Most fantasy advice covers the players you already know you want. Watch101 covers the other end of your roster.
The back few spots on a fantasy team are where seasons quietly get won or lost. They are also the spots nobody writes about, because writing about the top forty players gets more clicks. So we watch the other guys. Every list is 101 players deep, it is put together by hand, and it changes constantly.
The whole thing hinges on ownership. A player only belongs on the list if most leagues have not grabbed him yet. Once everybody owns him, he is not a watch list guy anymore, he is just a player you already have.
We look at ownership across both Yahoo and CBS, and we weigh them differently on purpose. Yahoo is free, so it is full of casual teams that stopped paying attention in May. CBS costs money, so the owners tend to be paying attention, and ownership there runs higher for the same player. A guy sitting at the same percentage on both sites is telling you two different stories.
There is no hard cutoff, and that is deliberate. A rule you can publish is a rule that makes you leave off the right player. Somebody widely owned who just got cut belongs on the list. So does an injured player who still matters in a dynasty league. Judgment beats a formula here, which is the entire reason a person makes this list instead of a script.
The stats on every player update on their own, straight from the league and stats providers, so the numbers you see are current even when the names have not moved in a few days. The rankings and the commentary are the human part. Those move when Matt moves them.
Two people. Matt has been playing fantasy baseball and basketball at a high level for twenty years and knows the player pool cold, and the rankings and write ups are his. Jay builds and runs everything the site sits on.
If you want to tell us we are wrong about somebody, that is genuinely half the fun. Get in touch.
