, and like we're probably headed for a Super Bowl in which I don't know, it might be Purty versus uh Lamar Jackson, right, Like these are these are dramatically different players, and I think that's really fun when we get a contrast in styles, and we we get less of that in some of the other major sports.

00:20:01
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, I think that trickles down into fantasy analysis, right, like like the beauty of football and fantasy football to me and why I'm so addicted to it. And I'm not necessarily addicted to playing fantasy I love playing fantasy football, don't get me wrong. Like I'm checking my teams constantly and you know, trading all the time and all that good stuff. But I'm addicted to fantasy football analysis because there's just so many pieces of this puzzle and these stories that we can create and these narratives that we can create that I just don't think are as possible in other sports, and other fantasy sports especially, And that's why because people are coming at it from all these different angles, Like you mentioned Chris Harris earlier. You know, I'm in plenty of leagues with Chris, and he's great in some of the leagues, and I'm great in some of the leagues, and but We're coming at it from totally different angles. Yeah, but it can both still be successful in some way, right, And it's always I always hear from people, especially with Chris in particular, who's very very you know, film heavy. They're always like if you and Chris align on a player, that's when it's like rocket ship emoji. You know, because you're coming at it from these two different perspectives. Is but you're drawing the same kind of conclusion one player that you really liked this year and bias aside.

00:21:07
Speaker 2: Well, we'll push it. We'll push aside the bias.

00:21:09
Speaker 1: You and I were on a couple of panels together at the Fantasy Football Expo in Canton this year, and one of the questions that we got was one of the players that you were targeting this season, and I was the last one to go. So I'll say that the reason I was wrong about mine was because all of my other players were taken by the time that I had to speak.

00:21:28
Speaker 2: Because I did.

00:21:28
Speaker 1: I did bring up Christian Watson as as as.

00:21:32
Speaker 2: A player that I'm targeting. But you mentioned Sam Laporta.

00:21:35
Speaker 1: Okay, I need to know what because you have an Iowa background, this is your school. I need to know what they're feeding the tight ends in Iowa, Like, how is this happened? Like were you and realistically were you on Laporta? You know, we all have our biases and we're all having fun with it too, right, Like I I jokingly loved Kenny Pickett whenever he was drafted by the Steelers just because you know, he.

00:22:00
Speaker 2: My school, my alma mater.

00:22:01
Speaker 1: That's like one of the I'm not really as big of a fanatic for the Steelers in particular, you know, growing up in Pittsburgh anymore, because I can't be given this job. You just kind of appreciate other teams a little bit more. So I'm not like, like, if the Steelers lose, I don't really care that much. But when it comes to your alma mater, it's a different deal, right, Like this is this is your school. There's a lot more pride, and so with the picket stuff, I'm you know, it didn't necessarily seep into my fantasy analysis because it was very obvious that he had some shortcomings. But Sam Laporta didn't really have many shortcomings as a prospect. I know that you probably were on him a little bit more just naturally because you saw him a lot and all that. But what was it this year in particular where you were just like, I'm drafting Sam Laporta everywhere?

00:22:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, it it definitely became a bit for me, right, I didn't intend for it to become a bit. I just like it happened to be. I don't begrudge anybody who was not watching Iowa football last year, the year before this year, right Like.

00:22:53
Speaker 2: It's not definitely not definitely not this year definitely not.

00:22:57
Speaker 3: It's not like credit to them for finding a way to ten wins when they cannot score more than thirty.

00:23:01
Speaker 1: It's it's honestly like the Pittsburgh's it's the Pittsburgh Steel college football.

00:23:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, same, same exact thing.

00:23:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, but look Laporta his last two seasons. Like, the quality of quarterback play at Iowa has not always been great, but it it really hit a valley when Laporta was there. Every good thing he did was after the catch. And it doesn't like, I don't know, you look at the raw stats and you'd be like, eh, six hundred and fifty yards, that's fine. He did all of the heavy lifting on those six hundred and fifty yards, right Like it was it was just the same screen and the same five yard out and seven yard out that he was catching, Like that's that's all we could hit. He was a wonderful player after the catch and the obviously what they've built up at Iowa, and there's you know, in game play calling, there's a lot of things that you can point to at Iowa that are not ideal. It might be the best teaching and development program in the country, particularly at specific positions. You think about like some of the big name tight ends that have come through there, Dallas Clark, George Like Dallas Clark was a walk on linebacker. I want to say, George Kittle arrived as one hundred and eighty pound receiver who had no offers. So like they built those guys strength and conditioning program, like exceptional coaching in terms of blocking technique offense at like whatever else you might think about the Farns family amazing offensive line coaching and they and they churn out like they also happened to play like a sort of simplified pro concept offense, where like players are ready to go when they hit the NFL, and I you know, they might have a year and a half edge in terms of like learning curve over over the way most tight ends hit the NFL. That wouldn't That wouldn't really shock me. And then I also just thought that Sam Laporta in particular, was stepping into a situation where it was just the path was clear for him. They drafted in to be the guy who played like eighty percent of the snaps, ninety percent of the snaps. You looked at the production from the year before, and like Lions tight ends actually caught twelve touchdown passes if you put them all together, and if that gets funneled to one guy, that's a pretty good opportunity. The other thing I'll say about Laporta and sort of the readiness of Iowa tight ends generally, I thought the best sign for him in opening week against the defending Super Bowl champs primetime game. It's not just the receiving workload, Like they got down to the goal line and they ran behind him. They just put the ball in Montgomery's hands behind Sam frickin Laporta and it worked. And that's kind of all you needed to know, Like once you saw that, he's not going to come off the field unless he has to. So he's just in a great situation. And I thought I thought his talent level relative to some of the other players at the same position in that rookie class was kind of understated because the quality of the quarterback play and the quality of the offense generally.

