Late-Round Perspectives: Rich Hribar

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Rich Hribar is a fantasy football analyst for sharpfootballanalysis.com. He's the king of providing context with data, some may call him the Swami of Konami, he's got the best worksheets around, and he actually looks nothing like Zach Morris. These are his late round perspectives.

I was starting these shows, man, with a little bit of background. You and I have been buddies for a while now. I know your background pretty intimately, obviously, more than just your career at this point, but you're, to me, obviously, you're a sounding board for me. You and I go back and forth, literally, I don't think this is an exaggeration. It's literally every day of our lives, talking ball and stuff and just talking fantasy. Yeah, I mean, pretty much. But I think that you're the best in the business at finding data nuggets, data trends.

You do that so well with your worksheet column that you've been doing for years now. What do you think? And I know that you're going to have to pat yourself on the back a little bit here, and you're not one to really enjoy doing that. But what do you think gives you an edge in finding the information that you find?

Rich Hribar (1:18)

It's funny, the first thing that comes to my mind is not patting myself on the back. It's asking why do I hate myself to this degree?

And put myself through this, because the one thing that definitely I do take a tremendous amount of pride in with something like the worksheet that I've actually been doing over a decade now, which, oh my goodness, it feels so crazy to think about. We've been doing this over 10 years of our lives at this point.

But there's been other columns, Evan's match-ups column being kind of the highlight of the industry. Obviously, we had the great primer from Tags, Rest in Peace Tags, We Miss You.

Now Derek's taken over that. We have these other match-ups columns in the industry that make me want to raise my game, and mine comes out first. Mine comes out before everyone else's. So I don't have any outside influence. I'm not saying that those people read mine and go into theirs either, but I take pride that, hey, here it is. Out front early, it's ahead of all these other big ticket items you get.

But I've had the benefit of doing it for so long that I've been able to kind of, you know, a lot of experience in streamlining, understanding what I'm looking for. I have a pretty hard process Monday and Tuesday, literally Monday, I pull everything, like you see in like the bullet points for the worksheet. And I have like a process where I update specific files and kind of go through, and I know exactly kind of what I'm looking for from like a team stuff, because that's like more of like your team package. You don't really get any player stuff like up in those bullet points on the worksheet, but I'm giving you, you know, several bullet points per game that impact the game that are important and relevant to the game on a team level that you can kind of have there. And then I start doing my player stuff on Tuesdays and writing up literally games on Tuesdays. I do actually start writing up the games a little bit on Monday night, overnight, and then just dive into it like real head first on Tuesdays. But it really is just the amount of just effort and put forth and just having a streamlined process of, and then I also have the benefit, I have access to literally the best information that we have available, you know. We've always had like PFR, you know, subs and everyone, I think everyone should actually have a PFR sub and donate to their website. I think it's actually something that people should prock that product up. And then obviously, you know, we've had things like Pro Football Focus come along the way and be able to get behind the doors there. Now I have TrueMedia access, which is like literally being plugged into the matrix.

So much stuff that I've uncovered over the last two years and I feel like I've only using like five to 10% of it, like maybe not even like hardly any of it that you can get access to. So all of those things kind of come in together, but yeah, I mean, it's been a fun ride. I'm really happy that people still enjoy the column. I try to make it bigger and better every year, but yeah, it's good, man. It's crazy how old we are at this point.