Fantasy Football Daily - 2021 Franchise Focus: Minnesota Vikings

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

Graham Barfield (@GrahamBarfield) and Scott Barrett (@ScottBarrettDFB) preview the Minnesota Vikings 2021 season in the companion podcast to the 2021 Franchise Focus piece on FantasyPoints.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fantasy-points-podcast/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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responsibly. It's time for the Fantasy Points podcast, brought to you by FantasyPoint.com. Top-level fantasy football and NFL betting analysis from every perspective and angle, from numbers to the film room, with a single goal to help you score more fantasy points. Yo, welcome back, everybody, to the franchise-focused podcast series. We are well over, well, not well over, we're halfway through at this point of of the entire NFL, breaking down all 32 teams here on the Fantasy Points Podcast Network. If you've been listening, you know we've been skipping over, you know, the Packers and Broncos and Texans for obvious reasons,

just waiting on, you know, the Rogers News, waiting on Deshaun Watson News. So those podcasts will be up, and those articles before the series will be up later, probably into training camp. But today we're going to be talking about the Minnesota Vikings. Scott and I are back for the third part of our little two bars reunion here for the franchise focus podcast series. Joe and Tom are still out. They're out visiting family, having a great time at a wedding. So, yeah, we're giving them some time off and letting them enjoy that before. Scott, the grind is here, man.

It's training camps are, you know, firing up right now. Hall of Fame games a couple weeks away. Week one's a couple weeks away. And, yeah, we won't really come up for, for a breath of fresh air until January. But real quick, before we talk Vikings, before we talk Thielen and Jefferson and Cook and cousins, I want to encourage everybody if you haven't already,

go check out the franchise-focused team profile series up on FantasyPoints.com right now. You can use code 21 Barfield 10 to get you 10% off. And if you buy the premium package, that saves you like 10, 12, 13 bucks. So definitely want to check that out, save a little bit of cash and get you prep for this. We have super in-depth profiles on every single team.

Tom Browley, our betting guy, has been breaking down every team from a betting perspective. So go check that out. Now, the betting side is the premium side, and that's where you want to be. So, Scott, let's start here, man. I think the Vikings, if you really rank the most condensed teams in the NFL in terms of usage, I think the Vikings would be number one. Jefferson and Thielen saw, you know, 50, 55% of the team's targets. Cook gets, you know, Belcal workload.

We know where the ball is going to be distributed here. But the interesting thing for this team is Justin Jefferson, you know, while he did emerge as the team's wide receiver one, there's a big gap in ADP. He's a second, third round pick right now. Adam Thielen goes in rounds four or five. And I know you and I've talked about this extensively off air, but I think Adam Thielen right now is one of the best,

if not the best wide receiver value among like the top 24, top 30 guys in ADP. So let's start there, Adam Thielen coming off a massive season last year. You know, he's a weekend, week out wide receiver one, scored a bunch of touchdowns. But now you're getting him in a nice discount. First and foremost, why do you think Thelan is going so much later than Jefferson? And why do you think he's like a fourth, fifth round pick right now? Yeah, I have absolutely no idea. It makes zero sense to me by FFP.

PC and NFFC. He's a low-end wide receiver 2 by ADP. Over the last four seasons, he finished 11th, 7th, 44th, and 11th in fantasy points for game in 2019 was an injury outlier year. He was averaging 17.3 fantasy points for four quarters before a hamstring injury, where he was basically a decoy for the rest of the season when he did play, which wasn't often. That would have ranked seven best.

So really, you know, 7th, 7th, 11th, and 11th. in terms of finishes over the last four seasons. Low-end wide receiver 2 ADP makes absolutely zero sense. So I'm trying to gobble up Thielen wherever I can. My issue is I keep playing acute where it's like the fourth round or whatever. I take Amari Cooper or someone I have ranked below Thielen, hoping to get Thielen the next round. And then Thielen goes to pick right in front of me and I want to rage quit. But yeah, crazy.

Maybe it's just all the hype with Jefferson. and I'd much rather feel in that ADP. I don't see their finish being too disparate. And I mean, Jefferson's awesome. I was in a dynasty draft in February. And I was, yeah, Wes, who do I take this running back? This guy or Justin Jefferson? He's like, well, Justin Jefferson's going to be in the Hall of Fame.

So there's that. Yeah. I mean, he just had the best rookie wide receiver season probably ever, you know, not, you know, OBJ up there if you, but he missed some games due to injury. But yeah, man, geez. I'll take you to task. I think Randy Moss had a better rookie season if you adjust for error. But yeah, it was certainly up there.

And that being said, I mean, we can put him in that like top three conversation with him and Bolton and OBJ and Moss. You know, he's in that conversation, top three, top four rookie receiver season of all time. But even that being said, man, Adam Thielen had more top 12. wide receiver one finishes last year. He had seven to Jefferson's five. And I get it. Justin Jefferson is nearly 10 years younger. He's going to, he's going to end up having a fantastic career. And I think Wes is, uh, Wes is called that he's going to be, you know, eventually have his own

bust in Canton is probably a really sharp one. All of that being said for fantasy this year, I think feeling is is by far the better value. And that's not to say that just, you know, Jefferson where he's going, and he's going at the wide receiver eight, wide receiver nine. And in ADP, it's definitely not a bad price. I just think Thielen is just that much more of a value. I mean, Thielen's like the wide receiver 22 right now. And I get it. He's probably going to regress a little bit in the touchdown department.

