Speaker 1a look into our crystal balls for the 2027 first and second round adps that's what we're doing today on stealing bananas i'm ben gretz you can find the stealing signals newsletter at bengresh.substack.com also check out the best of stealing signals reference guide it's on sale at gumroad and lemon squeezy couple online marketplaces it's like a long book you can
Speaker 2go check out with me as always this is spectacular before i mean we're this people are ready for the round one and two here but this is spectacular you sent it to me i was so excited i had my name mentioned in it relatively early i mean you send somebody something and their name is like they can find it in you know the first 20 minutes they're just over the moon and you mean you sent me the cover the first thing that i thought about all of this like it looks super cool it's arranged in a fantastic format this is event reading if you enjoy any part of what we do here for stealing bananas you have to get this product from ben gretch it is the book you've been waiting for on fantasy football with me as always is sean siegel you can find all of his work over at road
Speaker 1of his including i gotta do the big sell point now the recently released this week zero rb guide or zero heartbeat countdown 15 to 1 zero rb countdown 15 to 1 zero rb countdown 15 to 1 zero rb countdown 15 to 1 three pieces you've got five to one zero rb countdown 15 to 1 three pieces you've got five to one zero rb countdown 15 to 1 three pieces you've got five to one out today this morning i uh have not out today this morning i uh have not out today this morning i uh have not even gotten a chance to see that i see even gotten a chance to see that i see even gotten a chance to see that i see the cover boy is arian foster looking for the cover boy is arian foster looking for the cover boy is arian foster looking for the next chris johnson or arian foster i the next chris johnson or arian foster i the next chris johnson or arian foster i love the the old cover boys arian i was love the the old cover boys arian i was
Speaker 2like i don't think arian foster is in the nfl it is funny because when the second one dropped then and i were doing a main event and he's like i looked at it it's like don't like that one don't
Speaker 1like that one don't like that yeah from 10 to 5 i think 10 9 and 8 were ones i was like nope nope nope but uh seven and six i told you i had a both of them in our draft that we're doing together and i was pretty pumped about those five through one i just scrolled through fantastic names excited to read that later we are predicting today next year's adp we are predicting the 2027 first and second round we have done this now we believe for this this will be the sixth season this is our sixth season on the podcast uh the only reason i'm saying that or coming to that conclusion is i went looking for last year's results because we always kind of do a little bit of a discussion of what we did last year and how it went and i found stuff with tyree kill and alvin camara in it and i was like this is not last year's uh you know predicting uh the 2026 first and second round this is from much earlier i found the sheet eventually that had the other two but there's at least i believe five seasons that we found i think we did it the very first year in 2021 when we launched this podcast we've now done it for five straight years it is always our most requested episode uh people started asking this year sean in like june i'm like guys we do this like a few weeks before week one every year and it's a little later this year probably on august 20th we're recording it but that's because week one's a little bit later and that's just sort of the way this season has worked out but we are here to tell you who was going to go in the first and second round next year and the reason we've used this framework since the beginning is this has always been a framework for how we draft this season is you want to find players in the later rounds who can jump in value from something like an eighth round adp or something all the way up into the first or second round next year you want the breakout superstars and it's it's when we talk about like the dead zone over the years and we talk about how there's been young players young running backs that have hit from there the point i emphasize is it's young running backs that hit out of the dead zone because we didn't know what they were yet and then after that they go in the first couple rounds the rest of the way they are the like legendary upside running backs that karain always talks about the next year they just we just weren't sure what they were and we were devaluing them by adp and then they become stalwarts in in the top like derek henry early in his career was a dead zone back who smashed and then he just became a staple in the first and second round for years and years and years jameer gibbs early in his career was a dead zone back who hit and then he's been a you know breeze hall coming off the knee injury his rookie year in year two was a dead zone back who hit and now he's you know consistently pre-dead zone back since then although he's been in bad offenses he's around three guys this year definitely think of him as a pre-dead zone back that's that concept out of the dead zone it's also the same concept for some of the breakout receivers that we're thinking about young receivers in the later rounds you think about guys like garrett wilson after his rookie year and then he's going up there brian thomas is a guy as we go looking into last year's mistakes both you and i had as a top six guy going into the 2026 adp because he was a one two turn guy in year two and looked like hey by the time he's in year three yeah he's gonna be a superstar um and so this is a dude that is another example of the the rookie year phenomenon of going round eight round nine and the next year you're going at the one two turn those are the profiles that we're trying to target i have to say to you sean that's the point of the exercise i think last year when we came in because a lot of the top couple rounds stayed healthy in 2024 and we said it was kind of hard to get a lot of like exciting names in because all these guys stayed healthy and we kind of just were predicting the same stuff and our our list last year looked really similar this year even though everyone stayed healthy at the top again everything has been such chaos in the nfl going through the the season last year obviously the favorites a lot of the favorites didn't even make the playoffs team-wise seahawks end up winning the super bowl uh right after the super bowl we've talked about this on the show there was a ton of parody in the next year's super bowl odds no one knows what's going to happen with the 2026 nfl season it's something that i think is not being discussed enough right now is everybody's getting way too certain about fantasy football takes and everything we're going into a season in a time with the nfl where there's a lot of evolution there's a lot of different ways this could go and so when i sat down to try to put you know look in my crystal ball it was very cloudy this was the hardest time i've ever had putting together a list of the top five favorites in the nfl in the last year and i think it was a lot of fun and i think it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of fun famously we never look at each other's lists until basically we get on and press record i have not looked deep into your list at all you uh sent it to me earlier and i made sure you know you wrote spoilers in the name i made sure not to look until just now i pulled it into a spreadsheet i saw a couple of your top names i don't even know who you have in the second round or anything yet we're going to work through this with the with the listeners in real time it's the way we've always done it i number one i want to ask you if you felt the same way because for me this was torturous to do and i felt like especially by about like number five or number six overall i felt like i wanted 10 names and i didn't want any of them in the second round and i wanted them all in the middle of the first round and it was like yeah i want to bring some guys up there and i don't want to move guys back there's a lot of ways i could see this season going for a lot of different teams and that would dramatically affect whether like they're good players could be first round picks next year or they wouldn't be able to make it to the next round so i think it's a lot of fun and i think even be in this exercise in the first two rounds it's really hard because some of the really fun young superstar teams aren't very good you have like the element of we always do this as a tight and premium exercise because we get to talk about a different position is the main reason not because we care more about tight and premium it's a fake exercise anyway but it allows us to talk about the top of the tight end position and work it into the exercise obviously brock bowers is going to come up today but so is ashen genti we don't know anything about what the raiders are going to look like with a rookie qb how he's going to look how clint kubiak's going to assimilate and then same thing over in arizona with trey mcbride and jeremiah love and how's mccoy uh not mccoy uh mike lafleur gonna assimilate there what they're carson back potentially what the quarterback situation is going to be there's a lot of young talent on those types of offenses right now it was a terribly difficult exercise for me this year did you feel similar i mean yes and no it was fun
Speaker 2there are some names that are tough and you know just to give a tiny bit in the way of spoilers i don't know if i'm gonna be able to answer all of your questions but i'm not gonna be able to answer all of your questions but i'm not gonna be able to answer all of your questions but i'm gonna be able fantastic player in a fantastic spot and i think he's arguably undervalued and yet i put him below where he's going in drafts justin jefferson obviously a superstar maybe the best wide receiver maybe the best overall player in the nfl he gets a weird position in my countdown i'm on ross st brown quietly the best receiver from a fantasy perspective in the nfl and i think he's going to over the last three years two and a half what have you and he gets a really weird spot one of the things i was trying to do as i worked through it was to think about not necessarily the most likely outcome which in many ways just puts the guys back pretty close to their adps but to think about sort of the next level both on the positive and the negative side outcomes that are actually still quite likely we're not talking about like 95th percentile or fifth percentile outcomes still very likely outcomes that if you factor them in how does that change the movement a little bit and then you're trying to do some fun things think through you know what could happen with some young guys certainly you know part of this is always just moving the old guys who have a lot of risk out because that risk is meaningful and when you sum the various likely outcomes it actually doesn't look good for the old players even if we know that they have stopped i mean derrick henry is someone who one of the things that was interesting with some of the offseason research that i did in the injury research it actually made me feel a little bit more comfortable with the outliers in that even though we're dealing with small samples for those guys in terms of their individual careers and each season for them right is a pretty limited instance of it's not like these individual guys are playing 30 years and you can say okay well this guy is just different we can see that over his 30 years i'm just talking about just a handful of years the player has played and yet the injury research and some of the efficiency and production things i did alongside that made me feel more comfortable with individual guys actually being individuals in a way that you can track over the course of years when you're looking at players and so in some ways i'm more open to the idea that old players could stick if they have stuck to this point and yet then i mean we're still moving them out yeah we we really are um all
Speaker 1right i'm gonna do a quick pass on the 2025 stuff it's not that interesting this year to review but we always kind of have and so it's it's helpful in terms of like sort of what not necessarily what we got wrong or or what we were thinking or whatever but in terms of like what kinds of decisions we have to make going forward as we do this exercise and sort of why we do some of the things you mentioned the idea of like not wanting to just kind of keep guys near their adp which i'm kind of running i was running into too like we want this exercise to mean something or at least be helpful i mean it's not to be hot takey but like you think through the ways that things can could could go obviously we both believe there's a variety of ways that things could go there's a scenarios can can exist but you know if you wanted to be really accurate you maybe would just like because there's been so much health the last couple years we'll just keep things somewhat similar anyway as we look at last year's there's some of that stuff there's some of the stuff about like oh this guy's on a bad team and some of that so i'll mention a little bit of that as i as i work through but yeah a lot of it is just straightforward i think from last year so we both had bowers at one you had btj at 102 i had him at 106 um i went i went bowers gibbs bijon chase neighbors btj you went bowers btj chase gibbs you had mcbride at 105 which great call i mean like to have him that tight with bowers that he would maybe have a great season to move up it's fascinating because this is a an adp projection that he had one of the best tight end seasons of all time and is not going anywhere near the second second best season last
Speaker 2year behind christian mccaffrey outscored all of the other guys people are like who cares don't want an arizona cardinal yeah
Speaker 1you don't want don't want this player that uh had the second best season outscored all these people um in tight end premium specifically on a 3 and 14 team but sean because his team might go 3 and 14 this year again he can't do what he did on a 3 and 14 team last year and then you had justin jefferson 106 uh we both had genti 107 you had lamb neighbors puka after that i had jefferson had ted rohan mcmillan lamb nico collins um you had bijon back at 111 so you had kind of pushed him down a little travion henderson at 12 for you i also had him at 12 i had mcbride at 13. um you had london at 13 nico at 14 i had london at 14 nico at excuse me london at 13 nico at 14 at the 202 and 203 um did i say nico i meant nakua puka nakua so anyway we had nico we both had nico london nakua all around the turn um i had mcbride way further back than you we both had henderson there at the turn travion henderson um and then from there you had jsn at 204 which i think is an incredible call i had jsn in the honorable mentions not even listed here i was concerned about the the overall volume of course uh sean you and i both had barkley about 203 204 expecting him to be worse but still get drafted pretty high that's basically what happened you have xavier worthy there at 205 mcmillan at 206 i had mcmillan at 109 i think he's an interesting one because i would argue that he hit in a way that like brian thomas did in his rookie year but the offensive situation meant that he's not a one-two turn guy kind of we both saw him i saw him late first you saw him
Speaker 2mid-second um and so he's going in the third this year to have him hit and not be interesting to people is in some ways tracks but it also gets back to both what you're saying about the offense and this element of so many veterans and veterans and veterans and veterans and veterans and veterans and just so many people overall and so many veterans stayed healthy that it did create a
Speaker 3bit of a ceiling for guys to move up this episode is sponsored by better help you've heard me talk about better help for a long time but i don't know that we've ever actually talked about how much people love this service when they use it you can check it out yourself at betterhelp.com slash reviews to see amazing customer reviews in real time the reviews are updated every day with hundreds of people saying how much they love better help and how helpful it has been to them better help has an average live therapy session of 4.9 out of 5 based on 1.7 million client reviews the feedback from people who have actually used the service speaks for itself head on over to betterhelp.com slash reviews to see for yourself more than 6 million people have used better help globally and better help therapists have at least three years or 1 000 hours of hands-on experience and also better help makes it easy to get started answer a few questions get matched with a therapist based on your needs and you can switch a therapist at any time if it's not the right fit see the reviews see what stands out and see if better help is right for you visit betterhelp.com slash rotomiz that's betterhelp.com slash rotomiz after barclay you have
Speaker 1rj harvey or marion hampton which great call there um i had hampton in my oh no sorry that's me hey great call ben uh rj harvey or marion hampton devon h and bucky irving almond raw chase brown ken walker facial tootin so i went with a bunch of running backs in the second round i remember talking about this last year i thought running backs were gonna move up great call there too hey good job ben uh you went uh xavier worthy mcmillan you had some running backs as well rj harvey almond raw saint brown you had jayden daniels up there quarterbacks are going higher last year obviously daniels lamar both get hurt bucky irving chase brown mccaffrey we both had chase brown in the second round um i had ken walker in there you had ken walker in the just missed uh you had a chan in the just missed as well um but yeah those i mean that's that's what we did last year those those are the names that's some of the considerations obviously like some of the young guys who didn't break out we know about rj harvey and trey van henderson we had both those guys in we were drafting those guys last year as dead zone upside swings they're not going and ben the other
