Weekly Fantasy Football Rankings: MB’s Week 1 Rankings

by: MB

It's here and we haven't seen a single preseason snap. I have to go off of twitter videos, coach speak and instinct. Eh, that's alright, I feel like I have a pretty good grip on things. I'm pretty conservative this week when it came to moving people around. A lot of it has to deal with the unknown, but a big reason is that you should be starting your studs. There is no reason to get cute. Week 1 is not an absolute must win (although it would be nice to get one, right?")

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Top 60 Running Backs: Preseason Edition

September 8, 2020 | 2020 Fantasy Football, Fantasy Football Rankings, Rest of Season Rankings, Top 60 Running Backs | 10 Comments

by: Hobbs

Two days, football fans! Two days! That means the 2020 NFL Season will be upon us in a smaller span of time than your average game of cricket. Quicker than your seven round NFL Draft. And much faster than it takes Kirk Cousins to get rid of the ball on a typical pass play. Just two days and we'll have NFL football. Two days until you get to turn months of research and late-night draft parties into something that actually matters as all the projection slowly turns into production. Today, we'll begin with the former as I reveal my top 60 running backs heading into week one of the 2020 season. As a general baseline, I'll be using half-PPR scoring for these rankings. Moving forward, I will continuously update these 60 backs on a weekly basis to provide an up-to-date snapshot at the top options at the position moving forward. Before we get into the actual rankings, here are some highlights from the opening list.

Green Is Money

September 8, 2020 | Fantasy Football Strategy, Fantasy Football Targets | 3 Comments

by: Son

With the stock market going nuts recently, I thought it appropriate to harken back to my trading days. Some traders utilize tape reading and technical analysis to study price action and figure out the momentum of a stock. Buy high and sell higher is usually the mantra. Or sell low and buy lower. On the flip side, there are value investors who scour 10-Qs, listen to conference calls, and dive into all the fundamentals of a company. Price-to-earning ratios and book value are numbers often utilized. When a stock continues to go up or down, momentum traders are more apt to keep riding the train until it stops. Value investors, on the other hand, look for spots to buy/sell when pessimism or optimism are too high. Fantasy football participants are no different. There are those place emphasis on the most recent results, while others look for bargains or spots to fade when sentiment gets out of whack. Will A. J. Green keep getting hammered by momentum traders or will he be money for value investors?

Stealin’ Or Dealin’ Week 1: Get Your McLaurin To The Starting Line

September 8, 2020 | Buys & Sells | 50 Comments

by: MB

Welcome to week 1! The coffee and takes are hot here at Razzball headquarters. Yes, Grey let's us have coffee in his basement, but only when it's the regular season. We need caffeine for this hamster wheel and he knows it. But AHHHH, it's great to have real football back! You know, real football to add up scores for our fake football teams. I'll be writing a buy/sell this season. It may be weekly, it may be bi-weekly. I'll leave it up to a basis of necessity. I'm also going to be writing the Sunday Primer, putting out weekly rankings, and writing the start/sit column this year. Before your season starts, you might be interested in a trade to sure up your roster. This is the sharpest week to get a lot of value. Not everyone in your league may be privy to the upside of the players that they drafted. Your league mates might also be thirsty for early carries while you are playing the long game with your bench spots. Vacation is over! The markets are open! TRADE TRADE TRADE!

Fun With Small Samples: NFC East And South

September 7, 2020 | Fantasy Football Strategy | 18 Comments

by: al_FF_red

As we prepare for the 2020 season, there are tons of hot takes swirling around the internet. Some are baseless tweets and articles meant to stir up conversation and clicks. Others are bold predictions that do have some foundation in reality, even if it’s a long shot. I plan to make this article somewhere in the middle. Football is set up for small samples with only 16 games in a season and roughly 55-65 offensive snaps per game. In football, even a player with “a lot” of volume may only participate in a fantasy relevant play on 20 of those snaps. Contrast that with baseball where each hitter on a team sees 600 at bats in a season!

ESPN’s 2020 Fantasy Football Draft Rankings: A Review for Stu

September 6, 2020 | 2020 Fantasy Football, Fantasy Football Rankings | 68 Comments

by: Donkey Teeth

Remember when the news was actually legitimate news instead of a constant stream of propaganda and fear porn? Nah, me neither. But I do remember watching old school ESPN SportsCenter. The GOAT Stuart Scott (RIP) had catchphrases for days:

"Cool as the other side of the pillow!"

"Holla at a playa when you see him in the street!"

"It's your world, kid ... The rest of us are still paying rent"

"They Call Him the Windex Man ‘Cause He’s Always Cleaning the Glass"

My personal favorite was when Kenny Mayne busted out his classic, "Bring the finest meats and cheeses in all the land!" Ahhhh, simpler times when we didn't have to wear underwear on our face or keep tabs on protests and "counter protests." Alas, the good ole days of Stew yelling "Booya!" and "Holla!" are a thing of the past. And while a new more enlightened world may be on the horizon, ESPN's draft rankings have no place in that world. Anyway, here’s a chart of the biggest values from ESPN to me (Booya!) and the players that ESPN overrates (You Ain’t Gotta Go Home, But You Gotta Get The Heck Outta Here) compared to my 2020 fantasy football rankings:

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Donkey’s Advocate: Kareem Hunt, Gardner Minshew and Cam Akers

