Late-Round Perspectives: Drew Davenport

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Drew Davenport is part of the football guy's staff and hosts the Auction Brief Podcast. He's a three time King's Classic Auction Draft Champion. He's been a practicing defense attorney for 24 years, and there's no one in the fantasy space who breaks down off the field trouble like he does. These are his late round perspectives. This episode is sponsored by DraftKings. We've partnered up with DraftKings again this year for Best Ball, and we've got a can't miss offer on their biggest best ball contest ever. $20 million in total prizes. It's DraftOne, GetOne. Draft your team once, no weekly line of management, and your top scorers start automatically each week all season long. Download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app and sign up with promo code LateRound. Enter a lineup in the $20 million Best Ball contest for $25 and get a bonus ticket for a second entry. Two shots at the title. DraftOne, GetOne, only on DraftKings. The crown is yours. I feel like there can't be that many lawyers that sit on a fantasy football podcast with three championship belts sitting behind them dressed in shirt and tie. I mean, this is a dynamic that you don't find very often on fantasy football shows. I'll take it. I'll take it. I think that's probably a good thing, right? Yeah, of course. Of course. Are you going to be at the Expo again this year? Absolutely. Yeah, I marked my calendar by the Expo every year. I love that weekend. I just love seeing the people and the Expo is one of the highlights of my year, to be honest. What would be your, if you were to sell it to somebody who's listening right now? How many years have you gone now? Well, I started by going to the King's Classic in 2019. The Expo was just sort of a fledgling event at that point. It wasn't actually a big deal. Yeah. And then after COVID, it kind of exploded. So I think the thing for me is it's a community thing. Honestly, if there were no activities and there were just the Expo on Sunday, I'd still go all weekend because I want to see the people that I get to see once a year. There's a lot of people that I only see one time a year. Yeah, that's the thing, man. I mean, I've said it before on shows. I was on the, the podathon for SFB this past weekend. And I was saying how, you know, you go to Georgia's, you know, the bar that's there for folks who haven't been to Canton/the Expo, but it's where everyone kind of flocks to, especially after that Friday event, but also the Saturday and one, too. Everyone kind of just goes there and hangs out, you know, has a couple drinks. And it's hilarious. It's into the fantasy football space. And if you listen to a lot of podcasts and stuff, it's so funny because you go there and you just hear the voices that you've been listening to on shows as you're walking around that. I mean, it's a small dive bar. It's just a fun little spot to be. But it's just hilarious as you walk around. You can just hear all the voices of fantasy football that you've probably been listening to for years. It is. It is. And I got a buddy coming who is a big fan of podcasts. He's not in the business. He's in one of my homeligs. He's coming this summer. And I know that he's going to be blown away when he walks into Georgia. And it's like, oh, there's, oh, and there's, oh, and there's. Yeah. So yeah, he's excited. I'm excited, man. Me too. Me too. It's always good to catch up with people. Speaking of catching up, you and I haven't done a show in a minute since last summer, probably. And so, you know, this is your first time on perspectives. I like to get a little bit of a background for folks to kind of understand your perspective on, on, on your outlook on fantasy football, but also just kind of how you got started in this and, and why you got started in this. So, so have at it. Well, I got started in this. It was a little bit of luck, a little bit of hard work, but I got a Twitter account back in 2019 for the purpose of just following people on Twitter and staying up with fantasy football. It was an information gathering thing. And then I, I was seeing like the narratives around the Tyree Kill thing happening. And back at the, that time it was, I don't know if you remember the recorded conversation that his child's mother had that had him like you should be scared of me too. And like talking about how the child's scared of them and like the child had a broken arm. And anyway, the point is I was, I was thinking there was some takes on this that were a bit odd. And with my criminal defense experience, I said, all right, I'm just going to shout into the void at like 90 followers. I'm like, I'm going to shout into the void, you know, to my 88 bots and, and my mother and my, my best friend. And so I say it and then match off from draft sharks picks it up and then it went from their rhyme. It dial picked it up and all of a sudden I'm getting a DM from Joe Bryant and he says, hey, look, we need a legal guy. It just looks like you're into auctions too. We need both of those things. What do you say? So like I said, it's pretty lucky. But you know, hey, if I hadn't put myself out there, it wouldn't happen to either. So that's where I got my start. And I was back in 2019. What do the auction love come to be? A very underserved area of the fantasy football space. And we're definitely going to be digging into that on today's show. But how did you get so interested in that as sort of like your niche? Yeah. That came honestly because I didn't even really know what he better. So back in the late 90s or the 2000s, I'm in law school. I got a buddy who plays fantasy football. He gets me into it. I wasn't into it from the standpoint of like I was going to drafts and hanging out with people and doing home league. I was doing like these online salary cap things where like when you get a team and they perform well that week, their price goes up and then you can like get rid of that player and get like another really good player. And so that's what I was doing. And then I get a call from a buddy like, hey, we got a spot in a home league. It's an auction. Here's how it works. And I'm like, okay, like I didn't know any better. I didn't know there was picking. I had no idea. So I got in my first ever fantasy football draft and it was an auction. And I fell in love with it. I tell the story all the time because I ended up getting David Boston for a couple bucks at the end of the draft. And it was the year that he had the 1500 yards and eight touchdowns. And I was hooked because I said, oh my gosh, I got this guy for like three bucks and then he ends up being one of the best receivers in the league. And I was hooked from that point. example and you're, I mean, you being a football guy's guy, you know, you'll appreciate it. But back in the day when I started, which was back in like 2012 or so, the one person that I always wanted to make sure I was kind of crossing my teeth and dotting my eyes for because I knew that he would try to poke holes in my argument with Sigmund Bloom. Now, this is when back then, Bloom was a little bit more like combative on social, not in a bad way. Just like he was more confrontational, I guess you would say than he is today. It wasn't like he was being mean or anything. He was just wanting to learn, wanting to poke holes in arguments, et cetera, et cetera. And I still to this day, and I've told him this, I still to this day while I'm approaching an argument, I'm thinking, how would Bloom poke a hole in this, right? As I'm approaching a writing or analysis and I'm doing, and I would imagine for you having to do that and breaking things down that way, as opposed to just hitting record on a podcast has been kind of helpful. It's massively helpful. And one of the things that I referenced on my show all the time is a quote that I love that I'm sure I'm going to screw up the quote badly, but you don't wear a pathway in the grass by walking back and forth once. You have to do it over and over and over until the pathway is there. And that's the same thing with your brain. Your brain doesn't, you don't figure it out by hitting record and start talking. You have to do these things over and over