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My friends: the time is nigh. Pumpkin spice has returned to your local Starbucks, German restaurants are advertising pre-Octoberfest parties, and your fantasy football team is about ready to enter the fray. Whether you’re looking to win some money or just not suffer the embarrassment of losing to Tony from Accounting, we’re here to help you win your leagues.

Put it in your calendar: this year I’ll be re-capping the Sunday games with a Monday byline. Of course, that leaves me with a quizzical task for this final pre-season article: do I write the 7,000th “draft this guy in round 20” article that you’ve read this year — and you’ve probably drafted 18 teams by now — or do I bring my award-winning analytical eye to tell you how to not fudge up your Week 1 fantasy football lineup? Our time is probably best spent doing the latter. ACKSHUALLY, our time is best spent taking a nap or staring at the ocean or contemplating a shirtless Austin Ekeler. But for now, I’m going to set you on the right track with some strategies to help you claim a week 1 victory.

To help claim victories throughout the whole dang year, check out the Razzball Premium Fantasy Football Tools — it’s how we keep the lights on and the coffee fresh. If you value our services, please chip in a couple of bucks to help support us. If you can’t afford a premium subscription, please give us a share on social media and drop a comment — we love to hear from you! 

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40 million people play fantasy football across the world. In other words, if the fantasy football community was a YouTube channel, it would have more subscribers than Rihanna, OneDirection, and Maroon 5. Luckily, you can like both Maroon 5 and fantasy football. What’s that you say? You’ve got the moves like Jagger but you don’t know the first thing about fantasy football? That’s fine! Let’s get you caught up and teach you everything you need to know to play in your first fantasy football league. 

Why should I — a guy with an avatar from a failed 2000s TV cartoon — be your guide to play fantasy football? Because I’ve played fantasy football for over 20 years, won an industry league against top competition, finished in the top 10 of FantasyPros most accurate weekly rankers three times in 2021, and placed as a finalist for “best article” in the 2021 Fantasy Sports Writers Association awards. I’ve helped thousands of people in the fantasy sports space improve their teams, and I’m here to help you as well. 

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Perhaps the greatest skill employed by fantasy footballers is napkin math.  And the weird thing is, it’s useless to study napkin math; you can only get better at it after a couple beers and some takeout. What’s that you say? Door Dash calculated everything for you? Awesome. I suppose you had a computer algorithm choose your fantasy football team, too, eh? Is that how you ended up with Tom Brady as the fifth overall pick? ENYWHEY.

I saw a colleague post something recently about drafting your third wide receiver (WR3) before you take your second running back (RB2). Of course, going receiver-heavy is a strategy that can win, but it flies in the face of longitudinal evidence we’ve been collecting that getting 2 main RBs and 1 TE by round 5 is a strategy that wins everything from NFC tournaments to the RazzBowl to the Underdog Milly Maker tournaments. For your home leagues, it’s equally important to grab RB instead of WR because top RB are scarce. 

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In my downtime during the fantasy football off-season, I spent time doing two things: the first was admiring pictures of Joey Browner for my RazzBowl team. The second was learning a game that is less complex than fantasy football: chess. At least with chess you can have some sort of agency with your pawns instead of praying Derrick Gore pulls off 100 yards and 3 TDs to get you into the fantasy playoffs. But fantasy football and chess have an important factor in common: how you open the game will dramatically affect the outcome of the match (or league or tournament or cosmic championship). Let’s think about the ways you can open your draft, and then locate the players who will complement your openings. 

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[cue tympani drums followed by John Williams-style brass] Ta dah! It’s the 2022 RazzBowl! This year, we’ve got more Razz than ever, mostly because I’ve been eating nothing but lasagna since we last talked. What have I learned in the past eight months, other than how to order my pants size in “Extra Grande”? Glad you asked! Time for me to enlighten, illuminate, and thrill you to tears with my annual RazzBowl Guidebook! 

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It’s that awkward time of the year where us football writers scatter to distant lands, such as “baseball land” and “Branson.” But before I head out for the spring/summer, I wanted to do one of those montage scenes where we check out all of our favorite Razzball writer’s bold preseason predictions…and find out who is the boldest and who is the most accurate! 

For reference, here’s the original article, where our writer Skorish asked us to try and make bold yet reasonably possible predictions about the year. 

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It’s been a ride, folx. Some of you, you’re here because of completionism. You stopped by every other week and ya just gotta finish out the season, even though you’re out of the playoffs now. Others — you’re still fighting for the championship. What can I say — if you show up, I’m here to help. So let’s jump in and see what we can do to help you bring home the trophy. 

