Late-Round Perspectives: Heath Cummings

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Heath Cummings is a fantasy sports writer for CBS Sports, and he's an analyst on fantasy football today. He was once a writer at Football Guys, too. He's a family man, a fortunate Chiefs fan, and he's a nerd for not just dynasty fantasy football, but beer as well. These are his late-round perspectives.

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Now back to the show.

I was thinking about this earlier today, and I was like, you and I have talked and been a part of this space for like, I don't know, it seems like over a decade at this point.

Heath Cummings (1:23)

More than a decade. I think if I remember right, you were at Numberfire, and I was trying to kind of break in. I'd been a game recapper for football guys, and you and I had some conversations probably 13, 14 years ago before I started at CBS.

JJ Zachariason (1:39)

Yeah, it's crazy. And I don't know if we've done, have we done a show together?

Heath Cummings (1:44)

I don't think so, which is kind of really weird.

JJ Zachariason (1:46)

Yeah, yeah. Cause it's like, it's not like we've talked so like, like, you know, throughout the years on Twitter and whether DM or whatever, like for a while now. And it's cool to finally be able to sit down and talk shop a little bit, man.

Heath Cummings (1:58)

Absolutely, yeah. People probably thought we had some feud where we refused to talk to each other in public, but there was no feud. We're all good.

JJ Zachariason (2:06)

We can squash any beef that people think exists. Just know that there has not been any at all. I'm having you on at a time where things are pretty crazy in the NFL, where we have the NFL draft coming up. We will talk about that a little bit. Free agency is happening. And right before you hopped on, we learned that Desmond Ritter was traded to Arizona, and Rondell Moore is now on Atlanta, which means to me, a guy that wasn't even involved in that deal that I'm most excited about is probably Greg Dortch, because now all of a sudden he might have a real staple role. And we've seen him throughout his time there have some random blow up weeks or some random usable weeks.

But I do wanna talk about both those things, prospecting and free agency. Let's start talking about the prospecting side first.

I'm curious Heath, how you sort of approach your rookie evaluation. I know you're doing a lot of great stuff on the dynasty side now with CBS. So what's sort of your approach like when it comes to evaluating these rookies?

Heath Cummings (3:07)

I really try to take sort of a wisdom of the crowd approach, but not in like, give me the consensus rankings, I want that. But more like there's so many smart people doing so much good work. I want to hear what all of them have to say. I said before, I started a football guys.

So I've been a Matt Waldman fan for as long as I can remember. Like in his draft guide comes out, I get really excited. When you tweet about the model says this about this guy, or when I see one of your takes, I want to take that into account. When Matt Harmon's talking about wide receivers, I want to see what he's saying about those guys. And then like from that type of starting point, I probably am of the opinion that like as a fantasy industry, we've gone a little bit too far away from production. Like I do think it still matters. If there's a tiebreaker, I'd like to lean towards the guy who's actually shown us the ability to produce at an elite level, at whatever level he was playing at.

And then, you know, I do watch some film. I definitely look at the advanced stuff and lean a lot on Jacob Gibbs, who's on the FFG dynasty quite often for that.