Jakob Sanderson's 5 Favorite Fantasy Football Picks

**Hayden** (0:17)
It's all good. You guys know Jakob from the WaverWire show. You guys know him from all the writing he does. One of the best analysts in the game, honored to have his five guys that he can't stop drafting over on best ball. This also is gonna matter over at Yahoo as well.
The first name, we disagree, and it's in the top of what, 10 or so picks. Ashton Gentry, tell me why you're on him.

**Jakob Sanderson** (0:40)
This is probably my biggest stand in the first round. He currently goes right at the one-two turn. I have him ranked eighth overall in my best ball rankings on both underdog and draft kings, which you can find over on Thinking About Thinking.
Largely, this just comes down to the fact that I think of all of the running backs going after those very consensus top four. He is the one guy that I'm most confident in having just an all around, every single box checked part of the role in terms of, I see a pathway for him to get a ton of receptions, I see a pathway for him to get a ton of carries, and I don't see any sort of backfield competition on him for goal line work. Probably, I'm guessing the area of biggest disagreement from you, because I know you've been a little bit lower on him this year, is just what is the touchdown upside on the Las Vegas Raiders.
I think that's where I'm putting a lot of faith in Kubiak, and I'm putting a decent chunk of faith in the combination of Cousins and Mendoza to at least reach competence, and I'm putting faith in an improved personnel and health on the offensive line. Like for me, looking at last year, I also thought the Raiders would be more competent than they ended up being. I didn't know that Chip Kelly was going to be calling out plays that weren't in the play sheet from the box. I think Kubiak is going to be a little bit more locked in than Kelly and Carroll come anywhere. There's no longer a nepotism factory running the offensive line. And I also think they had basically two offensive linemen that to me were worth a crap on their team last year. One of them was playing out of position all year and got hurt. The other one also got hurt basically immediately. So hopefully we get Miller, JPJ back healthy. Linderbaum is going to be a massive addition to the interior of the offensive line, even if he was probably way overpaid.
He's going to still be easily better than anyone that was playing in their interior last year. And so I think it's going to be reasonably functional. And with that, I'm just banking on like 300 carries and 80 targets for Ash and Gentie in a Clint Kubiak design run game that I expect to be pretty darn competent.

**Hayden** (2:46)
Yeah. And that was a flawless argument. I really can't like nitpick any of that stuff. Like to me, it is just the like upside for touchdowns like Saquon Barkley can have a similar season. I do think that the differentiator is just the receptions versus Saquon, Derek Henry, those types out there. And then Devon Aitchin, James Cook, Kenneth Walker.
I would guess that they're going to have fewer all-around touches. And like those are the guys that he's competing with. So like he's one of the highest floor backs there is because like, I mean, Mike Washington is not going to get in there and get too involved. Like the touches are going to be there. I think he's around one, two turn pick. To me, I was like, could Saquon have like the Saquon season? I mean, like maybe that percentile outcome is probably just a gear that Genti can't hit right now, unless I'm like really low on what his actual skill set is. I thought he was like fine as a rookie, but I did not see like this is Bijon Robinson. This is Jamir Gibbs. You know, this is Saquon Barkley. I see more like this is Josh Jacobs, like totally fine.
Hopefully, he's more than that. Obviously, like this is a range of outcomes things and there very well could be a case that he's much better than the Josh Jacobs tier that I'm that I kind of had him in based off of his first year in the league.

**Jakob Sanderson** (3:58)
I think there's a little more juice there.
I thought he was better than his numbers showed. Like consistently, I felt like when I would watch Raiders games, which wasn't very fun, I always I always came away thinking like, man, like Gentie looks pretty good. Jenny looks pretty good. And then I'd look up, it's 12 carries for 31 yards. And I thought a lot of that was just him getting met in the backfield immediately. Most of the times that I thought he had poor runs where he was causing his own inefficiency, I thought it was fixable errors. I thought it was him knowing he was in this crappy situation, trying to do too much, making too many risky decisions. I feel like that stuff is pretty common with rookie running backs generally, especially ones who I think understand that they kind of have to take big home run swings because grinding out three yards at a time, going the way the play is designed just isn't going to be effective. So I give him a lot of grace from his rookie season. I don't know that he'll ever have the breakaway type of runs that you see out of a Saquon Barkley out of a Jameer Gibbs. He was still a guy that was top 15, missed tackles force for attempt. I thought that was his calling card as a prospect. I still thought that showed up consistently week to week. So I think he is somewhere in between the Josh Jacobs tier and the Jameer Gibbs tier from a talent perspective.