Speaker 2thing i think when we talked a little bit about mcmillan but i do think it's fascinating when you go and look and you realize that harvey and henderson were both in committees and they both score 200 plus points and are not interesting to people at all this year and so one of the things kind of fun about the exercise is i think it accurately projected that those guys would score 200 points right i mean that's that's a very good level for non-first round running backs who were in committees and i think that's a very good level for non-first round running backs who were in committees it also speaks to some of the interesting things that are happening at the running back position and just from you know macro perspective but it also does get to the very real concerns that henderson and harvey now have even though they score 200 points so as opposed to 200 points and now we're off to the races it's almost like 200 points and now we expect a big step back which i mean i don't think either one of us have them projected in the 2027 first or second round so in our own ways like we're spoiler alert also
Speaker 1you're gonna find something out um yeah i that was there's there's a little spoiler
Speaker 2interesting thing that's the you have not looked at my list good if you have guys in the in the first two rounds it has actually just made my day made my day ben one of the things too here we talk about how no one got hurt last year and yet the people on the list right the people on the list right brock bowers we had him 101 he gets hurt in week one and is still going in the middle of the first round we had malik neighbors in our first round he suffers a catastrophic injury early in the season and is still going in the second round jayden daniels obviously has his season wiped out by injury that was a huge bummer obviously i think that the person who raises the most eyebrows with people both in terms of us like being way off and just being kind of silly in the first place is xavier worthy but again he's injured like on the second play of the entire season and the other guy where i would just say that that i got this wrong but i would be very happy getting it wrong every time would be the high spot for brian thomas he's one of those guys where i actually think the post-hype thesis right now is pretty fun i haven't had the courage to take him very often in part because there are good picks in his range and i think that as you're building in those first six or seven rounds you can build such a safe and high upside team that you don't necessarily have to take the swing but brian thomas with those two amazing back-to-back seasons final year in college first year as a rookie he's another player where we tend not to think about it in quite the same way but injuries may explain most of what happened with him in 2025 as
Speaker 1well that's so one of the things that you're you're talking about with him and you're talking about with henderson and harvey being rookies who scored 200 plus points and i think it's really fascinating from the perspective of this idea of what we're actually looking at in the market in 2026, what happened in 2025. I wrote up a piece. It was before I did the draft strategy piece. I wrote a piece. I called it Understanding the 2026 Fantasy Football Meta over at the newsletter and talked a lot about what actually happened in 2025, which I think you're getting at, which is that a lot of the top guys stayed healthy and a lot of the top guys scored at a really high level. And then there was a lot of misses in a lot of other places in general. I think people raise the bar for what a hit actually is. I spent a lot of time talking about this concept of whether Travion Henderson was a hit or a miss in that piece because I had talked about it at the end of last year. It gets back to a thing that I had written about at the end of last year. The great J.J. Zacharyson, there was a disagreement in his Discord and he had posted a poll on Twitter about whether Travion Henderson was a good, neutral, or bad pick right after he had the huge week 15, before the week 16 concussion, and the rest of his playoffs were bad. And people don't really realize this, but in the five games leading up to that, Travion Henderson had been 11 point PPR points or better in every game and had two other games where he was 28 plus. And then he had his third 30, he had a 30 point game, his third boom in like a six week window in week 15. And people were still saying this was a bad pick in like round five because of how bad he was early in the season. And everyone's just like, you couldn't even have possibly made the playoffs. The argument I made was if you're saying that's a bad pick, you're saying you can't build a round. A pick that is a supposed to be a late season hammer. And you're saying that 75% or 80% of
Speaker 2picks are bad because most of them weren't giving you. I mean, I had Henderson into the FFPC main event sprint. It was doable. So if you actually get the late scoring, I'm not saying, yeah, it's one of these things where if you get the late scoring on top of actually having those teams
Speaker 1windowed a bit early, then yeah, for sure. It's a, it's a complicated question and people are probably feeling gas. I'm trying to, I'm not saying he was a great pick. I'm not saying he was a league winner. I do understand how tough having Travion Henderson was for the first eight weeks of the season or what have you. The point was that when, when I think people forget this, when Ramondre Stevenson got hurt, I just saw somebody tweet the other day. Cause there's, there's this discussion of Ramondre versus Henderson that it's going to be just like last year when Ramondre was the lead back again, Ramondre played a lot more, but Henderson got way more touches actually for a long stretch in there early on Henderson lost work, but they were giving Henderson more work on, on a smaller snap share role over a long stretch, actually, until he had the concussion and Stevenson started performing. If you look at the end of season numbers now, Stevenson missed a little time. Most people would be shocked to know this. Travion Henderson had 180 carries last year. Ramondre Stevenson had 130. He had 50 more carries than, than Ramondre Stevenson. Stevenson did miss time, as I said, but you know, people think the first half Travion Henderson did absolutely nothing. And then kind of forget. I think that anyway, we're not going to make this a Ramondre Stevenson, Travion Henderson show. The point was, we're not going to make this a Ramondre Stevenson show. The point was merely that last year's results, number one, people, I think have too high of a bar for what a hit is. And I think they did after last year, because there was so many big hits in the top and people stayed healthy, sort of just to your point, you're talking about it from a decade long perspective or more multi-decades of your experience in fantasy football. And you're saying, I love when a rookie running back in a committee scores, 200 plus points that had draft capital and a profile I liked and what that means for their career. That's something you've played throughout your career. When you talked about Brian Thomas just now, you're saying the same thing. When I look at what this guy was and why he may be struggled in year two, that's, that's a miss that I want to be in on from a multi-year multi-decade framework. But I think people are missing that in 2026 because of how unique 2025 was. And because they kind of raised the bar for what a hit is. And they don't, they don't realize that when they're saying guys are disappointing, they basically think 75% or 80% of picks were misses last year. If you really sit down and look at it, no, this guy sucked. This guy sucked. This guy sunk my season. This guy sucked my season. And maybe they to a degree were, but in terms of like how you can actually win in fantasy, then you need to, you need to have the most like contingent based draft strategy this year, or just upside based. That was my argument in the, in the thing last year, that would be the biggest excuse ever to lean into the things that we've been talking about and stealing bananas. If you think 75% or 80% of picks or hits, then swing for a league winner on every single pick always. And probably everyone listening is nodding along because they listened to our show at any rate, that was what we did in 2025. I want to real quick mention that our 2025 post, we did a post week four check-ins. So we got four games and it was way more accurate again. Like it kind of always is. You went Puka, Gibbs, Bijan. I want, uh, and then Lamb, Chase, Taylor. I went Gibbs, Bijan, Taylor, Puka, Jefferson, Chase. And then I, so I went Jefferson, Chase, Lamb, and you had Jefferson seven. So we had the same top seven. Um, we both had Gibbs as the RB one and Bijan is the RB two and Taylor as the RB three. I had CMCR before you had him RB five. That's basically what the RB rankings are. Um, and then
Speaker 2similar stuff at the top of. And the other sort of interesting note here is that we were both on Gentee in the first round, even after the slow start. Yeah. Yeah. You had him at 108. I had him
Speaker 1at 112. We both had Hampton at the one, two turn after his start, we both had a chant, the one, two turn, which we mentioned preseason. We were a little bit more, a little bit lower on a chant, which is interesting that we were both a little lower on H and preseason. Cause we did draft plenty of H and, um, I feel like we, you know, we had our exposure to H and last year, I guess he was maybe banged up at the time when we did this. I'm kind of remembering that he had a little bit of an injury in August that made it a little tricky to draft him at any rate. Um, I'm not going to go through our entire week for check-in. I just wanted to emphasize. It's fascinating to me how quickly by week four, everything about what was going to happen for the rest of the season had kind of crystallized for us. We had moved Bowers way down. You had him at one 10. I had him in the second round and he'd obviously been hurt. Um, you had McBride at two Oh one. I had him at two Oh four. We both had Warren at the back of the first round, uh, Tyler Warren, he had gotten off to a really big start. And so he looks like the stud new tight end. He's obviously he's not going that high, but he's going in the third round and tight end premium for people who aren't aware of that format. There's a lot of stuff here that quickly and accurately reacted to just the start of the season, the Gibbs Bijon thing. Like I said, the Jonathan Taylor rise, um, you know, having Pooka as a wide receiver one, we both had after four games, which we both didn't have in the preseason. So, um, we both had BTJ completely out of our first two rounds was another one I wanted to mention. That's right. Uh, we had him in honorable mention of us just, you know,
Speaker 2looking at this emphasizes even more is how virtually impossible it felt that the Vikings quarterback play could be as bad as it ended up all season. Because Justin Jefferson, I mean, I don't think he's a good pick, even like in the middle of the second round at this point, despite having, you know, an upgrade at QB, the Jefferson developments through last season were, were just shocking. I mean, I feel like we've never seen anything like a receiver that could go away. So
Speaker 1completely while healthy right while healthy which is why i think it's weird that you're so adamant that he's gonna go as late as he is but we'll get to where you have him ranked for next year i mean i think it was so shocking that he has to rebound and i this is one that we you and i have not really seen the same i'm not super excited about drafting him i think he's way too talented from a long view perspective to not get a rebound this year i have him you don't have him in the 2027 i have him right right after that sean i told you everyone from like round pick six on was the same for me all right this is very challenging you have him in the back half of the second round if we want to start giving spoilers all right let's get started on our 2027 first and second rounds and and what's so fascinating i said at the top is there are different ways to parse this for sure this year you're 101 i have it 109 and that is jackson smith and jigba explain to me why he's
Speaker 2the 101 in 2027 well jsn was the best receiver in the nfl last year and i don't think it was even close right you have the incredible yards per route run numbers you have him performing when he doesn't have anyone to draw coverage you have teams running gimmick defenses against him and then you see multiple plays in these games where he's run routes that are so extraordinary that despite all of these bracket coverages he's like seven eight yards clear of the defense relatively early on in the play to where sam darnold who is probably about the 23rd or 24th best quarterback in the nfl is now considered to be decent because he's had two back-to-back winning seasons he wins the super bowl even though he was egregiously awful in the super bowl the seahawks last year had also on top of having jsn had an extraordinary defense that's likely to take at least a small step back they also had this one two punch of kenneth walker and zach charbonnet i mean charbonnet actually good enough that he took almost 50 of the work from kenny walker and jack charbonnet and jack charbonnet and jack sharbanet who is a top seven or eight running back in the nfl now they have a rookie who you know wasn't a great college running back. Now, he may actually be a much better pro than he was in college because of the situation, right? And running in Seattle may end up being fantastic. Although I would note that the pre-contact numbers for both Kenneth Walker and Zach Charbonnet were not particularly good in part because of the line and in part because of how Seattle telegraphed all of those running plays. But you look at the context and you think about JSN and the volume. And I think that there is a strong possibility some of that moves forward, right? So when we think about JSN being, again, I would say clearly the best wide receiver in the NFL and going in the middle of the first round, going behind Puka, going behind Jamar Chase, those guys are very, very good. You know, if you had them at one and two for next year, that would be perfect. Either of those guys could have a 400-point season. And yet we're basically talking about quarterback questions and volume. The other thing that sort of jumped out to me with the injury study and the things kind of going along with that is that JSN is the cleanest of these guys. And when we think through that portion of it, I think that when you look at talent, you look at potential jump in volume, you look at the number of guys that are going to be in the first round, you look at the number of guys that are going to be in the first round, you look at the number of guys that are going to be in the first round, you look at the number of guys that are going to be in the first round, you look at the limits or the likelihood that some of the really bad scenarios play out. For Puka, obviously, you have a different type of superstar. You have someone who, like JSN, gets open everywhere. Someone a little bit different than JSN, who is more of the contested catch guy, and then a hammer after the catch. I'd be much more worried about the physical nature of Nakua's game limiting him. You also have a little bit of the off-field stuff that is disconcerting there, but I do think that it's mostly just some of the elements that we got with the Rams, I think, should move back to the pack. Some of the elements we got with the Seahawks should actually move in a more positive direction. JSN more likely to stay healthy.
Speaker 1There's a player in your... So I'm going to do a little bit of... As I mentioned that JSN was 109 for me. He was my wide receiver three. Your wide receiver two go... So you have JSN 101. Your wide receiver two goes at the 108. Your wide receiver three goes at the 111. Then you have another receiver at the 112 and at the 201, but you only have two receivers in your top 10, and then three straight near the turn. I only have two in my top eight, and then I have two of those guys at 910, and then I have three straight running backs at 11, 12, and 201, where you had your receivers, and my five and six receivers come in at 910. I only have two of those guys at 910, and then I have three straight coming in at 202 and 203. It's the same guys other than I have Jefferson there at 202. We just kind of already alluded to this, and you have them a little further back. I was just going to say there's a receiver you have in the second round we're going to get to later on that I overlooked entirely. So anyway, we've done this before as well. You have done this more than me, but I was late today. I was working on something else. But I remember in past years, you like, oh, I just this is an airball for me. It's a funny player. I'm just going to name him. It's AJ Brown, because it's the guy you've always said runs with a piano on his back, and I've always liked more. I have AJ Brown, not even in my honorable mentions. We both did a full third round for honorable mentions. You have him in your second round. So I'm giving away a lot of spoilers, but there's a lot here. We both think it's very non-receiver heavy near the top next year, which I think is sort of the top line thing to start with. Oh, I missed a running back too. I see. I did this really fast before we came live because I finished an article. Your guy at 106 isn't even on my list because I didn't copy him over anywhere. But we have a lot of running backs early, both of us, and two tight ends early, and we're pushing the receivers down quite a ways. As you comment on that structural stuff, I'm going to jam these two players in, and Trayvon Henderson is going to wind up getting bumped out of the second round.