September 5, 2020 | 2020 Fantasy Football, Donkey's Advocate, Razzball Podcast | 5 Comments

by: Donkey Teeth

The innovation machine never stops here at Razzball. Except for that one time when I tried to use it to heat up some leftover pizza. What a disaster that was! In the modern world of pandemics, riots and keto diets, we know it can be hard to find time to listen to 30-60 minute fantasy football shows. Oh, there’s a squirrel! Sorry, what was I talking about? Right, we’ve created a short-form video series for those of us with the attention span of a puppy. On Donkey’s Advocate, I’ll be bringing on many of the top fantasy football industry experts to sell me on one of their favorite 2020 fantasy football draft targets while I play ~~devil’s~~ donkey’s advocate. All of this will take place in a two minute rapid fire segment. In this week’s batch I was joined by Heath Cummings, Scott Pianowski and Danny Kelly to discuss Kareem Hunt, Gardner Minshew and Cam Akers:

TE Pockets: Where To Draft Your Tight End

September 5, 2020 | 2020 Fantasy Football, Fantasy Football Strategy | 4 Comments

by: JB Barry

Fantasy Football Draft Season is at its peak with the NFL season kick-off right around the corner! I recently posted a draft strategy article focusing on where to target quarterbacks in your draft and broke the position down into “pockets." The article had some great interactions and a few people even reached out to me on twitter saying that they liked the way it was broken down into pockets and asked for more. As I mentioned in the previous article, it is extremely important to have a plan when you enter your draft room to be successful. We know the guy who just prints out the rankings list five minutes before the draft usually is not the league winner!

What we will do today is break down the tight end position. Again, the most common leagues are 10 or 12 team redraft leagues where you start 1 TE each week. Depending on the size of your roster and how many bench spots you’re allotted, you will most likely draft either 1 or 2 tight ends in your draft. I will take injury risks into consideration, but do not rank based on possible injury. I don’t have a crystal ball and none of us can predict injury, so it won’t weigh too much on what pocket I put a player in. What I am going to do here for you is break down the tight end position into pockets, so you have a road map of where to target drafting your tight end.

By formulating a plan in pockets, you don’t go on tilt if someone snipes the one player you were targeting from you. If you are looking for breakdowns of the players, or rankings and projections, check out some of our amazing tools like Donkey Teeth’s rankings and Rudy Gamble’s projections! Also consider Rudy's great in season tools subscription which starts at only $17.99 for the whole season! Let's take a look at the TE pockets and nail down a plan on when to go after your guy!

Fantasy Football Rankings Update: MB’s Rankings

September 4, 2020 | Fantasy Football Rankings | 25 Comments

by: MB

It has been a couple of weeks since I last updated my rankings, so now it's time to hit you guys with an update! So much has happened in the world of football just in this past week. Trust me, when I was updating, it almost felt like starting from scratch. I always forget how much camp shifts stuff around. Imagine if we actually had preseason games this year. Rankings updates aren't always based on training camp news. Sometimes I go back and forth on swaps or a change of heart on a projected role in an offense. Hell, a lot of the time I'll look and wonder what I was thinking just a month back for a certain player or two. Here are some of the highlighted changes that I've made.

Sleepers for 2020 Fantasy Football

September 4, 2020 | 2020 Fantasy Football, Fantasy Football Sleeper | 41 Comments

by: Donkey Teeth

Yawn. Just woke up. Great nap, I'm a sound sleeper. I was dreaming of rubbing lotion on Kerryon's Johnson and drafting D.K. Metcalf and Marquise Brown in the 10th round of my home league fantasy draft. 15-20 years ago that type of bargain might have been possible on stud second year wide receivers like Hollywood and D.K., but in the modern world of social unrest and social media it's rare to find a player who isn't being touted by a least a two dozen fantasy analysts. The fantasy football market has become more efficient than Wall Street. So why are we still using the term "sleeper" when the crowd is already woke to these players in the year 2020? The same reason I'm including the terms hot chicks, sexy teens, large boobs and bukkake in this post. Search engine optimization of course! As long as people still use the term bukkake sleeper, we'll still write about them. But in 2020 a sleeper is no longer a completely unknown player. It's become more of a broad term used to describe a mid-to-late round draft target believed to be significantly undervalued. Or at least that's what the term means to me, don't ask me how Captain Obvious over at ESPN is using it. Anyway, here's a list of my top sleepers for 2020 fantasy football:

Top 80 WRs for 2020 Preseason 2.0

September 3, 2020 | Fantasy Football Rankings | 1 Comment

by: al_FF_red

This is the second iteration of my top 80 wide receivers with all the latest updates to this point. Some players were removed due to injury, and some new faces have forced their way onto the scene. I plan on updating this list bi-weekly as news comes in and the season approaches then of course each week in-season. This list is not league or format specific, but it is based on 2020 projection only. When thinking through tiers and rankings I asked myself simply – “all things considered who would I rather have on my roster?”

2020 Shadow Coverage Report: Cleveland Browns

September 3, 2020 | Fantasy Football Strategy |

by: Bobby LaMarco

Beckham’s down 2019 seems to be due to many factors. This includes injury, switching teams and poor coaching. Many of these things seem to be remedied as a healthy off-season, new coaching staff and continuity with Baker should help him improve in 2020. Last season while dealing with all those factors Odell had a tough schedule that included games vs. the NFC west and AFC east divisions that have many notable corners. Now Beckham has the best shadow coverage match-up schedule of any WR1 in 2020. Does this mean Beckham is primed to return to the top 12? Read why he is a lock to improve on his borderline low end WR2 finish from his 2019 campaign.