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: Assuming one draft for the entire postseason, who should be the top pick in a playoff fantasy league?
MICHAEL NAZAREK
My top pick is Ezekiel Elliott. He rushed for 80 or more yards in each of his last 15 games and scored 16 TDs.
Nazarek is the CEO of Fantasy Football Mastermind Inc. His company offers a preseason draft guide, customizable cheat sheets, a multi-use fantasy drafting program including auction values, weekly in-season fantasy newsletters, injury reports and free NFL news (updated daily) at its web site. 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. For more info go to www.ffmastermind.com. Nazarek can be reached via email at miken@ffmastermind.com.
JUSTIN ELEFF
There are two good ways to approach the question, it seems to me: One, you ask yourself which teams are going to the Super Bowl, and you make the best pick you can from either of those. That gets most of you to New England and either Dallas or Atlanta (or maybe Green Bay), and you pick LeGarrette Blount or Ezekiel Elliott because taking any quarterback is playing it too conservatively and Devonta Freeman shares too much work with Tevin Coleman. (I was a lot more bullish on the Packers a couple of weeks ago than I am now, incidentally, because they seem to have fallen back into their midyear trap of going away from the running game almost entirely. If no running back is getting even 10 carries per game, they're going to get bounced from the playoffs sooner than a lot of people think.) Two -- and this is the approach I prefer this year -- you ask yourself how it would happen if some team other than the ones you just named is going to the Super Bowl, and you see where that gets you. To me the NFC is too jumbled for this kind of speculation, but if it isn't New England coming out of the AFC it's Pittsburgh ... winning games on the road ... where Ben Roethlisberger throws for surprisingly few touchdowns. In other words, if New England stumbles I think there's an excellent chance that LeVeon Bell is far and away the most valuable fantasy player of this postseason. And while I can hardly promise that the Pats will lose, the whole object here -- drafting a team from a very limited field of options -- is to win the game you're playing. Not make a respectable showing; win. I'd take the gamble.
Eleff hosts the Fantasy Index Podcast, available in the iTunes Store now. He has worked for Fantasy Index off and on all century.
SAM HENDRICKS
Aaron Rodgers. Quarterbacks generally score the most points and he could be far and away higher than any other quarterback as Green Bay throws a ton and he is on fire. I see the Packers running the table and making the Super Bowl which means four games in any NFL contest with just one draft.
Hendricks is the author of Fantasy Football Guidebook, Fantasy Football Tips and Fantasy Football Basics, all available at ExtraPointPress.com, at all major bookstores, and at Amazon and BN.com. He is a 25 year fantasy football veteran who participates in the National Fantasy Football Championship (NFFC) and finished 7th and 16th overall in the 2008 and 2009 Fantasy Football Players Championship (FFPC). He won the Fantasy Index Open in 2013. Follow him at his web site, www.ffguidebook.com.
DAVID DOREY
Tom Brady has to be that pick. The Patriots are the only team that seems an absolute lock to not only advance to the Super Bowl, but to score plenty of points along the way.
Dorey is the co-founder and lead NFL analyst for The Huddle and author of Fantasy Football: The Next Level. He has projected and predicted every NFL game and player performance since 1997 and has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, radio and television.
ANDY RICHARDSON
LeVeon Bell. First off, he's great, and he'll get two favorable matchups with soft run defenses -- Miami this week, Kansas City next. Pittsburgh is the most likely team to win this week, and I think they have a decent chance of winning next week, making them the team (along with New England) most likely to play three games. On the NFC side, I could see any team losing its first game and no one looking safe to play more than two. There's better depth at quarterback and wide receiver that I'd definitely make Bell the top pick and hope for three games.
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.