Transcription
If you're watching this video and you want to win your fantasy league this year, you're in the right place because last year I won a $10,000 to First Experts League. I took home the grand prize. I scored the most points in the league 14 to 2 and honestly, it was somewhat easy. So in this video, I'm going to break down the seven reasons why I actually won that league and you could take those same reasons to win yours.
Okay, so here's that league specifically just to give you context. This experts league was called the Flock League. It was $10,000 to first. This was the championship where I ended up winning by like 70 points. Absolutely dominated. Went 12-2 in the regular season. We could pull up those standings right here. 12-2 in the regular season. Got a buy. Won my two playoff games. Scored the most points as you can see. Proof right here in the standings. 2100 points. The next closest, I believe, was this team in fourth place who faced in the championship for like about 2,000 or so.
Anyways, this was the Flock League. If you're not familiar, it is the most watched fantasy league in the world on fantasy football. We've been doing it for two years now. It is filled with a bunch of other experts. Now, if that word experts is like too much for you and you just think we're a bunch of idiots on YouTube making content for a living, that's completely fine. Just go with that instead. The idiots on YouTube. I'm fine with that. But regardless, it is the most watched league in the world.
And I just want to get into a quick story about this because I think it's very important and it ties in. I didn't start playing fantasy football until I was like 13 or 14 years old. My dad invited me into his league with all of his adult buddies. They needed one more person in this chaotic 20-person league. Now, unfortunately, it was on NFL.com, and it hasn't been reinstated since 2014. But this was the league. It was my first ever league back in 2010. Packers Nation 12. Oh jeez. Oh my god. 13-year-old vibes right there. NEPA FFL. Also, Northeast Pennsylvania, that was the league that I ended up going on and winning. I had like Stefon Diggs. He was like a kick returner for the Lions and this league had kick return yards and he was like my best player. It Drew Brees was my first round pick. It was just a wild league.
But anyway, I bring that all up because it was just like such a full circle moment when I won this Flock league last year. I ended up flying out my dad with the winnings from the $10,000 Flock league. I flew out my dad to Italy first class. I surprised him with first class tickets. He knew we were going to Italy, but surprised him with the first class tickets and we were able to have just an unbelievable time. My mother was there as well. Treated the whole family, but specifically for my dad, this was like an awesome full circle moment. Here's just some photos from Italy, different parts. We did the whole Italian, Rome, Florence, Venice, all that type of thing. It was an amazing trip. It was two weeks. But it's just full circle. He got me into fantasy football. And now fantasy football is the reason why he went to Italy for the first time, first class. It was awesome. I'll never forget it. I'll cherish it forever.
So, that's the context that I think is important about just like what this league is, how significant it was, a league full of experts. Now, let's get into the seven reasons or the seven ways that I ended up winning it that you could actually take and dominate and smack around all your friends.
Starting with tip number one. All the work happened in the summer. Now, this might just seem obvious, but at the end of the day, a lot of people don't actually start researching for fantasy football leagues until the day of their draft or they pull up rankings an hour before. And that can help if you have the right rankings from a trusted source, which most people won't. They'll just click the first or second link on Google. Those people are never going to be the people who are actually like watching this video, like you and me right now, who are actually caring in the summer about fantasy. I mean, one simple way that you can just get ahead of your league mates is follow some lists on Twitter. I have a fantasy news list on Twitter. I have a bunch of these. You can just check them out under my list on Twitter, I believe. Or you can just start your own. It's completely free. Uh, and just basically read beat reports. Skim through it for like you can just do this in 10 minutes most of the time. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer during uh like OT or during like training camps when a lot of stuff is coming out for those couple of weeks. But you just quickly get like the biggest cliff notes that you need about what happened that day or that week. If you just want to do it on like a weekly basis, it'll take you 30 minutes if that. And you're all caught up to speed and now you're just levels ahead of your competition.
