In-depth film analysis of NFL Draft Prospects With a Fantasy Football Lens - by Matt Waldman ©2025
Around this time last year Cameron Kenney was eluding top prospect Prince Amukamara on the football field for a more-impressive-than-the-stats-suggest, 6-65 performance without Ryan Broyles in the lineup. This year, Kenney couldn’t elude a trashcan and a pole in my home town. Continue reading
We live in the football era of specialization: Slot receiver. Third down back. Move tight end. Pass rush defensive end. Nickel back. In the box safety. But there was a time when its best players played more than one role.
Sammy Baugh was both a great passer and ball hawking safety. Chuck Bednarik played on both sides of the trench. George Blanda used his arm to lead his teams down the field and his foot to finished the drive.
They transcended a single position and were best known as “football players.” Believe it or not, we still have football players in the NFL. Continue reading
There are three NFL games on Thanksgiving. There are three NFL games used to form the player pool for a Fantasy Throwdown challenge. Sounds like a perfect match for a Fantasy Throwdown Turkey Day Competition!
Fantasy Throwdown is free to play, drafts are quick, and the game is highly intuitive to pick up. Here’s a quick tutorial.
Throwdown players can accumulate points by participating in official Throwdown Turkey Day challenges. An official Throwdown Turkey Day challenge is simply a game of Fantasy Throwdown where all three NFL games are the games played on Thanksgiving Day. (Note: You and your opponent will have to manually select the three Thanksgiving Day games when you set up your Throwdown match.)
The top point getters, plus category award winners, will be recognized as the best Throwdown Turkey Day players in this event. The top point getter will be crowned our Turkey Day Champ!
Earn points in the following categories: Continue reading
My piece Logic (Newton) or Chance (Luck)? got a comment the other day that sparked a thought I want to share. Here’s the comment and my response: Continue reading
I’m just a regular guy who has chosen to lead an irregular life.
And occasionally, there are people with websites and blogs that want to ask me questions about football and sometimes, how football contributes to my irregular life. If you’re curious, I have a short page of links to these Q&A interviews. (Link fixed, BTW)
At the top of this short page of interviews is a link to Dynasty League Football’s November 5 interview conducted by Eric Dickens.
Most of you reading the RSP blog play fantasy football. If you’re like me your favorite part of fantasy leagues is the draft. There’s nothing more enjoyable than assembling a team, except perhaps the week you play a heated rival and get a chance to smack talk like you’re Hines Ward and he’s Terrell Suggs.
I’ve been touting a fantasy football game for the past 7-10 days that is a free, simple, convenient, and fast way to play every day and it’s also challenging enough to keep you coming back for more – FantasyThrowdown.com. I think it’s a great innovation to playing fantasy football because its one-on-one match ups allow you to challenge anyone, anytime.
You can play 20 times in a week or you can play once a month – whatever fits your schedule. It’s so easy to learn that I’ve had very few people need to ask me a question about how to play because if you’ve been in a fantasy league, it’s truly an intuitive game to learn.
Here’s the basics (for more complete directions go here):
Drafts take 10 minutes if you and your opponent are both online. Or you can stretch out the draft throughout the course of the week or even do predraft settings. Play standard or IDP, PPR or non-PPR. We now have flex options – including 2-QB lineups! And the site has live chat and connects to Twitter and Facebook.
Challenge me to a game either by registering and looking me up on the Leaderboard in the Lobby (matt) or use my email address: thegutcheck@gmail.com.
I don’t know about you, but my favorite part of fantasy football is the draft. Now you can draft every day and have new match ups at any time at FantasyThrowdown.com . I actually received an email from reader last week who thanked me for tipping him to the site. He said it was like giving cookies to a sugar addict.
We actually saw a lot of people try Fantasy Throwdown last week and the feedback was tremendous. If you didn’t try this strategic and addictive one-on-one fantasy football game last week, then you need need to challenge me to a draft. Just go the site, create a login, and enter my email (thegutcheck@gmail.com) when you create a private challenge. If you need a few more directions, see below.
