ASK THE EXPERTS appears weekly from training camp through the Super Bowl with answers to a new question being posted Thursday morning. How the guest experts responded when we asked them: What is your favorite feel-good story from the 2021 season?
DAVID DOREY
Rough year for feel-good stories but I appreciate the sentiment! I'd have to say Matthew Stafford. The guy was a No. 1 overall draft pick in 2009 and spent 11 years languishing with the Lions. They went to the Wild Card Round three times (2011, 2014, 2016) and always lost. His final years in Detroit were on crumbling teams with mediocre talent. Now he's on the Rams where he has a legitimate playoff shot and mention his name and the Super Bowl in the same sentence and no one laughs anymore. He's finally on a contender after 12 years in the league and making every Cooper Kupp owner rich!
Dorey co-founded The Huddle.com in 1997. He's ranked every player and projected every game for the last 23 years and is the author of Fantasy Football: The Next Level. David has appeared on numerous radio, television, newspaper and magazines over the last two decades.
SCOTT SACHS
Browns backup running back D'Ernest Johnson used to work on a fishing boat. He got his NFL chance to start when the injury bug bit Chubb and Hunt in Week 7 against Denver, breaking through with 146 yards and a touchdown, producing 29.20 fantasy points. Johnson also produced 28.50 fantasy points against tough New England 3 weeks later. Also, Detroit wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown has had some consistent success the last few weeks and should be a starter going forward and into next year. Say what you want about the Lions, but they have not shown any quit this season.
Sachs runs Perfect Season Fantasy Football, offering LIVE Talk & Text consulting. He has multiple league championships including 2 perfect seasons. Scott is a past winner of the Fantasy Index Experts Poll and a 2-time winner of the Experts Auction League.
IAN ALLAN
With the injuries and COVID issues, there are more opportunities for unknowns to work their way into the league — guys coming off practice squads, playing hard, and proving they belong. Tennessee, amazingly, had two such players run for over 100 yards in the same game. Neither D’Onta Foreman nor Dontrell Hillard was a roster in September, but both ran for over 100 yards at New England. And I like the look of Craig Reynolds in Detroit. He ran hard in the preseason but didn’t make their 53-man roster. With both D’Andre Swift and Jamaal Williams shelved, Reynolds has played well enough the last two weeks that the Lions have had to add him to their regular 53-man roster. Reynolds played his college football at Kutztown. That’s a pretty obscure school in Pennsylvania. I remember Andre Reed being from there. Poking around on the internet, I think only one other Kutztown player has made it to the NFL in the last 30 years (linebacker John Mobley).
Allan co-founded Fantasy Football Index in 1987. He and fellow journalism student Bruce Taylor launched the first newsstand fantasy football magazine as a class project at the University of Washington. For more than three decades, Allan has written and edited most of the content published in the magazines, newsletters and at www.fantasyindex.com. An exhaustive researcher, he may be the only person in the country who has watched at least some of every preseason football game played since the early 1990s. Allan is a member of the FSTA Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame and the Fantasy Sports Writers Association Hall of Fame.
MICHAEL NAZAREK
When both George Kittle and Rob Gronkowski went down to injury in my FFPC main event team, I picked up Dawson Knox, not knowing I would get such a good producer for fantasy. Knox helped save my season and win some key close games to get into the playoffs after slumping late in my regular season.
Nazarek is the CEO of Fantasy Football Mastermind Inc, celebrating 25 years online! His company offers a preseason draft guide, customizable cheat sheets, a multi-use fantasy drafting program including auction values, weekly in-season newsletters, injury reports and free NFL news (updated daily) at its web site, www.ffmastermind.com. He has been playing fantasy football since 1988 and is a four-peat champion of the SI.com Experts Fantasy League, a nationally published writer in several fantasy magazines and a former columnist for SI.com. He's also won nearly $30K in recent seasons of the FFPC High Stakes Main Event. Nazarek can be reached via email at miken@ffmastermind.com.
SCOTT PIANOWSKI
Leonard Fournette’s season is likely over, but I appreciate what he did over the first three months of the year, steering a bunch of my teams to the playoffs. He was utilized in all game situations, showing power, versatility, durability. The measure of fantasy football is how you do in the long run; we shouldn’t sweat the short run too much. Obviously Tampa Bay laid an egg at an unfortunate moment against New Orleans, but Fournette was one of several Buccaneers that helped fantasy managers score consistently in 2021.
An FSWA award-winning writer (with nominations in four sports) and podcaster, Scott has been with Yahoo Sports since 2008. On the rare occasions when the computer is turned off, he enjoys word games, poker, music, film, game theory, and a variety of condiments. He lives in suburban Detroit.
ANDY RICHARDSON
Two quarterbacks of varying performance levels stand out for me. The first is Jimmy Garoppolo, who I trashed mercilessly in the preseason. I didn't think he'd even be on the 53-man roster, given his salary and what San Francisco gave up to draft his replacement. I was flat-out wrong; Garoppolo is probably going to take this team to the playoffs, and they'll be competitive when they get there. (Connected to this nod is Deebo Samuel, a Fantasy Index favorite a year ago who was hurt all season. He has been a superstar this year.) The other is Washington quarterback Taylor Heinicke. Midnight has struck for him in recent weeks, and he was never a fantastic option, NFL or fantasy. But this nobody backup has started all year for Washington and had some nice games along the way, upsetting the Super Bowl champs and keeping his team in contention for a while. If you can't feel good about a lightly regarded nobody having his NFL dream come true, you're missing out on something important.
Richardson has been a contributing writer and editor to the Fantasy Football Index magazine and www.fantasyindex.com since 2002. His responsibilities include team defense and IDP projections and various site features, and he has run the magazine's annual experts draft and auction leagues since their inception. He previews all the NFL games on Saturdays and writes a wrap-up column on Mondays during the NFL season.