So, that's like one little tip. That's just a piece of preparing in the summer for me. Somebody who does this full-time reads these reports like in-depth, the actual articles for one to two hours a day sometimes, sometimes longer than that. And I'm also putting this into my projections, putting this into my rankings, these rankings that get built every single year that then get turned into uh tiers that then get put into the fantasy blueprint and are updated in green and red for the best and worst values. All that is starting on just taking in information, information during the summer, then tweaking numbers from historical data. We don't have to get into all the nerd talk, but you have to prepare in the summer. You can't do everything I just showed you the day of, unless somebody like me is doing it for you. But odds are somebody in your league doesn't have me doing it for them. So, just to be clear, the goal here is to put in some work during the summer. It doesn't mean you have to spend 10, 20 hours a week. Obviously, nobody wants to be doing that for fantasy football, but if you just want to be doing a couple of minutes a day during the summer, it's going to help a ton.
Tip number two on how I won the Experts League for $10,000. I read the room and exploited it when possible. Now, this is my favorite one. You don't have to like spy on all your league mates' mock drafts in their computers non-stop to understand which players they like. You don't have to look at all their tweets, although that does help. You really just have to see what they're doing on draft night in the draft room. This is the draft board from that $10,000 experts league last year. And I noticed two things very quickly. I noticed that a lot of people in the room had best ball brain, which I would consider just drafting wide receivers non-stop. And you could see the blue is the wide receivers. For the most part, you're getting a ton of wide receivers in these first seven or so rounds of the draft. You're getting a very heavy wide receiver run in the first four rounds of the draft. These just blue players all over here. So, I noticed that. So, my thought process was if people are basically forcing wide receivers because they were drafting these best drafts all summer where it makes more sense to take wide receivers. You're stacking. We don't have to get into the whole strategy there. Well, that means a lot of top-end running backs are going to drop and there's going to be values. And we'll get into this as we go when you see my draft board, but that's exactly what happened. I mean, Jonathan Taylor fell to me at the end of the second round. Should not have been there at any point. I got Christian McCaffrey in round one based on my draft slot. I had the cojones to take him. I had some other guys like Saquon and Justin Jefferson. That's a different story. Upside Woods Championships. We'll get into that piece later on in the video.
But I noticed best ball brain. And then I also noticed a thing I would like to call rookie fever. We had a lot of people who like to play dynasty in here in general. Some people just love rookies. I mean, we had Danny Lad taking Travis Hunter in the fourth round. Travis Hunter at this point was like a sixth, seventh round pick in most fantasy drafts. I believe we also had Treylon Henderson going super early. Let's find Treylon Henderson. Yeah, Treylon Henderson going at the 4-2. This was right after he had a big preseason game and everybody wanted to draft Treylon Henderson. He was basically a sixth round pick that got bumped up to the second pick in the fourth round. If I go through this, you'll see a ton more. You'll see early picks on guys like uh Luther Burton. You'll see early picks on just a bunch of different rookies last year that people got excited about. Best ball brain, rookie fever, whatever the trend is that's going on in your draft. Sometimes it's just people love taking running backs. That makes wide receivers more valuable. You can notice that on draft night. See what they're doing. Spy on your league mates and their rosters during the draft and get a sense of where the boards are going.
Tip number three is I had a printed-off plan and I stuck to it. Now, this one is pretty simple. A lot of people will just pull up rankings on a laptop. That's fine unless the rankings stink because they're from like ESPN or Fantasy Pros or something like that and they're not actually taking risks. They're just trying to get the average of everybody. Anyways, to each their own. I ended up having a plan. I put this plan together. This is just mine. You could also get this exact same plan. It's a part of my fantasy blueprint. Basically, the stuff that I printed off, this is the exact sheet. I updated the players obviously for this year, but this is the exact sheet. The Fast Track Plan is what I called it. Um, it has all my top wants and avoids at each position. You scroll down, it has all my player tiers broken up by position. Green highlights the best values versus ADP. Red shows you the worst values versus ADP. And I just took these, I think it was like barely over two pages. Yeah, like two pages, maybe two and a half pages. I took those into the draft and that's exactly what I had. I was holding some papers, had my laptop up next to me just in case like any last-minute news came in. There were preseason games going on so I didn't want an injury to happen. I think Quinton Johnson actually got a little bit banged up in one of his games during the draft. I just didn't want anything catastrophic. I take Devon H a n at round two when he blows out his hamstring or Achilles.
