The Show: Kyle Pitts Tilt, Pass Funnel Defenses, and More

**JJ Zachariason** (0:00)
You're about to listen to The Late-Round Fantasy Football Show, which originally aired yesterday on YouTube. If you'd like to catch it live, you can find it on The Late-Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel at 1 p.m. Eastern every Friday during this 2025 season. That's on youtube.com/atlateroundff. So without further ado, here's this week's episode.

**David Kitchell** (0:37)
Welcome in, everybody, to The Late-Round Fantasy Football Show. David Kitchell, alongside JJ Zachariason. And boy, what a day we have had. What a past 24 hours we've had, JJ, really.

**JJ Zachariason** (0:49)
I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, man.
I was in the middle of just an absolute tilt fest last night. Just an absolute tilt fest with that game, the way things went down. We'll talk about it in the news section. But you know what, this is fantasy football. This is what we come...

**David Kitchell** (1:10)
This is what you signed up for.

**JJ Zachariason** (1:11)
It's what we signed up for and what we've come to love. The one thing that always grounds me this time of year is to remember that only one team wins a fantasy championship. You know, when you're in a big tournament too, only one team is going to win that tournament. But man, it would be really nice in those best ball streets to be able to just have a team in the final, you know, and just be able to sweat some of that.

**David Kitchell** (1:31)
Yeah, it would be nice to, like, I was trying to explain this to my home league, you know, where they're normies. We're just trying to explain to them, like, best ball, like, hey, you spend the whole summer drafting these teams and talking about things. And literally the Thursday night game, the first day of week 15, and you just feel like, oh, I'm dead. Yeah, I'm dead. My team's dead.

**JJ Zachariason** (1:55)
It's toast.

**David Kitchell** (1:56)
It's toast. So, tough.

**JJ Zachariason** (1:59)
I mean, it is, it is, you know, it's one of those things too, where you sort of forget what you signed up for. I was having this conversation with you earlier today, where you're like, okay, I advanced a lot. You know, I had, I advanced 47 for those of you who didn't see on Twitter. Like, I had, I advanced 47 of my 150 Middle-E teams when expectations 25, right? So I had a good advance rate for these millionaire maker teams. And so when you see that, you're like, oh, well, certainly things will go well, but you have to remember the way that these are all situated and set up is that you're merely increasing your odds. It's not a guarantee that things will go a certain way. And unfortunately, only three of those 47 had Kyle Pitts.
So, you know, which is not as bad as it could have been, because I've seen others in the space who have 40 plus teams that had no Kyle Pitts. You know, it could have been really, really bad. But yeah, I mean, I wish I had like six Kyle Pitts teams. That would be nice.

**David Kitchell** (3:02)
Yeah, of course. But I mean, one of the reasons why you don't have any Kyle Pitts teams is because he wasn't that great during the season.

**JJ Zachariason** (3:09)
He was just fine. You know, he was a fine pick. He wasn't an amazing pick. And, you know, we can obviously talk about this when we when we recap Thursday Night Football, but one of the toughest parts for me and why I was personally tilting is that, like, I try to, like, when I tilt, it's usually when I have, like, deep thought about stuff. It's not just like, oh, I'm facing Kyle Pitts and this sucks, you know, just period. It's more so like I think about the extension of why Kyle Pitts is doing what he's doing. And a big piece of that is Drake London being sidelined. And guess who has a lot of Drake London across all of my leagues and best ball leagues and touted him as someone to target in the draft guide. And it was looking great. He was looking like a league winning type wide receiver before that injury. And he goes down and Kyle Pitts, now I can look at the data again when we talk about the news, but Kyle Pitts has seen an uptick in work with Drake London sidelined. And it's just sort of like his double whammy, just a gut punch where, you know, you're excited about Drake London and weak whatever 11, you know, and things are trending in such the right direction. And then all of a sudden, you know, he goes down and fantasy football happens. And then Kyle Pitts puts together one of the greatest tight end performances in the history of fantasy football, period. I mean, the best in our history since we've started playing. And that's just that's just how it goes sometimes, man.