The Overreaction Episode! + Fantasy Freakouts - Fantasy Football Podcast for 5/7

Welcome to the Fantasy Footballers podcast with your host Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Welcome in. Thursday, May 7th. The Fantasy Footballers back again, Mike Wright, Jason Moore, Andy Holloway. Your reactions episode for 2026, some news to talk about, some golf talk if we want to. Yeah, some golf talk. Well, you had a really poignant tweet today. Yes, I did. About golf. And it was very true. I thought it was... Why don't you read it just for those out there that share the hobby, you know, our new hobby of golf? Well, the thing that I am working on, I am not good, but I have found in life when you work on things, you can get better. And so I tweeted out that my experience with golf, is it the more work you put into getting better, the higher you can score. So it's great news, guys. And you've been accomplishing... And I have been accomplishing it. Higher and higher. I did get a higher score today than ever before. So that's awesome. Your score went up. Your score went up. Yeah. Your score went up. Points four went up. Yeah. I'm a football guy. That's right. That's right. Mike, back in the building today. Chillow. We have a couple of quick announcements. The best ball rankings are now live in the UDK+. So that's pretty exciting. Those of you that play best ball out there on the various platforms, you can find our best ball rankings in the UDK+. Right now, if you don't have the UDK, ultimatedraftkit.com for that. Quick question of the day comes from Zach on Instagram. How can I convince my league to switch to FAB? FAB is a way to handle waivers. Stands for free agent acquisition budget. And it means that each week teams blind bid on free agents. And when the free agents process, you'll find out who gets them based on who bid the most. A lot of leagues have like a hundred FAB budget, maybe 200 over the course of the year. Some teams have or some leagues have off season FAB budgets. But this is in opposition to kind of a default standard of like waiver priority rolling. One of the things that's silly to me now is that I think most defaults are now a FAB system. So it's like old leagues that you've been in for a while that have been running it as the old standard, which was just waiver priority. If you start like a new league on sleeper, I have to imagine that that just defaults to FAB because that's the way that fantasy has been played for the last decade now. So if you want to convince them, just I mean, I think that's one of the arguments is like that's this is really the new norm for the majority of leagues to the big argument is always about fun. I mean, the reason to change any rule in any league is to maximize fun. And maybe some fairness. Sure. I mean, that's a secondary. You're finding fairness. But I think primary, like number one most important thing for every rule is, is this make my league more fun. It's also more fair. It's also another level of competition and excitement. And so you get to you get to try to out smart out, plan your opponents. It's another day of drama for your league that you get to look forward to in the waivers process. Most leagues do still default to rolling waivers. So this is a change. Even on sleeper. Kyle said he he fired up a test. On sleeper. It was rolling waivers. Hey sleeper, you're listening. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, we've got this platform sleeper. We love you guys. You love us. Change. That's all it takes. Just literally type some things on the keyboard and change your default to FAB. You want to know why it's not exotic bird? I'll tell you why it's not is because it is more involved. It does take more effort to manage a FAB budget. If you have reverse order of standings is very easy to understand how waivers are going to process. You don't have to do another action. So I think that's why I think it's because of simplicity. Is it better? FAB is better. Yes. So, you know, it gives every when you talk about fairness, it gives everybody a fair shot at every free agent every week. If you have FAB budget, you know what I mean? And there's a, we have FAB trading in our league now. So you can actually include FAB in your trade offers, which makes for another fun way to do it. And then you have to decide how much you can serve towards the end of the year. Do you need to spend it early because you got to make the playoffs? Do you want to save it? So yeah, that would be our compelling arguments to make to your league. And just say that Jason Moore said so. You can also just shame him. You know, sometimes you got to just shame people for being old busted. Okay. Yeah. Shame is another way to do it that Jason Moore would do. News and notes from around the league. Well, always good when you're not found guilty of assault. Stefan Diggs found not guilty on Tuesday. I mean, good. Yeah. I mean, I hope he was not guilty. Like that is the hope here. Good. Okay. Now stop finding yourself in situations where you keep getting accused of this stuff. The old liar liar. Stop breaking the law. Yeah. I mean, he didn't. He's not guilty. He is. But if you've been like, can we make it a new crime? Like it's a separate statute. Okay. If you're accused of the same thing three times, even if you're found not guilty, you are now guilty of a triple accusation. Oh, the crime is triple accusation. You put yourself in the position to be accused of insert crime here three times. We can take it up with the government. I mean, here's the thing. Diggs is not done. He had over a thousand yards led the, you know, Patriots in receiving last year, 85 exceptions. He's one of several old men out there waiting for teams. Him, Tyreek, Debo, Keenan. Keenan. I love Michael. I love Michael. I mean, he is, he's lowercase done. What we know about Diggs is New England who just made the Super Bowl, Super Bowl, they're like, yeah. Romeo Dobbs. We're going to get you out of here. We're going to, we're