I debated on whether I'd even post Week 18 rankings, but ultimately I settled on doing it. I thought I'd take a minute to get some of my thoughts down after another fun fantasy football season, so this is going to be a much longer intro than usual. If you're just looking for the rankings, feel free to just scroll on down. I won't know any different!
This has been a really good year for me with the FantasyPros accuracy competition. Because of that, I was often included in their weekly tweets for either a top-10 finish that week or a top-10 overall (which I got in and stayed in most of the second half of the season). That gained me over 1000 new Twitter followers this year, and I truly appreciate all of the new people who have checked out my rankings and random tweets. More than that, I've really enjoyed all of the questions, answers, discussions, etc. I've especially loved the last minute questions when I was able to do that around 12:30pm on Sundays.
Even though she doesn't even read my blog (!!!), I'll give a big shout out to my wife anyway because she maintained order in my house from noon-1pm nearly every Sunday this season. It really helped me focus on those last minute rankings updates and Q&A sessions. I hope to keep that going next year and maybe keep growing that Twitter following (tell your friends!).
Anyway, with all of the new followers, I thought there might be a handful of folks who could be playing here in Week 18. If you are, I'll post my rankings below with a big disclaimer:
With so many teams resting players and having guys active but playing limited snaps, the rankings the final week of the regular season are very difficult to do.
FantasyPros doesn't even include Week 18 in the accuracy competition because there's just too much variance and most fantasy leagues don't play this week. These rankings will change a TON from now until Sunday as we find out which players will be inactive/rested. So if you're using my rankings this week, check back before the Saturday kickoffs and then again around noon on Sunday for a final update. I won't spend as much time on it this week as I do most weeks, but I'll still get it updated as best I can for you guys.
There's a reason the vast majority of leagues don't include Week 18 in their fantasy playoffs. I can't imagine having someone like Joe Burrow for an entire season and scorching the EARTH the last couple of weeks only for him to sit in the most important week for fantasy because his real life team has nothing to play for. If your league still includes Week 18, talk to your commish and get that changed ASAP.
So with that out of the way, let me just say that whether or not you won a fantasy championship this year, I hope you had a good season and had fun. For me, it's more about the ride than the destination (as cheesy as that sounds). Or maybe that's just me saying it this year because I didn't actually win a championship in any of my three leagues (though I did finish second in two, ugh!). If it surprises you that I'm only in 3 leagues...well, it's definitely by design. I have a full time job and a family (with two kids who are ages 2 & 5). That's a lot to keep up with. Then on top of that I constantly update (read: obsess) over the rankings, I'm an active commish of a couple of leagues, and even just setting rosters in three leagues is a lot when I'm trying to do my usual Sunday updates. Then there's the sports gambling side which became legal this year in my home state of Virginia, so that's a bit of a time suck too. Maybe in the next year or two I'll get back up to 5 leagues or so, but for now I think 3 is a nice number.
Aside from the Week 18 rankings & betting picks below, it's on to next year, right? FantasyPros already has their 2022 rankings tool up on the site, and I started on those today. I'll put out an "end of year review" article soon to recap some of my preseason picks, and I'll post my initial 2022 rankings in the coming weeks as well. Then I'll be digging into the NFL Draft & free agency before you know it, and I'll get an article out with a preview on some of that stuff in a month or so. If you're just here for the rankings, that's cool too. But for me this is really a year round deal. It's all fun to me.
If you're like me and love trying to figure out and discuss how every little offseason move will impact next year's fantasy football season, you've come to the right place!