Speaker 2Such a disappointment. Such a disappointment. Then had Trayvon at the 211. The interesting thing with him, and also obviously the interesting element with Harvey, is that they both, on their way to scoring 200 plus points, they flashed the thesis, which is that both of these guys can score through the air. Both of these guys have the talent to create big plays. And in writing about the running back position, ahead of last season, those are the two things that I emphasize as being the most important. You have to be able to score through the air. You have to have the big play ability. Trayvon, all of these incredible touchdown runs, and people can wave some of that stuff away and say, well, it was blocked right. It's like, yeah, but most running backs cannot run through that hole and make the big play. Josh Jacobs can't do it. Bijan Robinson was a better big play guy last year, but he's someone who probably will not be able to do it. When you're looking at the top of the drafts, you're generally seeing those types of players because it is that important. R.J. Harvey, fantastic receiving back, big play, big play, touchdown, touchdown. But for both guys in camp, they are being hammered by beat writers who are saying the things that kept them off the field last year are showing up as big weaknesses again in the draft. And I think that's a big thing. I think that's a big thing. This camp, not being there yourself, it's always that question of, is it really the case, or is it a priming element here where people are so ready to anchor to the mistakes of the past and so ready to say this is a weakness that you are seeking out that weakness to report on? In fairness, we do the opposite, where if a guy makes a nice play, you're like, yeah, this is the thesis. This is what we're talking about. I wonder if Travion has been as bad in the areas as the Patriot reports suggest. I guess I don't necessarily wonder as much about R.J. Harvey, who supposedly is just so much worse than both J.K. Dobbins and Coleman running up the middle. That's probably not the way you wanted to play Harvey and probably not the way they will. The Travion, and I've fixed my list
Speaker 1now. Apologies to the listeners for my lack of preparation. I will. Make sure to punish myself in some way later. Sean was really on top of it this year. Before we even had a recording time this morning, he had emailed me and was like, round one, round two, spoilers. I was like, oh God, he did a bunch of research on this. He took this very seriously. Me with the bug launch yesterday and everything, I've been a little bit tied up in the last 24 hours. My fault on that, I have made some corrections. The Travion case for me was essentially to point it as ADP this year, which- Everything you're saying is true. There are so many issues with what happened last year. There are so many issues with how this season could go based on the reports, even this year. And yet there's a reason that he's going as high as he is. He was a really intriguing explosive play profile that was the only running back last year who had four runs of 50 plus yards. He did a lot of things right. He scored a lot of points. I talked about that a little bit ago. If he's going that high already, I think that's the market telling you that there's a belief that it's not going to be week one or the training camp stuff, that it's going to be perfect. But by the end of the season that we're going to see progression forward, this is also an offense that has no third running back at all. I mean, they have some dudes, whatever. They have guys on the roster, but it's going to be Travion and Stevenson. And the entire thesis with his current ADP is that Travion by the end of the year is going to have established that he is the more dominant player and the better player. And he has a really good profile, explosive play profile. I could see that going into next year, even if he doesn't have an amazing full season this year, it's more just he hits late. If he cleans that stuff up throughout the year from week one through to week 17, because I think that people don't think enough right now. We've always talked about how NFL seasons are chaos and to expect uncertainty and all of those things. I think that's going to be more true in 2026 than ever before. I think that's what we saw in a lot of offenses last year. The Jags receivers is the one that I always come to where we were talking about Brian Thomas and Travis Hunter, two first round picks as their main guys going into the year. And by mid season, they're trading for Jacoby Myers. And then a fourth guy, Parker Washington's the one that goes off in the second half. And it's completely different than what they really plan to come in. And it's this idea of evolving throughout the year. Same thing with the Rams and the 13 personnel. They didn't do that the first half of the year. They did it when Puka Nakua got banged up and missed a week. And then was they, they limited his snaps coming back. And then everyone was really worried about Vonta Adams is the one receiver and 13 personnel. It was the 13 personnel was their answer to wanting to take Puka Nakua off the field and not overwork him for a stretch of the season. Cause they're thinking about Superbowls. They're thinking about, and it was a 17, week season. And that's the way teams are going to evolve in the future going forward, where we're seeing a lot more sub package use. We're going to see more multi tight end stuff. We're going to see things shift. Fantasy managers inherently want to draft teams where they're like, that's my locked in RB one for the year. That's my locked in RB two. That's my locked in wide receiver one. That's my tight end. I'm ready to go week one. And it's going to be my team in week 17 when I win the championship. That's not how fantasy football ever worked. And it's not going to be the same. I'm going to be the same. I'm going to be the same. I'm going to be the one. It's not about what's happening in camp. It's not about September. The other little bit
Speaker 2of nuance that I would throw in with Henderson is that part of what we got last year with Stevenson was actually the Patriots telling us that they didn't think Drake May was very advanced, which seems weird within the context of him almost winning MVP. It feels bizarre and untrue within the context of him maybe having the greatest season, certainly in our memories. I mean, there are probably people who are like, well, I mean, you're forgetting about Dan Marino and John Elway and those guys played when I was a little kid, but you're not comparing them directly to these players. But in terms of the deep passing, probably the most magical season in terms of accuracy, and then his guys making the catch on the other end, right? The Patriots receivers don't separate. But their ability to have hauled in those passes last year was something that you're just you're not going to see again. With that being the case, and what we saw in the postseason was that may actually has a ton of things that he's not ready for. Well, in year three, as they firm up some of the things structurally, as you have AJ Brown, as you have Romeo Dobbs, as may is ready to actually run the full Josh McDaniels offense. Then you can put Travion out there and have that explosive element to you no longer need to be as conservative and as protective as they may be needed to be last year with Stevenson.
Speaker 1That's a great point as well. And I just would also emphasize and I wanted to I knew when I put Travion there, we'd spend time talking about him. Obviously, a lot of the people listening, they're like, you've told us one player from your actual first round so far, and we're 40 minutes into the pod. But the other thing I was thinking about with putting Travion there was this point about there's a lot of ways a season can go. And I think that's a great point. And I think that's a I also could see scenarios where Travion's a double digit round pick next year where it just really doesn't click again in year two and people are really out the way that they're really out on Xavier Worthy going into year three, for example. That would not surprise me entirely either. I do see that. But my point is his ADP is going this year as high as it is because people see that and they also see this, that he could be a second round pick, late second round pick next year because it's a wide air band play. thought he was an interesting one to get in there when I didn't have enough of the other names in the big mix or the veteran names. I had just straight up forgotten some. I didn't even have him in my third round. The other running back I'll mention was Kenneth Walker. Because it's that pocket at the end of this year's first round. I was trying to figure out where to place all those guys and I somehow deleted Walker and completely forgot about getting him into my list. Anyway, that's why I wound up having room at the back of the second round for a different tier of player and I moved in Travion Henderson. You have similar players at the back of your second round. Those dead zone-y type backs, couple year two guys, we'll get into which ones. But I had Travion over those guys. I had those guys in my third round. I had Travion over those guys. Part of that was that some of those other guys play in tough offenses or they have more uncertainty about whether they'd be in committees in a major way next year. Travion, they just don't have as much depth in New England. Ramonja could still be there. Anyway, let's go back to the first round. Let's go back to the top of the first round. I have JSN as my wide receiver three, but at 109. You have Jamar Chase as your wide receiver three, but at 111. He is my 104. You have Huka Nakua as your wide receiver five at 201. So I mentioned you have these three receivers at 111, 112, and 201. You have both Chase and Nakua back there. Part of why I didn't have JSN as lofty as you did, although I think you made a great case and I feel dumb for pushing him all the way to nine. I thought about just keeping him at five, but part of it was I wanted to get some of these running backs up here. And I do think it's going to be a little more running back heavy near the top next year. And I had Puka at 102 and I had Chase at 104. My argument for Puka at 102. So interestingly, I had Puka at 102. You dropped him to 201. You had Chase at 101. I dropped him to 109. We are seeing those two going different directions. Part of why I dropped JSN down, and this gets to this range of outcomes thing I was just hinting at with Travion. I think you made a very strong, very strong case for why JSN could be the 101. I think there's also an argument that in the last several years, these really peak wide receiver, there's a really strong group of five or seven great wide receivers. And these really peak wide receiver seasons are difficult to back up the next year. You mentioned Amin Ra St. Brown being the low-key best receiver over the last three years. The stat I have on him is in PPR leagues. He's been exactly the wide receiver three all three years. No other receiver has been a top three receiver twice. So the guys that have finished one, two each year have changed every year. It was Lamb and Hill. Then it was Jefferson and Chase. And then last year it was Puka and JSN. I don't know if I have the one, two organized correctly every year there, but those are the six names. And we obviously still think very highly of those guys. But that point of Lamb three years ago, we had, when I accidentally pulled the really old lists, we had Lamb as the 101 going into, one of us did, going into the year after that 2023 season.
Speaker 2Because he scored 407 points.
Speaker 1He did. He was an absolute superstar. He's been banged up the last couple of years. We both have Lamb pretty high this year in that top five receiver range that I've been alluding to. But both in the second half of the first round, we will get there. Superstar, CeeDee Lamb, still a superstar. He was amazing. We had him as like the 101. He had a tough year. And then he's been going in the back half of the first round ever since. Jamar Chase had a tough year coming off that. Jefferson had a tough year. Chase hasn't fallen. But Chase had a tough year, I would say. Last year, he still was awesome. But coming off, he was the 101 last year and wasn't quite worth that. And that's why we see him fall a little bit this year. It is tough to back up the type of elite deficiency. And the stat on Jason that's absurd is he had 44% of the team's receiving yards. It was the most since the ridiculous Josh Gordon season in 2013. And Gordon was just a fraction better. And like, those are the only two that are at 44% or above in like, like the Calvin Johnson great seasons were lower 40s. There's only been like five or seven that are over 40% even. That's like the dominator rating breakout absurd number for colleges. It's not something you do in the NFL. Jason had 44% of the Seahawks receiving yardage last year. That offensive context could be the reason that his numbers could come down a little bit if he can't consolidate to that degree, which is insane to do. In a Sam Darnold plays even worse, which is possible. It's also possible. So then he would be a late first. He would still clearly be in this group. And so anyway, that's why I had him at one. I want to talk about Puka who I have at one Oh two. You have a two Oh one. I want to give the positive. I want to hear the negative from you. The positive is that Puka has the kind of outlier usage that I think can sustain in the top five over multiple seasons. His both of his last two years are among the three best targets per outrun seasons. As far back as my database goes, which I think is the PFF route era, whatever. I think it goes back to, or it's like 2012 or something. I don't, maybe I don't go back as far as they go. But last year, I think he, he was third. And then in 2024, he was actually first on that list. These are 35% target per outrun type numbers. Now he's missed time. He's banged up. As you said, those concerns are an issue for me, but I had him ranked over Jamar chase immediately. I have flipped that. Sorry. This is for my 2026. Like stealing signal subscriber rankings. I have flipped that because of some of the off field stuff you mentioned. And because there was like vague rumors of suspension risk for, for Puka, as well. And I don't know if that's been resolved. So I'm, I'm debating what, when I'm going to flip that back. But for a stretch there, I was like, I can't really justify taking him over chase against ADP. If there's both some minor health things in camp and the suspension risk, but if Puka plays 17 games, I think he should be the wide receiver one this year. And I think he should be because the other side of the coin is the other receiver on that offense is Davante Adams, whose numbers cratered last year. People are still drafting him incredibly high. Cause he had 14 touchdowns, everything from a, uh, like a, per route basis and all of that very, very poor. Some of that is, you know, we got a lot of really short area targets, so you can't get a lot of yards when you catch 14, one yard touchdowns, but it's, it's, it's worse than just that. Um, and then the other key thing is what the team told you in the off season, which is they tried to trade him. They told him they made it publicly available. It was, it was known information. If, if you're not kind of factoring that in, and that's something you don't remember, they talked to Davante Adams. They gave him the veteran respect and they talked to his agent and it got out. And it was very, publicly known. They wanted to move on from Adams. It sounded like they didn't find a suitor. They were very much in on AJ Brown. Then the discussion became that they had an issue with AJ Brown's knee and the longevity, but parsing that they, they were at the situation that they were at. I think the year before they actually did get rid of Cooper cup where they were like, Cooper cups, not the same guy anymore. Cause there was already some rumors. They wanted to move on from Cooper cup a year prior. So they do a lot of like advanced tracking on stuff. They were not comfortable with cups. They were not comfortable with the speed and quick Twitch stuff and breaks with the hamstrings and how that was breaking down over the years. I think they know that Davante Adams is done and they wanted to move on.