going to bring some other people in. Tyrod Taylor signed with the Packers. He is the new backup to Jordan Love, which is often an important role considering Milly Gwillis saw playing time and I feel like anywhere Tyrod Taylor goes, the starter hurt does go down, but then he goes down. So now we have to care about who's the backup to the backup. That's always the case with Tyrod Taylor's team. The Packers general manager came out and said that he expects Michael Parsons and tight in Tucker Kraft back quote early in the season. Tucker Kraft coming back from his ACL injury. This is not as optimistic as this Patrick Mahomes news around his ACL. I mean, Mahomes is talking about being ready for OT-8. Well, I think it's different for a quarterback than for a tight end as far as what you have to be able to do. What's ironic is Tucker's injury was a much cleaner ACL injury than Mahomes. Mahomes had some extra ligament damage. I believe Tucker's was clean, but he should start the season. If he, if Tucker Kraft is their week one, he should not be at full strength. And I don't know that he will be their week one. It makes it a really hard pick because I know we were so freaking excited for the breakout that was happening last year. It looked like Tucker Kraft who Andy, you loved last off season and then it was paying off and it just was outstanding. And now I don't know how you can view it. Like how do you view him in this year's draft? Nervous. You have to be nervous. What's tough is that we've sat here and made arguments for Christian Watson and arguments for Matthew Golden being involved in the offense. And those arguments all fit for Tucker Kraft. They let go of Dobbs. They let go of Dontevian Wicks. You have opportunity to catch the ball in this offense. Kraft was already doing it. Like if you had to name those out of those three guys, he's the most reliable in a neutral injury situation. Sure. I'd be looking at Tucker Kraft and saying, he's the one I have the most confidence in. You throw the injury in there, but then you throw in the fact that you don't have that many tight ends that have that kind of potential to really make a difference. I think he's going to be worth a pick if he slips at all in the draft just to, you know, if you start the season and you buy a couple of weeks with some spots, start tight ends and you can rotate into Tucker Kraft for the last three quarters of the year and get anything like last year, I feel like you'd be happy with where he's going to go. I just worry that people won't have the patience or even the ability to have the patience. If it does take a month, six weeks, however long before all of a sudden the second half of the year, maybe Kraft is awesome. But I think you're probably going to end up getting him off of waiver. Like even if he's drafted, he's drafted and then week five, week six, you grab him off of waivers and he could have a good week one. You know, you never know. Yeah. Kenneth Walker. Oh boy, we got this in here, huh? He expects to be used more in the passing game with the chiefs. Mike is pleased. He says he's been working on getting connected in the passing game. Yeah, he has. And everything. So that's good. Said Walker to K Adams. I feel like I, I'll be used more in the past game. Mike feels that way. Let's get you a, just a nice clean 10% target share. Is that what you're projecting him for? That's where I have him. What did he end up in your rankings or do you have yours done? We had a little bit of a ranking reveal for our individual rankings on the last episode, Mike. Let me, we shared some. See if I can pull that up real quick. He is, this is going to surprise you guys. I'm going to guess. He's higher than you would think. I'm going to guess he's eight. Okay. 12 for me. He's 13 for me. You guys are all too low. Oh, eight is too low. RB seven right now. Wait, are you still working on yours? My first pass is done. Okay. So. Well, that's unsurprising. Deal with it. Let it wash over you. That would be a, that would be a, obviously his highest finish, but he's got every opportunity in front of him. You have him at a 10% target share? I do. I've got him at eight. Got bumped those. Those are rookie numbers. Now I got to bump those up. Now I've got to look and see. I'm pretty sure he had a 10% seven. Yeah. A couple of years ago, he went weirdly into just a past catching role. He was a 14% target share two years ago. If you want to see Mike somehow even happier than he was last year, Kenneth Walker having a top five season would get it done. Yeah. So the general manager of the Jags, James Gladstone came out, said he's going to play both sides of the ball in 20s, 26. We know he's going to play both. That doesn't help us. Now I will say. Well, it's better than the report of he's not going to play offense. Well, I don't feel like that report was ever actually he's not going to play offense. It kind of, it was, that's what it was alluding to. It was like, oh. No, it was full time corner. That's what was said. Yeah. And then to me, that's okay. He's doing a hundred percent of defensive snaps. So offensively, then he now his snaps are, are throttled. That's the part we need to know. I pulled up an interview today with Liam Cohen where he flat out and you can't get anyone better. This isn't a reporter. This is Liam Cohen. Thank you, Liam. This is the head coach saying their plan, their plan for Travis Hunter is identical to where, when they drafted him, which is to get him on both sides of the ball as much as possible. That's what he said. Yeah. Yeah. Look, we've had, we're going to talk about this forever. I've been very pro Travis Hunter playing offense. He won the bulletinical. He is a fabulous wide receiver and he might be their best one. He might legitimately be their most skilled wide. He could. He is, you can make an easy argument that his skill set is better than Jacobi Myers and Parker Washington. You could argue we've seen Brian Thomas Jr. go put up that kind of a