💥 The Bombshell Suspension Rumor

He's a ten, but he likes to start his draft with 5 straight running backs...

In today’s Fantasy Life Newsletter presented by Rotopass:

• The Deshaun Watson saga is about to end
• Pete's guide to stacking in Best Ball
• Does Deebo Samuel still want to be traded?
• Team preview: Jacksonville Jaguars
• It’s 6/27. Take it away, Peter Overzet…

The off-season's most drawn-out saga is about to come to an end. 

The Wall Street Journal's Andrew Beaton reports that the NFL will push for "an indefinite suspension that would last no shorter than one year" for Deshaun Watson.

Watson, who at one point faced 24 civil lawsuits that accused him of sexual assault and inappropriate contact during massage sessions, will attend his disciplinary hearing on Tuesday. The proceedings will be led by the NFL and NFL Players Association's jointly appointed disciplinary officer, Sue L. Robinson. 

With Watson exiled, it sounds like the Browns are currently content keeping their QB situation in-house:

 

Update: #Browns are expected to move forward with Jacoby Brissett at QB if Watson gets a lengthy suspension, rather than trying to reconcile with Baker Mayfield, says @AaronWilson_NFL

 

I'd continue to push Amari Cooper down draft boards, but it might be worth buying the dip on the cheaper pieces late in drafts like David Njoku and David Bell. Brissett isn't super exciting, but he's a competent backup QB who could support some WR/TE production at the right cost.

If you're looking to stay up to date on all of the latest NFL news and how it's impacting the fantasy landscape, there is no better deal than Matthew Berry's Rotopass subscription, which includes a bundle of great fantasy sites--Footballguys, Rotoviz, Sharp Football Analysis, Roster Watch, ESPN+, and Rotowire--for the low price of $79.95. 

It's legitimately an insane deal. Across all of those sites, you get access to ranks, tools, and data to prep you for not only best ball and season-long drafts, but also dynasty, DFS and sports betting.

Sign up here and thank us later

Before we turn up the heat and jump into Hot Best Ball Summer, we have a little tease for you 👀.

We'll be revealing a bit more throughout the week, but stay tuned for something BIG on 7/5.

Professor Pete is back with another hot best ball summer school lesson. Today, he explains why stacking and correlation are important and how to execute in drafts. If you missed last week's class, you can read his course on roster construction here. 

In a perfect world, we’d just always draft the best players. It seems simple enough. 18 picks, 18 home runs. How hard could it be?

The hard truth is that we aren’t very good at drafting the best players. Go back and look at any of your old drafts and you’ll be amazed at how many busts and injuries litter the roster.

But what if I told you there is a trick that will help you hit on more of your draft selections?

That trick is correlation, or put more simply, stacking.

What is stacking? In the literal sense, stacking means taking multiple players from the same team, preferably a QB with his pass catchers.

Stacking, and more generally speaking, correlation, reduces the number of things we have to get right to win. 

If Rams WR Cooper Kupp has a big year, it’s very likely that his QB, Matthew Stafford, will as well. So when we draft Kupp, we should also consider targeting Stafford because you only need to be right about one thing. If you take Kupp and then, say, Derek Carr, you now need to be right about two different, uncorrelated things. 

Why do we need to stack? Stacking players and teams widens our range of outcomes in both directions. It gives our teams a higher ceiling when we correctly identify the right stacks, but it also lowers our floor if the stack performs poorly. 

We want to embrace this kind of variance in tournaments like Best Ball Mania III where we’ll need to best 470,000 other teams to win $2,000,000.

We’re not playing for the friendliest loss, so we should be willing to take on the downside risk associated with stacking because of the upside. 

The two types of stacking. When we discuss the benefits of stacking in best ball, there are two different applications we can double dip from:

📅 Season-long stacking: This boils down to making concentrated bets on a couple offenses you think could outperform expectations. 

When I looked at the top teams from the finals of last year’s Best Ball Mania with Rotoviz’s Michael Dubner, we found that each team averaged over 3 stacks per team with an average of 1.7 stacks being a QB with another teammate and 1.5 stacks being 2 non-QB teammates.

Last year, one of the teams that finished in the top ten of Best Ball Mania II devoted 11 of their 18 picks to players on the Packers and Bengals:

Now there are diminishing returns to overstacking like this, specifically with how BBM3 is structured, but this illustrates how a drafter was able to reduce the number of things they needed to get right by heavily correlating their picks.

🌅 Single-game stacking: Anyone who plays DFS is familiar with this dynamic. Every time a QB throws a pass to a receiver they both score points so their production is directly correlated. You can see in this chart from 4for4’s TJ Hernandez that QB and pass catcher (WR + TE) production is highly correlated (green):

ETR’s Adam Levitan studied Top 100 rosters in the DraftKings Millymaker contest and found that they used double-stacks nearly 40% of the time. Because the final championship round of BBM3 in Week 17 is essentially a 470-person DFS tournament, we should also be thinking about best ball stacking through a single game lense as well. 

Be patient with your stacks. Last week we emphasized the importance of being flexible with which draft structure you employ in a draft. The same principle applies to stacking.