Speaker 2I think he's about the previous season. Why did they sign into so much money? If they're so forward looking,
Speaker 1that's the part that's weird to me. That is weird. Also everything you've been hearing about Terrence Ferguson, all off season ties in here as well, but they've been, I think the Ferguson thing is going to hit John. Like they're, they've been talking about him a ton and every fantasy analyst loves it. So there's no point trying to hide his ADP rise. going in the 10th round and FFPC drafts right now, if you're in a home league listening to this take turns Ferguson in your last round because there's a lot of smoke there and whether smoke there's often fire my point about Puka if he stays healthy if he doesn't get suspended if he's on the field that really high targets per route they're going to use the tight ends they're going to use Ferguson they're going to do different stuff they're not Adams had a ton of air yards last year they're not going to be able to do as much with Adams and Puka while he was on the field last year was the best statistical I agree with you that JSN was the best receiver Puka was the best statistical receiver per game which is why a lot of people said he should win offensive player of the year which was absurd in my opinion you had the MVP as your quarterback and JSN was doing what he did despite Sam Darnold so you had you know this very different context and JSN rightfully won offensive player of the year but people were looking at just the numbers not contextualizing well in fantasy all we care about is the numbers that we don't care about who should win offensive player of the year I think Puka Nakua has the potential to be even better this year if Devante Adams is worse if they have to use him more in the red zone it's why I've gotten a little bit intrigued by your Blake Corham optimism because I don't think they can just I think they'll still throw a lot to Adams close because they'll want to get something out of him so he may still catch eight or ten touchdowns I think it's going to come down it's going to make him a huge Boston fantasy without 14 TDs Puka I think could score a little bit more as a result and the running backs could score a little more but I also think Puka could consolidate I don't want to say volume even more but the volume can get really nutty when you look at the way that his per route stuff can be and his ceiling from a you know a compilation of yardage and what we've seen from him over multiple years is even though and from cup prior even though defense is obviously game plan for this stuff the McVay system still allows you to get the ball to this player and and Nakua is very good at it they'll do it a lot of different ways they'll do it the line of scrimmage they'll do it vertically he was really good playing the ball deep last year as well he's a superstar and I think he's going to have potentially a fantastic season if he stays healthy in a way that makes him the clear one wide receiver one next year
Speaker 2yeah some things have to work against him for him to not be spectacular you know that I'm not one of these like let's regress all the numbers let's regress the touchdowns let's do this and that to the players I believe in chasing touchdowns all of that type of thing I do think that when we're looking at the Rams we have to be a little bit careful about just how unlikely last year's season was Matthew Stafford has 10 seasons with 4,000 plus yards and he's going to be a little bit more aggressive and he's going to be a little bit more aggressive and he's going to be a little bit more aggressive and he's going to be a little bit more his season last year with 4,700 not even really that close to his best although the you know two of the massive ones in 2011 2012 obviously you're talking about Calvin Johnson and you're talking about a very different environment even though those are 16 game seasons he has three seasons with 40 plus touchdowns which in its own right is extraordinary but the weird thing is he has only one other season with even 30 the likelihood in the two seasons previous with the Rams and very good offenses 20 and 24 right the potential for the Rams to absolutely collapse in passing touchdowns is very real one of the things that I looked at with this because you had all of these short yardage touchdowns to Devonta Adams was whether or not they had completely changed what they did around the goal line and the answer was that they actually hadn't things just got skewed very much to the touchdowns being scored on the passing plays now there is a way in which if you have Devonta Adams and you have Puka Nakua that that could easily be something that happens again I guess I would be concerned that it might happen again for Devonta Adams almost because that's the only thing he does well and I've made the argument they don't have to like especially when they've been clear that they don't think Adams is that good they don't have to justify his contract again this season but if he is going to be someone who plays all the time they might still feel like they need to justify having him out there and using him in that way the Puka Nakua 10 touchdowns is actually something that I would expect to come down or I think there's a very real chance that it could come down dramatically even if he's healthy and then I
Speaker 1do think he's one of the most likely receivers to get hurt fair reasons to have him at 201 on the concern side so I start Gibbs Puka Bowers is my 103. he's your 103 as well Chase Bijon I've got Jenty at six and Hampton at seven you start Gibbs Puka Bowers is my 103 you he's your 103 as well Chase Bijon I've got Jenty at six and Hampton at seven you start Gibbs Puka Bowers is my 103 you he's your 103 as well Chase Bijon I've got Jenty at six and Hampton at seven you start Jackson Smith and Jigba Gibbs two so I have Gibbs 101 you have him 102 I don't know if we're gonna spend a ton of time on Gibbs because we're spending some time on the disagreements which I think are really interesting you have Bowers well so I I guess I do kind of want to talk about Gibbs at 102 for you but we'll get there in a sec um because I think Gibbs is going to have the 101 season like this is going to be the Gibbs season like we haven't had I've compared it a little bit more like the 00s which I know you're very obviously familiar with one of the things I love about you is you've been playing fantasy for a very long time as have I there was a stretch in there where if you didn't have the 101 and you didn't have with Danny Tomlinson you didn't win you didn't have Priest Holmes that year you didn't win if you didn't have Marshall Falk even prior you didn't win you just lost and it was like ah this guy drew the 101 and you know you're just mad at your this why all of us who had home leagues back then started lottos and stuff about how to get draft order because getting the 101 used to and then it's been a curse for the last like 10 years the 101 has been poor but if you go back a decade plus two decades now Jameer Gibbs at 101 this year is going to be that season it's the Jameer Gibbs
Speaker 2season I mean it's actually one of the reasons that auctions became pretty popular because the person who and if if there were a couple guys right if you're thinking about Marshall Falk if you're thinking about Priest Holmes the people who had access to Tomlinson Holmes Falk they needed to pay more than the top three picks especially if you're not going to do third round reversal I mean they needed to pay double what everyone else was paying for their first round picks so why do you have Gibbs at 102 you don't see that the touch mix should be very good one of the things that was I think bizarre in a way that is almost certainly untrue is that the injury study suggested that historically receptions for running backs have conferred no injury risk whatsoever now you know that obviously when you have the ball in your hands and you're being tackled on an NFL field that there's some risk of an injury there I think that at the same time that we have to understand that when you have a guy who has just gone 360 and 370 and scoring with a David Montgomery on the same team that the potential for that Marshall Falk season with a David Montgomery on the same team that the potential for that Marshall Falk season with 400 plus is is really strong and yet 450 and again I mean it's this it's this weird element where running backs have just become it really has flipped I mean they've become the safe play Jameer Gibbs has not had injury concerns played 17 games back-to-back seasons
Speaker 1you know you know who has an injury issue right now his backup his backup has an injury issue right now he's not coming off the field he's not coming off the field he's not coming off the
Speaker 2there's no backup there's no backup either like any play to Isaiah Pacheco is just asking to lose games the mix for Detroit when David Montgomery was hurt a couple of years ago made them an unstoppable juggernaut that was the best team in the NFL it was really sad that they choked the I don't know. I've knocked Amon Raw down as well. But having both of those things together doesn't make sense. But Detroit Lions, I mean, so many of these plays are going to flow to the player who shall not be named. And that's where I would look for an exploitable opportunity in the Detroit Lions offense.
Speaker 1Well, the player that shall not be named is going to get named in my second round, but he's not going to get named in your second or your third round, which is interesting. You do have Amon Raw in a very interesting spot, as you alluded to. We'll get there. You've got the Lions underrepresented in your first couple rounds, I will say, from my perspective, of how concentrated that I think that offense will be and how good we know that they are offensively. JSN Gibbs, you had Bowers 103, I mentioned. We both have Bowers 3. One of my big thoughts on Bowers was, will he go that high in tight end premium? We've done this before. We've had him as high as 101. And we've over-projected it. And one of the things that happens is people go, well, I can play tight end on the way back. I can play in the 2-3 turn. There's four good tight ends. What I will say about the way that you and I both rank these tight ends, we don't just think Bowers is going to be good. And if you look at our history of ranking these tight ends, we've probably over-ranked tight ends in the tight end premium format when we've done this exercise. Having said that, you and I both have all four of the top tight ends in the top, what is it, 19 picks. I have Warren. Warren at 207. That is later than you have Warren. You have him at 205. And we both have Loveland and McBride in between Bowers and there. So we're both saying that the way that ADP is going to shake out in tight end premium next year is if you don't take Bowers at 103 or in the top three picks, you won't have access to any of these elite tight ends who are going to be going to the back half drafters at the one or two coming back for the most part. And so anyway, structurally.
Speaker 2My question for you would be, in the last three seasons, the players who have scored more points than trey mcbride did last year are this the 400 point cd lamb season that we talked about two seasons from christian mccaffrey and then you have the 400 point season from jamar chase in 2024 that's it right that's it and so if you make the case that and and then uh tyreek hill also in there in 2023 edging him or basically scoring i'm sorry scoring the exact same number of points if you make the case that brock bowers is this year's jsn because of the similarities with the offensive stuff and what have you and because he's such an immense talent if you believe that he's going to have a better season than jason mccreary he's going to have a better season than jason mccreary last year i mean the scoring levels are such that almost no one can touch him it has to be something where you would think going forward in 2027 that a jameer gibbs still with the running back version of that is easier to sustain because you can just hand the ball to jameer gibbs and because there are these other weapons that in a 2027 season defenses could say let's figure out how to stop brock bowers and i guess i could understand that but again from a pure points perspective the tight end ability like a superstar tight end you think about brock bowers if you think he's better than trey mcbride or similar if you think he's better than travis kelsey and i don't think there's any question i mean there's no question in my mind it's probably just not remotely fair but i think i mean we're talking about a very different type of player than travis kelsey travis kelsey the most undervalued player in fantasy football for like seven year period are people going to be as skeptical of brock bowers as they were of travis kelsey i think that some people are people weren't skeptical of travis kelsey was going in the first round he was not going as early in the first round as he should have gone that is the big question
Speaker 1that's why i was talking about it that way it's not about whether bowers deserves to go here it's about the fact that we have traditionally felt that the market would understand tight ends differently than the market tends to and so i don't know yeah i don't know the answer to that we're that's the part of this exercise where we're trying to predict the market that gets really tricky we're not trying to say who what our rankings are going to be who we think it deserves to go where we're trying to say what we think the adp is going to be we did still both put bowers at 103 it sounds like you were having the same internal debates as me part of it for me was it is it does feel really flat man like gibbs was the only one that i felt like i almost put bowers 102 gibbs was the only one i felt like i definitely wanted to have ahead and you gave good case for why jsn can be so unique but i think we both are saying to some degree there's a lot of a lot of options for things at other positions at that point so for me though
Speaker 2i will say that there's a tear break after brock bowers yeah that's kind of how i felt three superstars the three positions jsn jameer gibbs brock bowers for me and then and then it gets
Speaker 1flat and interesting that's how i felt about it too but that's and that's my point i think of why put powers where we did and i i think that's why drafters may actually draft him that high if he has a season we're talking about because they may decide the player that i can't get anywhere else is brock bowers but i can get my other builds with different stuff you know they're similar to the guys that was going 104 he's similar to the guy going 109 but brock bowers is brock bowers and i have to make sure to get brock bowers um so anyway we have brock bowers both at 103 i mentioned my top seven i had gibbs puka bowers chase you have puka and chase later bijan genti hampton gentian hampton are going to come up in your top seven bijan is not and i'm going to pass it to you in a second jsn gibbs bowers were your top three people are like ben you have not told us sean's fourth player and we're over an hour in all i want to know is what sean siegel thinks about next year i get it i'm getting there ashen genti is the 104 omari and hampton is the 105 so i had these guys six seven as my rb three four you had two three then you had kenneth walker six that's the one that i completely omitted hilariously i threw him back at the one two turn when i made an adjustment a little bit ago on the earlier you know the first hour of the show and then at seven you have trey mcbride at eight i have colston loveland that is our tight end two i pushed mcbride into round two you pushed loveland into round two i think loveland could be really dynamic and i'll talk about him in a minute i also think with the mcbride point he already had the season of all time last year and they're drafting with the one two turn so i don't know what he's got to do this year to get up to 107 for you but uh you got him at one you got rising next year despite what he did last year i don't know drafters hate trey mcbride is my my logic for putting him in the second round and then you have lamb 108 i have lamb 10 you have jeremiah love 109 i have love 11 so it's interesting i have genti 67 hampton 67 you have genti 45 i have lamb love 10 11 you have them eight nine um and then a part of that is because you at 10 11 have bijan robinson and then jamar chase who i obviously mentioned i have at four and five so we actually see the genti hampton thing very similarly and we see the lamb love sort of being back first round guys similarly i would argue we have a different tight end two that mixes in here uh i have jsn sneaking in there you have kenneth walker sneaking in there and then we have a difference in the in the front of jsn versus puka you have puka back at the one two turn i have ken walker back at the one two turn but i always try to kind of draw parallels between what we have similar that's this is a very different first round for both of us usually there are more similarities but that's how i see it as being similar in my little pattern matching brain is that the genti hampton thing i think is similar i think the lamb love thing is similar i think what's pushing them down is you have bijan and chase back at 10 and 11 and i want to talk about that well i want to talk about both of them i guess pick one or what do you think about i mean i moved bijan to five and i felt like that might be low you did talk at the top about we're not just gonna we don't want to do it exactly the same as adp last year but i still have bijan as my rb2 i did have a hard time putting genti ahead of him and a hard time putting hampton ahead of him had a hard time putting love ahead of him i have them rb345 you go gibbs and then you go genti hampton you have ken walker five and then love six bijan is your rb7 he's still at 10 overall you have excuse me you have love five you have love you have bijan six he's your rb6 overall at 10 sorry he's your rb6 he's your 10th overall pick you have six running backs in the top 10 i mentioned this earlier and so it's not like you're pushing bijan completely way down you're saying that some other running backs are really interesting and may rise but i want to hear about that that bijan thing i also want to hear as i pass this back to you how you felt about putting genti at four part of the reason i have him at six and i kept chasing bijan those guys up is brock bowers at three i talked about this like what do you do with the raiders i mean we're we're putting a lot of faith in clint kubiak and i i was happy to actually i was like you know what clint kubiak's pretty sweet maybe it's possible man maybe it is possible that they're gonna have two top six picks next year bowers is gonna be the third genti is gonna be the sixth you're you're one-upping me there you're saying they're gonna have the number three overall and the number four overall players are going to be las vegas raiders this time next year that stands out to me so i'm gonna kick it to you for hopefully you have like 15 minutes in you because i want to hear about that i want to hear about bijan i want to hear about chase anything else you want to tell us about omari and hampton ken
