What to expect from our 2021 fantasy football coverage (2024)

Fantasy football is a weird thing, when you think about it. We argue for a solid month about the varying strategies in front of us, pack it all into one big day of fun with friends, co-workers and family, and then several months later we have answers to everything we forgot we fought about in August. Was David Montgomery the product of a soft schedule late last year? We’ll know in January. Can Travis Etienne and James Robinson co-exist in an offense run by a college coach plucked from health-related retirement? We’ll know in January.

And yet here we are, roasting Michael Salfino in the comment section for advising we pay up for a tight end, or suggesting to Brandon Howard that he watch more film. And we come back for one reason: this is fun. For all the futility of arguing over players we have zero control over, the fact remains that the next five months are possibly the best five months of the year.

Our job here is not to predict the future; it’s to best prepare you to go into the unknown void of the future, equipped with as much knowledge and research as possible. For three years, we’ve done our best to give you everything you need to beat up on your league. We don’t have a singular thought here and then make everyone write around it; we’re more of a commune of free thinkers — something Salfino writes on Monday may be completely contradicted by Jake Ciely on Tuesday. We respect the reader enough for you to decide which path you want to go on; we’re just making sure we’ve packed you enough to eat.

So welcome to fantasy football, vol. 4. at The Athletic. We’ve made some fun changes that you might enjoy.

Returning to the writing staff are Chris Vaccaro,Jake Ciely, Michael Salfino, Renee Miller, David Gonos, Virginia Zakas, Michael Beller, Jeff Haverlack(for dynasty) and Brandon Howard. It’s an award-winning assortment that is supremely talented and varied in background — from Vaccaro’s multiple high-stakes titles and refusal to spell “Thielen” correctly to Renee’s groundbreaking cognitive bias columns (Renee is a neuroscientist who won 2019’s Best Football Series award from the Fantasy Sports Writers Association). Each writer alone is worth the price of admission; put them together and you get a towering Voltron of fantasy football knowledge.

And new this year — strap in.

Brandon Marianne Lee, who is an OG of this section and wrote for us in 2018 when we launched, is coming back to The Athletic Fantasy as both a writer (she’ll be handling the mailbag, so butter her up early) and a podcaster (with Nando and Vaccaro on Tuesdays). She claims to be the Susan Lucci of awards, but we’re pretty sure she’s won at least two, so she’s being coy. She will destroy you in fantasy football, but Brandon chooses to fight on the side of good, so she’s here to help.

Last week, we announced that KC Joyner would be joining the staff. KC is a trailblazer in football analytics — and more specifically, the application of them for fantasy football. Our first call with him to ask if he wanted to write for the section was a solid hour of listening to him rattle off all kinds of stats (that he invented!) that you will 10000% love. This is unique, proven, awesome content that fits perfectly with what we’re trying to accomplish at The Athletic.

In addition to Brandon and KC, we’ve brought in some writers with unique POVs to help guide you through draft season. Fantasy Hall of Famer Scott “The King” Engel will be running several mock drafts and providing his unique brand of commentary. You may know Matt Williams from his twitter threads, where he breaks down some of the most controversial players; we’re happy to give him a platform with no character limits. Dominick Petrillo is a blind fantasy football analyst who will share his experience as a researcher and writer… and will then share some of his best picks for the season. We’ll be running an excerpt from a book on fantasy football ethics by Christopher Michaelson, aSt. Thomas and NYU professor. And Gene Clemons is a football genius who will be mainly contributing on the betting side, but will be popping in to dole out fantasy advice frequently.

Hey look! A sports betting segue!

We want to pull the curtain back for a moment. In 2018 and 2019, we published several DFS columns. They bombed. Badly. Surprisingly badly. So we stopped running DFS columns because that’s not what our subscribers — you — wanted. And now you may have heard we launched a sports betting section in January. We know there’s a lot of overlap between sports bettors and fantasy players, but we’re not going to jam that content down your throat and will only crossover when there’s a legitimate fit — player props, or a predictive model, for instance. But if we can, just for a few sentences, plug it for those who enjoy betting (everyone else can skip ahead) — we modeled the betting section after the fantasy section; it has the same spirit, the same ideals and the same leadership, frankly. We don’t have separate sports betting and fantasy weekly staff calls — we do it all together and everyone throws out ideas. It was that spirit of trying to be different and smart and awesome that led us to hiring James Holzhauer (you may know him better as “Jeopardy James”) to write for us. We brought on Derek Carty and his MLB sports betting model. We hired a former G League player to write about basketball. We found this phenomenal guy on Reddit to write darts columns for us (darts is awesome, by the way). It’s smart, it’s fun, it’s unique, and you’ll enjoy it, even if you can’t, or don’t want to, bet. It’s just good content. You can check it out here. And pretty much any story you click on has a link to get a free year of The Athletic (or to extend your subscription by a year if you’re already in the door). Plus, Gene Clemons is in there!

But back to fantasy football.

We repeat this every year — our goal is for you to say, on Day 1, that this section alone is worth the subscription price. The jewel this season is Jake’s customizable cheatsheet. It is BANANAS good. You will get lost in it for days, messing with numbers and seeing how things change in the rankings. He updates it with even the smallest of NFL news, and then texts us incessantly to ask if we’ve uploaded the new spreadsheet that he just sent. It is an obsession of Jake’s and you’re all benefiting from it.

The draft kit, as is tradition, will have 100-plus columns for you to enjoy by kickoff. It’s badass. It’s the best out there, truthfully. If we didn’t think it was, why bother, right?

We’ll have podcasts to fit your every need, from waiver wire to whatever you want to call the Vaccaro/Brandon/Nando show. Our writers will be in the comment section answering as many questions as they can. Brandon Howard will be proven to be a soothsayer several times over, again.

And, as always, your suggestions, comments, and ideas are always welcome. Fire away below.

Welcome to fantasy football 2021 — may we all enjoy the ride!

— Nando Di Fino and Brandon Funston, The Athletic Fantasy editors

(T0p photo: Getty; Jamie Sabau, Patrick McDermott)