and over. And then your brain actually has that pathway where you can walk down it and it's a lot easier to walk that path after you've done it a lot. Yeah, I mean, for sure that's anything with its fantasy. I'm sure you've talked to folks that are just starting in the space and they talk about what they can do and how you get things done so quick. It's just reps. It's just reps. It's just doing things over and over again and allowing your brain to know what to look for and finding those patterns, even if it's subconscious in a way, right? Like some of the things that you're finding, I'm sure while you're looking at those case reports and stuff is just something that you just know because you've looked at thousands of them. It's just the way that that things kind of go down as you get more and more practice. Yeah. And again, something else that I say all the time is people mistake gut instinct for like wild-ass guessing. There is a lot of people think that gut comes from, hey, I'm just going to like look at something and give you my wild opinion. No, gut comes from honing that instinct and that's from the hard work. The gut springs from the hard work and I see this a lot of the poker table where people think, oh, he didn't have it. I'm like, well, why did you think he didn't have it? Why just knew he didn't have it? I'm like, that's not a reason. Gut comes from the hours and hours and hours of study, thinking about it. And that's the other part that bothers me sometimes about especially with auction drafting. I tell my folks all the time, like, look, you can't just go to the auction draft, be done, and then it's over. It's not over. It's not a snake where you can just go, okay, maybe I could have made this pick here there. You can take you a few minutes to look at, maybe I should have made this for that play. And auction, you have to go back and say, where did I make my mistakes? Where did I do things wrong? What did I do right? When could I have nominated this guy at a different time? All of that stuff, it just all matters and it all rolls into one thing that's extremely important in a totality, I guess. Well, let's talk about auctions a little bit. Give your pitch as to why it should be more mainstream because it's not more mainstream. It's slowly grown as the game has grown, right? Fantasy football in general has gotten bigger and bigger. But I would argue that it's not even necessarily proportionally growing the same way that the rest of the space is. So what would your pitch be for more people to try out and play in auction leagues? Well, I'll give you the stump speech here. I don't know why it's not growing a little bit better. I'm trying so hard to make inroads, but it's difficult. I mean, I pitched a site recently as recently as last summer about how we need to approach auction drafting differently. And they were pretty resistant to it. And I don't blame them because when you run a website, you're worried about the bottom line. And the auctions are not pulling in the bottom line. I get that. It's not helping your bottom line. So people don't really care about innovating. And so I'm trying to innovate on my own. And I'm, well, I'm working on it. But anyway, the pitch would be this and it's real simple. I believe that if you are a strong fantasy football player, that auctions magnify your advantage. I believe that your knowledge and your experience in the game is magnified over somebody who's preparing a week before or buying a magazine on the way to the draft or printing out rankings. A lot of people come to auction drafts and they just print out values. And they say, okay, well, this guy is going for 37 and it says right here that he's valued at 42. So I'm going to bid 38. And that is not how auctions are done. So what I would tell you is if you think you're good at fantasy football, auctions will make you better than the rest of the people in the room. So that's my big pitch. And let me say this, a lot of times when I talk about auctions, it sounds like I'm saying snakes have no skill and they're this and that. I think generally they're boring. Let me just say that. But I will say there is a skill to snake drafting, serpentine drafting. They're 100% is, you know how I know that? Because I'm not very good at it. I'm just not. Like I don't do enough of them and I don't care. Like I pay attention to it and look, I talk about ADP a lot and I talk about where guys should be valued because that's the general need in the community. But my pitch is, look, if you think you're good, start getting to auctions and your base will make you better than other people. So let's dig into this a little bit more. When you look at what people on other sites are on social media or what have you or doing or your own experience, right? Because obviously, you know, you've done really well. Let's just say in the King's Classic Auction drafts, right? Or other industry drafts. What do you think fantasy managers get wrong most when they go into one of those auctions? So I think it's a, it's a, it's a super basic level that bothers me about auction drafting. Okay. And then I think the basic level is this everyone. What we see on sites a lot is when people write articles about this stuff. Everyone likes to say, hey, flexibility is key. Go into the draft and don't be rigid. Yes, that's true. But that doesn't capture the whole point here because I don't believe that flexibility should be the first thing that people are learning. In fact, I believe that what most people get wrong here is that rigidity actually breeds flexibility in the draft. And let me explain what I mean there. There's a couple things that I think people do wrong. Number one, I don't think people walk into an auction draft with a, with a smart enough plan most of the time. And I think a lot of times what that boils down to is people are reading articles that are telling them that say, hey, if you want to spend X amount of dollars on wide receiver, okay? So put 55% of your budget towards wide receiver. That helps nobody in the middle of an auction. You're not sitting in there going, I have 55%. Okay. So $200 cap, that's $110 and then they say sold and you're like, wait a minute, I was still doing math. Right. That doesn't help anybody. So I think the first thing is formulating a plan that you can execute. And I think that plan needs to be super specific. And that's where I think people get lost. I think people are like, well, I don't really like, or you know, this and that. And I'm going to try to go for a top wide receiver. I'm like, that's not a plan. The plan should be, who am I going to nominate the first round? Who am I trying to lock up early? Who are my targets that I need to figure out if I'm going to get these guys early? Like there is a specific way that you got to build a plan. And what flows from that is something that I have coined, the phrase that I've coined that has become a extremely important crutch, if you will, or tool. Maybe it's a better way to say it. And that is the par sheet. And the par sheet, I know that there are a lot of people out there that just kind of shrug that off and think that it's nonsense. But as soon as you use it, you will realize how great it is. And by the way, I realize I'm drafting against you in a few weeks. So just delete all this from your memory before we walk in there. But the par sheet, the par sheet is the single biggest innovation that I have in the space that I believe is important for especially new folks. But I think anybody, and I use it still to this day. And really what it is is, if you have a $200 cap and a 16-man roster, you're going to write a specific dollar amount for every single player on your roster. Okay. I need a kicker. I need a defense, $1. A backup tight end, $1. You're going to go and put these numbers down. My wide receiver one, I don't want to spend more than 52. Okay. You write that there. And then you get a specific dollar amount for everyone. And then the pushback I always hear is, that's way too rigid. It's going to make you go in there. And I say, no, it's the exact opposite. What it does is it gives you a guideline. Because in the end, what auctions are is a balancing act. It's a tight-rope act. Because you have to spend money. And