00:25:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll say this as wrong as I was about Christian Watson. My model loves Sam Laporto, like loved him, and to the point where he was ranked right there depending on what kind of inputs I put in for dalk kin K because he didn't test, but depending on those inputs, he was right there with don kin Kid. It was like way better than you know, the Muskgrave, the Michael Mayer within this class. The one thing that I really realized going into the season, I think it's really easy for us as fantasy analysts to sort of see trends and just kind of bake them into the back of our head and just be like, yeah, this is the way that this is. And that's what I'm speaking on with rookie tight ends right where we just kind of assume that rookie tight ends are bad in fantasy football because they have been bad in fantasy football. But when I really dug into it over the summer, because this was such an insane tight end class, like like objectively a very very good tight end class, So I you know, it's just one of those things that nudges you to sort of dig into that research a little bit more, and one of the things that was very very obvious was that the tight ends who did emerge, because's not like no rookie tight ends ever did anything well in the NFL. The tight ends who were good, the Jordan Reid or the Evan Ingram's or the Kyle Pitts, they all were running a lot of routes.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: Shocking they were able.

00:27:12
Speaker 1: To actually see the field run routes get work that way, It's not necessarily that all of them are just so inefficient and bad at the game. And so when you overlay the talent profile, you know, you obviously loving Laporta for all the reasons you talked about my model liking Laporta when you see the talent on top of the fact that, like you said, the situation in Detroit.

00:27:33
Speaker 2: Was was pretty awesome.

00:27:34
Speaker 1: I mean, there wasn't anyone there taking any of those looks. You know, James and Williams also had that suspension to start the season.

00:27:42
Speaker 2: Even though that looks like it's not even that.

00:27:44
Speaker 1: Meaningful today, but back then it was a little bit more meaningful because we thought that jameson Williams would probably be a little bit better than how he's performed.

00:27:51
Speaker 2: It just made a lot of sense.

00:27:52
Speaker 1: And so now I wonder, though, you know, as we move on to twenty twenty four, you know, we only have a handful of weeks left in this season, do you think that what we've seen this year, not just with rookie tight ends, but you see you know, Trey McBride stepping up and other tight ends that were drafted late kind of having decent enough seasons. Do you think that we're bound to see a shift in ADP? Do you think we're bound to see maybe not so many early round tight end approaches.

00:28:19
Speaker 3: That that's interesting. I think that I think the thing that drives the early round tight end is really we get we get this wrong to some extent, right because like there there has been a case for years for Travis Kelcey as a first round tight end, and that case is he's gonna double up the production of almost everybody else at the position, and it's this huge edge and people like people understand that. But like the then the mistakes that we would make is we would we would say, Okay, I missed out on Kelsey, I better get the second best tight end. Well, that's not the point. The point. The point was to get the best guy who's crushing everybody else, who has like a whole there's you could put two other tight ends in the gap between Kelsey and like number two, and now we don't really have that. What we have right now is a whole big bunch of guys with five or six touchdowns and the yardage is pretty close, and there's not like a man I got to if I don't get Hockinson first, or I don't get Kelsey first, like Kelsey's gonna be what is he thirty four? Like he's got Kelsey at some point where we're gonna really start talking about Kelsey's age. And he slowed a little bit, So I don't I think that's what's gonna bring it back a little bit. I am super curious. I feel like I don't know. Sometimes I'm in on the young guys. I was obviously in on Laporta, although the point of Laporta was getting him in the tenth round or twelfth round, not getting him in the sixth round. I have no idea what we're gonna do with Bowers when he arrives, Like is he gonna get the same treatment that like Kyle Pitts did, where we're taking him at a spot where he can only you know, he might be able to earn that back, but it's gonna be really, really difficult for him to be a profit at that price. But I do think that this season in particular might might change the way we look at rookie tight ends. Might be like it'll be like twenty fourteen with receivers, right, like that that year happened, and not all those guys didn't even hold their value necessarily. I don't know that was as good as Calvin Benjamin ever got, but like a whole but well, Devontae Adams was in that class too, right, and he didn't do anything as a as a rookie, but so many guys popped and then forever since then, we've just thought differently about rookies.

00:30:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that, you know, I sort of you because obviously with wide receiver, you're starting more of them, right, There's a higher demand for the position in your fantasy lineup, and so when you get an influx, it may or may you know, there might be a change in the way that we approach the position in redraft the following year. I think that with like quarterback and with tight end in particular, since you're only starting one. Like my theory with quarterbacks and the way that things have been going with the quarterback position, I always think that it's easiest to like start there and then kind of move to other positions because everyone kind of understands inherently what's going on at quarterback. But if you look at like the last three or four years or whatever, where the higher end quarterbacks truly are giving you an edge, like back in twenty fifteen, it literally didn't matter Like when I when I say that on podcasts, I don't think people who who are newer to the game truly understand that. On Living the stream that that Denny Carter and I host Are you know my other podcast, we would quite literally stream like QB three, QB four and points per game every single season, and I'm talking like Waiver Wire. Nobody wants these guys. It was so easy to match that production off the Waiverbier, and it's a lot more difficult to do that now. I'm sure that if any of you were streaming, and I've said this last you know, handful of years on the show, but like if you're out there trying to stream today, it's very, very difficult to match Jalen Hurts, to match Josh Allen.

