High-variance, volatile football players, the Will Fullers and Amari Coopers of our day, the risky bets — we all know those players, and most of all we all know about what they can do — for good and for bad. When was the last time you trusted Will Fuller or Amari Cooper to go off the charts and they let you down? You probably don’t…...

The other quarterbacks I’ve reviewed so far in this series all came into the NFL with a high pedigree. They were first-round draft picks after all. This player went much later in the proceedings. Yet in his way, he was perhaps the most exciting of all the first-year signal-callers. Let’s look back at the rookie year of Gardner Minshew. By The Numbers Minshew started 12…...

The latest player to fall under our curious gaze in our rookie review series was the third quarterback taken in the 2019 NFL Draft. Washington spent the 15th overall selection on Ohio State signal-caller Dwayne Haskins. I’m betraying no oaths when I say that Haskins did not exactly take the NFL by storm in his first year. But he is not fully to blame for…...

Continuing our look back on the 2019 rookies, let’s take a look at the New York Giants quarterback Daniel Jones. His selection was not without controversy or even outright debate. But regardless of whether the Giants should have taken their signal-caller in 2018 or not, they got Jones. Let’s break it down. By The Numbers Despite claims that he could spend his entire rookie season…...

Not many people were talking about Darius Slayton in fantasy football last offseason. He was a fifth-round draft pick who missed the majority of OTAs and training camp with a hamstring injury. His production profile and paltry draft equity suggested that finding any level of success in the NFL was always going to be a long shot for Slayton, and the lingering summer injury all but put…...

The 2019 NFL season is officially over. The last game of the 100th season of the NFL is in the books. There will be no more pads hitting pads, referees whistles (or flags), touchdowns or turnovers until September. Here we will be looking back on the rookie season of the player taken with the first overall selection in last year’s NFL Draft, and looking forward…...

In his weekly series, Fantasy or Reality, Curtis Patrick explores major fantasy football developments and exposes them as – you guessed it – fantasy or reality. Using a combination of fantasy stats, RotoViz metrics, and real football situational analysis, this series promises bold, actionable takeaways that will help you be a fantasy football winner. Fantasy or Reality – John Ross is the new Brandin Cooks…...

Welcome back to my NFL Game Script series, where I examine how game script affects running back fantasy production in season-long redraft and best ball formats. In Part 1, I broke up our running back sample into quartiles based on their teams’ preseason Vegas Win Totals: Quartile 1 is composed of players from teams with a Vegas Win Total of 9.5 or higher. Quartile 2…...

Last year, Tre’Quan Smith scored 88.7 points in PPR leagues, finishing as the WR72. His preseason ADP was 219.2 (WR103). While he did finish 31 spots above his positional ADP, you wouldn’t exactly call him a league-winner. Tyler Boyd, on the other hand, was a league-winner. His ADP was even higher than Smith’s at 226.7 (WR143). In fact, his ADP was so high that he…...

Welcome back to my NFL Game Script series, where I examine how game script affects running back fantasy production in season-long redraft and best ball formats. In Part 1, I broke up our running back sample into quartiles based on their teams’ preseason Vegas Win Totals: Quartile 1 is composed of players from teams with a Vegas Win Total of 9.5 or higher. Quartile 2…...

Welcome back to my NFL Game Script series, where I examine how game script affects running back fantasy production in season-long redraft and best ball formats. In Part 1, I broke up our running back sample into quartiles based on their teams’ preseason Vegas Win Totals: Quartile 1 is composed of players from teams with a Vegas Win Total of 9.5 or higher. Quartile 2…...

Welcome back to my NFL Game Script series, where I examine how game script affects running back fantasy production in season-long redraft and best ball formats. In Part 1 of this series, I examined game script from a bird’s eye view. Let’s recap some of the important findings from Part 1: Game condition (leading vs. trailing) has a significant effect on league-wide pass-rates. On average,…...

Game script: A concept easy to understand in the abstract but difficult to distill into quantifiable data. Those of us who play DFS understand game script through experience. A team gets down two scores early and begins to take more risks in the passing game. At the same time, the team with the lead begins to run the ball conservatively to burn time and keep…...

Everyone knows about the RB Apocalypse in 2015. First-round running backs averaged 29 points below replacement that season. That wasn’t the case at all in 2018. Four first-rounders scored more than 300 points, and the group averaged 69 points above replacement even with Le’Veon Bell’s bagel. On the surface, these two years couldn’t be any more different, and yet a weird thing happens when we…...