if you don't, you won't have enough good impact players. But if you spend it too quick, you won't be available in the middle of the draft to take up some of the deals that you need to grab. So it's a balancing act. And the part that keeps you on that tight-rope, and it keeps you walking down that path. Because if you stray too far, you go, okay, I spent 58. When I said I was going to spend 52, now I got to pull $6 from somewhere else. But that's the instant. know that stuff right away. way. It's no like any I've spent 38% of my budget now and now I need I've seven percent left to spend. So I believe that rigidity leads to flexibility. And I think that's something that everyone misses when they start out. It's almost like being hypothetically rigid, right? Where it's the rigidity is not necessarily I have to get chase brown no matter what, you know, which is definitely something that can get you in the trouble in an auction because then you're so fixated on that one player. And then all of a sudden people might be under spending, you know, you might have gotten values and other guys, but you're like, nope, I'm waiting for chase brown. And then all of a sudden you spend 10 extra dollars on chase brown because you have that idea. But this like this, this being like hypothetically rigid makes a lot of sense because you can then adjust as your draft is actually going down. Yes, yes, that's exactly right. And you just mentioned something that's a pet of mine is that if you believe that you really want chase brown and it's like, hey, it's chase brown or bust for me, that's okay to think that before the draft starts. But what you need to do is not wait to find out if you're going to get them. Right. Because there's going to be deals along the way that you have to decide whether or not you want them. And if you're waiting on brown, you miss the deals. So you need to nominate him right away. And a lot of things, a lot of times what people do is they miss that, that they think that waiting is going to equal a deal. That's not really the case with the top players. You're not getting great deals on the top players. You need to nominate your targets early. Find out if you're going to get them. If you don't, you can pivot. So I mean, this might be one of those things. But what are what are a few things, you know, if someone's walking into an auction draft that you think they should be aware of that they might not be prepared for, you know, just given, given your experience. Yeah. So you're show she did ask me for three things. I did list three here that are fairly specific. But I, I think they're somewhat universal too. Yeah. And that's what I was trying to do. The first one is I don't think anybody's prepared for the speed of the draft. I don't think anybody's prepared for how quickly things are happening. And certainly with an online draft, I know that most people are doing their drafting online these days. But if you're in a live auction, it's a little bit easier to say, hey, hold up a sec. I got to write that down or I'm going to do this. But an online draft is a really fast process that you're not ready to handle. And when that clock is beeping out, you like four in snake drafts, you're really comfortable with the fact that I've got time to check my roster, to check injuries, to look something up. You do not have that time in an auction draft. So it's just at the speed is different. So preparation is really important there. The second thing is an immutable law of auction drafting. If the prices are too high, they're going to come down. And if the prices are too low, they're going to go up. They're just, it is a closed system. It is a finite closed system. You have, if you have a 12 team league with a $200 cap, there's only 24 hundred bucks. And if people are sitting back in Jamar chase goes for 48 bucks, only should be going for 60. Then you need to be bidding. Even if your plan was not to spend a bunch of money on a wide receiver one, you've got a bid 49 because the prices are going to go up and you're going to be squeezed and you're going to be stuck. So just remember, if it's too high, it's going to go down and it's too low. It's good. Now, the one thing I'll say, the caveat here is that if the prices are too high, you can't just sit there and wait. And then all of a sudden, the top 28 players off the board, you don't have any of them. You got to get one of them over pay or whatever. So yeah, number three is, I don't think people really realize how much you're playing against people when you're playing an auction because serpentine drafts aren't really like that. I mean, it is a little bit like if you're in the 10 hole and you're in a 12 teamer and you need a quarterback, he, okay, does 11 and 12 have a quarterback, can I wait till the wrap around that kind of stuff, but you're not really even playing people there. You're playing rosters and stuff. But I think that it's underestimated how people will tell you what they think without knowing it. And in an auction room, you can look around and just see what people are thinking. I mean, you really can't. Nobody's in that room trying to, they're all thinking about what they're going to do next. Right. You can really look around and just be like, I know he doesn't want him. He doesn't want him. He does. This guy always nominate somebody that he wants. This guy nominates people. He doesn't want this guy tries to waste money. You can, you can peg it and it's not hard because nobody's in there in the room really trying to sandbag you or trying to, trying to like do something, you know, different. And on the other side of the coin here, let me just close by saying, it's funny too because when you're in an auction draft room with people you don't know, you can never predict when somebody's going to do something that's against their self-interest. And so that's one of the things we're playing people. It's difficult. And that's part of why I love auction drafting because people's self-interest sometimes doesn't come through and what they do, they get frustrated like, I didn't get that guy and I wanted that guy or they get mad at you because they think you're bidding them up when you're not actually doing that. You're just trying to build your team. And so people will act against self-interest randomly and they'll screw up your plans. And then you have to shift and move. But that's all about playing people. And that's one of the reasons I love the game. I love to try to beat the game itself by game theory and by playing people. But again, that's one of those things that people underestimate. You're playing against other people. You're not necessarily playing as much fantasy football as you might think. I also think that when I've had folks approach me about doing more auction content, which I've done auction content in the past, I actually, people don't know this, especially if you're newer to the show. But back in the day, I was Roto World's auction guy. Like back in like 2015, 2016, I would do even before that. Yeah. And I would do stuff with their magazine and write about it. And one of the things that I think that I love to get your take on this. But I think that people overrate the wrong aspects when going from snake to auction and what changes from snake to auction. And what I mean by that is I write an entire draft guide. And it's it's 99% snake draft focus. You know, talking about how to extract value, et cetera, et cetera. And in the end, a lot of those ideas can still definitely apply to auction drafts. It's just that people think that you go into an auction like you're playing a completely different game. Like it's still fantasy. Like the game itself is the same. And the mechanism in which you're obviously drafting those teams is what's different. Right. But for some reason, I think a lot of people, people listening to this right now probably think it, but they think about that in reverse. Like almost like the game is totally different. And you're not scoring the same way. You're not putting a lineup together the same way. And how you're drafting players, that's where things differ for me is that most people get a ranking sheet. And it's a linear sheet one to two to three to four to five. But to me, the big