Becoming a Best Ball Bro: A Weekly Winners Strategy?

Rich Ryan (0:00)

Hey, JJ, did you hear about American cyclist, Kristen Faulkner?

JJ Zachariason (0:04)

I saw clips, I saw the clip of her passing everybody. I don't know the full, full backstory, aside from the fact that she shouldn't have been there or something, I did see it though.

Rich Ryan (0:14)

Yeah, so she was just in finance five years ago, and then in the morning, she was like, I'm just gonna take up cycling as a thing to do. And fast forward five years, she's in Paris. She is a substitute for the Americans, so she wasn't supposed to be in the race, and then she just wins gold. So it got me to thinking, if there's any obscure events that I can just start getting ready for here in LA in 2028, and I went through the list, but unfortunately, the IOC does not have being overweight on tie-run tracing.

JJ Zachariason (0:47)

I'm JJ, and I've been playing in best ball leagues for years, but there are people out there who play a lot more than I do, and there are people out there who have won a lot more than I have, and I want to learn from them. This season, I'll be documenting my journey of Max entering Underdog's best ball mania contest, and I'll be doing so with guidance from some of the most successful best ball players on the planet. This is the year where things start to change. This is the year where I officially become a best ball bro. Welcome in to another episode of Becoming a Best Ball Bro. Only a handful of these things left. I'm JJ Zachariason, joined as always by Rich Ryan. Rich, what's going on, buddy?

Rich Ryan (1:35)

Doing good, man. All these camp reports keep coming hot and heavy. We're obviously gonna get into the Aiyuk news, but man, every day, I check these beat reporters, and I'm just crossing my fingers that we don't get any major injuries as we enter into the first week of preseason here. But yeah, it feels like, and I feel like we see this every year, but it feels like the news has been more hot and heavy this year than it ever has been.

JJ Zachariason (2:00)

Yeah, and I will be honest, I feel like the news hasn't favored my takes as much as I want it to favor my takes. Oh, no, yeah.

Rich Ryan (2:08)

Pour one out for Deandre. Pour one out for Kamani Vidal's career is over.

JJ Zachariason (2:12)

Yeah, yeah, right. I get more irritated, honestly, so like the news items happen, whatever. I get more irritated by not how I internalize that stuff because I usually just kind of can brush it off and not really let it impact my rankings and stuff like a dramatic amount. I just get really annoyed when other people start piling on and then making fun of you for liking a certain player because of what happened from a beat reporter. What a beat reporter sang in late July, early August.

I saw many, many tweets. So, Kamani Vidal got injured and he was playing behind Jared Patterson the one day and I've been someone who liked Vidal, but I don't like Kamani Vidal because he's simply in that backfield, which I think is the default for some people or some of the adversaries who say you only like him because of that. I thought he was a good prospect. Go back and listen to Late-Round Prospectives with Matt Waldman. Both of us were really into Vidal. We were talking about him and we both had these DeAndre Swift type comps for him. I liked him as a player and then he landed in a good spot. So that combination, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to like this dude. But what annoys me most is when people go to Twitter and they say things like, imagine liking Kamani Vidal after the fact or after a beat report. It's like, why are you doing this? All you're doing is alienating 50 percent of your audience right now and making them annoyed at you. That's the thing that annoys me with that stuff.

Rich Ryan (3:37)

Yeah, people love, first of all, Twitter is such a cynical place that anytime any news comes out, people are going to go for the joke in that aspect.

And it's pretty clear with Vidal why we like the player. It wasn't just that three-headed backfield, but you guys were in love with the player. And what it was is opportunity was the accelerant for liking the player. It wasn't the basis of it.

JJ Zachariason (4:08)

Yeah, right. And I think with a lot of day three, and this isn't even me saying I'm pivoting off of Vidal. I'm still okay with him. But the thing with any of those players is that you can go out and say, draft him, draft him, draft him. I really like him, I really like him, I really like him. But everyone who listens to that kind of advice, and this goes for any advice that I give, ground yourself with what that really means. It means that at cost, we like this player. And if you look at day three running back hit rates, they're not very strong. We shouldn't expect the world from the dude. Chances are, Kamani Vidal will not do much at all in fantasy football in 2024 from an odds perspective. But we're also layering on cost and ADP, and that's when a player becomes a little bit more attractive. So yeah, I mean, the news stuff this time of year, to me, is more, I get more annoyed by how people interpret it rather than what the news item itself is, like what the beat reporters are saying. They're just doing their job and injecting their own opinion.