monster year. I think his highest ceiling is the highest of the group, but that doesn't mean that's the kind of snaps he's going to get. That will be the risk with Hunter. I could see myself never drafting Travis Hunter because the reward might not be worth the risk. It is really tough where these small little percentages make an enormous impact when you say, okay, let's say he plays the majority of offense, but it's still not good enough. If he's playing 60% of snaps on offense, you look at the players who are slot only guys that can't get in on two wide receiver sets. They have such a hard path for fantasy plug and play relevance. I still am very skeptical. I agree with you, Andy, that Travis Hunter is a good wide receiver and too good to be off the field. They've got to involve him. They have a great wide receiver in that, but I also think he's not going to get enough snaps to be reliable for fantasy. I think that's right. I'm more just speaking to Jacksonville. Okay, that's fine. Which, I mean, it sounds like Liam Cohn has the same mindset of basically you drafted him to be a special weapon on both sides of the ball. We're going to use him that way. Maybe his plan was not to get him more involved when he was breaking out in week eight or whatever it was, but I just think he's a really good player. Now it's hard because if I told you a game was happening tomorrow and I told you, start Jacksonville wide receiver with your season on the line, you could argue for the other three guys already. You could say Jacoby's the best one to play today. Brian Thomas is the best one to play today. Parker Washington is the best one to play today. Britton Strange is the best one to play today. And then you have to throw Hunter in there. So maybe the best path is just watch the sidelines. Yeah. Trevor Lawrence is way higher than I thought he'd be on my rankings. That was one of our reveals, Mike. Do you want to know where he is? Or did I already tell you? I saw you threw out a number, but you were not complete yet. Four. Poop. Oh, okay. Oh, there he is. There he is. Oh, horse boy. Horse boy. We are into our overreactions episode, players and situations that fantasy football managers will overreact to this year. It is always a fun episode. On this episode last year, one of the ones we brought up was not to overreact to Saquon's dominance and believe that it's repeatable. That was not met with a lot of respect, maybe. I don't know, with a lot of agreement. People are not happy to hear it. Usually think whatever just happened is what's going to happen again. Like that is the normal stance. Yeah. It's sometimes true, but I mean, things change every single year. Yeah. Let's get into it. What can it do? What do you all think I'm going to do? Which is just flip out. All right. Overreactions. I think we both picked a couple of them to go through. I feel like I want to start just based on what you just said, Jason. Yeah. Which is that our default position is to say what happened last year is going to happen again. The first overreaction that I'm going to bring up is an overreaction to what our perceived stinkiness value is for a franchise. So we'll call this the Poopy Diaper Club. This is the Browns, Jets, Cardinals, Dolphins. You could throw a couple other teams in there. We're talking about how bad are these teams, how bad is our perception of them, and how do we react in fantasy? Our default opinion is, oh my gosh, I just had to watch 17 weeks of that garbage. So it's coming again, and I don't want any player to touch that team. So my simple counterbalance, the pendulum swing in the other direction of this, look, I stand by everything we've ever said. You want players on winning teams. OK? So we're not taking that out of the equation. Here's part of it. Part of it is you don't know which teams are going to be winning teams. You think you do, and some you do. Some you will know. You can tell me Buffalo is going to win a lot of games. I will accept that. But 20%, somewhere in that range, some years it's 15%, some years it's 25%. Somewhere in that range of teams that are below 500 become above 500 teams. On a yearly basis, the turnover at the NFL level. So you've got a quarter of the league that is going from a team that we perceive as bad, that was bad, to a good team. So you're going to try to identify those situations. The other thing is that you will get fantasy value out of franchises that are not necessarily the funnest to watch. Even in the worst year, the Jets, Breeze Halls had success. Garrett Wilson, top 10 wide receiver. The Cardinals were full of, from Jacobi Brissette to Trey McBride to Michael Wilson to the running back. I mean, James Conner the year before, you do find value in those positions. And what I don't want somebody to do is completely remove guys from your draft board because of the emotional reaction that you had to their nasty performances on the field. The breakout season for Odell Beckham came on a six and 10 season for the New York Giants. James Robinson, that breakout running back season came on a one and 15 Jacksonville team. Brock Bowers rookie season, Las Vegas was four and 13. Devon Achan last year, we didn't like watching the Dolphins. We liked watching him. You talk about touchdown opportunities. Part of why you haven't ranked lower is you're afraid that they weren't a good offense last year. And so he still had a big performance. Harold Fanon last year, a big performance. To me, you'd need to make sure that you're finding the diamonds in, I guess, the big Jurassic Park poop pile. Even if you don't like the team, there's the opportunity, a 20% chance that they turn it around and become a winning team that fits the category of draft players on winning teams. And then there's a chance that talent just wins out on those franchises. It's something I've been saying a lot with the draft this year with some of these wide receiver destinations, some of the places where players have gone where you're like, oh, that's