key with auctions is understanding tier when you're doing player take, you know, when you're trying to find pockets of value. Because I think I think in the end, both snake and auction, if there's like where the overlap is, it's understanding where there might be pockets of value within a position. Like I really like a lot of the late third round to early fifth round wide receivers this year. Right. So we're talking like the Luther burdens of the world, the, you know, the the Teteromic Millions of the world that there's so many, you know, Jalen Waddle, Terry McClaren, there's so many good wide receivers in that range. To me, you can use that to your advantage so, so much in an auction draft that you can't necessarily do in a snake draft because in a snake draft, you're forced to make decisions and you're probably only going to walk away with one or two of those guys. And an auction draft, you can walk away with four of them, you know, because you can just bid on them. And then for go, the early round wide receivers. And so to me, it's really about like really not, not just tiering players and having those tiers, but understanding what that means and where you can attack different pockets of your draft as opposed to simply converting a linear rankings list, you know, over to auction values and drafting off of that because in the end, when you're doing that, you're still getting linear values in a dollar form, you know, it's still the same kind of thing that you would be doing in a snake draft. Is that something that you've, you've sort of witnessed and gone through as well? Yeah, this is a really astute point here because the preaching I started to do last summer and I actually made an entire episode about how the fantasy industry is really failing auction drafters because it is, there is a tendency to believe there's a one to one comparison and that a mid third round guy should be X dollars. And I just think that's nonsense because the auctions themselves are non linear process. Exactly. We don't, we don't nominate guys wide receiver eight than wide receiver nine than wide receiver 10. That's not so there's, you have to get rid of the linear thinking because prices happen because of nomination order and on top of that, the spikes in prices will happen because of scarcity and that's not something you can predict ahead of time. And so to your point and I'm going to steal something from something I was going to say down the road, but you're talking about something that I preach about all the time, which is opportunity cost. Yes. And I hate mid round tight ends and snake draft. Yes. Exactly. Absolutely can't stand it. Yes. But when I get into an auction, it's a lot easier because people don't care about tight ends after a certain number of them. Once you get past a, you know, tight end four or five, people just kind of don't care. And you can get guys like for three to five bucks that you would have to spend a seventh round pick on. I'm not doing that in a regular snake, but I'm in an auction. the opportunity cost is not the same. So and it's the same thing with wide receivers and I love that you pointed out all these guys because the the open to my show a couple weeks ago we had just done a mock auction with some of my Patreon folks and I said you know I'm not so sure that with seeing the prices that I saw it was a weird sort of inflation at the top and I talked about this with Rich Rebar recently about how there's a there's just a very small subset of receivers now that are demanding that 30% alpha target share and that was reflected in this first auction that I did where the top guys were way more inflated than I had seen in recent years and then it fell off a cliff and I said in my show like I think that it's very possible that my strategy this year is not going to be to have one of these guys but instead it's going to be to go after Tedaroa Mcmillan right Terry McClore and Jaylen Waddle these guys that are all 25 to 30 dollars you could go and get a pre bang in group of five wide receivers for about 110 bucks yeah that are all like those guys and the guy that I had leading the charge was Devonte Smith he went for 33 bucks in that in that auction and then I said okay put him with and I think I listed those guys and then you know Christian Watson or James Williams for 18 or 19 bucks bang 122 bucks I think it was to have Devonte Smith Terry McClore and Ted Mcmillan you know James and Williams and then and you know one other Jaylen Waddle and I'm not so sure that that's not going to be my strategy this year because you've isolated exactly my point which is that your approach should matter as far as where you see those value pockets yeah it's something that I preached about for years with quarterback that I thought that now I don't believe that this year and I've kind of come off it but I believe that for several years the way to approach quarterback was I don't want the top couple guys and I don't want my roster filler replacement level guys there's a little value pocket of guys that are six eight ten dollars that I believe are extremely valuable but that don't command the price of the top guys yeah I think that that also the quarterback things really interesting because I I've noticed more anecdotally and obviously you've studied this a lot more than I haven't done a lot more drafts than I have but I've noticed anecdotally that if you're in a especially if you're in a sharper room where you know people aren't going to want to spend on quarterback people are trying to like penny pinch at that position thinking that oh there's no difference between this middle round guy versus this late round guy you know traditional late round guy in a in a steak draft but like in the end you still have to look at the dollar value itself and what those savings are we're not talking you know Nico Collins to the next tier of that group of wide receivers we were just talking about where there might be a significant dollar value change from that player to the next we're talking about going from you know a middle round maybe even Jalen hurts this year however much he goes for or Justin Herbert or Trevor Lawrence to then you know knocking that down to one of your favorite you know late maybe Tyler Shuck will go for a dollar right and if you're only spending four or five dollars or six dollars on a Justin Herbert or Trevor Lawrence I don't think that the penny pinching makes that much sense in that case compared to what it might do from a regular season long draft and a regular snake draft I should say the opportunity cost equations I think with those you know it's the same ideas the tight end thing that you were talking about right the the middle round tight ends the delta and actual dollar value even if we're usually fading those guys in a snake draft the actual delta and dollar value when you're talking about throwing a dart at Greg Dolsich compared to drafting Tucker craft you know it's like why would we not just spend four or five more dollars to get Tucker craft instead of because you're gonna have to spend that dollar and there's just such a low ceiling in terms of how much people actually spend on those guys when pushed comes the chef yeah and it's it's radicalized me a little bit in the last couple of years against spending too much on my bench and honestly what happened to me was the reason it happened was because in the King's Classic after I was coming off my back to back which I don't know how that's ever gonna happen again I was I was flying high and I was like I'm going to draft this super deep team because I looked at the previous years and said I can draft this really deep team and I had the illusion that I could build a deep enough team to stave off the injuries in a 14 team league it's just not happening right and and so I've gotten more and more to the point where I'm absolutely not going to spend money or excuse me save money because I need to get some guys on my bench if it comes down to it and I'm in a tough bidding war and I need this guy and he's my starter then I'm just gonna spend the extra money right because when you get to the hand of the auction you're never gonna regret spending the extra four bucks for Trevor Lawrence or Justin Herbert you are