Late-Round Perspectives: Andrew Erickson

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Andrew Erickson is a fantasy football analyst at FantasyPros, who previously worked for Pro Football Focus. He's a Patriots fan, he loves betting unders, he's a karaoke king, and according to his co-host, he's never met an espresso martini that he didn't love. These are his late-round perspectives.

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Andrew Erickson (1:12)

Why is it called the cold open anyway? I wish it was called something different, to be honest, because I like the idea of like you hop in, you just kind of start shooting from the hip. Kind of like how I do a lot of my fantasy rigging sometimes when you have these ambiguous backfields where you're not really sure what you're doing with them.

We get these BS reports about so-and-so is going to be the starter and then they're not the starter, so...

JJ Zachariason (1:34)

A quick Google search says a cold open is called that because it throws the audience directly into the action without any warm-up such as an opening credit sequence or introduction. So it's the most intuitive reason imaginable as to why it's called a cold open.

Andrew Erickson (1:48)

Yeah, so it does actually kind of make sense. It makes a lot of sense.

JJ Zachariason (1:55)

I was thinking every time someone hops on, I say this every week, but I'm like, okay, let's think about like you guys, you're going to talk about your background a little bit. And I'm going to think about when we've crossed paths and stuff like that. I mean, I think we met a really long time ago like in Vegas, didn't we? I remember you sitting at a bar at one point at a Vegas FSGA. And I met you, I remember meeting you. And I think Ratcliffe was with us. And it was just a brief conversation when I first originally like, had met you IRL. But I realized also, like, I mean, look, I've been in this space for a while. Like it's to the point where I've gone from being the young guy to the unc, as the kids say.

I'm unc now, right? Isn't that what Zoomers say these days? But you've been around for a minute too, despite you being younger than the unc on this today show.

Andrew Erickson (2:45)

Yeah, I don't feel like that, though. I feel like I could still, you know, hang out with the kids, as I like to say. But I am 31 now, so it's really not the case anymore. And I guess I have been, you know, I don't know how many years I've been doing this full time. I think, what, this is my third year at FantasyPros, after I spent three years at PFF full time. And before that, it was like freelancing several different places and trying to kind of find my way in the industry. It feels good that I'm viewed in that capacity, where it's like, you know, I have clout now. Like, is this a good thing?

JJ Zachariason (3:25)

I mean, look, you've been around.

Here's the dirty little secret, though. People listen to this show, you know, and they might be in their early 20s or something like that. And they're like, oh, JJ's, you know, he's got a family. He's got kids like he's a dad and like, you know, all that. Trust me, guys, I feel no different today, really, than I did. The only difference between I feel today versus when I was like 23, 24 years old is that, yeah, I think that I'm more mature and like I have like a different world view and stuff like that. But like, it's just like recovering from like drinking alcohol and exercising, you know, like it's just that kind of stuff is just a little bit different. I don't really feel that old, you know, it's not really that different. But, you know, I'm a monk. You're almost a monk at this point.

Andrew Erickson (4:07)

Yeah, no, I can definitely co-sign on the recovery thing, though. Like the minute that I turned 30, it was like my body took so much longer to recover from workouts I can't even do half the workouts I used to do in my early 20s when I was just doing absolute insane things on very, very little sleep, a lot of caffeine, and I don't know how I was able to function at like a normal level based on what I was actually doing on a day-to-day basis. If I told someone like, oh yeah, this is like what I do, like I sleep like four to five hours, drink a ton of pre-workout, work out all the time, seven days a week. I can't even go exercise like lifting weights probably back-to-back days. I need at least like a couple of days in between.