Weekly Twitter Observations

In this series of Twitter Observations, we will focus on some of the interesting tweets you may have missed. Twitter can be overwhelming with the amount of information that streams live, but it also proves to be one of the fastest and easiest ways to communicate. In 140 characters or less you can learn something about a player you may have never thought of from trends, stats or analysis. Let’s review some of the best tweets I’ve captured this week.

News

Darren Urban, azcardinals.com

Arians: Palmer looks “fantastic” after waiting to throw until end of OTAs. “It’s like he’s 20.” Palmer will work all of minicamp.

— Darren Urban (@Cardschatter) June 1, 2017

This time of the year, the NFL news is filled with these types of reports. Ultimately they don’t mean much of anything. While I believe Bruce Arians is excited about Carson Palmer, I also am not about to overreact to the comments either.  Too often people want to ever overreact to the news itself, or overly make fun at those who mention it. I find I am a mix of the two. I prefer to monitor the news and build confidence levels using all the information.

The better Palmer looks, the better I feel about John Brown. It doesn’t mean I am moving anyone in my rankings, but it does factor into my confidence about how I am viewing certain players. Basically, I caution you to throw the baby out with the bath water, but also not to stop what you’re doing and buy at any cost.

Mike Garafolo, NFL Network

The Chiefs dabbled in talks with teams to see if there was any interest in a trade, source says. But never asked him to take a pay cut.

— Mike Garafolo (@MikeGarafolo) June 3, 2017

By now you’ll have seen that Jeremy Maclin was cut by the Chiefs. As a post June 1st cut, the move saves the Chiefs $10 million in 2017, but over the next three years the total savings are $32 million. The move leaves behind the prorated signing bonus of $12 million which the Chiefs deferred over the five years of the contract. With three years left, the team will carry a dead cap hit of $2.4 million per year through 2019. So the glaring reaction is that the Chiefs saved $10 million in cap space this season, as they had the second lowest space with only $2.2 million.

Per spotrac.com, Patrick Mahomes alone is likely to cost the Chiefs $3 million in 2017, with another $1-2 million required to sign the rest of their rookie draft picks. It’s hard to make the case the Chiefs didn’t need the space – they most definitely did. However, of the whole situation, this tweet from Mike Garafolo simply baffles me. The Chiefs didn’t even ask him to restructure? Come again? It’s hard to believe Maclin wouldn’t have agreed to provide cap relief in a restructure, possibly lowering his salary or deferring payments. As for the trade partner scenario, there’s really no incentive for another team to take on the three year, $32 million.

In dynasty, he remains a hold for me. I am not looking to buy, nor looking to sell for peanuts. His ADP is currently at 104 overall and I expect that to fall a bit as long as the uncertainty remains on where he will sign.

Stats

Tod Burros, FootballDiehards.com

Did some research on the top 25 point per game RB’s in MFL10 by percentage of time they hit each milestone points per week in 2016 pic.twitter.com/T9ENGHoTPy

— TodfromPa (@TodfromPA) May 28, 2017

Tod Burros with FootballDiehards.com had a great series of tweets sharing a heat map of how often running backs hit a target scoring threshold. Mostly it looks as you would expect, but the one in particular which stood out to me was Theo Riddick’s floor of ten points hitting 70%, while reaching 15 points 40% of the time.

In deeper formats with many flex positions or nine-plus starters on offense, Riddick provides a very nice floor. Playing in ten games, he saw 15 red zone targets compared to Eric Ebron’s mere six red zone targets. With Anquan Boldin not returning, there are another 22 red zone targets up for grabs, providing even more opportunity for Riddick to see an increase potential for receiving touchdowns after having five in those ten games in 2016.

Pat Thorman, Pro Football Focus

After returning from injury in Week 8, Dez Bryant ranked 4th in FF points per game (10th in PPR) despite seeing 24th-most targets per game.

— Pat Thorman (@Pat_Thorman) May 31, 2017

As Pat Thorman of Pro Football Focus points out here, Dez Bryant had a very solid stretch from week eight through week 16. Put me in the crowd that no one should hold a poor week 17 against a player. Focusing on weeks eight through week 16, Bryant had a top seven wide receiver level output. In those nine games, Bryant had 39 receptions on 72 targets, with 646 receiving yards, and seven touchdowns. This production averaged over a 16 game season would have been good for 258.8 points in PPR leagues.

In dynasty, his ADP has been 15 overall as the 11th WR off the board. If drafting Bryant early in the second round, I would recommend doing it where you took a younger premiere WR in the first. For example, pairing DeAndre Hopkins and Bryant, or Allen Robinson with Bryant would be optimal. I would not recommend pairing one of Antonio Brown, A.J. Green, or Julio Jones with Bryant as they are all in the same point of their career cycles.

Fantasy News

Jason Tran, @FLAFFLHouse

@jasontran joins @flafflhouse for his first article and talks Charity through Fantasy Football  https://t.co/Kke47hdt40

— The FLAFFL House (@FLAFFLHouse) June 1, 2017

In past Twitter Observation articles, I have tried to highlight some of the great charitable work the fantasy football community has done. Jason Tran went one step further and wrote an article highlighting many of the charitable works done by the community. Please check out the article and I encourage you to reach out to some of the people he mentions in the article to see how you can contribute.

Scott Fish, DLF – Creator and Commissioner of #SFB7

I sent all the MFL invites to 568 people last week. Some appear to have hit spam, I’m re-sending 1×1 this weekend.

— Scott Fish (@ScottFish24) June 3, 2017

I wanted to share this tweet by Scott Fish and help make sure everyone who inquired about the Scott Fish Bowl was aware that there are many who haven’t logged into the site yet to confirm their spots. He is re-sending the invites, but it would be great if you could check your spam folder, or make sure you log in so he can verify as many of the invites as possible.

With so much information on Twitter, there are so many great minds contributing great discussion, articles, and bits of data, truly a hot bed of fantasy goodness. I will be doing my best to capture the highlights of the week and mining it out in one place for you.