00:31:40
Speaker 2: You're just not gonna do that, right, I.

00:31:41
Speaker 1: Mean, realistically, our streamer this year, we don't have the benefit of you know, picking up c. J. Stroud and then saying, oh, he's our streamer the rest of the year. You know, we're obviously going back and picking up you know, like this week, Kenny Pickett is one of our streamers. Right. But regardless of that, you know, you're just not gonna find quarterbacks that that are going to be very, very strong, and they're gonna be lower end qb ones if you're streaming and you're having a decent enough season. And so my take on the quarterback position then is we're not gonna see a true change in the market. I don't think like next year, I would still maybe not as high as what we saw this year, but like a Josh Allen Jalen Hurts will still probably go pretty high. Maybe we see Patrick Mahomes take a step back a little bit just because people are so reactionary, but regardless, we're gonna see those guys because they do give you some sort of advantage when that stops is when we get the right number of quarterbacks being influx into the league that have the true dual thread ability that can actually give you those high.

00:32:39
Speaker 2: End QB one seasons.

00:32:40
Speaker 1: Like if Justin Fields were a better passer, he would be in that conversation, right if even if Kyler Murray were a little bit better of a passer, he'd be in that conversation. So he's just not there yet. They're just not there yet. But we're going to see more and more of these guys just given the fact that we the NFL has taken so much from college with the quarterback position that eventually there's gonna be twelve of them. And when there's twelve of them, you know, and we're in a twelve team league, we can then go back to drafting quarterbacks in the fifteenth round and not caring about them. And so with tight end, I do think there might be because of this rookie class, Right, you have Dalton kin kid now who looks like a stud. Sam Laporta looks like a stud. I know, Trey McBride's in year two, but he's looking more and more like a stud. I do think there's some intrigue by you know, looking at sort of the bottom of the barrel, because historically middle round tight ends, like you mentioned, like after you get out of like Kelsey and maybe Andrews, people are always like forcing the issue at tight end, and that's really getting them into trouble more than anything else. Right, middle round tight ends have sucked historically, Yes, And I do wonder, and you can feel free to chime in. I wonder if this influx of truly talented players because before we were drafting like Tyler Higbee in the seventh round, you know, like like he's not and even like even like Greg Olsen, you know, who had a great career, but we were drafting greg Olsen. I wasn't really drafting him that much, but we people were drafting greg Olsen because of the floor and not the ceiling. Right, they were like, oh, he's gonna see a twenty three percent target share in this Carolina offense.

00:34:14
Speaker 3: So and that was and that was despite the fact that there were always like four or five tiny ends like it. It takes so little historically anyway to finish as like a top ten fantasy tight end right right right, somebody's gonna catch five touchdown passes and finished with five hundred and fifty yards and then the tight end eight that has always happened, and that guy's always available on waivers at some point in the season.

00:34:33
Speaker 2: Yes, and so like.

00:34:34
Speaker 1: But but even that, like when when Greg Olsen was being drafted in the middle rounds every year, there was always at least one or two like athletic tight ends who had like Tyler Eifert or like Jordan Reed. You know, these guys who like would match that production to some degree, right, I do wonder though, like, what do you think of this idea that we have this influx and talent with all these rookie tight ends. You know, we haven't even talked about like Luke Musgrave and Michael Mayer if they're gonna be I mean, like realist, Michael Mayer hasn't had that grade of a season, but like within the context of history for a tight end, it's really not that bad, right, Like, he hasn't had that bad of a year. And I wonder if now we see middle round tight ends do what middle round quarterbacks have done over the last where they become more a little bit more valuable because they are the guys who, you know, like the Joe Burrows of the world, who, Yeah, they can kind of get there and match the production of the hiring guys. Do you think there's anything to that, like, or am I just am I just spewing nonsense?

00:35:30
Speaker 3: I No, I don't. I don't think that's nonsense at all. I am actually this this is a This is one of my more unpopular ideas, one of my more unpopular takes. But I'm I'm I'm kind of ready to ditch tight end as a position, and a lot of it is really just that the guys that were drafting, and there are there are exceptions, but there are not many exceptions. The guys that we're drafting are usually they're they're pretty big slot receivers. They're you know, like Mark Andrews is never not running a route, which is great, but it's like even those guys kind of get hosed by being called tight ends and not wide receivers because they get on a different like salary scale and all that. Like, I don't know, I'm I'm kind of for the idea of just blending the tight ends in with the receivers and then we wouldn't have to worry about the people who are putting up eh, you know, the guys who are delivering the six hundred yard five touchdown season who we have to start because they're the tight end eight, We would have to worry about that a little bit less, and we could just treat them all as essentially what they what they really are, which is professional pass catchers. So that's I don't know, that's where I've been. There's no chance we're ever doing that at ESPN or Yahoo or any major platform, right Like, people like what they like and they like what they've played for years, so that that ain't happening. But custom leagues, that's I don't know. I'm a big supporter of that, and I feel like we would still I don't know, we may get to a point where you'd still roster across the league eight or ten guys.

00:36:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.

00:36:56
Speaker 1: I still feel like if that were the case, because I've been I've gone back and for worse than that, because part of me is like, you know, I know that you would agree with this, where it's just like, okay, just play the game, right, like this is the game that you're given, Like, just play it.