There will be a temptation to “reach” ahead of ADP to complete your stacks in fear of missing out, but if we are constantly reaching for these stacks then we are going to cancel out the correlation benefits and end up with teams that are watered-down versions of other teams who were more patient. 

Think of correlating your players as a boost and reaching ahead of ADP as a negative. When you correlate with strong ADP values, then you are able to enjoy the correlation boost without hurting your team.

If you’re only doing one draft, being patient can be especially tough. We all want to get our guys. But the more drafts you do, the more comfortable you will become with waiting patiently for your stacks to fall to you. 

You can get some stacking practice now in BBM3 with the $2,000,000 top prize, or in the new Superflex Puppy contest. First-time depositors get up to a $100 deposit match with promo code LIFE. 

Sign up here!

On Wednesday, I’ll share one of my favorite teams to stack in BBM3 right now and the different ways you can do it. I also stream BBM3 drafts every Monday morning on my YouTube channel if you'd like to watch me talk through stacking strategy in real-time.

💪 Guess who is in the best shape of their life? Ok, I normally roll my eyes at these, but, um, ya...I believe it in this case.

🌟 Could the Cowboys trade for a WR? This rumored move would make me extremely happy.

🔎 Wait, Deebo Samuel could still get traded? Someone should have checked the fine print.

📅 Mark your calendars. Training camp dates for every team. 

🎨 Insanely cool NFL art time-lapse. Last week Samantha Holt drew a sick Bengals illustration for us and now she is sharing the video on how it got made. 

😀 Brush your teeth before drafting. Our very own Cooterdoodle joined me for a Randomizer best ball draft on Thursday and we somehow ended up eating cereal and brushing our teeth while drafting. 

🚩 PPR Destroyer incoming. John Hansen from our friends at Fantasy Points explains why he's out on J.D. McKissic this season.

The season is fast approaching, which means it is time for us to get to know all of these NFL teams and who we should be drafting and fading after a busy offseason. In today's team preview, Kevin Tompkins previews the Jacksonville Jags. Hey, someone had to do it... 

What started as optimism for the Jaguars, with Urban Meyer as new head coach and No. 1 overall pick QB Trevor Lawrence as the franchise signal-caller, ended badly in 2021. Meyer lost most of his games and clashed with players and staff, leading to his firing in mid-December. I’d say it couldn’t get worse for the Jaguars, but they did win three games in 2021 after going 1-15 in 2020.

The offseason brought sweeping changes to the look and makeup of the roster, starting with Super Bowl-winning head coach Doug Pederson and offensive coordinator Press Taylor. Taylor has followed Pederson around as QB coach and passing game coordinator for the Eagles and last season worked on Frank Reich’s staff in Indianapolis as a senior offensive assistant.

Add in the spending spree in free agency, and we’ve got a recipe for a revamped team with renewed optimism. But will that translate to success on the field in 2022? MGM has the Jaguars slated for six wins, so the team is expected to improve this season. (I'm not sure if it can get any worse)

⚙️ Offseason changes

• Signed WRs Christian Kirk, Zay Jones, and TE Evan Engram to bolster the receiving corps.
• Lost WR D.J. Chark, RB/WR Tavon Austin, and TE James O’Shaughnessy to free agency.
• Drafted RB Snoop Conner in the fifth round of the 2022 NFL Draft

✨ Team vibes

Lawrence didn’t suddenly become a bad QB after being the most-hyped collegiate QB prospect since Andrew Luck. But, it's hard to imagine any player thriving under the previous coaching regime in 2021 so I’m more than willing to chalk up Lawrence’s lackluster rookie season to an unwinnable situation. Pederson’s addition should be great for Lawrence’s development as a passer and passing volume. In the five years under Pederson, the Eagles finished top-10 in pass attempts in all but one season. That bodes well for improving Lawrence's 12 TD, and 17 INT rookie season.

RB Travis Etienne should get the first crack at the starting job with fellow RB James Robinson on the mend following a late-December Achilles’ tear. Etienne’s 2021 was a sort of “redshirt” season as a Lisfranc injury wiped out his rookie year. He’ll get a redo in 2022 and should provide three-down upside, especially if Robinson is still recovering from his Achilles tear.

The WR position is a mixed bag in 2022. The Jaguars paid Kirk a ton of money this offseason which leads one to think that he’d be the projected No. 1 WR heading into the season. Kirk was schemed well in Arizona to get him into advantageous matchups, but in Jacksonville, he’ll have to live the life of a top WR facing the opposing team’s top CB.

Still in the mix at WR are veteran Marvin Jones, new Jaguar Zay Jones, and Laviska Shenault, who we are contractually obligated to never fade here on the Fantasy Life Newsletter (editor's note: correct). There are as many as six pass-catching options that could lead the Jaguars in targets and it wouldn’t surprise me.

🎯Draft targets

• RB Travis Etienne (Underdog ADP 40.9, RB17)
• QB Trevor Lawrence (Underdog ADP 141.9, QB18)
• TE Evan Engram (Underdog ADP 178.9, TE23)
• WR Laviska Shenault (Underdog ADP 206.7, WR90)

👋Draft fades

• WR Christian Kirk (Underdog ADP 87.6, WR42)
• RB James Robinson (Underdog ADP 172.9, RB53)

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