gross. That's nasty. Look, you might be right for some of these teams, but if you have a player you really like and you have a team situation that you can at least paint a picture of a chance that they turn it around, don't overreact to the stinkiness of these teams. Trey McBride had the greatest tight end season ever on a four-win team. You can do it. And I think there is a difference between middle of the pack bad and bottom of the barrel bad. I think those things are different, too. Yeah, you do need to have a little bit of thought behind it. There are examples in the past where teams that you thought were going to be putrid were good. And it is shocking, I think, of the Texans a couple years back when the Cardinals acquired their next years first and we thought, oh, this is a top five pick for sure. And then they were really, really good. But also, they got a new rookie quarterback who was surprisingly way better than we thought. And so I do think you can take a look at these teams, these bad teams, and kind of get a good idea of, like, OK, sometimes a player is alone. So he's going to soak up so much of the target share that they can still be bad. But other times when you're looking at the bad teams that are going to get better, there's got to, I just look at the quarterback and say, is there a chance? So for instance, Shadour Sanders, right? Is there a chance that he could surprise and be better? I think probably, I think that is more likely that he could have a better than what? Well, I'm saying as opposed to, like, if we're looking at these four teams and saying, you know, Geno Smith at this stage of his career, is he going to really rescue and turn the Jets into a really good team? Probably not. Now I think probably not with Shadour as well. Browns were in 9-1 score games last year. There were a lot of games that their defense kept them in. It didn't mean that they had great offense. I mean, you can talk about the Browns and Quenchon Judkins. Judkins and Fanon had great seasons. Yeah, but that stat is such an indictment of the offense. Because of how? Like they were in 9-1 score games. They were in 4-5 in 1 score games. Yeah, their defense was that good. Every week, their offense is that bad. Yeah, exactly. Every week, you would look at the score and you'd be like, oh, the Browns are in it again. You know, I know Jason, you don't have high expectations for the Dolphins. You know, a lot of their personnel is pretty similar to last year, but you bring in Malik Willis. The performances by, you know, who they had on the offensive side last year was terrible. Two has gone. Just keep an open mind. Don't shut these teams out. Don't completely take them off your list for the draft board because I think there's opportunities to find value. And I think the overreaction is to say, oh my gosh, I don't want one. You know what I like about that, Andy? I like your positivity. Thank you. I like how optimistic you are. You're looking forward and you're saying it can be better. It doesn't always have to be worse. But now it's my turn. Not yet. Oh, man. Thank you all so much for being here at our wedding. I can't believe I get to spend the rest of my life with the woman of my dreams. Speaking of dreams, have you ever dreamed of tasting all the colours of the rainbow? Because that is exactly what you get with Skittles. Five bold fruit flavours in every pack. Lemon, orange, lime, strawberry and blackcurrant. They're chewy. They're colourful. They're perfect. Just like my wife. So thank you for coming and remember to buy Skittles. Shamelessly promote the rainbow. Taste the rainbow. And now it's your turn. Dude, I've been waiting forever. I'm so back here, baby. I am back to my old ways. Oh no. I know what this is. Yeah. The one thing that I don't overreact is don't overreact to the onslaught of rookie Titan success recently. Okay. And so now here's just another offseason. It's I mean, it feels just like another offseason. I will. I want to qualify this because I have completely changed from saying that rookie Titans, you know, they they take time to develop. They can't hit the ground running in your one. That's the old NFL. It's obviously changed. Obviously. This last year you had Warren Loveland fan in. You had Brock Bowers. You had Laporta. So I am not I am not stuck in that. But what I am saying as an overreaction is because we have this slew of really good fantasy impact rookies, there are at least Sadiq this draft. And if you want to throw stowers in there where people are going to be drafting these players higher than they should be based upon the overreaction of what's happened recently. And I want us to be smarter than that and look at the nuance of the players. First of all, Warren and Loveland were unbelievable talents. These guys, their production profiles, their landing spots, like we could see this coming. Brock Bowers, literally the best prospect that tied in that, you know, we've been doing the show for over a decade. He was a perfect prospect. We knew about him years in advance. That's not what Kenyon Sadiq is. Even Eli Stowers, especially where he ended up behind Dallas Goddard. You know, when we look at historical trends, that's great, but it's not predictive. It describes what happened. It doesn't automatically mean that Sadiq is going to be good. If you look at Sadiq as a prospect, he is way behind those other guys. Yards per route run. Only Hayden Hurst was lower over the last decade. For a first round tight end, you look at a dominator rating, which is the percentage of a team's yards and targets. Only Hurst and OJ Howard were lower for first round tight ends. You look at yards per team pass attempt. And the reason I'm throwing these three stats out is because these are three of the most predictive stats that we have for, you know, pass catchers coming from college to the NFL. He's the lowest of any first round tight end over the last decade. Now he goes to a team where he's not going to be in a