Speaker 2walker any of these other guys so i think just straightforwardly the main thing with robinson and chase is that it's more a statement about the guys ahead of them than any sort of certainly extreme skepticism about robinson and chase and partly it's putting them there in order to sort of facilitate conversation but in terms of the actual weaknesses would be skepticism that robinson separates in quite the same way that he has when you think about last year he was a better big play guy i'm not sure that that continues to be the case when he really is someone who is slightly less dynamic in a straight line than a lot of the other stars now his lateral agility for a big back is otherworldly i'm skeptical that he'll catch as many passes when they now don't have alice year and probably are thinking just most teams are going to be thinking a little more conventionally right and so you move a little bit more of his work into the running game you have someone like zachariah branch who can do some of the things that he did as a receiver you have the coaching change which when you've scored as many points as robinson already has that can be nothing but a problem now it doesn't have to be a problem but it can be a problem in terms of how it how the lack of continuity sets you back a little bit and then we're talking about a team that probably won't score many points the falcons are trying to decide between two bad quarterbacks who have injuries when you have two bad quarterbacks and you're trying to decide between them again it's not that they're going to be a complete train wreck but the falcons are probably not going to be one of those top scoring teams in the nfl just to jump
Speaker 1in here i saw a beat report from another team i can't remember who they're doing the joint practices with but they were talking about a team that's going to be one of the top scoring teams in the nfl they were talking about players on another team and then he just threw in on his it was a social media post but he threw it on the end of his post also to a takeover by loa had a horrible practice it was just like this guy's terrible just wanted to let everyone know he's like i don't even cover the falcons but this guy was horrible all practice so it's not it's not great at the quarterback position there so if you do believe in some of
Speaker 2these other guys in the first round then you could see your way to robinson dropping one of the things is when someone's been as good as robinson and still kind of in that peak age range we tend to think of them as being just so locked in and yet you don't have to go very far back to the david rob david johnson levy on bell todd gurley melvin gordon time period to find situations in which guys did fall off pretty quickly and then when you think about the current situation and the extreme talent of genti hampton and jeremiah love when you think about what kenneth walker did last year in the playoffs and now playing in a chief's offense where they have nothing except for him i do think that we're talking about big enough talents that if things hit in a really even a really pretty straightforward way then if robinson has these structural things working against him that he could be pushed down even if he even if he remains bijan robinson who is just an
Speaker 1extraordinary player what about the genti bowers two raiders thing well
Speaker 2one of the things that kubiak does that's pretty fun is he creates i mean he's he's one of these guys who does seem to know what he's doing within the context of the current nfl and if we're talking about i mean you've done a ton of work and explained to listeners and readers about the youth movement in the offensive coordinator positions across the league and i've got a ton of optimism that that will mean exciting things and that's what i'm talking about things for football this year the football will be more fun but you think about what he did you know to an extent with the saints what he did last year with the seahawks making it possible for jsn to thrive even though he was the only guy there the raiders have a really weird wide receiver depth chart where i mean we're in round 15 16 17 whatever it is of the apex experts draft and the and the raiders wide receiver one has not been picked so you think about where trey tucker is you think about what jaylen naylor is then this has been an incredibly exciting offseason for the road of his rookie guide and the road of his dynasty recommendations from sort of draft weekend where we were all in on stribling all in on jacoby lane but then another guy sort of under the radar where i'm like this could be not really the puka nakua because that's just so unrealistic but the guy who's drafted at the very end and yet seems like he could factor in right away was malik benson and malik benson has also had one of these camps that has been really good now does that mean that he's going to actually gain yardage and score points in 2026 for the raiders i mean probably not but when you have three speed receivers all of whom bring something a little bit different and at the very least can play enough to drive defenses off the ball and you know that your coordinator is going to run these guys vertically and is not going to just do that but is going to do it in ways that are they're interesting right in ways that actually do stress the defense in 2026 to be able to come back and get the ball underneath relentlessly to brock bowers and ashton genti because you have these three vertical receivers that you've established and the defenses actually have to account for even if they're only three receivers that you've established i think that's a little bit of an under the radar point of excitement for the raiders it's so easy to focus on the two main guys the lack of an alpha receiver the fact that you're going to have kurt cousins and then go to mendoza i think this tucker nailer benson thing is real and fun and while they're not fantasy relevant it does actually unlock the other guys i like that
Speaker 1we got um i mentioned your top i just realized i had another player another player not accounted for in my list this is absurd uh i should have i should have done more checks and balances i think i was so intent on not checking your list before we started recording i think in the past i've actually like glanced over yours a little bit to come to some ideas and then mentioned to either you or or me if we had kind of forgotten somebody it's kind of hard but the one i missed this time was bruce hall who is i mean i i think i'm really excited about him and i don't know how i missed yeah i've gotten i've gotten i think that the jet stuff is weird he's had he's never had more than six rushing tvs in a season he's had 1350 yards all three of his healthy seasons the last three years he's a superstar he just puts up massive yardage numbers but has not been able to get enough touchdowns and everyone's like well he plays for the jet so he can't ever be good and like one of these years he's going to be meaningfully better for fantasy scoring than he's been up to this point because he will score touchdowns the one year he got like four receiving tds and that was why he was so good um and so he had like nine total but he hasn't even had a double digit touchdown season which is bruce hall so anyway we'll get to him uh i actually ended up putting him ahead of walker as i just went and made my little adjustments can't stand by any of the things that i've done it's a giant asterisks across my board but your first round i mentioned jsn gibbs bowers genti hampton walker mcbride lamb love bijan robinson chase and you're 12 as malik neighbors i really wanted to get him in the first round but he keeps moving down he's at my 205 now because i have to keep putting people in that i forgot at the one two turn uh but neighbors is your wide receiver four ahead of puka nakua your wide receiver five i get neighbors to wide receiver six here behind justin jefferson still i didn't really love that uh having neighbors behind jefferson but i also didn't love pushing jefferson down i guess i'm not surprised that you have because of the question of like okay we're we're basically pushing all the wide receivers down and then it's a question of okay you know which of the really good wide receivers actually belongs in the first round if we're both only going to have four you get chase neighbors at the end at 11 and 12 i went gibbs puka bowers chase bijan genti hampton as i mentioned then i had loveland and eight jsn 9 lamb 10 love and jt 11 and 12 you have jt 202 so we both have jonathan taylor at the one two turn i think he's a really good pick in the middle of the first round i thought i thought that was interesting that i wound up putting him back to the one two turn i didn't necessarily want to do that he's another one of these guys that when i was at like six where i put genti i was like i want to put jt there too and i want to put genti and i want to put hampton there and i want to put jsn there and i want to put lamb there and i want to put neighbors all the way up there all of these guys um but i think he's a really good pick and i think he's a really good pick but taylor's one that you know probably listeners can understand like he's a massively interesting player the fascinating thing is that he was way better than every other running back not named christian mccaffrey when daniel jones went down he was a 25 point per game player hitting on explosive runs like crazy and had added the receiving this year which has always been the limitation third in the nfl and running back routes last year over 400 by pff's numbers had never been over 300 he was like 50 percent higher in routes he was like a two 80 peak and now he goes over 400 he adds 140 routes to his total no one's reacting to that
Speaker 2and i think it's we also i think it's always tricky to project that forward with taylor in part because i mean people have seen him play and one of the arguments that i always made to people with him and made to you back you know several years ago when i liked him at 101 and you're like i mean it's not going to catch enough passes for it is that he is used in the past game and he is viable he's not adrian peterson when it comes to receiving at the same time he's also not one of these guys who's ever going to fully have that as the thing that they do what he's awkward with it i mean he's he's in that middle right where he's not adrian peterson he does catch pass he's such a big play guy that you're like yeah if we can get him on the edge like let's throw him some passes because those could be 80 yard touchdowns but the lack of intuitiveness with it is always going to cap him in terms of pure receptions at a level that makes it tricky to take forward to the next year and i say that just absolutely loving him jonathan taylor is still i mean it's probably the wrong time to bring it up but one of the reasons that it made my mind explode at the time and that i will just never get over the chiefs passing on him for clyde edward gillier is my favorite running back prospect ever and you know so i say it from a place of deep love that i don't think he can be the type of receiver that you know the people feel comfortable in the top couple of picks and then if it's as crowded as it appears to be to us and he's a year older and you have daniel jones and you have all of the the colts weirdness maybe the colts weirdness clears up i mean the way that he could be like a clear 104 is if the colts may like the afc championship game and i don't think that that's out of the equation either out of the question either
Speaker 1yeah yeah yeah their offense going into their buy and they had everyone says oh well their schedule got harder out of the buy and this and that it's kind of funny because no one's knocking like the patriots for the fact that they played four tough defense fences in the postseason and had horrible offensive results but everyone says this stat that the Colts were the product of their first half schedule and then it was getting worse when Daniel Jones got hurt they had two games and one of them was against the Texans who have like literally I mean same thing the Patriots struggled against the Texans in the postseason they played the same team the other one was against the Chiefs I believe and then the third game Daniel Jones tore his Achilles in the first quarter and it's like all right well I mean we yeah we saw like a couple bad games coming out of the pie going into the buy they had played 10 games go go look at every like to control for buys go look at every team's first 10 games not just through week 10 they had the most total yardage of an offense of all 32 offenses in the NFL they were the best offense there were teams first 10 games not just through 10 weeks any team who had an earlier buy give them their week 11 go 10 games Colts number one so anyway your idea that they could be an AFC championship team if you know if their quarterback stays healthy I think that's possible and I think Jonathan Taylor's a superstar too and it's funny because the way that you said that is it's it makes sense that he could be going at the one-two turn and why we kind of both landed there and it's also like we're still saying he's a good pick in the middle of the first round this year we're not saying he's not I mean there's a lot of ways that that can be a superstar season I agree with you I don't think his receiving is going to be anywhere close to the other three stars the problem is he could run for more yards than all of them by a lot potentially I mean he could run for 2200 yards it wouldn't surprise me I mean he's a superstar rushing prospect he's what Barkley you know he's younger version of what Barkley did two years ago right I mean that's what you're thinking in terms of what he can be as a rusher and an explosive play guy go look at his career rushing efficiency it's absurd and he's been in some bad offenses if this is a good offense like it was early last year he was hitting explosive runs left and right his yards per carry were through the roof they came down massively at the end of the year with Philip Rivers because you don't have any threat to defense you don't have any threat to defense is and everyone's like oh yeah we're gonna do everything we can to stop the best player in the field which is Jonathan Taylor if you can make them respect anything else Jonathan Taylor is going to make explosive plays so anyway we have him back at the one two turn and I agree with you about the receiving stuff and that's why is there anyone else I want to have the tight end discussion is there anyone else I blew through too quick do you think the the listeners will want to hear because I did kind of go through that a little bit weird this this time around love you have him at 109 I have at 111 I think people probably understand that we think he's a superstar prospect I think he's a superstar prospect I think he's a superstar prospect we also think it's a tough offense like he's got an injury now going into the year maybe that will linger a little and impact his first year a late first round pick going into next year makes some sense Hampton we didn't really talk about you have 105 I have him 107 I think it's kind of straightforward too though I mean I think in some ways it's similar to the BTJ pick from before and from last year and I would make the case that the reason listeners love this show so much is the first few years we did this those picks were hitting every time we were actually like really accurate on that stuff you had some great calls I can't remember who but the first couple years you had some incredible calls the next year that's why we started reviewing it we were like look at how good we did like it was it was really good and I think people will remember that who have listened to this every year they'll basically remember that like yeah this was a exercise that had value because we were finding players to talk about that then the next year we're going up there and it was very interesting and that's why people were tuning in and cared maybe we didn't hit on those guys last year with the BTJ type example. The thing I would argue is you can't hit on that player every time you play it that's the point you're trying to win your league when you do hit on it you're one of 12 teams you make these you know these big wide air band type of high upside swings there's no expectation that you're going to hit on them every single time at any rate I think Hampton is maybe that player for us this year where people probably have a hard time seeing it and yet we both do with from the perspective that this is an offense that could take a huge step forward it's a great prospect very talented player it's really easy for me to see how he could score in ways that I can't see right now I can't tell you exactly what a stat line is but he's the star of this offense and so
