Late-Round Perspectives: Anthony Amico

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Anthony Amico is a fantasy football analyst who does dynasty content for Establish the Run and projections for football guys. He's a math teacher, a high school defensive coordinator, and there may not be anyone else on earth who likes to bet the NFL draft more. These are his late-round perspectives.

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Now back to the show.

Anthony Amico (1:10)

We DM-ing stuff a little bit sometimes about prospects, but it's nice to see you in the flesh and talk this out.

JJ Zachariason (1:15)

Yeah, man. Yeah, I know that you love betting the draft probably more than anyone else that I see on Twitter.

Are you, like, are you in a phase, because you do it more than I do, are you in a phase where, like, the things that you're hearing, are you reacting to it strongly, or do you think that we're still in a noise phase? We're recording this on Tuesday, for anyone listening. We're recording this on Tuesday, so we still have 48 hours until, a little over 48 hours until the draft.

Anthony Amico (1:42)

Yeah, I think this is where some of that smoke starts to become fire. Like, I think it's a little more legit the week of the draft, so I'm definitely paying attention. And I mean, most of the positions are in, so we're kinda, we're hoping for confirmation bias, and then hoping to react on anything that maybe doesn't go our way.

JJ Zachariason (1:59)

Yeah, yeah. It feels like the whole draft is coming down to how teams view JJ McCarthy, like at the end of the day. Is that right? Or do you think that he's gonna jump like a Drake Maye or Jaden Daniels somehow?

Anthony Amico (2:13)

I mean, I still think he could go two.

Like, I just, I feel like, I don't know, like a 21-year-old guy with good advanced numbers and like won a national championship. Like, is he really gonna be out of it? Like, I don't know. Like, I just, so.

JJ Zachariason (2:30)

I feel weird about that too. I know that we're not really, I've sent Anthony a show sheet and everything and we'll get to all that kind of stuff. But like the McCarthy thing is strange to me because it doesn't feel like he has that bad of a profile. Like, I think that there's like this contingent that just assumes that he's terrible because they didn't throw the ball that much. But if you think about like what a front office would want, he has like the raw skills, like the physical, the physique, the build, the age is on his side. And I guarantee you the dude interviews well, right? Like he's like a football guy.

So is that sort of like the perspective that you're coming from with the potential of JJ McCarthy going top two or top three?

Anthony Amico (3:12)

Yeah, it's just like a super easy sell. I mean, this is like a guy, like the report came out like last week that he was like calling recruits and being like, if you want to party, don't come to Michigan because we're trying to win the title. And I'm like, how do you not love that?

JJ Zachariason (3:25)

Right, right. Yeah, like as a football guy, I mean, as like a normal human being, like, okay, that's different. But as like a football guy running a football team, that's exactly what you want to hear is that kind of thing, right? Definitely.

Anyway, so like you said, you and I, we've DM'd like a lot through the years, especially like early on in my prospect model building and stuff like that, you were kind of doing the same sort of things and messing around with numbers and stuff like that.

And you were someone that I would go to a lot and seeing if you tested this, if you looked at this. And I remember this is gonna date ourselves a little bit because it's a well-known metric at this point, but yards per team pass attempt. That was one of the big aha moments for me with wide receiver evaluation. That was something that you had introduced me to. I remember talking about it on the show a little bit. This is probably in 2019 But I'm curious if anything's changed on your end with your prospecting, the way that you handle all that. And let everyone else know sort of how you go about the scouting process.