Brock Bauer situation and soaking up the targets. He, he's behind Garrett Wilson at the very least. Garrett Wilson is soaking up the targets. So I, I believe he's going to be overdrafted based on the hype of this is a top in first round draft pick. Those have been dominating. I'm just going to take my shot. I'm just going to, you know, swing for the fences in the early middle rounds, especially when it comes to late August address are happening. People are going to push them up a round or two too high. I don't think that we have a breakout rookie tight end this year, even though I love Stowers and I just don't want to overreact from the run we've been on. I, I'm, I don't disagree with you at all. I know I, the, the prospect of Kenyon Sadiq. I am concerned of if you're that awesome, why aren't you dominating in college ball? Cause like OJ Howard's is kind of, and he's not Alabama. He's in the S there was sorry in the SEC, like Josh Jacobs was similar, you know, like as a running back, his production profile was lacking, but you, you could understand why Sadiq, like you can't like, why aren't you better? I'm just chuckling the whole time cause your, your topic is don't overreact to rookie tight ends. Just call it what is Jason. I don't like Kenyon Sadiq. Thank you. Okay. Just be intellectually honest with the people. Just say, don't overreact to Kenyon Sadiq. Okay. That's, but the reason my point is the reason you have to like briefly mentioned Stowers just so it, you're like, no, I'm talking all the tightest. No, you're not. All right. Well, look, last year, Andy's was, you know, about say one and that was, this is about Sadiq. Don't overdraft. He's not, he's not going to be special. Get Stowers off the graphic. Yeah. I honestly, I think Stowers could do it. Stowers is so good. Oh my God. I would take Stowers over Sadiq. He still has to get by God. Yeah. I think, you know what I think actually happened? I don't think that fantasy football players are capable of reacting in either direction to rookie tight ends. I think all we do is we take the young unseen upside in the spot of the draft where it's ugly, old and boring. And we've gotten lucky three years in a row. And it's worked out spectacular. So maybe we, maybe we, that's why people are going up a little bit. They're going to say, well, it's worked out three times a row. I'm going to. And you know what? When I get to some late round pick and I have to choose Mark Andrews or Stowers, wish me luck. Don't overreact. Wish me luck. Grab Mark Andrews. Mike, go ahead. I just want to talk a little bit about some, some touchdown regression and, you know, we call it positive regression because we just want you to understand we're talking about going in the right direction. So we're talking about touchdowns specifically for, for the running back position of saying last year's touchdown droughts will not last forever. You know, James Cook is kind of the, he's become the poster boy for this type of talk where his first two years in league, he scored a total of two rushing touchdowns in each of those consecutive years breaks out in a huge way. And it's like, Oh, the other, he was, he was hitting some bad luck. He's hitting a little bit too much on the good side, but he's a great player. You, it can't be just simply, Oh, this player will never be able to score. So I wanted to highlight a couple of guys to pay attention to because it's not as, it's not as easy as, as, you know, like last year's Matthew Stafford through a touchdown on 7.7 percent of his, his passing attempts. That number is probably going to come down just based off of a huge history of Stafford. Running backs are more difficult. But one player I do really want to highlight, Ashton Gentie is a, he was a, he is in this category of, of last year we had 266 rushing attempts for him and he only scored a rushing touchdown of, you know, like for every 53 carries. Like these, these are numbers we can look at and say you're getting way too much volume. Your touchdown expectation should be far better than you performed last year. We have, you know, like, so like some guys in, in, in talk about carries inside the five where the success wasn't there, but the opportunities keep flowing. Dave, a Montgomery, only five of his carries inside the five turned into a touchdown. He should be seeing exactly the same amount of volume he was seeing in the side of the five this year compared to last year, maybe even more. And I expect those numbers to go back up. But along with Ashton Gentie, you know, going on the good side, Blake Corum is very interesting when you're talking about this because he stands out dramatically of a player who had 13 carries inside the five and he only had four touchdowns. And I think people will see that number and be too dismissive and say, well, that means he's not good in it. It's all Kyron or look at the actual amount of carries that they, the team is giving him inside the five and be like, maybe I need to be a little bit more hesitant about what's going on. He has some touchdown regression coming for himself. Maybe I need to be more worried about the timeshare. We had, I guess last episode, you guys were talking about the report of Kyron and Blake Corum being more of a 50-50 split. We had a pretty, pretty big debate about it. So how many carries inside the five for Corum? He had 13 last year. So Kyron had 18. There's a lot to go around for that team because they're scoring off, but the point is, well, Kyron is. Yeah. Okay. So that's where you stand on the side of the argument. The touchdown, the numbers of the numbers, man, analytics, they bounce back to the mean. And I think that Corum really underproduced in that area. And younger players tend to get better and older players tend to get worse. And then, you know, it's to highlight like Bill, only three of his carries inside the five, three of 12 turned into touchdowns. So make sure you're paying attention to these. We give you access to these types