Follow The Money | August 18, 2026 | Hour 2

**Robert Walker** (0:02)
That's what I always say, you always follow the money.

**Phil Steele** (0:04)
This is Follow The Money with Mitch Moss and Pauly Howard on VSiN.

**Mitch Moss** (0:11)
Busy hour coming up as we're live in Vegas, Circuit Resort and Casino, Mitch Moss, Pauly Howard. We're gonna go inside our pizzeria with your long shot bets coming up in 45 minutes. Some good sound, strong sound by the way, on dark horses in college football and a quarterback battle that evidently is not even close. Pauly, we were just talking about this with Paul Ciarci and what to do with the Jordan Tyson injury with the Saints. And Ciarci said, Joann Johnson had a monster year last year. He's gonna get a ton of targets. He was third overall in receiving yards by a tight end in the entire league a year ago. So I said, well, Caesars has 30 to one. They offer that market. Well, thanks to Mark, he hit me up on Instagram, Mitch Moss there.
Fan duel has Joann Johnson 75 to one. Kind of a big deal.

**Pauly Howard** (0:58)
Yeah, yeah.

**Mitch Moss** (0:59)
That is absolutely worth plunking some change down on.

**Pauly Howard** (1:02)
Yeah, that's excellent. And a good observation he made as well. He also said off air, the best time to do your draft if you can, because all these injuries and with the news is right around Labor Day weekend.
And that's coming from a Hall of Famer. So I think that makes sense as well. How many are you going to do?

**Mitch Moss** (1:23)
I'm cutting back.

**Pauly Howard** (1:24)
Are you?

**Mitch Moss** (1:24)
I'm cutting back for various reasons, but I'll probably still be in four or five, I think. And all of mine are basically the week of, Labor Day or week one of the NFL. I do know that the hardcore nuts, and I say that in a complimentary way, they like to draft a lot like in July and early August, because they like to get ahead of these moves with the average draft positions and everything like that.
I'm not in enough leagues. I mean, I was before, but I'm not going to be this year. I want the news of who's going to be healthy and who's not going to be healthy. So I like waiting until the very end. I don't want to draft. And then all of a sudden, I have four guys on the same team that are just, oh, they're going to be gone for the next three weeks.

**Pauly Howard** (2:01)
Oh God, going back in time, there was Michael Vick, Jamal Anderson. You had the Emmett Smith holdout.
There was just one after a number where there were big injuries happening in camp or in the preseason that was devastating for fantasy. They're in that stretch. You retired playing. I did, yeah. Yeah, I'm sick of it.

**Mitch Moss** (2:22)
Do you miss it at all?

**Pauly Howard** (2:23)
No.

**Mitch Moss** (2:23)
No, you don't?

**Pauly Howard** (2:24)
No, not with this now, not with the player props and what's going on with sports betting everywhere now, too. It's changed things.

**Mitch Moss** (2:33)
I still enjoy it to the point of where I have to play because I do get that much excitement out of it. But I will tell you that the randomness makes it a little, I don't like it, you know, and I bring this up, I think, every single year. True story, good friend of mine was in a league many, many years ago. He did not even draft his team, it was an auto draft team. And he forgot that he was actually in the league. He got a call the week of the championship. So late in the year, oh, hey, you're in the title game. He's like, what are you talking about? He goes, yeah, we did this draft back in whatever, it was July. He's like, you weren't there for it at auto draft and you made the title game. He's like, what? Are you kidding me? Now that's one example of 100 million leagues or whatever. But that's the kind of craziness that can happen in fantasy football, and it kills me. And the injuries bother me.
If you want to go in big and play for high stakes sometimes, it's like, I've had that idea and I play for a decent amount, but the idea of really going like high stakes, I know it's going to happen. I think I'm going to have, because I'm pretty confident that I can get a team in the playoffs, like no matter where I'm going to be drafting.
But when I have the three injuries that are coming at some point, it drives me nuts. And then the stink bombs that come out of nowhere. There was a year when I was, oh, I had the best team I've ever assembled. It was 14-0, undefeated going to the title week. And I was playing a guy that barely snuck into the playoffs, and he had a horrible draft, and credit to him, he put together a team with the waiver wire every single week. And he beat me, because Philip Lindsay, I believe, for the Broncos, did nothing on that Monday night game against the Raiders. And that's how I lost by like four or five points. So I went from having the one and only time I can ever say that I would have been undefeated in fantasy football to losing in the title game at 14 to one. No joke, this is, no, it was after an ankle surgery that I had, but I wasn't feeling so hot like that night. And I said, Lorraine, we might want to go to the quick care real quick. Had the blood pressure check. That was like 168 over 130 I'm like, yeah, I need to dial it back a little bit here.