Speaker 2I think the really strong counter argument is just that when you pick out examples of how it could work those tend to be Mitch examples or they're very unsustainable examples but I even though that stuff is true I think it's still kind of the wrong thing to do. way to look at it right when we talk about you know how and for me with say JK Dobbins I think that JK Dobbins is maybe the best interior runner in football but it's devastating for him the Coleman is so good and then you're starting to look at well with three backs together how do they hit and for me it's like well the the Camara or the Sproles or that type of player you know basically the Harvey is the one who historically can still score in a way that at those prices it's pretty compelling the thing with with Hampton for example is just you think of a couple years ago where Raheem Mostert was the RB3 in points per game and HN was the RB5 now partly that happens because both players missed some time it would have been difficult for them to each play 17 games and for that to be the case and immediately that took a step back the following season but partly because the Dolphins were far less talented than what this Chargers team is and so if you think about a scenario where you know let's say Hampton is the RB3 in points per game and Keaton Mitchell is the RB5 Hampton is not Raheem Mostert and Keaton Mitchell is probably not HN or doesn't really have the path to becoming the guy in the way the HN obviously was going to right so I mean there are just so many different ways and it doesn't even have to be that I mean Hampton is going in the middle of the second round say he's the RB10 and Keaton Mitchell is the RB20 and then you look forward to the next season where Hampton is young he's huge he's got blazing speed he is a plus receiver and he's got the best offensive coordinator in the NFL with a plus offensive line and one of the NFL's best quarterbacks a quarterback who has had kind of a checkered existence in the NFL but yet where a legendary head coach is saying if I don't get him into the hall of fame I will have failed as a head coach this is very different than Raheem Mostert and Tua Tagovailoa right you're setting up for a five or six year period where these guys simply score a ton of points and I don't think you have to be overly precise in figuring out when those points come especially when you're thinking about playoff upside for winning a million dollars or playoff upside for beating you know your family members in your home league it's one of those types of plays too where if you are concerned at all about running back injuries the fact that Omari and Hampton can be RB5 with far fewer touches than the guys around him you have again a little bit additional safety in that play which is helpful for him because he did actually have injuries last year
Speaker 1two things though something I want to emphasize there and something I want to push back on very slightly the point you made about Mostert and A-Chan Mostert had the 20 TD season A-Chan had 11 I believe I think there was one other running back TD if I'm remembering all this from memory they had 32 running back touchdowns that was the whatever 2022 season in Mike McDaniel's Miami Dolphins offense maybe 20 yeah it's gotta be 2022 sounds right I don't know one of those years 2021 to 2023 something in there so that's you know what you were explicitly referencing for anyone who's not following that and I mean it was a scenario where like Hill and Waddle were good or maybe it was even pre-Hill I can't remember exactly but the running backs were so productive obviously the the drivers of like those guys were good in the past game as well but were able to score a massive number of points the minor little pushback was if Mike McDaniel does that he's not going to be the best offensive coordinator in the league next year he's going to be a head coach again because this he had head coaching interviews this offseason he took the the coordinator job seemed like he wanted to do something really fun if they have a monster season he's going to get a bag thrown at him if they put the template in place
Speaker 2the blueprint in place and Harbaugh has demonstrated the willingness to sort of put his own ego to the side and say we're going to have one of the best offensive coordinators in the NFL I guess I would have optimism that if McDaniel leaves maybe you don't have him and he may be unique in a way that is hard to match but you're going to stay yeah aggressive you're going to stay young you're going to stay creative you're going to stay in this mindset of we're going to score the most points in the NFL yeah I think that makes a lot
Speaker 1of sense Loveland I had him at 108 you have him at 203. the Bears offense is going to be very concentrated this year um I think I've given the take enough that people probably are well aware of today Loveland I think are going to consolidate a lot of volume I projected them all for over 100 targets and no one else for over 50. their wide receiver three is probably Kalief Raymond or the rookies avian Thomas are going to do some creative stuff with their risk their their backs are going to split so they were I think in the 40s and targets or whatever uh and then you have the fact that with the the the pick of Sam Roush who's actually a pretty strong prospect uh all things considered same prospect yeah a really interesting prospect but he's their tight end three they took him on day two and you already have Cole commit they're a lock to play more tight ends this is like there's been a lot of this talk this is one of the offense that's going to for sure and Loveland is my like the cleanest way to play this in my mind it's the when people talk about the two tight end sets they talk about how the wide receivers can consolidate more they can so can a tight end like loveland it means that he's also running routes against other tight ends that are not you know being used very effectively for um receiving stuff loveland's late season production was absurd last year he was a 21 year old rookie closed the season insanely well 22 year old who also by the way had really productive per route numbers like he didn't run a lot of routes at michigan based on how they do things really productive per out numbers with a quarterback that we now know is terrible in jj mccarthy um and then the funny thing was everyone was saying the quarterbacks after mccarthy were even worse because loveland was a year behind and that's why loveland's production his last season went down but he basically played with nobody in college and he got to play with a decent quarterback last year in a good offense of ben johnson's and he went off down the stretch if you go look at his game logs from week 16 ish through the postseason he got concussed in the final game but 80 plus percent routes four straight games 10 plus targets three times massive production over 100 yards multiple times i think at the high a dot and what he is and because he's a little bit of a higher adoc i think part of the issue with mcbride for people is they're like it's just receptions and they think it's just volume and so well i i don't know i i said it the reason i i ranked mcbride lower is i flat out think people are just wrong about trey mcbride they're like stupid about trey mcbride
Speaker 2or something and so i i mean i i'm confused but the interesting thing too with mcbride is maybe it comes from people not watching the games and i can understand if you're not doing it for a living that like tuning in and watching the arizona cardinals is probably not on the first thing on your list on sundays or mondays or tuesdays or what have you but it actually is appointment viewing from the perspective of trey mcbride is that good if you actually watched him play there's nothing with the a dot that makes you remotely good so i think it's a good thing to do with trey mcbride because he's constantly coming free deep down the field as well and the ferocity with which he plucks those balls out of the air and then looks for defenders yeah the way that he bolts them i mean there's just no question about it if you've watched trey mcbride play i mean everything about the stats which are extraordinary still don't do him justice just like if you go back now and you look at calvin johnson's numbers and you're like oh 1900 yard season in a 16 game i mean that was probably pretty good i mean if you haven't actually watched calvin johnson play you have no idea what it was like
Speaker 1i i mean i agree entirely about the mcbride thing it actually it's a great analogy that of of calvin johnson it's an analogy of like if you weren't watching it you don't understand how unique it is to watch we've been saying this about trey mcbride on our sunday night shows for years we did it two years ago in the 2024 season that was like our our nightly thing and then we both going into the off season we're like trey mcbride is a tight end one for next year right yeah he's tied to one we both had him ranked tight in one all off season he went like tight in three or whatever last off season or this is uh bowers rookie year whatever i'm going i'm getting my ears mixed up but um this is i guess the 20 we've been we've been talking about him on the sunday night show since 2023 i guess because it was the 2024 off season that we were this high on mcbride etc etc super fun the loveland the loveland point though just to wrap it up i think he's going to get better and johnson offense that's only going to get better i mean we both really like caleb williams as a potential breakout um and then burden is the kind of higher risk thing here right we both put him in our third round we both put him in our just missed like he's still going to be really good but already having the injury to miss most of august as well sets him back a little bit adunze i think is going to have a better year than people realize too probably just because there's going to be so much volume for these three guys to be the whole passing game and johnson i think is going to do a good job of getting the three guys to be the whole passing game and johnson i think is going to do a good job of getting that stuff consolidated to his playmakers he did it with the lions he did a really good job of getting the ball to the playmakers that he wanted to get the ball to back in detroit um so that's our our first round so you go to the second round you had puka nakua at 201 jonathan taylor at 202 as i mentioned you had loveland at 203 you have breeze hall at 204 tyler warren at 205 i have breeze hall at 202 i have ken walker at 203 who you had all the way up at 106 and you just kind of briefly mentioned but i think gave a good case that like he's just going to be the best player on the whole offense and they it snapped into my mind of like yeah the andy reed brian westbrook years back in philly like he's just going to be the dude and the ride receivers didn't matter back then they had like james thrash
Speaker 2todd pinkston and stuff and it's really easy to pattern match to what they've done recently which has been pretty running back negative but this is where it is important to understand just personnel and understand that the chiefs didn't have a starting caliber running back didn't have a backup caliber starting running back all of that changes when you actually have a guy who deservedly was you know super bowl mvp best player for the seahawks in the playoffs i mean there are some concerns about walker's running style that probably don't apply to the other people we have in the first 18 picks maybe that actually will manifest but man i mean there is an upside scenario there where andy reed is just like exactly what you're saying back to the good old days and i mean before you're talking about donahue and knapp i mean this is with priest this is with patrick mahomes who i mean the reports about him have been glowing as everything
Speaker 1else about the chiefs training camp has been a train wreck so i had breeze hall 202 walker 203 jefferson 204 jefferson for you comes in at 208 i have neighbors 205 i mentioned you had neighbors 112 so we both have him you know in this range i wanted neighbors higher i added both breeze and walker literally during the show at 202 and 203 um and then i have mcbride 206 now so those guys all kind of slid down again huge asterisks around my early second round but jefferson neighbors mcbride i'll come in there uh and then i go almoner on saint brown a name we have not said yet or or or put on a list yet we've talked about him uh tyler warren and christian mccaffrey at 209 spoiler you have christian mccaffrey not just out of the second round but at 312 so you're thinking that next so part of the reason i put him at 209 is even if he gets hurt if he plays some he's gonna score probably pretty well and there's gonna be people that are like you still have to draft christian mccaffrey if he what if he stays healthy he's only 30 like he's gonna be 31 next year he's gonna be old but i think the peripherals would have to really really crater for people to not talk themselves into christian mccaffrey before 312 so i think you're crazy there i took you don't think it's a little bit like an alvin camara thing where not with mccaffrey he's multiple 30 point seasons camara never scored like that it's mccaffrey that's the that's the thing that people
Speaker 2talk themselves into sorry what were you gonna say yeah mccaffrey's rushing was really bad it was last year and one of the things that was interesting for camara is that he put up negative wins above replacement by sis for multiple seasons before he actually fell off from a fantasy perspective but i think with christian mccaffrey you have some of that concern christian mccaffrey's way better than alvin camara and his receiving is extraordinary but you do have this injury problem that just continues now as we record this they're saying that if this was a game week he could play one of the things that popped up again in that injury study that makes me very sad because i hate having to track this stuff i hate having to be skeptical about people who are injured i really want to do it based on how good players are and even with all the zero running back stuff and talking about chaos and talking about sadly people get hurt if you have someone really good behind them that's a cheat code type of thing it's still i would prefer everyone just to be healthy and we could just do all of this with health all the little nagging things are not good and so i guess that's the thing i mean i think it's it's pretty implied but we have aggressive rankings on jeremiah love and malik neighbors and i guess i would say that i think neighbors is now overpriced for 2026 and we had a very fun main event with pat and pete on ship chasing just last night in terms of when this releases it may be a little more distance but anybody who's interested in that go check it out we took jeremiah love at the 3-4 turn i think that that is problematic perhaps but with both of those guys i see a second half of 2026 where they are just so clearly transcendent players that if they play poorly in the first half which i expect them to do but they emerge cleanly from the second half and score big in the fantasy playoffs this kind of gets back to your question at the beginning with travion henderson like good or bad pick if most of the production is late and is in the fantasy playoffs i mean for neighbors we're now in the late second round i think you've got to score all season it doesn't really set up that way for him with love it's trickier but i do think they'll be so good down the stretch that when people are saying like if you have a healthy 2027 offseason for those guys going into the actual year i mean i don't know how you don't pick i mean malik neighbors is just a completely different thing even than say that jamar chase and justin jefferson maybe that'll turn out to be silly i mean it's probably impossible to gap those guys but that's kind of how i'm thinking about it do you think that's the right way to think about it with these guys who are currently injured that we have them so aggressively ranked even though i mean do you agree with me that their prices are now especially neighbor's price is now wrong.
