The Show: Deep Sleepers, Rookie Wide Receiver Hype, and More

**JJ Zachariason** (0:00)
You're about to listen to The Late-Round Fantasy Football Show, which originally aired on YouTube. If you'd like to catch the show live this offseason, you can head to the Late-Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel, youtube.com/atlate-roundff. We'll be live each Wednesday at noon Eastern. Without further ado, here's this week's episode.

**David Kitchen** (0:30)
Welcome in, welcome in. It's the Late-Round Fantasy Football Show sponsored by DraftKings. David Kitchen here alongside my quant, JJ Zachariason. JJ, how are you doing today?

**JJ Zachariason** (0:43)
I'm good. I'm fired up, man.
We're peak fantasy football draft season.
And this is the time of year where, in July, I'm not hearing much from people in terms of feedback, of rankings, or how I feel about players. But this is the time of year where people start to test me, if you will. Not in a character way. I mean, in like, why are you so high on this guy? You're wrong about this. Explain why you feel this way. And I love that part of this game, because I do think that there are, there continue to be some like, general, and in my opinion, this is my opinion, of course, flawed way of looking at fantasy football, right? There was a big discussion in the late round Discord today, because if you guys have been listening to any late round podcast episode for the last couple of weeks, maybe month, it seems like anytime I talk about, like, sort of like a boring, no upside type selection, I just seem to bring up Courtland Sutton. Courtland Sutton is always getting thrown under the bus. And I did it on Becoming a Best Ball Bro, where I think in best ball, Courtland Sutton is a little bit of a different type of case. But I don't know, like, number one, I think that still today, people are so best ball brained in the fantasy football space, where they don't recognize what is going on on season-long platforms, in home leagues, and 95% plus of this audience is listening for that type of analysis. Like, they want to know how they can beat their ESPN ADP, or the ESPN ADP. They want to know what their league mates might be doing when they're drafting on Yahoo, right? They want to know how to beat their rooms on those specific platforms, and best ball is totally different. I was tagged in a tweet right before we went on air, and someone was saying like, can you explain, because there was a tweet by our friend Pat Thorman about Bayshall Tutin and Bucky Irving, and someone was like, can you explain the Tutin, like why you would prefer Tutin over Irving given this information? And I was like, okay, I can go through that and I can explain it.
But if you look at ADP on these platforms, like Bucky Irving is going well ahead of Bayshall Tutin. Even though best ball is not doing that in season-long drafts and in the season-long format that we're all participating in right now, the majority of platforms and the majority of leagues will still see Bucky Irving get drafted ahead of Bayshall Tutin. And so just because it's going on in best ball in that way does not mean that it's going to go that way in your home league draft. In fact, there's a lot of instances where it won't. And so the Courtland-Sutton discussion got brought up today. And look, the bottom line, if I were to just really dumb this down into just a few sentences, the bottom line is that when I get into round five, round six, round seven, round eight of my fantasy drafts, I do not care. In most formats where you're starting one quarterback, two running backs, two or three wide outs, a tight end and a flex, I don't care about a player simply meeting expectation. I do not care if Courtland Sutton is drafted as the wide receiver 30 or 30, 30 to 35 and he finishes as the wide receiver 27 I don't care. It does not matter. That does not move the needle at all in fantasy football. And if you look at season long platforms, like ESPN right now is crazy, their ADP. Courtland Sutton is being drafted ahead of players like Parker Washington, Mike Evans, Jordan Tyson. I take all those guys easily, easily over Courtland Sutton. And it's not even close, you know? So my philosophy in fantasy football is that I am trying to win, right? And this is why, you know, to rant even more and hopefully people enjoy this and aren't going to just yell at me for seeming like I'm angry. I'm not angry. I'm passionate. This is passion, right?