The other tip that's important is before the draft even starts and this is what I did. This is not a part of the seven. This is just a bonus for you. I took these running back targets, running back avoids like you can see right here at each position. And I just started to queue up players. I didn't X out the running back avoids because if a player falls past their average draft position, they can become a value and somebody you want to draft of course. But like my targets, I just started queuing up all these players to make sure that they were in my queue. Because you're going to notice, at least for this draft specifically, we didn't have like a set clock, but many of you are going to have 60 seconds, 90 seconds, maybe at best like two or three minutes to make a pick. If you're in a live draft, you're talking with your friends, you're drinking beers, you got to use the bathroom, the clock's going to start ticking. You're going to start panicking. So, make sure you queue up some of these players. It's very easy when you come in with a plan and you know the exact players you want to queue up instead of just going off like your hip like, "Oh, I like this guy or he did good for me last year. He's on my favorite team." No, you have an actual plan. You bring it into the draft. You queue up those players so you can never make a mistake or maybe not never make a mistake, reduce your chances of making a mistake. That is the whole point. We're going to get into that. You're not trying to be perfect. You're just trying to make the least mistakes possible.
Now, I should mention if you want that fast draft plan that I just showed you, like these player tiers that are updated like uh every single week during the offseason and then in season there's a bunch of other tools. If you want all this type of stuff, the Fast Track Plan to bring in with my wants and avoids, there's a whole bunch of other stuff in there. This is like maybe like 10 to 20% of what you get for the draft guide and then in season. You can check it out at jointheblueprint.com. It'll be linked in the description. Uh, it's the proven plan that I used to win that $10,000 league last year, win 75% of my home leagues last year. Uh, we could put up those three home leagues. I play in four main home leagues. Used to play in like 10 or 11, but then it just became too chaotic and hectic and I didn't really love it. Four main home leagues, couple other industry leagues, and a bunch of best drafts is what we're going with. But you can check it out at jointheblueprint.com. Uh, and it'll just tell you everything you get in it. Some frequently asked questions get answered in a video at the top. Uh, you'll get testimonials from people who have been using the blueprint the last couple years, who have won multiple leagues in one year, who have won back-to-back three years in a row, whatever it might be. Check it out if you want at join the blueprint.com. That's what I used last year to win this Flock league in $10,000 and send my family uh to Italy first class. It was amazing.
Tip number four is I let the value come to me. And in many situations, these values were maybe bounce-back candidates if you wanted to call them something. But a lot of the times you dominate the early rounds of your draft, which in my opinion, I did in this draft. McCaffrey, Jonathan Taylor, McBride, obviously that came to be. Uh, we'll talk about DJ Moore in round four. I'm not perfect. Nobody's perfect. We're just trying to reduce mistakes. That was definitely one of them, but luckily we reduced the other spots, but the value then just came to me. Um, if we show my draft right here. So, I'm just going to highlight it quickly. I believe if I just click my name. There we go. Made a weird noise. All right. So, George Pickens falling to the fifth round. In these like expert leagues, he was always going in round four. That was one that I was hoping would happen. It did. He fell to the fifth round. I didn't really do anything special there. Chris Ave, he was going in round six in round seven of home leagues all offseason. I kept telling people it was a mistake. This was a former second-round pick. Now he just had a different quarterback, but in my opinion, a better coaching situation. He was going at his floor. That obviously was proven. Finished as a top 10 wide receiver.
