🤔 Buying or selling training camp RB hype

Training camp moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it…

In today’s Fantasy Life Newsletter presented by Underdog Fantasy:

Real-life football happened last night, and it was awesome.

Of course, preseason and training camp performance isn’t exactly guaranteed to correlate to big-time regular season success. It’s fine to be excited about the non-stop supply of glorified scrimmage highlights – but at the end of the day, we should be most concerned with attempting to gain clarity on the pecking order of the league’s most muddled depth chart situations.

This is especially true at the RB position, where two of the league’s very best offenses somehow offer all sorts of mid-to-late-round value to be had if drafters can accurately project the eventual pecking order of these extra-murky backfields.

🦅 Philadelphia Eagles

📰 Latest news

Ex-Lions RB D’Andre Swift is reportedly the “very clear RB1” according to Eagles beat reporter Eliot Shorr-Parks, and Tim McManus noted Swift has “made the strongest impression to this point.”

McManus did add: “The RB rotation is far from settled,” but clearly Swift has made an early impact at camp.

The Eagles’ reigning third-ranked scoring offense enabled Miles Sanders to RB21 heights in PPR points per game last season on the back of a whopping 259 carries. While Swift’s receiving prowess has stolen most of the training camp headlines, he’s certainly plenty capable of running between the tackles as well.

Of course, the latter point is also true for Rashaad Penny, and it’s unlikely Kenneth Gainwell, Boston Scott and maybe even Trey Sermon (seriously!) completely exit the picture.

There also isn’t as much meat on the bone in this backfield as one might think: Eagles RBs collectively ranked just 27th in expected PPR points per game last season.

📝 Ruling

Swift deserves to be the highest-ranked Eagles RB and is hardly someone to overly fade at a reasonable Round 7 ADP, but it’d be surprising if Nick Sirianni and company put too much on the plate of any individual RB. Penny (RB34) and Gainwell (RB53) are still in play as cheaper pieces of this loaded offense.

Read on for the opposing take on Swift this season (in the Watercooler).

🐃 Buffalo Bills

📰 Latest news

Ace Bills beat reporter Joe Buscaglia noted that James Cook has “continued to look like the far-and-away top back at training camp and seems designed for at least over half of the offensive snaps.”

It’s another great note for Cook, who earned a rather resounding endorsement from QB Josh Allen.

It’d be kind of weird if Allen didn’t say nice things about his teammate, but the allure of Cook as a discount version of Jahmyr Gibbs is clear: This is an explosive, pass-catching RB with the potential to crush in full-PPR formats with a full-time role inside of this high-scoring offense.

Cook (5.7) averaged more yards per carry than any RB not named Breece Hall (5.8) last season while also posting the position’s eighth-best PFF receiving grade (71.8) among 55 qualified RBs.

The Bills’ rising second-year RB certainly benefited from defenses not going out of their way to load the box against him, but then again that sure sounds like a decent side effect of having a dual-threat talent like Cook on the field in the first place.

📝 Ruling

It’s unlikely that Cook gets short-yardage touches ahead of Damien Harris or Latavius Murray (or even Allen for that matter). But this is a prolific passing attack that isn’t exactly overflowing with proven options after Stefon Diggs. I’m not afraid to bump up exposure here to the current RB30 (pick 90.8 ADP), who is going in a sweet spot of drafts after the top-45 WRs, top-nine QBs and top-seven TEs are already off the board.

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Each preseason, Matthew Berry provides his “Ride-or-Die” Fantasy Football player. Last year, we saw his Ride-or-Die, Jalen Hurts, post a QB3 overall finish and lead his fantasy managers to championships. Who does Matthew have in store for this year? Without further ado…

You’re on the clock in the final two rounds. Oh no: Time to draft a DST and you have absolutely no idea who to pick. Good thing you are reading this right now because Ian has you covered with the best — and cheapest — options at the position ahead of 2023.

Defenses and Special Teams (DST) don't get nearly the same amount of attention and love from the fantasy football community as their offensive counterparts.

There are two key reasons for this:

• DSTs join kickers as two positions that are commonly left out of plenty of leagues.

• The position is a lot more difficult to predict year-to-year as well as on a weekly basis.

Big-time point-scoring outcomes like sacks and turnovers simply aren’t all that sticky from year to year; if anything you’re better off simply targeting DSTs facing an incredibly weak schedule.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that squads like the 49ers or Cowboys DST will likely (again) finish as some of the league’s highest-scoring teams at the position – but it will also cost you a later mid-round instead of a last-two round pick to acquire their services.

The aforementioned San Francisco and Dallas defenses join the Eagles, Patriots, Bills, Jets, Jaguars, Chiefs and Dolphins as the only units boasting top-200 ADPs in high-stakes NFFC drafts.

Feel free to grab the 49ers or Eagles – in that order – if available in the final two rounds of your drafts. They are both really good at football and have the top two easiest first four weeks of the schedule; you could rely on either throughout September.

However, I would avoid the Cowboys (vs. Giants, Jets Weeks 1-2), Patriots (Eagles, Dolphins), Bills (Jets, Raiders), Jets (Bills, Cowboys), Jaguars (Colts, Chiefs), Chiefs (Lions, Jaguars) and Dolphins (Chargers, Patriots) to start the season when looking for a unit that we can get at least two quality projected weeks out of.

Luckily, you, a scholar, are reading this article, and I have the five best DSTs to target outside of fantasy’s top-200 picks and have the ability to supply at least two weeks of potentially high-end upside before you have to head to the waiver wire.

As always: It’s a great day to be great.

