“Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds … fire walk with me!” – Mike It may not be as exciting or interesting as Twin Peaks, but the first RotoViz Staff best ball league of the off-season is underway! I’ll do my best to look at this draft from every direction imaginable, including an explanation of…...

Players entering Year 2 are among the best investments you can make in your fantasy drafts. So how do you predict who will be the top second-year RBs? Last offseason, I wrote that, contrary to what you may have heard, we want to chase efficiency at the RB position. Specifically, rookie-year efficiency appears to be a sign of good things to come. It turns out…...

It’s common for fantasy owners to target high scoring, high powered offenses. Even though bad teams can provide fantasy relevance, it often doesn’t extend past a few key players. The top passing attacks like the Atlanta Falcons and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are perfect examples of teams with ample fantasy assets. Run-heavy teams are great targets as well. However, the dreaded running back by committee…...

The final few rounds of best ball drafts are rarely exciting. You’re often left picking between third or fourth receivers, unproven players in tough situations, and handcuff running backs with no standalone value. Admittedly, very few of these picks ever turn out, and most of the time it won’t have any serious impact on your roster. However, among this seemingly lackluster pool of pass catchers…...

Before the draft, I took a look at a few late-round boom/bust draft picks to help win your best ball leagues. The general premise was to find players with a high weekly ceiling that wasn’t fully priced into their average draft position. Now that we’re beyond the draft and free agency, it’s a little easier to project early depth charts. There’s still some risk drafting…...

The MFL10 of Death is annually one of my favorite leagues. Drafting against these experts is an absolute blast, and I want to thank Pat Thorman for putting it together and donating the proceeds to charity. Each season I like to break down all 20 rounds to get a feel for how my compatriots are playing. It goes without saying that I hold all of…...

Stefon Diggs is the RotoViz poster child. D.J. Moore has made a strong case over the last two years, but Diggs has the advantage of being a former fifth-round pick who blossomed into an NFL superstar, whereas Moore’s success was more readily predicted by mainstream media based on his first-round pedigree. As such, it’s no surprise that the RV redraft rankings have Diggs as the…...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about the importance of wide receiver efficiency and found that we want to target efficient WRs who are going into their second or (to a lesser degree) third NFL season. This isn’t a new idea – Blair Andrews wrote about it last year in The Wrong Read No. 59 – but the extent to which efficient, inexperienced WRs…...

In Lesson 6, we looked at all of the best two-round starts in best ball. Given what we know about RB dominance in 2019, the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches were surprising. In today’s Lesson 7 of the 2020 Best Ball Workshop, Shawn Siegele examines the key RB tactics throughout your draft, including the sweet spots for selecting your RB3 and RB4. It’s Best…...

Zig when others zag. It’s a common refrain in the fantasy community, but here’s the thing: Not that many people actually do it. Over the years, RotoViz has become well-known for its contrarian beliefs, most notably with Shawn Siegele’s famous Zero RB article. More than six years later, Zero RB is still one of the most hotly debated topics in fantasy football. Zig when others…...

In the first five lessons of the 2020 Best Ball Workshop, we used the Roster Construction Explorer to provide the latest intel on each of the onesie positions. The insights from the 2019 Workshop led to sky-high win rates overall and dynamic results at the onesie positions. Now in Lesson 6, we move to the marquee positions of RB and WR. In the next several…...

Year 2 has always been a big year for wide receivers, and last year’s sophomore class certainly did not disappoint: four different players eclipsed the breakout threshold of 200 PPR points, the most since 2015, rewarding owners who took advantage of perhaps the biggest edge in fantasy football. Success doesn’t come cheap though, as all the previous breakouts from the 2018 draft class are being…...

It seems like 100 years or more since the 2020 NFL Draft. But I assure you, it was only last month. Since the last name was called at the event, nearly 150 high stakes drafts have taken place over at the FFPC. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at five players who have experienced something of a drop in popularity since…...

The New York Jets are eagerly looking forward to what they can get out of tight end Chris Herndon in 2020. According to Connor Hughes of The Athletic, “to say the Jets can’t wait to get (him) back in their lineup is a vast understatement.” Hughes doubled down on this sentiment on Tuesday, remarking that they “had sky-high expectations” for him in 2019. But suspension…...

The NFL recently released the 2020 schedule, giving fantasy gamers the opportunity to find an edge in best ball leagues. With some help from the RotoViz Strength of Schedule Streaming App, let’s make sense of the gauntlet that each team will face and as an added bonus, identify a division whose WRs oppose significantly easy schedules. How Does the App Calculate Opponent Difficulty? As a…...

Yesterday, I wrote an article that used best ball win rate data to examine the impact of efficiency for wide receivers. It built off of what Blair Andrews did in The Wrong Read No. 59, which showed that WRs who post positive Fantasy Points Over Expectation (FPOE) tend to see more volume and continue to be efficient in the following season. That’s certainly good to know,…...