00:37:07
Speaker 2: Whatever.

00:37:07
Speaker 1: It's like when people will talk to me about like, what's your favorite league setting, And I'm like, I don't really have one.

00:37:13
Speaker 2: I'm just playing whatever you know is really like put in front of me sort of deal. Yeah, I know that you're you're very anti PPR or full PPR. I feel like we.

00:37:25
Speaker 3: Fix that problem. Actually is where it is where I am with PPR. I just like, you know, I like when everything aligns with scoring in fantasy, aligns with things that really truly matter in the logic.

00:37:37
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, well, and like logic, I mean, it is pretty silly that a one catch, you know, for for minus five yards is the same as someone picking up a first down.

00:37:47
Speaker 3: I'm also in the ground, and I'm also just I'm old enough to know why we really did it right, like and we like it.

00:37:53
Speaker 2: Was the what is the background behind that?

00:37:55
Speaker 3: It is the solution to the to the running back running back running back problem? Right, Like when we draft to fantasy teams in the nineties, you're like, three of your first four picks were always running backs. You might make an exception for Jerry Rice or whatever, but the first round was all running backs. The second round was almost all running backs, and that was because they were like the intention of every team was to give a single running back three hundred eighty touches, and you had to do it that way, and so this was a way to sort of balance positional value. It was a kind of sloppy shortcut to balancing positional value. We started giving credit for just catching the ball, just a different way to transfer possession of the ball from one player to another. So fine, But then the NFL itself kind of solved that problem, right, and committees are everywhere, and it's super rare now to get a player with three hundred eighty touches. That's not no team is trying to do that for any specific player. It's you know, that's not even a problem. You would never draft a fantasy in a standard league. You would never draft running back, running back, running back right now, So losing hand. So like, I just feel like the league itself, the game itself, has solved that problem, and you have PPR remains.

00:39:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, the irony of that is that you could easily argue that PPR favors elite running backs now more than it does like you know, like like like the actual delta between receptions of the high end running backs to you know, replacement level is much much greater than what you're gonna see at wide receivers.

00:39:23
Speaker 2: So it's pretty funny that I forgot that.

00:39:25
Speaker 1: That's that's the reason why you know that all came about, let's move on and talk about more.

00:39:30
Speaker 2: Of a player.

00:39:30
Speaker 1: Take that obviously the biggest news of the week, one of the most tilting news items of the week. I would argue too, for those of us who have Jonathan Taylor, he has this thumb injury that we didn't even know existed until Tuesday and comes out. He's got this thumb injury. He's gonna be out two to three weeks. Is the timetable they threw out there. A lot of Twitter doctors are not nearly as optimistic. I mean, my my, My question to you is, are we living in a world where not only Kyne Williams a potential league winner, but is Zach Moss Zach Moss a potential league winning player?

00:40:06
Speaker 3: It's not out of the question, right, Like first Like, First of all, credit to Zach Moss for having the best four game streak of his career at the start of his seat Like, I thought, he looked great, and I was when he came into the league. I was very pro Zach Moss. And then you watched a little Zach Moss and you saw how he was used, and it like you saw what Josh Allen himself was doing at the goal line instead of Zach Moss, and you were just like, well, that's a whiff. And like a lot of people, I gave up on Zach Moss. He looked great to start the season and now he gets another one of those like I don't know, he he destroyed Tennessee earlier in the year and now he gets him again. So that's a good spot. There's there's not and then man, it's the Bengals defense. That's a great spot. There's just no there's not really a stay away matchup rest of season. We know that they're there. They're a they're a team committed to run past I guess I would say, right, he's gonna get fed. There are no games coming up. It's always dangerous to assume that we know what game flow is going to look like. But I don't. I don't see a match up ahead where I think the Colts are going to fall way behind and Gardner Minshew's gonna have to chuck it fifty five times, right, Like it's the runs always going to be in play for that team. So league winner might be strong, but you know, somebody who appears on the rosters of a lot of league winners is probably is probably more accurate. I don't like to get you know, I feel like I should have some sort of honorary medical degree for having tracked injury information for as long as I have. But I don't want to speculate it, Like how when exactly Jonathan Taylor is going to come back. I he probably comes Like this is a potential playoff team, So assuming that remains in play for the Colts, I assume he comes back in three weeks if he possibly can. But even when he comes back, he probably returns, you know, a bit compromised and needing to protect himself, and we probably get a lot of Zach Moss. And if Zach Moss is getting forty to fifty percent of the snaps, he's going to be super playable down the stretch. Yeah.

00:42:08
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:42:08
Speaker 1: The crazy thing too, and this is one of the counterintuitive things with backfields is how you have a guy like Jonathan Taylor, who's one of the best talents in the league, if not the you know, some would argue he's the best running back in the league. And then you have Zach Moss, where there is a talent discrepancy still there, even though Moss has looked good, but there's a chance that Moss is still Moss without Jonathan Taylor could be a better fantasy asset than Jonathan Taylor.

00:42:35
Speaker 2: With Zach Moss.

00:42:36
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, right, absolutely.

00:42:37
Speaker 1: And now they were trending obviously the last handful of weeks. And this is why it was so frustrating that this has happened, is that Jonathan Taylor was trending to I mean, he was becoming the workhorse again, like seeing better target chairs than we had seen from him in his history, and like things were really looking like Taylor was going to crush it down the stretch because the schedule you mentioned and all that.

00:42:57
Speaker 2: But realistically, you know, if you're someone.