You know, he's nearly converted 20% of his receptions in the scores last year. That's going to regress. But he can score, you know, eight or nine times and still easily pay off his costs. One guy, you and I is. Just the thing about that. So he is due for. a little regression, but he had 9.5 expected touchdowns. He was really Kirk Cousins guy in the end zone. Well, he led them in end zone targets by a mile, right? 20, yeah. And so that was second

best in the league last year. Wow. And I mean, why not? Thielen has amazing hands. He hauled in some insane touchdown catches last year. So, you know, maybe that's a sticky role. And even if there is an efficiency regression, you know, double-digit touchdowns seems more likely to not. How many, how many ends-on targets do you know off the time? I don't know if you have it pulled up, but how many ends-on targets did Kyle Rudolph have last year? That is a really good question. I know Jake Trippy talked about it in his XTD article. Yeah. But yeah, so that's part of it too. You know, Rudy's not there anymore. Right. I'll try to pull it up real quick while we're on the on the air, but let's talk, you know, good segue here into Irv Smith because back in June,

Mike Zimmer mentioned that Irv Smith's role is not going to change. It's going to be Tyler Conklin, their number, he was their number three guy last year. He's going to be their number two guy now that Rudolph is in New York. Mike Zimmer mentioned that the Earth Smith role is not going to change. It's actually going to be Tyler Conklin's role. And when he said that, I honestly, I kind of scoffed at it. But then I think Tom and maybe you started pulling up the numbers, and it was like, damn, like there's actually a lot to this. And their final four games last year, when Kyle Rudolph missed because of an injury,

it was actually Tyler Conklin who led the Vikings Titans and Targets. He had 21. Irmsmith had 20, and they split snaps. They split snaps 203 to 202. There has been a lot of. of projection in Irv Smith's ADP, he goes in like the 10th or the 11th round. And man, I mean, not only is this head coach saying, hey, he's basically going to remain and not necessarily a part-time role, but he's not going to be like the full, full-time role that like, you know,

Kelsey or Waller gets. Not only that, but we have, you know, actual on-field game data that backs that up. I kind of went into this year thinking I'd have, you know, way more Irv Smith and based on where he's going, I really, I really don't have much. What's, what's your take on, you know, Irv and the whole Vikings starting situation? Yeah, there was a point last offseason where I tried to acquire Irv Smith in just about every dynasty league I do, and most of them are tied in premium. I think Arif Hassan, the athletics beat writer for the Vikings, had an article where he was talking about how Irv Smith was running wide receiver routes. He had, in their playbook specifically designed for Smith to, to, to place some wide receiver.

And I'm like, okay, boom, sky is the limit. You know, that's what you want. You want those wide receivers masquerading as a tight end, like a Travis Kelsey, a Darren Waller. And then there was just no positive news after that. And so he slowly, you know, for whatever reason, didn't pull off, I think, a single trade. And then I just kind of forgot about it. And, you know, no positive news.

And it was easy to make a bullish argument for him last year. You know, you had a solid rookie season, despite playing part-time alongside Rudy. And then he had basically the same exact year last year, just scored a few more touchdowns. And, yeah, this news is not good. You know, they're basically saying, yeah, no, Irv is just going to be the same thing he was last year. But Tyler Conklin, he's our new Kyle Rudolph. And, yeah, so I want absolutely no Irv Smith at ADP, no, no, no, thank you. Yeah, I'm kind of with.

you. I'm not really messing around with either one of them. And I did pull it up. So in the first, what would that be, 12 games before Kyle Rudolph got hurt, it's kind of crazy. Thielen had 16 end zone targets. 16. Justin Jefferson had three, Irv Smith had three and Rudolph had three. So yeah, I think, you know, Thielen is probably not going to repeat and score 14, 15 times this year. He's got the extra game to do it. But I also, I mean, he is clearly Cousins number one guy. And I really don't think you can add in too much touchdown upside with Irv based on those numbers either, even if it does even out a little bit in terms of end zone target distribution between Thielen and Jefferson. Smith is still like the distant three on this team. And honestly, he's the distant

four in terms of just like overall touches, obviously, because Dalvin Cook is freaking awesome. Yeah, I just, if Irv we're going in like the 13th or 14th round and kind of like near that like Johnu Smith range where you can kind of make an argument that the spiked weeks will be there for best ball I'd be in but yeah man he's still going like 10th 11th round and I just I have not been I have not found myself taking the Irv Smith plunge this year but that's going to do it. That was a quick nice 10 15 minutes on the Vikings. Tom, Joe and I will be back. I believe for the Patriots tomorrow.

I don't want to set anything in stone because those guys are traveling back from their trip. But it should be Joe Tom and I back tomorrow. But it's been fun doing a little two bars reprise here for the franchise focus podcast series. And again, guys, if you have not checked out the article for the article series for franchise focus, you're really missing out. I mean, it's the best team preview series you can possibly find to get yourself prepared. for the season and win some shmoney. But I'm going to leave it at that. We'll be back with the Patriots and Saints

to round out this week on the podcast. For Scott, I'm Graham. Thanks for listening to everybody, and we will catch you tomorrow. Thanks for tuning in to this edition of the Fantasy Points podcast. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review on your favorite platform. And come join the roster at FantasyPoint.com.