going to regret waiting and then looking down at your team and saying I have no guys with X factor on my team because I dropped out because oh this guy was four bucks too much this guy was three bucks too much like that silly lock down those guys those impact guys and then worry about the rest later the the rest will come to you and if you end up not spending enough on your bench hey work harder on the wire I've been doing the exact same thing and trying to preach the exact same thing and best ball to a degree where I mean I talked about this on becoming a best ball bro this week but essentially there were going to be times where you know I was at like the front of the draft right and I drafted Jalen Waddle on this best ball team I think it was in like the 102 area or something like that 103 and I drafted Jalen Waddle and the way that the quarterback room was kind of shifting and moving I was in the ninth round and I took Bo Nick's like 15 picks above ADP because I knew that he likely wasn't going to make it back around to me and you can sit there and say but ADP value you know you're not extracting but it's not about extracting every or value out of every single pick that you make you know in the grand scheme of course you want to you want to extract value and you'll be able to pick and choose those battles but you have to work or you have to look at what works for your individual team in that instance right like you can't just ignore you know you can't just sit there and say like hey look at this amazing value that I got on Tyler Shuck I only got him for a dollar when realistically if you're looking at the usability of that team if you would have just spent I mean I think the exact same thing happened with with me in the King's classic last year I drafted Drake May and I love Drake May like that was one of my you know you know it seems like a humble brag but it was just my guy last year as it was a lot of other fantasy analysts and I got him for like three or four bucks and it was a situation where you know he gets nominated I bid him up a dollar and then someone else bids him up a dollar and then no I could see no one else wanted to go further because it was a late round quarterback and they're like oh I budgeted a dollar two dollars from a late round quarterback and I'm like I'm just going to spend one dollar one extra dollar to get all of you off of me right now you know and and that's all it took that's all it takes you don't think about that dollar when the draft is over it doesn't matter how many times do you end an auction with four bucks left him right that was all the time and then you're like oh damn I should have spent that money on Drake May exactly and then you look back halfway through the season and you go oh my god my quarterback is Jordan love and I could have had Drake May what the hell did I do to myself and that's why I say you'll never regret and the other thing that I think that that you hit on here is that when when when you're calling out a guy like that there is a certain categorization that you hit on this perfectly that had people having their minds about that player and that prevents them from kind of breaking through and bidding on that guy when in reality that's not what you should be thinking about because look I know we're we do this for a job we want to post our team and be like look at this sweet deal I got on this guy right and sometimes you just need to spend money and sometimes you're gonna spend too much money right and let's say that hey I this guy rated as a $17 player but I really need a good wide receiver too that I don't have and it's getting thin and I spent $24 on a guy that's a $17 player that bugs me and I don't want to do that and one of my biggest problems literally might be my biggest problem is that I know value so cold I know him so well that I hate paying extra yeah but what I have to do is I have to force myself to do it sometimes and say this is way too much for this guy but it matters more to have the guy than it does to have the value exactly like just like we have to we have to not lose the forest for the trees when we're in the middle of the auction it's easy to say there's no way this dude is worth that much but how much is he worth to you and your team and your fantasy team and week one when you're setting your line up that's what matters exactly I also this kind of plays into one of the things I wrote about really early on at Roto World whenever I was doing the auction stuff was what I called the U theory and it was essentially this idea where you know a lot of times in drafts there are like generally accepted tears right you have the the round one to round two running backs this year let's say where there's a group of like six or seven guys that everyone kind of sees as interchangeable in rank and you know maybe you like a marion hampton more the Kenneth Walker or whatever the case may be but generally you know that the room of 12 you know 11 other people are going to view this tier very similarly and what I noticed in doing some reason this is again this is like 10 years ago but what I noticed is that if you think of the letter you when the tier starts people will spend X dollars on that right in the middle of the tier before you know there's still like three like if you take the seven guys and I'm talking I don't even know how many running backs but just say there's seven players in this tier that's generally accepted the first guy gets nominated he goes for X dollars the next handful of players will go for a comparable number, if not a little bit lower because that people know intuitively that there are other, unless there's like someone that people just really like, but people generally know intuitively that there's more players left in that tier. And then at the very end, when the tier is drying up, that's when prices skyrocket again because they understand that this is when things are going to try up. And this, I got to get my guy now because I didn't buy into this tier and you can get more value. This is why I think knowing tier is an understanding pocket values are just so important in auctions because you can really extract value by knowing when it's the middle of that tier and you don't have like such strong player takes that you need to absolutely get this guy because there is variance and fantasy football and you can sit there and say, I'm going to wait one or two guys in this tier. Okay, I know that this guy's off the board, this guy's off the board. Maybe now's the time to pound. We'll see what the price tag looks like. And then once that tier is done towards the end, that's when the price is start to skyrocket a little bit more. Is that something like a phenomenon that you've witnessed as well? Yes, absolutely. I call it the boomerang effect. It's the same thing. You're definitely hitting the nail on the head there. And the wild card factor there is just the nomination order because a lot of times somebody will nominate somebody who's in the middle of a tier. And it's hard because people really find comfort and they don't realize it, but they find comfort in that market setting within the tier. So if a player goes for 27 in this tier and they think, well, that's the top player in the tier, everybody's going to go below that until they get nervous and then it's going to spike. But they find comfort in that. And again, that's another thing about playing people. Find out what makes people comfortable and uncomfortable. By the way, you always want people to feel uncomfortable when you're in the game. Sorry. No, it's true. I'm just thinking about myself in literally three or four weeks from now, dropping with you. And not only are we going to be approaching these trash, probably similarly, but you're just going to have this look on your face. Like, I want you to feel pain right now. I just want you to feel bad. Do you feel bad yet? But yeah, when people are comfortable with like, hey, this is the number, then they're going to slot those guys in behind it. And you need to make sure you get one of those slotted guys before everyone goes, and then starts going crazy. Exactly. Exactly. All right. I want to move on from auctions. I want to talk about the legal side of things that you