How to Play
Starting a challenge is easy and the draft is really flexible. If you want to draft in minutes with a friend, you can do that online together. If you don’t have a lot of time in one sitting you can start a challenge on Monday and slowly pick a starting lineup before the first kick off on Sunday.
Some folks are playing dozens of times per week and telling me drafts take as little as 10-15 minutes when both parties are online. Others tell me they enjoy knowing they can draft over the course of a week if they don’t have the time to finish a game in one sitting.
Here’s how it works: Continue reading
By Jene Bramel
Television makes football look and sound amazing. They give us HD video and surround sound, on-field suspended cameras, and parabolic microphones. But the TV production crews – including many of the color broadcasters and their spotters – still miss showing us crucial chapters of the game story.
Thankfully, football geeks can get a glimpse behind the scenes every week with the Game Rewind service on NFL.com, which provides the coaches film for a few selected plays. It’s a great way to see if something went down as the television angles and the announcers said it did on Sunday. Sometimes, the two stories are as different as what my seven year-old and four year-old tell me after I find that half the Halloween candy has been eaten two weeks before they’ve put they’re costumes on. Continue reading
If you follow me on Twitter then you might have seen that I was looking for people to play me in a game of one-on-one fantasy football. The game is FantasyThrowdown. It’s a one-on-one fantasy football game that is simple, but strategic and addictive. Drafts can take as little as 5-10 minutes and you can play as much as you like each week.
Here’s how it works:
Fantasy Throwdown offers traditional offense + team defense or offense + IDP options as well as PPR and Non-PPR scoring.
The site is still in testing (BETA) mode, but I’ve participated in numerous drafts and it works well. Go to the site and create a login, accept (or create) a public challenge, or send me a private challenge by using my email: thegutcheck@gmail.com. Send me any feedback about the game as well.
“Throw down” with me and let’s see what you got.
Questions came this morning on Twitter and the names in parenthesis are Twitter accounts.
Q (Dave Larkin): Is this the day Mark Ingram breaks out?
A: I think this five-week stretch with Carolina, Tampa (twice), Indianapolis, and Saint Louis is the time that Mark Ingram is going to either build steam or become a wait-til-next year guy. Either way, I don’t think Mark Ingram has shown anything counter to his standing as a top-tier draft prospect at his position. Carolina has the best chance to maintain a points pace with the Saints offense, but the next four opponents will struggle offensively and I think Ingram will then see more game-sealing opportunities.
Q(Haydn239): How close are Landry Jones and Andrew Luck in talent?
A: I think it’s Luck and not even close. Cam Newton might have a better statistical year this year than Luck next year because Newton has the great athleticism combined with smarts and an offensive system that really has been tailored well for him, but I think Luck’s demonstration of how to change plays at the line of scrimmage and manage a game is rare.
Luck runs a west coast offense that is very close to what we see in the NFL and his ability to manipulate a defense before the snap is very much like Manning or Brady. I just watched him against UCLA last week on a 99-yard drive where he consistently moved around his personnel to the optimal run or pass play after getting the defense to reveal its base shell. This isn’t something that we see very often with college football quarterbacks and it is not that noticeably impressive to the casual fan because it doesn’t involve athleticism.
Landry Jones is a nice physical talent with the type of skills to have been a top-tier guy in other drafts. He still is a top-tier QB prospect. However, Luck is in another realm because he is given the conceptual keys to the offense that few quarterbacks his age are.
Q(Baxinpin): Thoughts on Jahvid Best the rest of the way?
A: Best is a terrific receiver from the backfield and I think the Lions are a smart enough group to make offensive adjustments to exploit defensive weaknesses that will generate big plays in the next 6-8 weeks. However, I don’t think the Lions have enough evidence to change their minds about Best and use him as a 15-20 carry back.
I think it will take injuries to other offensive pieces in the passing game and Best to show he can handle a higher workload to prove to the Lions that he can be more of a Marshall Faulk or a Tiki Barber in terms of role. It might evolve for Best over a course of years. However, I don’t think we’ll see it this year. Maybe some big runs this year, but the Lions are a pass-first team and the addition of Mikel LeShoure in the draft was an attempt to develop a power running game that they lack.