👑 New Orleans Saints

• Week 1: vs. Titans (19.25 implied points)

• Week 2: at Panthers (21)

• Week 3: at Packers (21.75)

• Week 4: vs. Buccaneers (17.75)

• Week 5: at Patriots (22)

• Week 6: at Texans (19)

A ridiculously easy schedule to start the season allows drafters to keep the Saints defense until at least their Week 7 matchup against the Jaguars. Hell, even that game is in the Superdome – and then the team gets two more theoretically great matchups against the Colts and Bears before having a tough road trip to Minnesota and a Week 11 bye.

The league’s reigning ninth-ranked scoring defense managed to perform rather great in 2022 despite inconsistent offensive performance and injuries to high-priced secondary starters CB Marshon Lattimore (7 games played) and S Marcus Maye (10).

It’s not guaranteed the group simply keeps on keeping on after losing defensive linemen Marcus Davenport, David Onyemata, Shy Tuttle and Kentavius Street to free agency; just realize the schedule Gods have done the Saints some SERIOUS early-season favors.

The Saints deserve to be the first DST off the board after the 49ers and Eagles.

🌞 The GOAT Matthew Berry’s top-200 ranks are LIVE. The Sun God is ranked how high?!

📈 This RB could WIN YOUR LEAGUE. Upside this cheap is rare.

💰 Top-20 NFL players in merchandise sales have been released. Can you guess the top three?

👀 A certain Browns RB received starter rest last night. No, not Nick Chubb.

🩺 Pete Carroll has an update on Zach Charbonnet (shoulder). So much for being “out indefinitely”!

😥 The injury gods have cursed this 49ers’ RB. At least there’s still plenty of time before Week 1.

😬 More info on Jonathan Taylor’s trade standoff with the Colts. Talk about a messy situation.

😃 This is a borderline miraculous injury recovery. Sean Payton with a GREAT update.

🐶 Babe, wake up: New Underdog best ball tournaments just dropped. Those are some VERY good boys.

🏆 RBs you MUST DRAFT this season. Dwain joined some friends to break them down.

If you want to win big money in an Underdog Fantasy tournament, you will need to build a team that is optimized for the playoff weeks, specifically Week 17. Today, Professor Pete expands on his stacking course from last week, with an explainer of why Week 17 is still all that matters…

If you want to win a championship in a normal, managed fantasy league, your team needs to get hot for the fantasy playoffs. You’ll need to win three head-to-head matchups in a row Weeks 15, 16, and 17 to be crowned champion. Easy enough, right?

But to win a big prize in large-field best ball tournaments like Best Ball Mania IV, not only will your team need to be good enough to make the playoffs, but you’ll also need to get hot in Weeks 15 (finish first out of a group of 16) and Week 16 (again finish first out of a group of 16) to advance to the finals.

At which point, your team will need to get scorching hot in Week 17 to become a best ball millionaire (finish Top 2 out of 441 teams):

If you finish in the bottom forty teams of the Week 17 finals (401-441st), you’ll return $1,000 for your efforts.

Let’s repeat that again for added emphasis: you could perform better than 677,336 other teams in the tournament and still only 40x your buy-in.

This isn’t to turn our nose up at $1,000 (lord knows I could use it to buy some shirts with sleeves), but rather to illustrate that making it to Week 17 is not enough.

Even with the expanded regular season prizes, the $10 million playoff prize pool ensures that Week 17 is still all that matters.

This means that we must draft teams that have a chance to finish Top 10 in Week 17 to make playing this contest worthwhile.

When Ricky Bobby said, “If you ain’t first, you’re last” he could have easily been talking about Best Ball Mania IV.

So how do you go about actually building teams that can compete in Week 17? Here are 5 tips…

🔮 Draft your team like a DFS lineup

Here’s a thought exercise: What if a Best Ball Genie hit you up on December 28th (the start of Week 17) and said I'm granting you a team in the Best Ball Mania IV finals. You can bypass the playoff gauntlet and hand-select the 18 players you’d like on that team to compete with the other finalists for the $3M top prize in Week 17.

What would your team look like? Sure, you’d pick some top RBs. You’d probably select an elite TE too. And then you’d build out some game stacks–a couple of QBs with a few of their pass catchers, and then a player on the opposing team in hopes of capturing a shootout game environment.

That exercise isn’t even entirely hypothetical. In fact, it’s something DFS players do every week during the season. They stack their QB and target specific games in hopes of using correlation to vault their team to the top of the leaderboards.

So even though we don’t get the benefit of building our teams days before Week 17, we can still reverse engineer our best ball teams to perform like Week 17 DFS lineups.

In last week’s stacking course, we spotlighted Pat Kerrane’s winning $2,000,000 lineup as an example. Despite drafting the team on July 18th, 2022, Kerrane devoted 10 of his 18 roster spots to two Week 17 games:

• Tom Brady to Chris Godwin (D.J. Moore bring back)

• Tua Tagovailoa to Jaylen Waddle and Mike Gesicki (Rhamondre Stevenson, Jakobi Meyers, and Tyquan Thornton as bring backs), as well as Raheem Mostert

In that Week 17 Dolphins/Patriots game, Mostert scored 19.1 for his lineup, and both of his Patriots WRs cracked his lineup, with Meyers scoring 13.8 and Thornton going for 13.5.

Not a single one of those stacked players mentioned was a league winner, but they all contributed in a correlated fashion in the same game environments when it mattered the most.

Looking to deploy these strategies and build your Week 17 stacks? Use promo code LIFE on Underdog Fantasy to get a 100% deposit match of up to $100 and start drafting TODAY!