Yahoo Fantasy Cram Session - Draft strategies to help fantasy managers

Yahoo Sports' Andy Behrens, Liz Loza and Matt Harmon discuss a few draft strategies, including the importance of Running Backs who have proven receiving roles.

Video Transcript

LIZ LOZA: Matt, give me one nugget for fantasy managers strategy-wise to use entering this crazy season.

MATT HARMON: Yeah, to me, I think teams are gonna be so sort of thrown off from a game script perspective, I think things are gonna be weird. Defenses might have the edge early on. And I think that you really need to just favor these guys in the backfield that have proven receiving roles.

And to me, this is really an Austin Ekeler tweet. Because at no point in this show have I really gotten to talk about how excited I am about Austin Ekeler and how all these goofballs out there are letting him fall outside of the top 10 backs. Give me a break.

Like Liz talked about earlier, we realize that the Chargers offense has changed with this quarterback. And I know that people immediately will say a scrambling quarterback equals less targets for a running back, and theoretically that has been true. But Ekeler is a different kind of machine to me. He saw 28% of his targets out of the slot last year. He's not just some bunny hop little dump it off to him.

I'm gonna name drop here. I'm gonna name drop the guy. In the before times, we were working out in the gym together, me and Austin Ekeler. He was complaining to me that I don't chart him for reception perception because that's how many routes he runs. I mean, this is not just a dump-it-off back.

So I think he's gonna be an integral part of this offense. And to me, these are the type of players you need to target. Because remember when we all used to say, oh, Christian McCaffrey, he can't be a three-down back. Well, at the end of 2020, we're gonna be talking how dumb it was that people thought that Austin Ekeler couldn't be a three-down back. So my strategy for you really is just draft Austin Ekeler and log out.

LIZ LOZA: Sample size much bigger for Austin Ekeler than guys like Miles Sanders or Kenyan Drake, who seem to be gaining on him in terms of ADP.

MATT HARMON: Even Josh Jacobs too. Another guy that I'd rather take Ekeler ahead of.

LIZ LOZA: You calm down about that. We can talk about that offline. Andy, what else should fantasy managers stop caring about?

ANDY BEHRENS: Yeah, first of all, if you're playing the Matt Harmon name drop drinking game, you want to go ahead and drink right now. That just occurred. I am--

MATT HARMON: Hey, you're pretty sober this long into the program. Give me a break.

ANDY BEHRENS: One piece of fantasy advice that I feel like I've given for years, and it's never been more applicable or more important than it is right now, is that you just can't make plans in the NFL, like long-term plans as a fantasy manager. Don't talk to me about bye weeks. I wish we didn't even show a player's bye week in the draft tool, all right? Because you just can't make plans eight weeks, 10 weeks in advance.

Let me tell you something about my baseball leagues, my fantasy baseball leagues, that I think is probably gonna be applicable to fantasy football this season. It took about a week and a half for me to fill all of my IL spots. And we added a bunch in Yahoo leagues too. This year is gonna be really hard, between a bunch of teams getting wrecked by COVID, obviously, and the normal injuries that we expect in an NFL season.

There is gonna be a lot of missed games, and we're gonna hear about them late. And the idea that you can make plans like two months in advance-- I'll pass on this high-upside guy because it doesn't work in terms of bye weeks when we hit November. That's absolutely ridiculous. That is a ludicrous thing to do.

Don't think about it at all. When you're drafting beyond, say, the fifth round, I don't even plan on a lot of those guys being on my team at the end of the year. I just want to take a bunch of big swings on high-upside players, players with exceptional potential, and I'll sort out week six, week seven, week eight when we get there.

LIZ LOZA: The landscape is ever changing. And while we've talked about Tyler Eifert and Blake Jarwin on this show, we haven't really talked about the tight end landscape overall and how it has shifted rather dramatically from 2019 to 2020. I mean, at the top of 2019, I likened it to the aftermath of a Thanos finger snap.

And now because of the infusion of young talent, that chasm between the very elite-- I'm talking Kelce and Kittle. And I, like Matt, have Kittle ranked ahead of Kelce just by a hair for what it's worth. And then the, quote, late-round dart throws, the potential breakout players. Trying to find this year's Mark Andrews.

There are some players in the middle. I wrote the tight end positional primer slash preview for the website, for Yahoo Fantasy. And I did a poll.

And I kept hearing people say, I don't touch tight end. I don't touch it. No. In double digit rounds, that's when I do.

And I thought, well, has anyone ever done a mock, like actually done a mock employing a strategy where they took Kittle in the second or they took Hunter Henry in the fifth or sixth? And then they took Mike Gesicki, say, in the double digit rounds. Has anyone done that and seen what they ended up with?

And so I did that, and that's all in the primer. Here's what I can tell you. If you are drafting out of the three or four spot, you can absolutely feel comfortable selecting either Kittle or Kelce. I don't care your preference. If you want the Super Bowl champ, great. And if you want the $73-million man, great.

Pick either of those guys as it snakes back towards the end of the second. Your team's still gonna be money. There's enough depth at the wide receiver position that you can continue to hit running back and an elite tight end and still be fine. If you miss out on those guys, or whiff on them as Andy says, then I did not like the way my teams looked when I reached for even a Zach Ertz, frankly, when I tried to get Mark Andrews again in 2020.

When you start to hit those guys in the double-digit rounds, things do start to pop. I will say, for what it's worth, I am continually selecting Hayden Hurst in the ninth or 10th. I really like his situation, and he is a prime late-round target at the position for me.