do because this is also a big differentiator for you and what you can provide to the fantasy space. You know, you do awesome threads all the time on different legal situations because unfortunately, the way the NFL is, there are a lot of off the field incidents that go on that we have to figure out from a fantasy football perspective. And it sucks. And it's unfortunate. And I want to caveat with that first and foremost that we even have to go down this path and talk about the legality side of things. We do have to be fantasy analysts and we do have to understand the implications of what these things are. So there's two players in particular that are going through it right now from an off the field perspective where, you know, you look at their ADP, especially in bestball right now, it fluctuates and it has been fluctuating for the last couple of months. So the first one that I want you to dig into and explain where we're at is with Rishi Rice. Yeah. Boy, this is a super complicated one. But let me try to break it down as simply as I can because I think right now we're in a different spot than we were because he's out of jail and we haven't heard anything from the NFL. Now that doesn't mean we're not going to hear something from the NFL. But the original thing that I think confused people with this case and with the development in the case of him going to jail, missing OTAs, while he's, you know, recovering from an injury, all that mess. The thing that was difficult for me to parse at the beginning was that he got 30 days and initially I thought, hey, he violated his probation. He's got 30 days from the probation violation and technically, yes. But what happened was he was ordered to do 30 days in jail as part of his deferred adjudication from the original plea. And that 30 days was, you know, I have the sentencing entry posted on one of my threads, which says that that 30 days was to be served TBD. Now that's great for rice because it's obviously part of the deal that his team worked out that he could just kind of do that 30 days whenever he wanted over the next five years. He hadn't done it yet who wants to sign up to do it immediately, right? I got five years. I'll do that later. So basically, he's got these conditions and I've read the probation conditions and the conditions, one of them was that you can't have illegal substances in your system. Actually, he's not supposed to be drinking or buying alcohol either, but he's not allowed to have illegal substances because I kind of heard that argument about, well, we'd blow up. And I'm like, first of all, he's not allowed to have alcohol. That's illegal everywhere. And number two, weed is not legal in Texas. So where this case is, it's not legal. So I'm sorry, but that's one of your conditions. And so what ended up happening was I said, now, but why is he getting this 30 days now? Then I said, Oh, I know. He walked in there on this violation because the person said, Hey, he dropped dirty. They have a hearing in front of the judge and the judge says, Okay, I'm not giving you 30 more days, but this is your wake up call. You're going to do your 30 now because you violated probation. And I'm not taking away your probation or your deferred adjudication, but you're going to go do this now. And this is your wake up call that I'm not messing around. And so this was confirmed to be accurate. And I'm glad that it parsed it correctly because there was a lot of moving parts there that I was just like a lot of this just isn't adding up perfectly. But he ends up going to jail because of the violation. But the reason I say all that is not to hear myself talk and sound smart. The reason I say all that is because this is part of the original plea that he was already punished for by the NFL. So I think that's super important when it comes to whether or not he's going to miss time this year because I don't know that the NFL is going to care about a weed violation of the probation. And it's not because it's not important to them that he violated probation. It's just that it's already part of what he's been punished for. And I think his team in the NFL PA would argue very strongly that this is not something that you can give him additional punishment for. And then so when it comes down to is and let me just say I'm breaking this right now on JJ show because this has only been available to the Patreon so far. But I think that with rice, I feel more comfortable with him in mid to late August by saying we're taking a hundred and twenty day bet on him. We don't have to worry. But now we're talking of redraft obviously in dynasty. He's still toxic in my mind. But you're only taking a hundred and twenty day bet. And the couple of times that rice has gotten in trouble has been in the off season when the guy's got nothing to do. If he makes it through training camp and he makes it to the season, I think it's okay to make a hundred and twenty day bet because I think he's going to stay busy and I think he's going to stay in trouble during the season. And I don't think he's getting a new suspension. So I think it's okay to make a bet on rice when we get to middle of late August. Right now I'm still pretty nervous about it. Yeah. I mean, it seems like the like especially from like a dynasty perspective, like the thing that he did, right? Looking weed is not the thing that people should, you know, in my opinion, really care about because people are doing that everywhere all the time every day. It's the idea that he was on probation and he knew that he shouldn't and couldn't do that thing and he did that thing, right? It's just a decision making thing, right? And so that's on top of the other decision making things that have gone south for him. And so that's the scary part about him long term. But to your point, if there's no suspension based on, you know, how you read this and confirm this and the fact that this was the delayed 30 days just happening now instead of later. And then on top of that, like do you think that the way the NFL has sort of approached marijuana could also play a role in this, how they've become more lax and just it's not as big of it. It's not like it was like a different type of drug that they might have been a little bit harder on. Yeah, absolutely. It's part of it because the NFL has changed the substances of abuse policy that raises the level of marijuana you're allowed to have in your system and how much they care about it after each offense. And so I think that absolutely plays into it. If he's caught with something different in the system, I think we're having a different conversation. Josh Jacobs, this one, I can't wrap my head around at all because obviously he was like in jail. Then he's out of jail. But yet it's not closed. Like it seems like an investigation. So I'm going, where are we at with Jacobs? The weird thing with Jacobs is this particular jurisdiction and I think that this might be Wisconsin in general, but they have a statute on the books. That's what's called a mandatory arrest policy. That's pretty normal for most jurisdictions, but they handle it differently and there's is more draconian than other jurisdictions that I've practiced in because where I'm from, the mandatory arrest policy is really for the time of the incident. It's really to separate the parties. It says you must arrest somebody in a domestic incident because you want the party separated. Well, tensions are high. That's when things happen. That's when bad things happen. That's when homicides happen. So you want to separate these parties. And so a lot of times there's a mandatory arrest policy at the time of the incident. In this particular case, they arrested them days later, but their policy says within 28 days, which is crazy to me, they've got to have an arrest. And they determine that it was Jacobs that needed to be arrested. So he gets arrested and then he gets released because they declined to file charges right away. Now, I think he would have been released anyway, but the point is it was confusing for a lot of people like YZ and Jail and there's no charges. Well, that's why. because of the mandatory responsibility. Now they're saying, hey, we're not necessarily ready to make a decision yet. That's also somewhat normal