Kobe Myers in round seven. Nobody wanted him. And and honestly, to their credit, he wasn't doing great with a terrible Raiders offense. He got traded though. Did really good with the Jaguars. Jaden Reed gets hurt. Hard to say. Brock Purdy, I mean, he was my quarterback all year long. Obviously dealt with injuries. Top five fantasy points per game scorer last year. He fell to me in round nine. And the value just continued. You get Rhamondre Stevenson in round 11. Was he that sexy or exciting? Especially when Trayvon Henderson was breaking off touchdown runs in the preseason a day before this draft. No, that's why Rhamondre fell from an eighth or ninth round pick to the end of the 11th round and he ended up being a solid flex option. So, it's not always about and I'll just like show the rest of the draft the end of the rounds. I don't really care about these like last three picks or four picks. They weren't really that valuable interchange with uh players off waivers and all that type of stuff. Um, but as you can see, like it's not that complicated if you can nail the early rounds of your draft. In this situation, I ended up landing two running backs because we said earlier there was some best ball brain going on. Wide receiver or was just going left and right. That allowed me to get Jonathan Taylor. In my opinion, Trey McBride was a value. He fell to the third round. And you might be saying, "How do you know if somebody's a value?" It's the exact thing I've been showing you. You come in with a plan. Not only was I using the uh tiers, which I think is like the best thing you need to be drafting with player tiers, positional tiers, so you know the exact pockets of value. So, this is one way to know value if you're in, let's just say, all these wide receivers in tier one and tier two are gone, which they were last year when I was drafting Jonathan Taylor. And then you have Jonathan Taylor who's a tier one running back this year who last year was probably like a tier two running back. Obviously, there's a pretty clear pick at that point. There's also, if you don't really want to like look across different positions, you can just make like a top 250 across all positions. So, I also have that available. You can see right here, it just shows every single different position, running back, wide receiver, tight end, quarterback. So, I would just take names off just like this as I went. I would delete the names as I went. I would cross them off and then you just get to a point where it's pretty obvious who the outstanding values are. Now, this is just an example, but if you're drafting in the second round and CD Lamb is your best available player and there's a wide gap bound to a Jeremiah Love or George Pickens for this year, obviously, you know, you should be taking CD Lamb. At times last year, that's exactly what this board looked like. Especially when I was drafting George Pickens, Chris Ave, Brock Purdy, even when I was drafting Trey McBride, there wasn't a gap because it was so early in the draft of like 10 players, but there was a gap of like five players and Trey McBride was up here as the obvious pick. All the hay is in the barn. I did all the work in the summer. I prepped everything. I don't have to overthink it. The rankings I'm looking at are there for a reason. So, I'm just going to go off those rankings during the draft. It makes it very simple. Just take the value on the board.
Tip number five is don't flinch when people start to make fun of you. Now, here's the fun part. People last year were absolutely roasting me. We'll put some comments up on the screen. Even experts, and we'll get into those guys as well. They were roasting me. This guy doesn't have a wide receiver through the first three rounds. What is he doing? He's an expert. Haha. Right? It's all the people that also have best ball brain, rookie fever, group think, all of this. They want to go to the exact same plan. Get your wide receiver in the first three rounds. Right? Do not flinch when your friends are like, "You took that guy. Oh, you only have one running back." Do not flinch. Stick to your plan because your plan is good. You've been doing it all summer. Meanwhile, theirs probably just started that morning. But I mean, last year, if you pull up the Flock League, we have our draft from last year. What is it, like an hour? Yeah, it's an hour and 5 minutes. Last year, when I didn't have Let's see if I could actually find the spot. This is so funny. I just clicked to it quickly. This is me in the draft room. It's a room that has a glass wall behind us, and I'm looking at who I'm going to pick next. I'm picking Trey McBride here, but during this entire time, you're going to see, let's just see. Here's me. You're going to see Mason. This is Mason right now. If I put the volume on, he's talking [ __ ] He's saying, "Oh, Sal's going." This is Faul Fantasy, by the way. Mason Dodd. He's saying, "Oh, Sal's going with McBride. He doesn't have a wide receiver yet. The guy's tanking his draft or he doesn't know what he's doing or whatever he said." Right? That's one of the biggest experts in the league in all of fantasy [ __ ] on me. I did not care.
