Late-Round Perspectives: Andy Behrens

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Andy Behrens is an analyst at Yahoo Fantasy and the president of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association. He's a dad, he's a novelist, he has an amazing collection of loud shirts, and he loves Iowa football more than you do. These are his late-round perspectives.

Well, you have the honor of getting the Perspectives episode the one week of each season where you get sick, you know? Like every fantasy analyst has one week where they're borderline deathly ill, but they have to still do content, right? It's how it goes, how it goes. But this is my promotion for people to view some of the clips on my YouTube channel, is that I have conjunctivitis in both eyes right now, and so you can go view that over on the Late-Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel.

Andy Behrens (0:58)

Oh man, good for you, not wearing like welders goggles or anything like that.

JJ Zachariason (1:01)

I did that, so that's the thing, on Living the Stream earlier this week on Tuesday, I wore sunglasses during the episode because I was so embarrassed. Like this right now is, and then later that night with my patrons, I had a live stream and I saw, I was literally like covering my eyes throughout the live stream because I was so embarrassed by how just deathly I looked. But it's one of those things where it looks worse than it actually feels.

Andy Behrens (1:26)

I'll try to carry us.

JJ Zachariason (1:29)

Yeah, I'm gonna need you. And you're the true pro here, man. I mean, you've been doing this for so long.

You've been with Yahoo for a really long time now. I wish that, you know, I listen to other podcasts and stuff. I'm guilty of being someone who loves Armchair Expert by Dax Shepard, his show. And the beauty of like having celebrities on shows, this isn't to say that you're not a celebrity, Andy, because we've all seen you in the Yahoo, you know, draft room whenever we enter that room.

Andy Behrens (1:59)

Quite right.

JJ Zachariason (2:00)

Fantasy analysts don't have Wikipedia pages, man.

Andy Behrens (2:02)

Right.

JJ Zachariason (2:03)

We don't have the Wikipedia page to like understand each other's backgrounds and to see where we came from. We have LinkedIn, I guess that kind of sort of counts, but it's, you know, it's not giving you like this detailed information on our lives. And it probably incorrect a lot of times too. But you've been around. I mean, you've started at Yahoo, I think in what, 2007?

But I'm really curious as to sort of what your background is, how you got to that spot and how you're still thriving and crushing it today.

Andy Behrens (2:32)

Yeah, so pre-Yahoo, I had been more of a mainstream sports writer. I was kind of like, feel like I was kind of a ground floor, you know, journalism was just venturing out online, like 1999, 2000, 2001 That's when I started to do a lot of freelancing around, at first, just sort of around Chicago, like mostly print publications, but also a little bit of online stuff.

And pretty quickly got picked up, you know, like it was much easier to get jobs like in online journalism, which now is just journalism back then, right? So like it wasn't that long before I was producing some sports content for ESPN.

And, you know, the old viewers out there will remember page two, page three. I was writing features for those sites, you know, once every couple of weeks. I was part of some really fun email chains. It was a great environment at ESPN back then. And I was doing that for a while. And then I dabbled a little bit on the fantasy baseball pages there. And I was like, I think I was the Montreal Expos correspondent for Eric Carabelle for a little while.

And then one of my older friends in one of my oldest friends in the fantasy industry is Chris Harris, one of my absolute best friends. And he had, I hope I have the details of this right. He had won the Talented Mr. Roto Open Pen Contest, which was just a way to get cheap labor for Talented Mr. Roto. Like, kudos to them, right?

Where they like, you know, you win their contest and then you get to write a piece of recurring content for, you know, that either appears on their site or appears elsewhere. And I believe what they assigned Chris was something for Sports Illustrated that was covering fantasy basketball. It was like a particular contest that the NBA had devised. And like, Chris was going to have to write fantasy basketball. And he was like, please help. I have no idea what I'm doing.