00:42:59
Speaker 1: Who has Nathan Taylor and let's say that you had Zach Moss or you got him off waivers, I don't think that this is necessarily this massive step back for your team. It's a step back for JJ's team where he has Jonathan Taylor and didn't get Zach Moss.

00:43:12
Speaker 2: It's a it's a it's a big in my RB three has kind of gained well.

00:43:16
Speaker 1: So that's definitely step back, you know, from that perspective. But if you have Moss and you had Jonathan Taylor, I don't think it's like, would you agree like it's probably a wash for the most part from a production standpoint.

00:43:30
Speaker 3: Oh, I would. I would totally agree that. The other thing that I've found and we get a couple of these cases that are that are somewhat interesting each year, Zach Moss's actual like roster percentage on Yahoo's right, like entering the waiver period this week was like right around forty nine or fifty percent. But I feel like that was a little bit of a lie because actually in some of the leagues I'm in in which he was actually available are are some of my more active leagues. And I feel like in the leagues where like people noticed that Zach Moss was barely playing while Jonathan Taylor was healthy in the in the most recent few weeks, and so he was a yeah, he was a plausible drop, So like that's where he's available. It's it's more of these like deadbeat filled leagues where you know, oh, my season's not going very well. I'm just not going to touch my roster for the back half of the season, Like that's where Zach Moss was on all these teams, and you know, but he was weirdly available in some of my more competitive leagues, so he was obviously he was a push all the chips into good to go get him sort of player. I completely agree with your point that Zach Moss getting ninety percent of the snaps is at least as valuable as Jonathan Taylor getting sixty sixty five.

00:44:43
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:44:43
Speaker 1: Do you think there's any any chance that Trey Sermon gets any love in that backfield? I know it sounds crazy, and it is crazy because he's had such a tumultuous start to his career. But I got the question this week, is Trey Sermon you know someone that we should adding to me, probably more of a handcuff than anything else.

00:45:02
Speaker 3: Would you agree, Yeah, no, I would agree with that. But I will also say that there is not a single thing in the NFL that surprises me, Like there's something that happens each year that is just like, come on, I didn't see Josh Jobs, I didn't see Geno Smith, Like there is a thing that happens each year where It's like, come on, there's no way that was that was on anybody's radar. So I'm not going to totally rule it out. I will say the only leagues where I've where I've taken a shot have been like King's classic style leagues where it's you know, we're talking fourteen teams, three receivers, three four flexes, right, it's got to be a big sprawling league before I add Trey Sermon, but they're out.

00:45:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally agree.

00:45:39
Speaker 1: The Rams passing attack really weird this year, man, very very weird. I need to ask you if, first off, is Cooper Cup broken? And how do you feel about Cup and Pukanakua moving forward?

00:45:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, like Cup is actually appears to be literally broken, Yeah, quite literally. Yeah. He I mean great that he played a week ago, Not great that he was immediately limping in the game. Right, so's he's clearly whatever we see from the practice reports is a full participant on a Wednesday. That's awesome. He's clearly hurting. So that's one reason to down grade. The other reason to downgrade is that it's the Browns and then it's the Ravens. So we have this really really difficult two game stretch. I actually think, you know, I think Stafford has looked better than the fantasy totals. I thought, particularly early in the season, I thought the ball was coming out of his hand just like vintage Stafford, making throws that we just don't see from every quarterback who starts in the league. I think he's been pretty impressive, and it's I consider it one of those I just consider it like a miss for me coming into the season. That was a blind spot for me. I was just, you know, the elbow last year. I was like, Stafford's probably cooked, definitely not cooked. We can forgive Cooper Cup for like the last two weeks in which he's clearly been compromised not producing, and we can forgive like the Brett Rippin game too, right, because how is that going to go? Well? So I do think it's I do think we can look down the road and be like, man, there's a commander's matchup out there, and I just got to get there. And so like, if you have, I don't. I doubt anybody has reasonable options to Cooper Cup in a week with six teams on by Maybe you do. If you do, I think it's fine to play somebody ahead of him, especially in a difficult matchup, but like if he can just get right for like that Commander's game and they've they've got a couple of friendly they basically they have nothing but like nightmare matchups and the biggest green lights, right, so it just is going to toggle back and forth for the rest of the year. There are some good spots for him, So I don't think he's done. I hope that the Rams stay competitive so we don't get to a point where we're talking about shutting down Cooper Cup, shutting down Matthew Stafford. I guess that would be the that would be the real concern there. As for Nikua, it's wild. That's like we do we do this thing on Yahoo on the podcast where people right in with like the players they're panicking about, and obviously a lot of people are panicking about Puka Nikua right now. There's no way they knew what a Puka Nakoula was three and a half months ago, right and now he's now he's the key to their fantasy season. Like that's just the fun thing about this game. He's still drawing seven eight targets a game, and no, it's not twenty it's not fifteen, but it's it is a healthy workload tied to a good quarterback in a pretty good system, So I'm not He's also had a couple of near misses over the last over the last three weeks or so, so I'm not that scared with him.