of numbers in the ultimate draft kit. If you just want to go look at a red zone report, see who's getting a bunch of carries inside the five. I mean, this is part of the process that I go with. So you can have, build it into yours as well. Look for signs because guys don't like chase Brown scoring on 31% of his carries inside the five. That's, it's just, it's low. It's low. Look for opportunities. If you were to simulate that season a hundred times, right? That's going to come up as one of the lower performing seasons relative to the mean. And the, and the big boy is Segwan Barkley, who had one touchdown from inside the five. Like that doesn't make you know how many attempts on 13 attempts. You highlighted Andy like, be careful with his performance. I will say the same thing now of in the other direction. Yeah. Don't, don't bury Barkley just yet. Rank check. Yeah. So I, I really did not like where Segwan ended up for me. He's, he's a player that I'm going to move up because he finished where I had him stat it out at running back 15. That feels too low. He's got, yeah. I got him at 10. I felt pretty good about that. I felt like that's the right, the right range. Yeah. I agree. And maybe a value for that team that's going to lose by all, you know, counts. AJ Brown. Yeah. Yeah. We can like stowers and lemon, but that's not the presence of AJ Brown on that offense. I would not be surprised if you saw a very similar run heavy scheme with a little bit more bounce back to the mean. My second overreaction is the, it's ironic cause we, I don't think we knew we were going to talk about Travis Hunter and this Jacksonville offense, but my second one was just that Brian Thomas Jr. is not dead. Oh man. When I was doing Jacksonville brother. Hard time. Yeah. It's so, it's so difficult to not react drastically to what happened last year. You talking about the fact that he finishes the wide receiver 43. He missed three weeks due to injury, but only had 48 catches, 700 yards, two touchdowns. His catch rate was, it totally bottomed out. It was not. It was at 50. All too different than what you saw from a book a second after the year. He caught 65% of his, of targets in his rookie season that plummeted to 53. And it's like, I, I can't, you know, Mack Jones targets me. He can't be at 53. Look, he's, it doesn't make sense. He's rookie. It doesn't make sense. But maybe it does. A lot went sideways. The challenge here is that you had, you've only had like a handful of rookies that have finished his top five wide receivers in the history of, of the game. Mack almost won. Chase was one. Pucco was one. Brian Thomas Jr. did that two years ago. That's why he was a top 10 pick in a lot of drafts. The falloff of expectation to performance, that difference is the most impactful thing that you could have in fantasy in terms of like, he is the bust of the year probably for the, when you relative to draft position, he has to be. What's wild is that all the other sophomore wide receivers struggle. They all went down. Malik neighbors barely played, but he's, his points per game was down from his rookie year. BTJs was the most extreme went from 14 to eight, but lad, Mckonkey went from 12 to nine. That's not that different than Brian Thomas Jr. in terms of the actual output in points per game, 14 to eight, 12 to nine. Marvin Harrison went down a point per game. Xavier Worthy went down three points per game. These were all, I mean, Malik neighbors wasn't even in the top 90 wide receivers. That's true. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. I didn't mention he was injured, but this was a new offense. When I look at that receiving room and I've been through it, Mike, you just said you had to go through it. I had to go through it. There's a lot of different mouths to feed. He did not end up, I think he ended up basically tied as my target leader on the team with Jacobi Myers and total targets, but the true purest upside potential, the biggest bang for your buck in this draft for somebody that's going to make a difference on your team is still placing a bet down on Brian Thomas Jr. to bounce back to the type of form or close to it that he had in his rookie season. Jacobi Myers, we know what that dude is. We do. We've seen him on multiple franchises, the Patriots, the Raiders, Jacksonville. Let me give you a word for him. The heart. Solid. Yeah, that's the issue. Is he just a good wide receiver or is he good enough to be that for them? Brian Thomas? No. Jacobi. Jacobi is, we know who Jacobi is. But that's what I'm saying. He's not enough. But he's not. That's my question. Is it enough? Let me say this. You'll have to answer that as a drafter. If you overreact to Brian Thomas Jr. struggling and you end up right and he's horrible, I promise you Travis Hunter is the thing. If Brian Thomas Jr. is nothing, I promise you it's not just going to be Jacobi Myers and Parker Washington. It is going to be somebody else. I think BTJ can bounce back. We've had some big time standout rookies that had a struggle as sophomores and bounced back. Mike Evans went from the wide receiver. 