in these cases. And it's normal with celebrities specifically because they want to make sure they're really buttoned up and they know what they're doing here. So they're taking some time. Now, I operate under the assumption that when I don't know something about a case, there are unknowable variables in the background that we can't speculate on. But I will say that when it takes this long, generally they do not have it. They don't have what they want. And I think that part of it is that Jacob's team was pushing really hard. Like, we've got some information here that says that he's going to be, we've got a compulsory information. You have to pay attention to X, Y, and Z. I think they're behind the scenes really lobbying the state. Like, look at this information we have before you decide to do something. And I think it's making the state think to themselves, should we do this. Now, the major problem I have with all of this is that I've been in so many of these domestic violence cases that is one of my between DUIs and domestic violence, those are my two most common cases. Domestic violence, there's so many different components to it, but one of them that I have learned is that if another person calls the police, things are pretty bad in that situation. And that's what happened here. I believe in neighbor, call the police because they heard stuff was happening next door. I believe there's a recording of it. And I'm not sure we know exactly. I'm not sure that we hear the exact, but the point being, you know it's a fairly serious situation when a neighbor has to call the police. - You want to got that nerve. - And Mark and Ruckus, yeah. And that's bad, that's real bad. And we don't know the problem is, and I have to be real careful here. The problem is there may be something awful that happened. And there may be something that happened behind closed doors that only two people know about. And that's Jacobs and the other person. And there could be, I don't know that. And again, I'm trying to avoid a slander lawsuit. But there may be something that happened behind closed doors and it seems like things were bad enough that police need to get involved. Something probably happened, but whether they can prove that and whether the victim is still interested in going forward at this point, I'm doubtful on both of those because of the length of time they're taking to charge this case. And two things come from that. One is that I think that either they don't file and then Jacobs is fine for the season or if they do file, I think we're getting so close to the season. Jacobs team is gonna push it off in the next year. I'm operating under the assumption Jacobs is gonna play a full season for the Packers this year. - Yeah, and it seems like right now when this stuff was not even in our imagination, he was in Bestball, the late second round pick, early third round pick, and now he's fallen at times to the fifth and over on draftings. And so yeah, it could be an opportunity from a strictly a fan, look, again, I have to reiterate, it's admittedly incredibly gross that you have to go in one set, and one of these things is way more important than the other. I totally understand that. But I also have to do my job and talk about what this means from an implications standpoint for fantasy football, and it does seem like if that's the case, then Jacobs is someone that you could hypothetically be targeting right now. All right, I do need, yeah, you are, okay, there you go. You got the lawyer targeting him right now. - I am, yeah. - Okay, I wanna get at least some player takes from you before I let you go. So give me some players that want at each position that you are targeting this year here in 2026. - The first one is Trevor Lawrence. He's QB 11 right now, and I looked at some of his numbers from the end of last year. Now, I realize that a lot of people are saying, well, he had a really easy schedule that set up well-formed down the stretch, but, you know, post-buy, they did play the Texans, they played the Broncos, and by the way, they lit up the Broncos for 34 points. Lawrence was awesome in that game. I think he had 279 and three passing with one rushing, like maybe 50 rushing yards. He was awesome in that game. And T'Baroa phrase from Rich Rebar, you wanna see all offenses that are able to punch up, that are able to go at defenses like that. They struggled a little bit against the Texans, but post-buy, Lawrence really seemed to lock into the offense, and I think that that's underrated because I'll never forget a quote from Bruce Ariens who said when he got Carson Palmer, he said, you can't judge a quarterback on your system until they've got at least eight games of real action to get them into the system. And post-buy last year, Lawrence was awesome. He was the QB2 in a lot of formats. At least top three, his EPA was fourth in the league. He was fifth in completion percentage over expectation. The Jags offense in general was sixth and dropback EPA. And this is with a pretty mediocre running game. They rarely weren't running the ball very well. He played extremely well. And I think one of the things that he picked up in his fantasy game over the second half of the year was his rushing. - Exactly. Because he averaged 16 rushing yards of game prior to his buy after the buy, he was only below 16 yards one time, the entire second half of the year. So the rushing, I hope the rushing production is still there. I hope that's a product of him learning the system better and knowing when to take off with the ball. And maybe that's a Cohen thing. Maybe it's not, I don't know what I hope it is. - Yeah, I mean, the thing, not to interrupt, but like the thing with Cohen that's really interesting with that is that Baker Mayfield had his best rushing season with Liam Cohen. You know, like I do think that there is a little bit of a tie to Liam Cohen to allowing his quarterback to escape the pocket and generate those fantasy points via rushing. - Yeah, and I know it's a small sample size, so I don't want to put too much into it. But I do think there's something to say about free buy, that is a really stark difference in rushing yards there. - Yeah. - And then the last thing I'll say about him is just that all the extra time they traded for Jacobi Myers near the end of the year, all the extra time with Myers and with Cohen's system and Myers getting to learn the system and all the pieces fitting together better after a full off season together, I think wheels up and QB 11 seems a little bit odd to me. I don't know why he's so slow. - I spoiler alert, but he's a player to target in the draft guide this year. So I'm totally with you. - Me and you are gonna bud heads, I can tell. - Yeah. - So just make sure you bid five when I say four. - Yeah. - So at running back, the guy I'm looking at is Kyron Williams. You know, I just can't stop talking about Kyron Williams and I realize that it's fun for everyone to be in on Blake Horram, I get it. But let me pull this out for you that this is from our buddy, Duane McFarland, over at Fantasy Life, I love his utilization tool. I don't know if he've used it before. - Yeah, it's great. - But he's RB 15 right now at ADP. He's never finished that low in his fantasy career since his breakout. He's never had a fantasy season that low. I think the most interesting thing is when they started to use Blake Horram last year, we saw his numbers right about 15.8 points per game when they started to use Blake Horram and before they used Blake Horram, he was about 15.7 points per game. So they really focused on getting Horram involved and yet Kyron's fantasy production didn't really take that much of a hit. And it's one of those things where I know that it's hard to get your mind around this, but when you're watching on Sunday, it was really just a rotation. It was just, this is your series, this is your series. - Yeah, right. - And there's gonna be some luck involved there about who gets the goal line carries. But what's not luck involved is what I pulled from Duane's numbers. And that is that he played 95% of the two minute snaps. He played 72% of the long down a distance snaps and he played 73% of the short down a distance snaps. He still managed 59% of the carries