00:48:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with you about Nikoua, and I talked about this in my Mailbag episode. But if you look at his last four games, you have Stafford kind of getting hurt in that Dallas game and like it was, it was just weird game flow all that kind of stuff, and so you know that's a reason why Nikua didn't perform. Then you have the Brett Rippin game. Of course he didn't perform well in that game, and then over the last two weeks with Stafford, one was a good performance, one was a bad performance in terms of just overall production. He's actually one of five wide receivers this year who has hit a twenty percent target chair in every single game this season. So you know, and the other guys that are there, I mean, Garrett Wilson's one. I think Keenan Allen is another one, but yeah, I mean, like he's with Michael Pittman was on, but he's with good company obviously, you know within that group. I you know, I think that you're right with the matchups upcoming, because they get Cleveland and Baltimore and that is a insanely brutal next two weeks. And so if you're kind of limping into the playoffs and you're you're at least hoping to get in and you're kind of on the borderline, probably not a by candidate for you, But if you're looking for the playoffs, and you're looking towards the playoffs and maybe you have something locked in, I would be kind of intrigued by Nikoua at least more so than Cup, just because you have all this, like you know, secondary stuff going on with Cup, whereas Nikua at least is seeing that consistency in terms of target chair and stuff.

00:49:45
Speaker 3: I can tell you that they are both highly available in trades because that has been one of the has been one of the things that I've learned from doing this. When you do like a panic meter segment in fantasy, you are engaging with some of the worst fantasy players, right because these are the people who, like you know, oh Man. After a string of four games in which Derrick Henry gave me one hundred yards and a touchdown. He didn't what's wrong with Derrick Henry? Right, it's like that, But like it also tells you who's available via trade, because if people are writing in thinking, oh man, I got to send whatever great player to the bench, that's that guy's being shocked or they're willing to listen to offers. So like Niku is probably available in your league right now.

00:50:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the players this week on my fifteen transaction show that I called a cell and.

00:50:34
Speaker 2: I didn't do it with like a ton of conviction.

00:50:36
Speaker 1: There are some players where I say trade this guy away most definitely, and I feel great about it, right, And there's some like this week I had two that were higher profile. One was David Montgomery, but it was only from the perspective of keeping up the touchdowns, et cetera, and like being able to do what he's doing, and you know, game script obviously playing a role in that. I don't really like Dave Montgomery is still an RB two for me rest of the season. It's not like I'm like, hey, you got to get rid of him, no matter what. It's just more so noting where he's at and understanding that this isn't the most sustainable production in the world. Deebo Samuel's one who I feel more so as a cell compared to Montgomery, But I don't feel like over the top. You got to get rid of him no matter what. Now, the reason obviously behind the Deebo cell is we just saw a spiked week from him period like that.

00:51:23
Speaker 2: That's like, I.

00:51:24
Speaker 1: Think that there is a disconnect between fantasy gamers UH and the way that they view Debo from a real and fantasy perspective. I truly think that he's just not as good in fantasy football partially because of what he did two years ago as he is in real for like, is an amazing asset in real football, And so I bring people on perspectives because I want other perspectives. And I always ask, am I a moron for saying this thing?

00:51:49
Speaker 3: No? I think I think the one thing that's locked in with UH with Deebo. And this is true of this is probably true of every Niner who isn't Christian McCaffrey. Actually like you are. You are guaranteed that there are going to be like two weeks ahead in which they see three or four targets. Yes, it is. It is a team highly efficient passing offense, but you know, it's pretty common for brock Perty to finish a game with like eighteen completions on twenty five attempts. Then there's just not you know, we can talk about target share, but we're talking about a really small pie, and it is hard, especially with a lot of the targets that Debo himself sees, which are nearer to the line of scrimmage than what we're going to get from Ayuk, like at least the Auk targets are. We're talking about a great player and we're talking about like high yield opportunities to an extent, that's true with Kittle as well, But man, Deebo has to do all his work himself. This is stuff really near the line of scrimmage, and he's awesome at it. He's a great player. But there are definitely two or three games ahead in which he likes spoiler, in which he sees four targets that happens that that is the way this season goes. He's saleable because man, there's some good matchups. I'm looking at it right now. He's got he's got the Commanders in week seventeen, and I don't, like, what else could you hope for? But again, even in the great matchups, sometimes that's worse. Sometimes like they run out to a huge lead and then there's just no need that we can put Debo in the holster for the rest of the game. Like so just in terms of pure raw volume, it makes a lot of sense. And he's also still he's a brand name that you can actually take to the market and if you wanted to, like, if you have an urgent need in the backfield, you can fill it with somebody like Deebo Samuel in a way that you can't with like I can tell you that, oh, you should shop Deontay Johnson, you should shop Chris Godwin, but like nobody's buying you got to you got to shop somebody that someone would actually want to accept onto their team.

00:53:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you make a good point about the difference between Auk and Debo. I think the perfect example is literally last week on Thanksgiving, where I just scores a touchdown towards the end of that game because he's getting that ball down the field, right, he's able to That's that's Brandon. That's why Brandon Ayuk just has more inherent, just a better inherent than what you're gonna see from and he's seen better target chairs too than Deebo. Like I've called Ayuka buye throughout the season because of that playoff schedule, And yeah, it scares me a little bit that they could just put up a fifty burger against Washington in Week seventeen and if you held onto debo and you but you're also you know, taking the hits of using debo in matchups where more than likely there's going to be more of that roller coaster. To me, it's like if you were to rank these guys in terms of just stability, it's like you got CMC and then there's Ayuk in his own tier and then Kittle and Deebo are kind of back and forth and who's gonna get it this week?

00:54:34
Speaker 3: You know? Yeah, And the deal with Kittle is he plays a position where you're just gonna park him in that spot and it's right, like, it's not it's not killing you if he gives you three catches for thirty.

00:54:43
Speaker 2: Years exactly, exactly exactly.