Speaker 1i have neighbors a little higher i did have one subscriber who has done some of his own pretty intense uh injury research comment on a post um when i talked about neighbors optimistically after some of his early videos and i wouldn't be able to repeat everything he told me but it's stuck in my head a little bit and essentially it was that the video that we saw was him cutting one direction but the specific knee injury that he had was going to be a problem for him cutting the other direction whether it was left or right i can't remember but it was like yeah it would make sense that he looks fluid cutting that direction what we're concerned about is whether he can cut the other way off of that other knee or whatever if you see any videos of him cutting that other direction and looking that fluid and i mean it really stuck with me i don't know anything about this stuff i think the injury stuff's really really hard to parse obviously um but it stuck with me from a perspective of like yeah maybe i was too quickly to be like yeah he looks 100 you know i mean not 100 but he looks close enough and my take on malik neighbors is that i think he has talent to burn like i'm i'm concerned about like zach charbonnet rushing back and i always say it's because i don't even think he was like that great to begin with and so now you have like the potential to be a little bit worse and how much talent did zach charbonnet have to give up i mean he's a downhill runner and all of that but maybe maybe he'll be all right you know because he's a downhill runner and all those things with neighbors it's an element of i think he was i mean he's made some good catches like in the back of the end zone in some of these videos i think he was so talented that he was able to do a lot of things and he's so talented in so many ways at creating the different separation his like some of the videos of him decelerating and stuff already looks so good and it's like and cornerbacks are like blown off on that and i mean if you're still that good at getting up to speed and decelerating that fast even when you're not 100 like it's still going to create separation is sort of the idea and so i mean his whole thing is like he can create target he can earn targets on every route at every depth and then he's really good at the ball in his hand and maybe he won't be as good at the ball in his hand and maybe he won't be good at the ball in his hand and maybe he won't be good at the ball in his hand and maybe he won't be as good at the ball in his hand and maybe he won't be as good at creating separation if no one else in that offense he's still going to create enough separation that they're gonna have to throw his direction i don't know i it's hard for me with the that the neighbors is overvalued thing and and the way that you said it i was gonna ask you you said it doesn't set up that way for him in 2026 now my answer is my question is why not because they don't have anyone else and i say likely barely played in that preseason game people think he's like their number two receiver because there's nobody and they're not even paying attention to the fact that he's like he only ran routes on like third downs in the preseason he's like a rotational player which he always was under john harbaugh but everyone's like well they paid him so they're going to use him well i mean they free agent contracts are big they paid him because john harbaugh wanted him he knows the system he wanted another good player doesn't mean he's gonna suddenly use him differently than he's always used him that's the coach that's always used him limited ways anyway it's not a likely conversation the point is people are overlooking that because there's no one else in this past game and it's it's easy to see a second role that could be very valuable and i think that's a good point i think that's a good point i think that's a good point valuable who else is going to get like how does it not set up i mean i think you're you think he's going to be pretty compromised in the first half is what you're saying i do and i mean the fact
Speaker 2that they've had to protect him so much through this time period one of the things that came out with the injury stuff that i didn't put into the article was that being like avoiding pup was actually huge and so that part is good but these guys who avoided and are not practicing with the players who are just not that far away from the season for the players who are still so protected and again there are different i think the point you made about the different talent levels is huge because how much you can give away is gigantic i mean one of the things that really bums me out with tucker crack because i mean he's like a hundred percent owned and dynasty kind of guy is just that i mean you're already talking about somebody who needed to add volume because the sustainability of the efficiency is just not really there even if you think he's the best titan in the nfl it's going to be tough they have these other guys now the other guys are injured a bunch too so it could come down to just tucker craft but you're you're looking at him as the second half of the season play and so i think if you're looking at guys as second half of the season plays then the price has to be right for that malik neighbors is so good that if he is basically like a 400 point level guy over a full second half the price is pretty good here and it is in a little bit of a weird spot where with tyler warren and breeze hall having the groin injuries you know i've seen zay flowers get pulled way up and zay flowers is very good but i think that half of malik neighbors is better than a full season of zay flowers nico collins is now an interesting pick there with higgins out i don't think he was before chris olave now interesting with tyson out i don't think he was before so there's that mix i guess even though you know we're talking about cd lamb in the first round or the one two turn i mean george pickens is just so clean i don't and again so it's got a little bit of a portfolio thing too where if you're going to do a bunch of teams you have a bunch of picks in the 101 102 so that's the area you're always coming back to i mean you're probably going to have a lot of pickings and you probably don't want george pickens on every team in part because despite all the positive reviews for pickens this year you don't simply stop being a wild crazy person
Speaker 1right yeah yeah so you said he's so clean and i'm like wait a minute
Speaker 2so i mean you have all that you're in a little bit of a dead spot there which is it's so weird that like this is maybe the most fun year to ever draft and round seven round eight round nine round ten round eleven those rounds are loaded then they're absolutely loaded the fact that the two three turn and like all of round four are not the type of players that you would want for that even though when we look forward to 2027 we're saying i mean these rounds are are really strong so that's the part that is kind of fun where like 19 to 36 this year i don't know this that strong but in our lists i'm like how can we get more guys in how can we get more guys in i mean you have colson loveland i'm like bennett for me to put colson loveland in there i have to put him ahead of jonathan taylor i mean no chance in hell i'd have to put him ahead of puka nakua i'd have to put him ahead of jamar chase i'd have to put him ahead of bjorn robinson i mean there's just no way and so i put
Speaker 1him ahead of the some of those guys all right i put him ahead of jonathan taylor you're like there's no chance at all no i think loveland can have a pretty monster season um what the the way that his efficiency can be one of the things in my projections that you look like as yards per target versus like mcbride's the mcbride a dot thing i loved your point about that it's it's not that's relevant but it's it is vaguely relevant just from the perspective that that drives stuff like a dot now one of the things uh excuse me like yards per target one of the things with because like trey mcbride for as amazing as he is has not had a target over eight yet in his career his two highs were 7.8 last year it was 7.3 part of that's because he had 169 targets you get that much volume funneled to you over and over and over again your yards per target comes down a little bit but the yards per reception down a little last year at nine point eight it was ten point two ten point three the second two seasons the rookie year was was lower and on lower volume as well he wasn't great that rookie season um part of the part of the thing is when you kind of like go through the projection from that perspective i mean colson lovin had an 8.7 yards per target last year 12.3 yards per reception some of that was driven by that one massive play late in that game against the bangles but i mean it was significantly higher because of a higher a dot and so i had mcbride for meaningfully more targets but i actually had them close in yardage because of the way that loveland's volume and and um yardage per target and all that manifests and then i the reason i'm so into loveland is i think i was low on the targets with burden getting hurt i did this projection in july and i haven't updated but with burden getting hurt and through august and i just don't know that i'm that crazy about a dunes a and the way that ben johnson calls things and sort of thinks players not plays you know i think he does that i always use that with mcdaniel but i think it's very much a ben johnson trade as well just saw a tweet the other day about or a post from their from their um practice uh about the run game also creating a bunch of explosives and like ben johnson isn't thinking uh it referenced that robert solid quote about the jabs and the haymakers and it said basically that the i can't remember who had it but it um it said that the run game's not a jab it's a haymaker and then the past game's also a haymaker and then everything's just haymakers and like good luck like that's what ben johnson's you know doing and they're gonna do the big tight end stuff and they're gonna run and they're gonna run a effectively then they're gonna throw off of that and i just think colson love is going to be an
Speaker 2efficient receiver for chicago bears were the weirdest team last season because they didn't have that much talent their quarterback was not playing that well their running backs were deandre swift and kyle menon guy and when they ran the ball it looked like the opposing defense had eight
Speaker 1players on the yeah it's crazy and they're gonna do that again i think swift's a good pick i'm realizing with menon guy getting a little bit banged up in camp and i'm like i want to draft some deandre swift which is absurd you're like
Speaker 2you're like really uh i don't know if i want it but so one of the things with the mcbride loveland sort of comparison that you had there i think with the burden injury that there is this upside with colston loveland to not just be good but to finish as like the going away tight end one and if he does that obviously he's going to go middle of the first round i do think there's an element where trey mcbride is stefan diggs after he's done with the first round he's traded to the bills, where he's allowed to do everything. and colson loveland is saffon diggs when he's with the vikings and is the vertical guy and maybe it plays out that way maybe it doesn't the thing that is also interesting is the thailand warren is almost the opposite right where we both have him in vaguely the same area and he's another guy who can pull up there it'll be fascinating i think to see what the structural element is with tight ends in 2027 i think that some young guys could flash late and push in there my thesis maybe it's just what i dream of happening although i don't actually dream of it happening because i think that the current situation is very exploitable but you have this tier of elite tight ends that is so potent and that gaps the dead zone tight ends so clearly you have this tier of elite tight ends that is so potent and that gaps the dead zone tight ends so clearly you have this tier of elite tight ends that is so potent and that gaps the dead zone tight ends so clearly the drafters finally move into the direction where you have the elite tight end tier valued appropriately and then you have this gulf down to these guys who are just guys and are going to have volume in their offenses and can catch the ball when it's there and you could start them if you needed to i think it would be it would be a lot of fun if we actually get that next wave of players if you know if harold fannin is able to join it if you have one of the rookies get healthy enough and or get involved enough to to move if you have that if you have like say two more guys whoever they are join this four-player group do you then have it really deflating the players after that top six or does it just continue to pull everybody up one of the things that just seems so exploitable right now is that people are scared of people still are reluctant to draft the elite tight ends but they're reluctant to get gapped so much that a lot of tight end who simply are not going to score enough points to justify their adps are pretty i think that's what's going to happen that's probably the exploitable area that's why i think the top
Speaker 1four are going to go in the first 20 picks and that's the way you have it as well is i think that's what's going to happen i think people are going to realize that this i think right now there's a lot of people out there talking about the move to more tight ends and tight ends are scoring more and they're not parsing well enough that like the isaiah likely point i just made that a lot of these guys are not going to run enough routes they're going into multi-tight end sets that are going to be very multi-dimensional they're going to use that multiplicity to their advantage and it's going to impact routes the guy like last year aj barner gets drafted in all these drafts his routes were like pretty decent he scored a bunch of touchdowns he's like the the ceiling scenario when you're in that kind of a scenario but like he didn't even run that many routes and people are like convinced that he had like a breakout year he's going to run more and all these things i guess my point is i mean he's a positive outcome but like that's the ceiling is that you stack a bunch of touchdowns like he did he had like a rushing td and then he caught a bunch of tvs but it's like is receiving his receptions and yards and stuff weren't even that good elijah elijah arroyo was a rookie as a year two guy now i'm if his touchdown rate comes down i think he's like gonna get cut in most places where he got drafted because he's not gonna be running enough routes and there's a lot of these situations that i think are going to be where they do the heavy tight ends that are going to be similar i don't think that's going to happen to loveland because i think he's going to stay on the field in all situations i think your digs note is very interesting but as far as what the four guys do and then one of the things i wanted to say is you were talking about loveland and warren and how warren could also come up i know you know this but i would say to the listeners and i keep hearing about warren warren warren at the beginning of the offseason i i was like warren should be closer to loveland and then as i dug in more i i kind of changed my perspective i have loveland in the same tier as mcbride and bowers he was an h21 rookie last year you've talked about this constantly you've talked about all the great work blair does when you do what he did at h21 it's different tyler warren is almost two full years older he's about 22 months older i just looked up their birthdays and everything he was a 20 age 23 rookie last year he's already 24 loveland's going into his age 22 season there is a you know loveland trajectory that's bowers and mcbride-esque it's not necessarily guaranteed to happen but that's part of what i'm differentiating between loveland and warren is the two-year age gap and it's not it's not just age is just a number for a lot of people they don't understand when i reference the the blair work and everything what that work shows is that when you come in that young and you're that productive that young you have more room for growth you have more room to get better which logically makes sense you are a lot younger as you produce there could be next steps to him or he could just sort of be near his peak and not get that much better but that's the potential for loveland is that he becomes something very unique at the position as well but i i agree with you i think these four guys are going to be so good this year all of them and people are going to realize there's a lot of room for them to be there's a big gap and i don't think people put enough weight on how big of a gap there was last year because only the mcbride owner if you're playing in a fantasy league and you only have to play mcbride one time in the regular season and he drafted poorly the rest of the way you're like yeah i didn't need any tight end points nobody was gapping me at tight end points if this happens what we're talking about and you get stomped four weeks in a row by people who have great tight ends and you lose four weeks in a row because they're putting up 20 points against you every week and you can only muster five at tight end and you're like man i'm losing so many points at tight end every single week and then there's no one else out there that's scoring any points so you said some of the young guys might but if that is sort of the way that it plays out i think next year drafters will finally get it with elite tight ends that's my thesis that they'll see the difference between elite tight ends and these offenses that use a lot of tight ends 12 and 13 personnel but are not functional for fantasy tight ends and drafters will be like i gotta get me one of those four in a tight end premium format or else i'm going to be chasing a bunch of different builds that have a lot of tight end points and i don't i mean you're not just dodging one guy
Speaker 2and it's fair to say that the opportunity cost is massive too you're going to lose a superstar running back or a superstar wide receiver off of your roster but it's a little bit of the same logic as you know why you would draft a josh allen which is that in most cases maybe it's just a wash but you simply then can't compete with the manager who's going to be the one who's going to be the who drafted these guys and then drafted well on top of it you can't compete with the manager who has an elite tight end and then their team was healthy you just simply can't compete with them