Then we also had Nick BDGE, who ended up, he's one of the other biggest uh experts in the industry. He ended up reviewing the Flock League, right? Got a ton of views on it. 300,000's crazy, right? He ended up watching me go through and take Jonathan Taylor in round two over AJ Brown. I think the quote was like, "You had AJ Brown sitting there all checked up for you and you didn't take him. Don't know what we're doing here." Or something something along those lines. He did not grade my draft very good. I think he gave me the worst grade out of the 12 teams. Uh, spoiler alert. We obviously now know the fact that I took Jonathan Taylor here, AJ Brown here. So, Jonathan Taylor right before because it was coming back the other way. We now know Jonathan Taylor was one of the highest scoring players in all fantasy football. And AJ Brown, I think, scored like half as many points or so as Jonathan Taylor from weeks 1 through 13 at least. Anyways, that's like a lot of me going in. I know these guys. They're my friends. Don't worry about it. I'll probably be playing pickleball with Mason later. Anyways, it's just to prove a point. No matter what, how many times you draft a fantasy team, if you do it for a living like me, people are going to make fun of you. They're going to think you have no idea what you're doing. They're going to do it left and right. You could be damn sure your buddies are going to be picking on you. Do not let because I've let it happen in the past. Do not let that pressure force you into taking an extra running back because you only have one through five rounds and you feel bad and your friends are making fun of you and they think you stink and the Yahoo grade score so far says you got an F grade. Do not let any of that influence you. Those things do not matter.
Tip number six is your draft will set the tone for the rest of your season. Now, obviously, this is the case. It's where the fantasy season starts for you and your fantasy team. But what I mean by that is if you could actually draft a good team, you don't have to panic about waivers. You don't have to panic about going and making trades. Last year, I only made a handful of trades. I think I only really made two real trades if you don't count like trading a player for a couple of FAAB bucks. I traded towards Yeah. November. So, towards the end of the year, I traded Rhamondre Stevenson when he was hurt for Alvin Kamara. I kept him for a week. That ended up helping me. I think I then quickly, if we scroll up here, um, yeah, I quickly flipped Alvin Kamara and an injured Jaden Reed for Josh Downs, who wasn't doing much in Tyron Tracy. That worked out for me. Tyron Tracy was in my championship lineup. And then if we scroll up, not much else here. I traded uh, Rashee Rice for some FAAB budget to the fan Sammy. And then I traded I got Jaden Reed back and I traded DJ Moore. DJ Moore was doing nothing for me. Jaden Reed might have came back for the playoffs. I just put him in my IR so I can hold another player. So, for the most part there, I really made like two actual trades that hit my lineup. That's great. Most people and in this league there was probably 30 plus trades if not more. Most people are trading five times. But thankfully when you nail your fantasy draft and this was my championship roster I believe I drafted. McCaffrey I drafted. Taylor I drafted. I'll keep scrolling here. Pickens I drafted. A uh McBride, Jacoby Myers. I drafted all these guys. The only guy I did not draft were my kicker who I just streamed every week and Tyron Tracy. Even my bench I picked up Herbert after week one. Um, drafted Jaden Reed. So, like if you don't have to draft or if you don't have to panic about waivers or trades and you just feel good about your lineup because you drafted properly and obviously injury luck is going to factor into this some. But if you're in that position, it's great. Let the draft set the tone. The draft is not the only part of fantasy. Those other things matter, but it's arguably the most important part cuz if you nail it, you're going to cruise.
Now, before we keep going, I've got something to tell you because I've teamed up with DraftKings and you're going to want to hear this because they just dropped the biggest fantasy football contest in the history of the sport. We are talking about a $20 million best prize pool where three different people are going to walk away millionaires this year. Now, look, if you've never played best ball, no worries. Here's what you need to know. You draft your team one time and that's it. No setting lineups, no waiver wire, no Sunday morning panicking. Your top scores automatically count every week. You're basically getting a fun sweat all season long with your team and players without having to lift a finger or do any work after the draft. Now, here's the part you don't want to miss. DraftKings is running a draft one get one offer right now. All customers enter a lineup into the $20 million best ball headliner contest for $25 and get a bonus ticket for a second entry. That basically means you have two shots at your share of $20 million and maybe being one of those three people who will become a millionaire. So, all you have to do now is download the DraftKings app, sign up with promo code SAL and get your lineups in before the season kicks off in partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours.