00:54:45
Speaker 1: Another thing that's happening across the league is the Pittsburgh Steelers finally got rid of Mat Canada. How amazing is it that they get rid of Matt Canada and they break the streak immediately. It's not like it took two or three weeks like it was quite Literally, five days after he got fired.

00:55:01
Speaker 2: They put up over four hundred total yards. Are you like? I've said it on my podcast this week. I think this is the week.

00:55:07
Speaker 1: I called it that Kenny Pickett is gonna get more than one passing touchdown, which sounds crazy that it's like a weird game for him because he's only done it once in his career.

00:55:16
Speaker 3: Said almost two passing touchdowns since September.

00:55:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's crazy, It's insane. It's insane, but I'm calling it.

00:55:24
Speaker 1: This is his week that Kenny Pickett is gonna said I said on Living the Stream where I get a little bit edgier, I said three touchdowns.

00:55:31
Speaker 2: But I was wearing sunglasses this week, so.

00:55:33
Speaker 1: You know, I could, I could say crazy things and no one would take it seriously. But even on my you know, my sleeper show, I said two touchdowns from Kenny Pickett this week. This is gonna be his best performance of the season. Are you You don't have to like buy in buy into the Steelers offense, But do you feel better about them without Matt Canada.

00:55:51
Speaker 3: Short answer is yes, they he was so close to a two touchdown again, some of its time was but he was so close to a two touchdown game last week. We like, you can look at that in a couple of ways, and the first way is to just say, man, we face the Bengals and we put up sixteen, like we got a we got a clear twenty points against the Bengals, because that is a that is a poor defense. But on the other hand, like a couple of early deep seam routes to Friarmuth right, he hit deep sideline shots to both Deontay and Pickens. That stuff is really good to see because he, as you know, Picktt's been like bottom quarter, bottom third of the league in terms of eight out all season. Like it's just I don't know there there are going to be we know, we know some of his limitations and they're probably not going away. He's like sometimes he's he's maybe a beat slow on some throws. He's you know, he's gonna sail a couple passes. He missed Pickens on a on a play that would have gone for I don't know, a fair distance. It wasn't wasn't a perfect game, but it was a good game and and some of the throws were some of the throws were great, some of the deep shots were great. That stuff is all really good to see. It's funny. I like early in that game, you know, there's always a conversation around like Matt Canada and pre snap motion, and I just thought some of the they weren't doing a lot of it. And when they did it, it was just Alan Robinson going from this side of the formation of that side, and then they would run the ball right there and it was, what are we doing, We're predictable. Yeah, we're just telling the defense where we're going. But then they pivoted off of that later in the game and it was fun and it didn't all work, but they did get a you know, they got a nice play to Robinson. I think it was that popped off of that that really sort of created a game of musical chairs for the defense. Like it was, it was fun. I thought it was. I thought it was definitely a step forward. Obviously, the raw yardage total is really promising. And pick it made some throws and like I get it, like there's gonna be a two touchdown game at some point rest of season. To his credit, he doesn't turn the ball over like they they're very Iowa. You know, they're very Iowa.

00:57:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Colors too. I mean, it's the same exact freaking team.

00:57:57
Speaker 3: It's it's what I mean, we would never gain four hundred and twenty one totally yards or whatever it was, but like it is, it is still very like we're just not gonna give you the ball. You're gonna have to work on offense. Like if you're gonna score against us, it's probably gonna have to be a fifteen play drive. You're gonna to do everything right, and like it's just sort of in a very big picture sense, it feels like the same game flow and it's definitely going to end sixteen to ten. Yeah.

00:58:21
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:58:21
Speaker 1: The problem with that is that in college, you're really taking it in college like season by season, and it's fine if you have this, like you know, cause you're not obviously players are rotating more and like you're looking at different schemes and stuff each year. Potentially in the NFL, it's really unsustainable. Like it's like what the Steelers are doing. And this is obviously not really a fantasy take. This is just a real life take. It just it feels like the Steelers are stuck in like two thousand and six, you know, like this is this is the Tomlin slash Cower way where, you know, because people really do forget that the Steelers in like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen were this aired out. I mean Ben Roethlisberger had back to back games with six touchdown passes at one you remember that back Yeah, it was like the Ravens and the Colts or something back in like twenty fifteen. Someone can fact check me on that. But uh, like it's just it's a totally just just old school way of playing the game, and it just feels like it's just totally unstainable, unsustainable.

00:59:16
Speaker 3: No, it is a it is a philosophy that you can carry in college because you're gonna face a lot of bad quarterbacks in college.

00:59:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Like exactly, you.

00:59:23
Speaker 3: Can get to eight to ten wins in you know, even in a Power five conference like playing that way because you just face a lot of bad players. There's just you don't get a break from great players in the NFL.

00:59:33
Speaker 1: Exactly, even even when you're playing Jake Browning and you can almost lose, you can almost lose that game. All right, Andy, Before I let you go, I want a player that you're selling before the Fantasy playoffs and then a maybe like a low key league winner in the playoffs.

