Late-Round Perspectives: Ryan Heath

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Ryan Heath is the lead data writer at fantasypoints.com, who has a background in marketing and economics. He's a New Englander who may or may not be a Patriots fan, he's an avid gamer, and being up north, he's a skier too. These are his late-round perspectives.

It's cool to see some young blood, some fresh blood in there, man. I celebrated my birthday yesterday, and I'm at the age now where I don't necessarily look forward to getting another year older, because it's just, I feel the age now. I look at the number and I'm like, man, this is bizarre. And then I realize that I'm just torturing myself by having you on Late-Round Perspectives today on the opposite side of the spectrum, where you're still hanging out, man. You get to celebrate all those birthdays. You don't have to worry about getting another year older. But it's great to have you on, man. I'm really, really excited to chop it up. Like a lot of the data folks that I've had on over the last year or so, whether it's Dwayne McFarland or whomever, sometimes the show sheet that I send, we go in a lot of different directions. So hopefully you're cool with that.

Ryan Heath (1:20)

Yeah, no, of course, whatever you end up wanting to talk about. But yeah, happy birthday.

I do feel you on the age thing, though. Like I'm 25 right now. It's getting to the point where I'm close to like calling NFL players that are the same age as me. Like, oh, they're getting close. I don't know, a couple more years in their primes. Like it's really going to hit once I'm like 28, 29 And I'm start saying like, oh, well, this running back, he's about to hit the age cliff just like me, apparently, because we're the same age.

JJ Zachariason (1:54)

Trust me, trust me. It only gets stranger. You know, I'm writing the prospect guide right now. And I turned 37 yesterday and I'm writing the prospect guide and I'm like calling Trey Harris old for being a wide receiver prospect. He's 23 I mean, the dude is like, yeah, when I was 23, I felt invincible. Like nothing, nothing. Now I get the stomach flu earlier this week and over the weekend and I'm just down for days. I can't even recover normally. So yeah, man. I mean, it's definitely a nice little wake up call. So I look, I feel you with the 25 thing, but give me a break.

Ryan Heath (2:32)

You're 25 I guess it's not so bad. Yeah. I'll put, definitely puts an in perspective. Yeah. Yeah.

JJ Zachariason (2:38)

Right. Look, I like to open up with guests, especially folks who I haven't like talked to one on one, like this before, talk to me about you. And again, how you're you're doing what you're doing right now. You've been crushing it. Like I said, lots of awesome content. I love to consume it, whether it's your tweets or some of your articles and stuff over on Fantasy Points. So talk to us about your background a little bit and what got you into Fantasy Football and how you now are with Fantasy Points doing the work that you're doing.

Ryan Heath (3:06)

Yes. So kind of how I first got into Fantasy Football was just having a league with a bunch of my high school buddies. Yeah, I was probably like 15 or 16 when I first kind of really started getting into it. And how I guess first kind of get into fantasy content and writing and all of that was, I don't know if high school still do this. They probably should. But my senior year of high school, I had to do basically a senior project. So what they would say was you have to learn a new skill or spend a certain number of hours on something you've never done before. And my senior project was I wrote a very bad blog of doing waiver wire picks in this would have been 2017, 2018 around there. So I was just posting them to the fantasy football subreddit, had a lot of fun with it, got decent responses. Again, guys, please don't Google this. They're really bad. I don't want anyone reading that stuff. But yeah, I just kind of fell in love with it, and it took off from there. Really, after I graduated college with like a marketing and economics degree, I was like, you know what, this stuff is fine. Like I can work like a normal kind of desk job like this, and it's okay. But I really like the fantasy football stuff. Let me actually make it a priority to put time into it and start taking it seriously and see kind of how far I can bring this. And eventually, my work got in front of Scott Barrett, and it kind of went from there. Like he really took me under his wing, made me a much, much better writer than I ever was before. And yeah, over at Fantasy Points, they basically needed content and promotion and just like breakdowns of a lot of the new stats that they were creating like through the Fantasy Points data suite.