Speaker 1because they do have an extra spot so sean i'm gonna have to rip off a lot of information for the listeners because unfortunately i have a appointment today i thought we'd be able to do this in two hours uh it was an absurd thought um but i'm gonna let the the people know what we have we weren't sure if we were going to do josh allen or if we were going to do the josh allen just the first round or the first two we kind of went into the second round we're kind of doing the shows differently these days people have figured that out we're kind of just having fun with it we're not like trying to optimize for anything at all um so apologies to anyone who wants some stuff but i'm going to rip off my whole second round because i had gone almost through and then i'm going to do yours i had skipped my 201 it's devon h and you have him in your third round i wanted to have a little conversation about him my quick note on him is i think he's going to be good and yet not score well but good enough fun enough that if they don't have malik willis next year people will be back in on devon h and at the 20 201 i think you're thinking he's not going to score well enough we're both pretty concerned about the receiving and some of that stuff and so he falls to the third round i think you go either way with it but i was basically saying i think devon h and is a long view very fun player and a good explosive player and he's going to do fun stuff you're going to give him a ton of work this year he's not going to score as well as people think but if the offensive situation changes next year people might be back in him 201 in that same group with like jt and all those guys and then i had uh breese walker jefferson neighbors mcbride amin rot warren cmc i had already said all those um and then i had aj brown at 10 or i threw him in there garrett wilson was a name i had snuck in to my back of my second round i have i had him basically middle of the second round had to move him back i think he's going to get a ton of volume i think this is a garrett wilson breakout season chase brown at 212 the guy that got bumped was jameson i mentioned i think jameson's the pickings of this and i think people are going to draft him like it that was the he who could not be named that you mentioned earlier um james cook also got bumped from my back end of my second round as i started adding people during the show i think i had harold fanon at 212 i mentioned travion a bunch of guys got bumped um but that was the first names that i had in my second round that are no longer in my second round because i was changing my my my lists during the show your second round puka nakua jonathan taylor colston loveland breese hall at 204 warren at 205 you had aj brown at 206 this is the one i want to get your thoughts on before we go chase brown 207 justin jefferson 208 specifically that you had brown over jefferson i thought we had the same five receivers as our top five just in a different order where i had puka chase jsn lamb jefferson or sorry that's top six i had puka chase jsn lamb jefferson neighbors you had jsn lamb chase neighbors puka but you didn't even have jefferson next you had aj brown come in there and then jefferson at 208 you have pickens 209 who i dropped out probably unfairly you have tetero mcmillan 210 who i also dropped out again offensive it's it's a for me the point would be the offensive volume concerns that i feel like he was a hit and he's already a late third you know fourth round pick despite being a clear year two profile to buy and we're not even like pounding the table to buy him because again the offense just i think bryce young's bad uh and then you go basial tootin who i love at 211 and then you go basial tootin who i love at 211 and then you go and quinch on judkins i promised the listeners you had a couple year two guys snuck in there you have tootin judkins i'm worried about the browns offense i had them as you know just missed guys as well your just missed was almond raw outside the second round and then you also have scataboo there i have scataboo much further down my my third round i'll go to the just mists in a second like you had garrett wilson in there you had hn and you're just missed you also had james cook we both have james cook falling out of the top two rounds over concerns about what the volume actually looks like everyone wants him to just add receiving yet 300 plus rushes last year for the first time it's not that easy to just add a bunch more work for a guy like him i think you've said that you think he's going to lose a lot of rushing in addition to the receiving i think they're just going to keep optimizing for the rushing because they really like his explosive run rate they're going to try to throw to the backs a little bit but it's not going to make that much of a difference in my mind and i think it's going to be pretty tough for him to keep up the level of efficiency he has in some of those things so i actually think the receiving is going to come in a lot lower than a lot of the optimism there um but we both have cook out of the second round i want to ask you about brown at 206 because that's a lot of optimism from you about aj brown then relative to what i've heard from you in the last couple of years and then pickens and and mcmillan tootin judkins all four of those guys at the end are guys that i didn't rank um maybe pick one or two of those that you think is pretty interesting
Speaker 2so aj brown has been the similar caliber receiver to these other guys but has been with the titans and the eagles which means the volume simply isn't there you had mentioned earlier in the show that they failed to trade for him or didn't stay in the mix because of concerns about the knee that's a bit of a problem as you get old and i do think there were times last year where he looked old at the same time you're now moving into a situation where drake may is your quarterback i think that drake may as a fantasy quarterback is overvalued but when we think about him finally unlocking aj brown especially when the patriots have no other players right romeo dobbs is limited enough that the packers like didn't want to play him didn't want to keep him kashon booty is somebody who doesn't separate and successfully catches these deep balls aj brown is reportedly burning the patriots elite corners and elite defense repeatedly in practice i mean maybe it's just that it's fun to put in there once and be like this could be the season he'll have a massive year people will still be willing to draft him when he is another year older because of drake may right and all the people who are desperate for aj brown to be a jamar chase level player his whole career they get a season of that he's not going to fall below the middle of the second round after they actually get that season so that would be the thesis i mean there are some worries with him once you're getting old once you have some injuries the thing with not having other weapons in the passing offense kind of cuts both ways where your volume your target share could be extraordinarily high and you're not going to be able to get a lot of the same amount of time you're not going to be able to get a lot of the same amount of time you're not going to be able to get a lot of the same amount you're not going to be able to get a lot of the same amount you're not going to be able to get a lot of the same amount you always mention the piano on the back thing i mean he's such a big guy he looks big when he's running i do think there are probably things that defenses can do if none of the other patriots receivers emerge and certainly that's what you're getting from camp this is just him you're really
Speaker 1loving pickens and you think mcmillan can be so good this year that he actually rises to the second round yeah i mean he looks like deandre hopkins right i mean that's that's the thing about deandre hopkins right i mean that's that's the thing about deandre hopkins right i mean that's that's the thing
Speaker 2about deandre hopkins right i mean that's that's the thing about deandre hopkins right i mean that's that's the kind of rookie season he had a little bit better than hopkins that's where he goes the you the reporting that you get from camp with the panthers is when you talk about how bad bryce young is and it's like yeah bryce young he just can't play tetra mcmillan and jalen coker are awesome now how does that resolve when you have a terrible quarterback and you have these young receivers who are fantastic they lose the guy they drafted who would have been an interesting deep threat they probably are not going to get much of a season from hubbard jonathan brooks super high ceiling massive risk i mean part of my thesis has always been that like the panthers can't do what they did last year which is to just try and pretend like they don't even want to play see if we like how few plays can our game have and can we randomly win at the end because we're in the nfc south like this season the quarterback the head coach they have to go out and play is bryce young jj mccarthy levels bad i don't think he's that bad and then tetra mcmillan i think is that good what about and probably coker doesn't actually take as much target volume as the positives for him would indicate mcmillan is just so good in every area that you
Speaker 1i mean he's going to be a target monster yeah i agree with that i think he's going to get a ton of volume i just it seems yeah i don't know it seems weird but one of the big things could just be that they try a little bit more i mean they were good enough last year to wind up winning the division and win loss good enough but they were still like a minus 61 point differential which is just massive if you don't like go look at the list of point differentials it's so low if you win enough games to win a division you really have to win every game by three points and you have to lose every game by double digits to get to minus 61 points when you win eight games and lose nine it's crazy it's crazy the difference it's like you know if you if they were exactly 500 eight and eight like the difference of your wins and losses is like almost 10 points to get to minus 60 you know to like it's just insane but they as part of that when they were losing they were just completely they're one of these teams that just completely gave up and didn't play in the fourth quarter and didn't care and they moved on to next week well if they're worse and win loss you've said this to me this offseason are they going to be able to do that are they going to be able to just pack it in and give up are they going to actually have to try to like garbage time it a little bit like look like make it respectable like their season was already respectable in win loss last year so they they could just pack it in take their lumps and move on to next week this year may not work out that way and that may lead to a lot more volume and i mean every week is a huge
Speaker 2leverage point for nfl players and coaches it's probably i'm probably exaggerating the difference between what they were actually experiencing last year and what they'll be experiencing this year but i mean this is an end of the career season for canalis
Speaker 1and young i mean they've got to bring it end of career season i love that um we'll have to talk tootin judkins scataboo guys a little more next time but your honorable mention list aminara saint brown scataboo mckay lemon luther burden devon achan james cook zay flowers garrett wilson jonathan brooks in the back you threw in kenyan sadiq harold fannin and then christian mccaffrey at 312 i had this like huge cluster around the 2-3 turn that i mentioned included jameson james cook harold fannin trevion henderson because i had to add people that i had left out hilariously um my rest of my honorable mentions were basial tootin he was in my honorable mention was basial tootin judkins i had jadarian price in there i think he has a better season than uh people probably realize and is an a good spot going to next year lemon i did throw jordan tyson in there because i think we might get enough late in the year and then people will be optimistic going into next year i had casey concepcion in there i had luther burden i threw matthew golden in there i think matthew golden could have a good enough year for the packers that next year he's viewed as the essentially the clear number one if he takes over that dobbs role i don't really love the talent profile enough to be like oh i'm going to put him in the second round but you can imagine a year where he's the number one going into next year the offense throws a little more josh jacobs is like aged out or is not the dude anymore it looks a little bit more optimistic for past volume and golden is the year three guy that people are drafting in the third round jonathan brooks cam scataboo and the last guy that i had in there was terrence ferguson you brought up kenyan city trolling people come i brought in terrence ferguson and i meant it um no sean what do you mean he could have the like the the whole the whole thing on terrence ferguson is he could come out of absolutely nowhere like kairn williams did and pukunukua did and if terrence ferguson does that then he's a clear third round pick in tight end premium i mean we can just keep pretending that that's what's going to happen until it doesn't happen
Speaker 2right you can i mean but like for next season isn't it max claire then is the guy yep next man
Speaker 1up yeah well i thought you were gonna be telling me about jarquas hunter this offseason i don't know how we became a blake quorum show but you're a blake quorum guy now it's so sad then it's so
Speaker 2sad the i mean the people who are actually at rams and eagles practices claim that this year as opposed to the past now i mean are you going to believe him now when they were unreliable in the past but evidently jarquas hunter is not
Speaker 1good will shipley is not good sad dreams to die sad dreams to die we always do a super flex one two sean has lamar at the 101 and then he goes jsn gibbs bowers genti at the 106 and then he goes a bunch more non-qbs until the 111 sean thinks in super flex next year only two quarterbacks will be drafted before the 111. i think there's a little bit of bias seeping in there he hates drafting quarterbacks early in super flex josh then the adp for these
Speaker 2guys has completely it's come down come apart josh allen at 111 doesn't seem likely to me but
Speaker 1it does speak to how optimistic you are about all of the non-qbs having big seasons near the top alan burrow caleb williams at 201. for you and then you have herbert all the way back at 205 after three more non-qbs you had alan burrow caleb at 11 12 and 201 and then it's jeremiah love bijan chase and herbert and then you go neighbor neighbors Nakua Taylor and then Jalen Hurts Dak Prescott before Loveland and Brees Hall close out your top 24 I my top 24 the non-quarterbacks aren't going to be right because I had to add a bunch of dudes but I actually started with Lamar Allen Daniels Herbert I think that people like Allen will still have another good year and people will still take him 102 but I think you know Daniels belongs right there and then Herbert's the one that I thought deserved to be up there I think he is the MVP season and people are that excited about him you have him a gap down from even Caleb Burrow and those guys which I thought was interesting I go how does he fit I mean I know
Speaker 2we're rushing to finish here but how does he fit compared to say Baker Mayfield with the spike season one of the things that you referenced last night when we were drafting and passed on Matthew Stafford was the massive season for him obviously if Herbert believed to be a bigger talent than Mayfield and he's younger than Matthew Stafford you don't think there's going to be an element there I mean it's basically a thing where he becomes Joe Burrow you're you're saying well I mean the thing that's different between
Speaker 1him and those guys is that he actually does run a little bit I don't think he's going to run as much this year but Justin Herbert was second in the NFL in QB rushing yards last year I don't think people would ever guess that he had 498 rushing yards last year second in the league behind only Josh Allen and there's other like Jalen Hurts played as many games as him and had meaningfully less rushing yardage Drake May was meaningfully lower Jackson darts the closest guy and and missed a couple games so you can say darts yards per game were higher but there's a lot of mobile QBs that did not well the guys you are comparing them to are less mobile I think Herbert's going to add enough with the legs and then like the the season that I'm saying he has this year to go there next year is also one where he throws 40 touchdowns I mean and wins the MVP but I think he had some I don't know I don't think he had a lot of touchdowns but I think he had some some some stuff with the legs as well in a pretty meaningful way it's basically what what happened to Drake May after last year is going to happen to Herbert people are going to go oh but the problem is May probably doesn't belong going that quite as high as he is because the rushing has kind of
Speaker 2regressed a little in year two you don't think it was the thing where I mean those are really good points I hopefully Herbert does score that well the first main event that you and I did we selected him it seems like part of the rushing last year and he's had this before too so it's not like out of nowhere by any stretch but there is a running for his life element that they are have been like that's the number one priority for this season is that Justin Herbert gets the ball out doesn't have to run it doesn't take the risk and they have too many other guys that you just prefer to have the
Speaker 1ball in their hands and maybe maybe the rushing goes like to completely zero there's actually precedent for that Daniel Jones is one of the guys who had had a 700 yard rushing season a few years back and one of the fascinating things about him with the Colts last year is he had under 200 rushing yards before tearing that Achilles in and he was able to get the ball in and he was able to get the ball in and he was able to get the ball out and if you're like optimistic about the Colts offense going into this year it's very similar to what you said he was getting the ball out so not having an Achilles he doesn't need the mobility he used to be a 700 rushing yard guy once you know he did that once upon a time that year with Brian Dable when everyone was running way too much I think it was 2022 and last year he had like 180 rushing yards or something you know it's a way way different quarterback profile at that point for a guy who was leading the best offense in football through 10 games and he's not using his legs at all maybe that happens with Herbert so maybe I have him too high here Caleb and May for me was the next tier and then I had a bunch of skill guys and then I had Burrow Mahomes Hertz and Dak bunch of skill guys I did a third round on this too and I threw Kyler Lawrence Purdy and I threw Mendoza in there in that next group because if we think that's what I like to see Burrows and Chenty are going to be this good then Mendoza's got to be a third round pick so that was the kind of super flex stuff the I got all of our honorable mentions I think we talked about most of it we'll have to talk more about like tootin' Judkins some of those guys next show again I apologize to the viewers the listeners whatever I do have a thing that I can't miss that I got to get to but this is my favorite exercise every year it was super super fun I'm going to run through the top 24 for both of us one more time in tight end premium Sean's was Jackson Smith and Jigba, Jameer Gibbs, Brock Bowers, Ashton Jenty, Omarion Hampton, Walker, McBride, Lamb, Love, Robinson, Chase, Neighbors, Nakua, JT, Loveland, Warren, AJ Brown, Chase Brown, Jefferson, Pickens, McMillan, Tootin' and Judkins, mine was Gibbs, Puka, Bowers, Chase, Bijan, Jenty, Hampton, Loveland, JSN, Lamb, Love, JT and then the second round was A-Chan, Brees, Walker, Jefferson, Neighbors, Trey McBride, Amin Ra, Warren, CMC, AJ Brown, Garrett Wilson, Chase Brown we didn't even talk about Chase Brown but we both have him sticking around the second round for a guy who doesn't have like that great long view profile he's going to be good enough next year he's going to stick around in the second round yeah and I mean
Speaker 2you got to go so I can just cheat and throw out something you can't respond to which is that your Chase Brown versus Devon A-Chan is way off all right thank the listeners Ben give us the spot to find the Stealing Signals book it is fantastic how do they get it
Speaker 1how's the storefront look there's there's two storefronts one is gretchy.gumroad.com/lori/stealingsignals man I have no idea the other one is uh at lemon squeezy I mean I don't you gotta you gotta you gotta go to like my social media or something um I should know that I should know I should be able to tell you Sean but you know what I can I can pull it up I'm gonna pull it up because it's important I don't know about the Gumroad one if that's an l or an i but I can tell you that it's bengretch.lemonsqueezy s-q-u-e-e-z-y dot com slash checkout bengretch.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout is a place you can
Speaker 2definitely get it that's the book it's the best thing you'll read about fantasy football make sure you get that the zero rb candidates countdown is up at motoviz we love you guys talk to you soon bye
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