00:59:46
Speaker 3: Well, I'll give you a player that I don't have the courage to sell, but because he's been like sometimes sometimes somebody is just like a they've been a success story for your team. And in two talk about Lowe's case. He's got he's got awesome matchups ahead right, like it's the he's probably I don't know, he's got a good shot to be the QB one this week, right, he's got the Commanders. That's great. Next week is great. He faces a gauntlet in the in the Fantasy playoffs, it's it's the Jets, it's the Cowboys, it's the Ravens. And I, you know, I've got a couple of teams with Tua. Things have been going great, and I'm looking at you know, I bring up his player page on Yahoo and I'm looking at the fantasy projections, and no problem, Yahoo's got him for like twenty one points a week in those No way. Yeah, he's at some point in the Fantasy playoffs two has given me nine points. I'm getting I'm getting nine or eleven from one of those matchups. It's not it's no fault of his. It's like, I'm sure Tyreek can survive it. Tyreek is a different animal together, but those are That is a that is just a brutal stretch of games, and I'm not looking forward to it. I don't personally, I don't have the courage to sell him at this point. But if other do, they should probably take a look at it, because he's he's gotten you this far, He'll he'll get you at least one more week. But then, man, it takes a it takes a pretty dark turn. If you want to buy, I can give you a high key by and a low key by.

01:01:14
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:01:14
Speaker 3: I think the high key by is probably Isaiah Pacheco number one. We just like the the league winner in Fantasy over the final six weeks is often a chief's running back, right like we saw it with Damian Williams, saw it with Jeric McKinnon last year. And now we got a guy who's actually getting volume. Ye who falls into into that description like this guy's actually getting fifteen carries and like three four catches a game, So at that volume, I think he's pretty can't miss. The Chiefs have a super friendly schedule rest of seasons, so I think he's somebody who if you can, you know, kick the tires there and your trade deadline hasn't passed, he's interesting. I also think that the people who maybe you added Jordan Love as a replacement for Kirk Cousins, maybe you added him as a replacement for Joe Burrow. I don't I hate the national discourse around Jordan Love because it's always it's always either uh, oh, the Packers have to draft their next quarterback, this isn't the guy, or it's oh, this is the next guy in the in the Brett far of Aaron Rodgers line, and he's going to be their quarterback for fifteen years. And maybe he's just a Maybe he's just a good player who deserves another year, right, right, He's just pretty good. But I think the bar he's cleared over the last three weeks, I would say pretty decisively, is that if you put a good matchup in front of him, he can kill it. Yes, and what like, we'll learn something from the Chiefs game this week, because that is a that's a pretty frisky defense and he's going to see some stuff. But then after that gets the Giants, he gets the Bucks, he gets the Panthers, he gets the Vikings. It's pretty smooth sailing. And we've seen you know, it's a it's a fun receiving core. It's it's flawed, but they've got some guys. I actually think. I think Tucker Craft looks great and obviously Read looks great. So like Musgrave doesn't come back, no problem, Like they're covered. I think that's a good group. And I think you put a good matchup in front of Jordan Love and that can be three hundred yards and three touchdowns.

01:03:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love the call with Love with the contingency of him playing a good match being in a good matchup, and that's especially true like some quarterbacks you can tell, like Kenny Pickkett's a good example where he's not really making many special throws per game, Like how many special throws have you seen him make all season long? You can probably count it on half of your hand. You're your one hand, right, Jordan Love seems to make a couple of them every single game. He makes mistakes and he has dumb plays. But I'll tell you what, man that touchdown past to Jordan Reed or Jayden Reid this past week. I mean the fact that he got that in there and he was confident enough to make that throw. That's on a throw that a lot of quarterbacks can can make, especially with that accuracy. So I do I am cautiously optimistic about Jordan Love. I'll say I'm pessimistic about Jordan Love and bad matchups, and I'm optimistic about Jordan Love in those plus matchups, which is what you're saying.

01:04:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, Jayden Reid, by the way, is a personal favorite too. That's a guy who that's a guy who maybe thinks he might think he's six' five or six, six and, like, yeah, FORTY i LOVE i love. That so he's PROBABLY i CAN'T i cannot believe how widely available he, is AND i cannot believe How i'm, Embarrassed LIKE i write the pickups column AND i have not been able to talk people into a like sixty percent rostership Of Jayden, reeds who literally leads that team in receiving yards like he's he is a team leader across important categories that we care about in, fantasy AND i cannot talk to people into adding.

01:04:38
Speaker 1: Him he is one of my Favorite he was one of my favorite wideouts from this year's. Class that Was another example is when my prospect model likes a guy and then Obviously Matt, harmon who anything that he says is.

01:04:49
Speaker 2: Gospel to the.

01:04:49
Speaker 1: Folks you know that that freaking guy in his amazing process with reception. Perception BUT I Dmd harmon back in Like february or. SOMETHING i was, Like, Hey Jaden reid one of his top comps model right, now And i'm like whispering it to him because it was almost embarrassing at the. TIME i was, like It's Stefan. Diggs can you kind of like look into this guy and see and see how stupid this is because and then, obviously you, know he charts him and he's, like, wow this guy actually looks pretty. Good and then that's when after that, happened Then i'm, Like, OKAY i can be fully fully confident in what's going on here because he looks like the real. Deal so it's good that that you're A Jaden reid stand as. Well, Andy so good to chat with, you. MAN i wish we could do him more. Often why just let everyone know where they can find.

01:05:29
Speaker 3: You this was this was really. Fun thank you for having me On TWITTER x WHATEVER i should call. It i'm just At Andy. Barron's i've never given myself like a really fun name on any social, Platform so they can find me, there and they can find me obviously in their in their draft, rooms they can find me all Over.

01:05:44
Speaker 1: Yahoo, ANDY i appreciate. It i'm On twitter At Late ROUND qb as always, everyone thank you for tuning in The Printed papa