12 as a rookie to 24 to 3. Calvin Ridley from 19 to 26 to 4. Cooper Cup 27 to 51 to 4. Garrett Wilson 19, 32, 4. I'm not saying it will happen. I'm saying that the draft value, it's one of the best picks you can make. It is absolutely one of the best picks you can make. One of the things that is a high predictor of future success is past success. We know that. It's obvious, but this was in years past. You had a MyGuy prediction of Todd Gurley and then he was the running back one. You had a MyGuy prediction of Cooper Cup. This dude is close to that category. He was the number one wide receiver afterwards because they had shown that they could do this in the past. Right now, depending on your source, I'm seeing an ADP of wide receiver 31. He's being drafted at wide receiver 31. Now I have his median outcome at wide receiver 22. I think he's a huge value, but this is a guy who two years ago was the wide receiver 4. His seventh, third, eighth round pick potential. Yeah. I mean, it's a wonderful shot to take. There is more talk of Jacksonville moving to two tight insets. BTJ is not the guy coming off the field in those situations. He's the extra receiver. He's going to stay out there. He led Jacksonville in first read target percentage. Even in his crappy year last year, you talked about the catch percentage with two or fewer wide receivers on the field. He's still the dude. Liam Cohen has come out and talked a little bit more about the fact that he didn't realize what BTJ is capable of doing in the slot. They need to do some better stuff with him. I don't think the utilization was questionable. He had 25% of his routes as pure go routes. They're only a handful of guys and they're not names you love. Marvin Mims, Darius Slaton, DK Metcalf. The nine route warriors. Yeah. Your catch percentage is going to be low. K. Shawn Booty kind of got it done with that. He had the highest percentage of go routes, but not to the degree where you were reliable in fantasy. Yeah. I mean, they also figured that out a little bit. To start the year last year, Brian Thomas Jr. was way worse than how he finished. Before their bi-week, he was catching 49% of his targets after the bi-week is 58%. So I do think that they are going to figure that out. He's going behind Cortland Sutton. Who do you want to try? Take a shot. Of course. He's going behind DK Metcalf. Mike, let me throw that one to you. Never Metcalf is what Mike has lived his life on. There's players drafted after. And he's going behind Jacobi Myers, by the way. One pick. Wow. That won't happen. Why? Because everyone's like, huh? I don't know. Yeah. I think there's not going to be a big overreaction. Maybe it's even an appropriate emotional reaction, but don't let it affect how you draft 2026. All right. Is it your turn? It is my turn. I'm going. Not yet. Mike, what do you got for us? I don't think we can do that now with the screen. Oh, it must be Jason. All right. So, um, injuries have one of the biggest effects in fantasy football, and they are not predictable. Um, however, there's a lot of data at different positions for how often players get injured or don't. And I want us to be aware of what happened last year at the running back position and not overreact and think it's going to happen again because it ain't running back last year. We're so healthy. Yeah. No one got injured. It was unbelievable. We never, part of it was you. You made the proclamation about B-John Robinson. We knew it was the player. It was Mike Shearwell kept Christian McCaffrey on the field plus an electrical station plus he siphoned the powers of his other teammates. I mean, it really was. You have guys who have massive injury history like Christian McCaffrey, Jonathan Taylor. Um, a lot of guys just didn't get injured. In fact, if you look at the players last year, Christian McCaffrey, 17 games, Jonathan Taylor, 17, B-John 17, Jameer 17, James Cook 17, A-Chan 16, but he was just benched in week 18. All the guys that were 16 were benched in week 18. That was, uh, you know, Devon A-Chan and, um, Javante Williams. There was a little, basically, it's kind of hurt too. There was basically only one injury of, of no, which was Josh Jacobs. Well, yeah, Bucky. Oh, yes. Sorry. Two Bucky and Josh Jacobs. Those guys were injured. To give you a little bit of numbers of how wild it was in 2025, the top 12 by ADP averaged 16.1 games. And it's really higher than that because most of those were week 18 sit downs from their team. Seguin Barkley didn't play, wasn't injured. Usually, you look back at the, the previous decade, they're only averaging 13.6 games. And that is a big difference because when you have those injuries, like Josh, you know, Josh Jacobs missed like two games. Not really. He was injured. Who was playing injured. He had games where he would play like 29% of the snaps, not touch the ball. It was a very bad end of the season for Josh Jacobs. So how does this apply to not overreact to it? Well, one, you're going to have the pendulum swing like it will. Running backs were great last year. Running backs will be highly drafted again this year, which means you're going to have some value in the first two rounds at wide receiver. I also think that this is a very good year to focus on depth at running back because, you know, people are going to be like, Oh, I've got my studs. I'm solid. But also what that kind of points me towards, I'm not the hugest fan of this, but the years where you want to try it are years after what we just saw. And that's your RB. Zero RB is the methodology of drafting where you are going to take the backup insurance running backs late in a draft, the fodder, and you're going to wait for the injuries at running back. The reason it's probably a good year to do it is because it didn't work well this last year. When you have a bunch of the no dub strategy, when you have a handful of people playing that strategy in the same league, they kind of cannibalize each other and it doesn't work well for them to succeed. But when it's like not popular, it's like, Oh, that didn't work. And especially in the running backs are being juiced up. You get access then to elite wide receivers and the elite tight ends. Exactly. So I don't, I don't want to look back at last year and think, man, somehow running backs just figured out how to exercise and stretch better. And they're not going to have, you know, big, massive, devastating injuries this year. It will sadly happen and take advantage of it. Way to not be positive like me. Talk about injuries coming. I, yeah, I mean, you're kind of like the grim reaper. That's kind of your thing. Yeah. What are you trying to do over here? Reapers. I don't know. I don't know. They're just trying to rebrain live on the air here. Can't do that, man. We're not fooling nobody. All right. We'll leave him. We'll leave him as double stuff. Mike, what do you got? So like Jason's talking about with the running backs, we have a situation to monitor here with the elite top tier mobile quarterbacks because they did not come through. I want you to read it verbatim. I want you to read your headline verbatim. Which the, the, for the over for your section here. Do not let last year's quarterback disappointments brainwash you. Mortal mobile quarterbacks still slap. That's it. All right. All right. That's a, yeah, wrap it up. That's a Kyle Borgagnoni. Oh, is that what he did? Kyle, Kyle loves say things slap. Mortal combat still slaps. In which it does. There you go. There's no movie coming out. Not hashtag non-sponsored. I hate, I hate being old enough to work every theater. Everything has come out three or four times. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like I don't, that is not a great part of growing up is just seeing the same exact movie. Want to see some new stuff. Remade for three or four times is wild. They're just still trying to get it right. You know, anytime now. Crazy. But so, you know, like Lamar, ADP of quarterback two finishes at 20. Jayden Daniels lost season to injury. Jaylin hurts not nearly as good as you hope. Bonex, like it was, Bonex was a weird season because sometimes it was fantastic. And then of course, Kyle Murray, who loses his job to injury and the team just no longer wanting to play him. We need to know where he is for you right this minute. We have Tyler. Yeah, this is part of our rankings surprise yesterday. Me and Jason had a big differential on Kyler Murray. Right now, I have him better than ADP, but he has quarterback 15 for me. 23. Jason has him at 10. He has just called me baby bear. He's currently 12 now. But yes, I had him at 10 at the beginning. But to your point, Jason also has Jayden Daniels very high, which that's, that's what we want to bring up here is the forgotten man is the ADP is, it has shifted. So last year, Lamar Jackson was going around the two, three turn right now in best ball. He's going in the late fifth. Jayden Daniels went from a third round or two, a sixth round or this is value is being placed upon you. And these are these are still the guys like Jayden Daniels. Last year, if you look at his, at only his six starts, his rushing numbers were exactly what you wanted. They were nearly identical to last year. Just, he got hurt. The completion percentage wasn't as great, but we, we need these guys to run and we need to know that they're going to run all year long. And it, and Jayden Daniels is now giving you a discount and like his scramble rate was even higher in those first six games compared to his rookie season. Then Jalen Hertz, it's, it's the same thing. You know, you had a weird, lower rushing touchdown year for, for Jalen Hertz. Is that the new normal or is it the couple of years prior where it's just, it's automatic. You know, last year only eight rushing touchdowns on the season. It was the fewest carries inside the five since 2021 for Jalen Hertz. The chance for him to regress to his mean there, I think is it, it's very strong. And I'm not saying like I'm, I'm for sure calling these things to happen. It's just about finding value where the market is presenting it to you. And regression studies should be a huge part of what you do when you're getting ready for drafts because that's how you know when people are, we're a little too excited for them or the, the mob is too scared of this player. Yesterday, we got a question, Mike, on the mailbag portion about our process for statting players out in the UDK. Jason and I got to answer for ourselves. You weren't here. We talked a little bit about you looking at pace of play. Yes. Do you want to fill in some more? Yeah. The way I started as I, I start with the top down of just kind of the whole team, the team environment of their pace of play is very important to me. And that's based off of the history of the team coaching staff. You know, there's, there's definitely some projection that goes into it when, you know, like last year, Kellen Moore goes to the saints. He plays way faster than Peyton and like the previous regime or not pay who Dennis Allen. Yes. And you're like, so you got to just kind of anticipate that's going to go on, but we, we have enough history of Kellen Moore. And then I look at, okay, that coach, the, the quarterback, like just who they have, their pass to rush ratio is, is really important to me of, is that going to stay about the same? Is it going to rise? And then that, that essentially just feeds my quarterback statistics of knowing those, those things. And then of course, knowing the, how the quarterback performs. And then I just kind of filter that down to the, the rest of the players. Now we, we kind of talked about different starting points for what you're looking at as we build those out. Obviously the entire set of player by player team by team projections for all three of us and our consensus rankings are all going to be in the 2026 ultimate draft kit. We just released the best ball rankings in the UDK plus available right now. All of that at ultimate draft kit.com. If you never want to think about it again, you can just become an ultimate foot clan member. You'll get access to both the UDK and its highest form, the UDK plus. And you'll also get in season tools, including the lineup optimizer, everything we add all the time, everywhere, extra episodes every week. It's a great way to support the show. Just go to jointhefoot.com for that. We are going to say goodbye to today's episode and we'll be back with dynasty week next week. Good targets, rookie sleepers and autograph jersey giveaway next week and a whole lot more from the fantasy footballers. Until then, I wish you good luck on the golf course. Oh, I need a man swing straight hit the ball. Definitely hit it. Sometimes step one. Good. Bye. Thank you for listening to another episode of the fantasy footballers podcast. 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