We Changed Our Mind On These 12 Players

**Dave Kluge** (0:11)
Earlier this off season, I said Omarion Hampton was one of the best picks you could make in fantasy football drafts, but I have completely changed my stance on that. And today I'm joined by Jason Wood, and we are going to talk about other players that we have also changed our stances on. But Jason, let's start with Omarion Hampton because there was some buzzy stories going on earlier this week with some quotes from Mike McDaniel. So is that explicitly what changed your ranking on Omarion Hampton, or were there other things leading up to that as well?

**Jason Wood** (0:38)
Yeah, you know what, Dave, I think as I reflect on the Hampton situation, I think I broke my own cardinal rule, which is not to overreact to training camp news and developments. So just to take a peek behind the curtain for the listeners, I was right with you on being overweight Hampton. I think I had an RV7 really since like early February when I first started doing projections for the year. So I was on him early and was happy being out of consensus.
And then to your point, the news of McDaniel essentially saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, fantasy owners are going to be disappointed because I'm going to work all three and go the hot hand and they're all starters in my eyes. I think we all took that as like, okay, well, that's as explicit a warning across the bow as possible. And I just quickly went in and took about a percent and a half of his target share away, one rushing touchdown and a handful of carries. And that was enough to knock him down to, I think, RB 14 or 15 at the time.

**Dave Kluge** (1:43)
Oh, wow.

**Jason Wood** (1:44)
And then sort of after the initial reaction, I thought that feels a little severe. And I'm sure you've done this too. I went and looked around to see where McDaniel was with Coach Speak when he was in Miami. And as we, I think, all have come to realize now, he is a king of Coach Speak.
You know, there's a YouTube clip going around now of two years ago when he was talking about the Dolphins backfield and that he felt he had four starters. And he made very similar overtures of how they were all going to play and it was going to be impossible to project their workloads based on game script. And of course, we know how that went, Devon H.Hain was the top five running backs. So, long story long, I have moved Hampton back into the bottom of the RB1 tier, but that's still a fairly big departure from where I was going in all this.

**Dave Kluge** (2:28)
Yeah, and I think when I look at Hampton, it's not even that I like specifically moved him down. It's just that a lot of the players that I had ranked behind him, I have had reason to move up and then by default, Hampton kind of moves down. So I think, you know, we're starting with the Omar and Hampton thing because that is the buzzy trendy thing that everybody's talking about right now. But one of my rules is like when a head coach or an offensive coordinator comes out and specifically addresses fantasy managers like 99 times out of 100, that is tongue-in-cheek like that is trolling like we know that there's like some weird tension between the NFL and fantasy football and they love to throw shade at fantasy managers when they can. So I'm not putting a ton of weight into McDaniel's comments. That being said, like we can't ignore the fact that Keith Mitchell was a guy that they really wanted to go out of their way to sign. I heard the story about the Wanted posters all over the building and Kamani Vidal stepped up in a big way last year and then on top of that like everything broke right for Chase Brown. They didn't draft anybody. They didn't bring in any free agent. So I moved Chase Brown up.
Same thing with Buffalo Bills. Didn't bring anybody in. So I moved James Cook up. Ash and Jinty were getting nothing but good news out of there. Clint Kubiak bringing in Tyler Lindemann to help that offensive line. So I haven't moved Hampton down, but he has fallen in my rankings because of the other guys that have moved up. And I am so excited about the show today, Jason, because I published my first set of rankings right after the Super Bowl. You publish your first set of projections, which are much more in-depth than the rankings that I'm doing, days after the Super Bowl. And I kind of look at both of these, like rankings and projections when you're publishing those in February. They are very much so a living and breathing document that is just constantly shifting until week one.