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Welcome to the edition of the Primer…I mean Game Day…I mean, Prime Day! Sure, that won’t infringe any copyrights. Welcome to Razzball Prime Day, brought to you by soft pillows and marshmallows. We’re in one of the weirdest finishes to  a fantasy football season that we’ve ever seen, and I’ve been fantasy footballering since the newspaper days. And, to be entirely honest, this is my first time in my fantasy sports writing career where I honestly don’t know what to write. The number of players being held out of games this week is staggering; last week over 100 personnel missed games and 3 games were rescheduled. So, rather than do my usual primer spiel, I think it’s more productive to keep this post up for a longer time period and offer my question answering services for a longer period of time. 

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We’ve told you this before, and we’ll tell it to you again here: the best projection systems are accurate on the best players about 35-45% of the time, depending on various factors like slate size, injuries, weather, and proximity to unsanitary gas station food sources. When people say that “fantasy football is just luck,” well, they’re wrong. Fantasy football is about educated guesses, really. Just like there was no real reason that GameStop and Doge Coin should have been making people millionaires earlier this year, they nonetheless did make people rich. People are able to make educated guesses about the trends of chaos and say, “The risk of this commodity meets my expectation for value, so I’ll take the risk.” That’s basically what fantasy sports are all about: what player will you draft at what position, and how much value will they bring your team? And as much as we analysts like to say that we are certain about stuff, the truth is that the more uncertain and skeptical the analyst is, the more likely they are to be reliable over the long term. Analysts tell themselves all sorts of narratives in all sorts of ways to prepare for each week of fantasy sports: Rudy Gamble uses snap count data, I tend to consider how likely a player is to end up in a favorable game script, and Donkey Teeth considers how a player looks without their shirt on. And in a week like this — Week 15 of 2021 fantasy football for the SEO record — we find ourselves in a world of massive underdog narratives that make no analytical sense to predict at the beginning of the season. Craig Reynolds — a guy who went undrafted and for three years was unable to crack even the practice squad of teams that didn’t have running backs — put up 112 yards rushing as the Lions triumphed over the Cardinals and gained their second win of the year (not season…year). Aight, this paragraph is getting long. You get the point: the impossible was possible tonight. Tonight. (Now you’re singing it in your head, I bet) Let’s check out the rest of the players that you probably didn’t start unless you were in a 50,000 person DFS contest. 

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I stand alone and atop a pedestal, the raging, salty ocean of fantasy footballers seething below me. Formless and shapeless yet their psychic terror is expressed in the rage of a tweet sent into the ethereal server in a room of Somewhere, USA. Yet at the center, there is always me, tall with small pores and a magnetic smile — a cross between Brad Pitt and Jared Leto — holding the “Okayest Fantasy Footballer” award that has been bestowed upon me by the corporate sponsors of Feetballs dot com. I smile as I gaze upon the teeming masses, their faces angry and contorted from two straight years of disappointment from Christian McCaffrey and Saquon Barkley. I never drafted 1.01. I was never the bride, only the well-dressed wedding guest that — you guessed it — could eat 5 plates of buffet food and down 12 drinks without making a mess of myself. I’m everything you’ve ever hated. Come and get me. Take the trophy from my hands and declare yourself “Okayest Footballer” in your zip code. Your parents will write letters. Your neighbors will invite you over for brats. Other people you’ve never met on the internet will validate you. You are the champion. This is your destiny. Come, come and take it from me. 

Motivated? Yeah, me neither. Let’s talk some random players who might help you not lose in the first round of the fantasy football playoffs. 

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A decade ago, Michael Burry started posting his investment ideas on Reddit. He believed the housing market was in a bubble and ultimately shorted the housing market for a gain of over a billion dollars. This week, our dear commenter William Hung wondered if Rashaad Penny should be the waiver wire add of the week. Penny, I hear you thinking. Yeah, he’s been around the block, bypassed by Chris Carson, Alex Collins, Mike Davis, and basically every other semi-productive Seahawks RB in the past few years. With the likes of Russell Wilson finding their steam in the late season, it’s opened up the field for players like Penny who pay homage to Dicey, the God of Variance. Dicey is a generous yet vengeful god, one of the old souls from the chaotic beginnings of the universe. This week, Penny accumulated more yards on the ground than he had accumulated in the previous two seasons combined. Should you have started Rashaad Penny? Nah, just like you shouldn’t have ordered the sushi on Monday morning. But sometimes, the supply chain is running unusually smooth, or a team might be so focused on stopping somebody like D.K. Metcalf, that somebody like Penny can step in and earn another year on their contract with a wildly successful performance. Let’s see what else happened on Sunday for Week 14 of fantasy football: 

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