Tip number seven is I minimize the mistakes. Now, this one is maybe the most important one. We might have saved the best for last because this is all it takes. Everybody thinks you have to have the perfect draft. You have to get all the perfect sleepers. No, that's not the case. You don't have to do that at all. You just have to make the least mistakes in your draft and throughout the seasons, whether that's flex decisions, which the blueprint will also help you with, uh, add drops, whatever it might be. But obviously, it starts with your draft. Make the least mistakes possible. If we look at my picks from last year, in my opinion, based on all the research I did, Christian McCaffrey was a slam dunk where he went, Jonathan Taylor was a slam dunk, and McBride was. DJ Moore was not a good pick, right? These things are going to happen. I was choosing between DJ Moore and one other wide receiver or actually it might have been Kenneth Walker. Either way, none of them were the greatest picks. That was my mistake. That's going to happen. Nobody's perfect. You're going to make a lot of mistakes in your fantasy leagues. I for sure over the past decade easily have. But like the tip said, you want to reduce those mistakes. So although we made a catastrophic, some would say mistake with a fourth-round pick who absolutely busted. Sure, he had some 20-point weeks, but some of those were on my bench, some of those were after I traded him. For the most part, he let you down as a fourth-round pick. Thankfully though, Pickens, Ave, Myers, Purdy, um, even Rashee Rice before he got traded, he was doing well with the Saints. Uh, Rhamondre Stevenson, like out of those first 11 rounds, Jaden Reed's hard to say he got hurt in week two. Out of those first 11 rounds, one mistake I would say if you want to say Rashee Rice, but he got traded. Who could see that coming? DJ Moore was probably the only mistake.
Now, I will say a lot of this was also some luck. I'm not going to sit here and say I always go 10 for 11. No, this was obviously one of my better drafts. That's exactly why we won the league and went 14-2. We stayed healthy. McCaffrey didn't get hurt, all that stuff, right? But at the end of the day, even if two of these were mistakes, you just want to reduce the mistakes as much as possible. I've said in another video, in your first two rounds, you really can't afford to have any mistakes. And like rounds three through five, you could probably get away with one, maybe two if it's a minor mistake. But in rounds one and two, you cannot make a mistake. If one of these guys absolutely busts in round one and two, it's just going to be so hard for you to overcome that across other positions. So like for this person next to me who had J.K. Dobbins and AJ Brown, AJ Brown was a massive bust. J.K. Dobbins obviously pays off. Bijan Robinson and Lad Makani. Lad Makani major bust. CeeDee Lamb and Josh Jacobs. CeeDee Lamb gets hurt. Doesn't really pay off. I wouldn't call him a bust. Jamar Chase and Amari Cooper. Amari Cooper obviously deals with the injuries and then he's kind of in a time share with Kamari Vidal when he comes back. So like you cannot if you can nail your first and second round pick. You're off to the races. Reduce the mistakes as much as possible at all parts of your draft and all parts of your fantasy season. You don't need to be perfect. Just be better and delete your league mates. Obviously that sounds obvious. It starts with reducing the mistakes.
So, when I put it all together, these are the seven tips that I thought about were the biggest factors into why I was able to win that $10,000 first experts league last year. Was able to win 75% of my home leagues last year. And really, it all gets boiled up into the fantasy blueprint. Some of it strategy, which we talked about today. A lot of it is just preparation and knowing exactly who to take and when to take them and when to pivot and not to panic and sticking to your strategy when people are making fun of you. So, if you want to check out the fantasy blueprint for this year, I think so far like three or 4,000 people have bought it for this year. You could join those fantasy gamers as well at jointheblueprint.com. A lot about what you can get like we showed earlier is right here. So check it out at jointheblueprint.com. This is the story. Um, pretty sick. Was able to take my dad and my mom uh full circle moment just doing this full-time. So Italy. So unbelievable. It was awesome. It's crazy that fantasy football was able to do that, but it was. And I hope in some way or another it can do something like that for you if you win your leagues. So if you found any help from this, leave a comment some other strategies that you know about. I'll be happy to read them. Maybe we'll make a follow-up video based on all the comments from the viewers.