inside the five yard line. So all of those things tell me, Sean McVeigh trusts him. They're gonna continue to use him. And even when Blake Horram is involved, I still think Kyron Blooms is a value at RB50. - Yeah, how about your wide receiver? - My wide receiver's Jaylen Waddle. We already talked about him. He's at wide receiver 24 right now. I think it's weird that, let me just say in general, I think it's odd that all Jacksonville wide receivers are 33 or worse. Somebody's gonna break out of that bag. That's my honorable magic. Waddle at 24, let me just say this. He's had two seasons in his career where he's had over 104 targets. And he finished as the wide receiver 12 in one season and the wide receiver 14 and the other. Those are PPR points per game. - Yeah. - He got 117 targets in 2022. And 142 is rookie year. He caught 104 balls and he had 1300 yards in the year that he got 170 targets. That offense that he played in in Miami had a couple problems. Number one, they wanted to get the ball to Tyree kill and that's what the offense was designed for. And admittedly, that's the right strategy. But also number two is we saw the fall off in two Attaga Viola was play. And two was a different quarterback when he was throwing the ball in this first couple of years to Jaylen Waddle. He just fell off a cliff and the offense got noticeably stale and waddle with it. And he had to downward trend with it. So I think you're going to an offensive system that is very strong with Sean Payton. He's got a strong arm quarterback. He's got an excellent receiver playing opposite him. And I think Waddle is going to be the focus there. So I think wide receiver 24 feels like a value right now. - Yeah, I love Waddle. He checks so many historical trends boxes for me at that ADP. There's just so much to like, we're going to be fighting over him too. All right, give me your tight end. Hopefully we won't be fighting. - We should have done this in early August, man. - Yeah, right, right. My title is, Sam Laporta right now, although I'm not loving the steam. I'm a little surprised because he was cheaper about a month ago. Right now he's at tight end eight in ADP, but I'm comfortable with this because there's two guys that I'm looking at that I like at tight end, but I like Laporta a lot better than the other guys Travis Kelsey. Kelsey is going 10th overall in ADP. And I will say that last year, Kelsey finished eighth and PPR points for gave me finished third overall. That's a little bit of a weird discrepancy there. He was second in routes run, fourth in targets, sixth in receptions, fourth in receiving guards, but I don't love the upside with Kelsey anymore because I do think that that part of his game is capped. And so I don't consider him as interesting of a value as I do say I'm Laporta because we know what his upside is and he's still a young player. We don't like messing around with back injuries. I get that and I get that it could backfire. And this is a little bit more of an auction play than a snake play. Because I think you can get Laporta cheaper. But at tight end date, if you look at his historical finishes, of course, we know he finished tight and won as a rookie, but then he finished tight and nine and PPR points for game the following year. And last year before he was hurt, he was tight and eight in points per game. So I think you're drafting and has floor right now and we know what his upside is. Yeah, I mean, he's also one I've gotten him in best ball of time just because of a week 17 stack to it because they get Chicago, which is nice. But yeah, I like that call from a from an auction standpoint, basically plays into to bring it all back, plays into what we were talking about with those middle round tight ends and in quarterback. So all right, I got one more question before I let you go. Yep. Give me your bold take, your hot take for this 2026 season. My hot take is that so I just debated how hot to go here. So I went right in the middle. I my hot take is that AJ Brown has overall wide receiver one upside. And I was prepared to hate AJ Brown going into this fantasy season. I really was because I watched last year a guy that I felt like looked like he was falling off a cliff. These big bodied receivers when they get older, they break down quick and the end comes faster. And I thought that's what we were seeing last year. But I'm turning off my brain a little bit for that because I do think motivation was such a huge problem for Brown last year. I think the relationship between him and her said deteriorated. He was upset with the play calling. He was upset with everything that was going on in Philadelphia last year. And I think some of what we saw could be effort based. Yeah. And so I think I kind of felt the same way about say, Juan Barkley, like is this dude just had too many injuries and he's, you know, he's just not going to be the guy we thought he was going to be. And then he goes to Philly and he's electric. And I think the same thing could happen here with the Patriots. And I was, I was talking about how much they love to throw the ball the other day. And that's I looked up a couple things. And one thing I like is, first of all, they were plus 3.2% in pass rate over expected over the full year. They were 12th and neutral pass rate as well. But the thing I love the most, the, the, the, the stat that I love the most about the Patriots offense was when they were facing a second and eight or greater, they were a plus 12.9% pass rate over expected. That is a monster number. And that I love that because that tells me the play call is not an idiot. Because I can't stand running the guy into the line. He gets nothing. And on second and 10, you're like, let's do it again. Yeah. Right. We have seen study after study that shows that that second and long run is just a negative EV play. Yeah. And so that 12.9% is massive. I think I think the Patriots offense in general could be a firecracker. And I think AJ Brown has that possibility. Now, maybe he's the washed guy I saw at the end of last year. But I think a lot of times motivation comes when we don't expect to see that because we think what we saw was, hey, this guy's fallen apart. And really he just needed motivation and a new lease on life and a new place with a really good quarterback. Yeah. I bought more and more into AJ Brown. You know, I bought into him before the trade happened because from a best ball perspective, just because you knew that the ADP was going to rise. And then the ADP rose and I'm like, wow, this seems kind of insane. But the more that I've thought about it, you know, he's he's the more I think it's a stable, you know, place where he is. Like it makes sense as to where he's going at. He loves his coach too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a difference. He's got to be. Yeah. Love it. Drew, this was great. Thank you so much for for hopping on and chatting. Let everyone know where they can find you and where they can find those awesome threads that you're putting out there on X. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Man, this is fun doing a little home at home. I think you're coming on next week. So this is really fun. I enjoy talking to you. Thank you for having me. You can find me on Twitter at Drew Davenport FF. You can find my show, the auction brief anywhere you find podcasts, my writings over at football guys. And if you want some extra behind the scenes stuff with legal stuff and with the auction stuff, I do all auction targeted content over at my Patreon. That's fantasy football lawyer. Yes. Can't recommend Drew enough. Also check out latrown.com. Make sure you have pre-ordered the draft guide that will be out on July 10th. So by the time this is released, it'll be a week before that comes out. Get and get closer almost done, which is, you know, I read that thing cover to cover last year, man. I appreciate that. Yeah. And so, yeah, that'll be out a week from from Friday. So a week from when you're listening to this, hopefully. Also check out the new members hub over there on latrown.com. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. All that great stuff. Otherwise, everyone, thanks for tuning in. 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