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: Who will be the MVP of the fantasy playoffs?
SCOTT SACHS
Derrick Henry and the 8-4 Titans play the Jaguars, the Lions and the Packers in the next 3 weeks. The Jags and Lions are jockeying for the 2021 draft, while Green Bay might be on cruise control in 3 weeks. With Tennessee getting bumped by the Browns, plus the Colts also at 8-4, each week is meaningful. Derrick Henry is a solid bet to tear it up going forward.
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.
MIKE NAZAREK
The G.O.A.T. Bucs QB Tom Brady plays vs. MIN, @ATL, and DET over the next three weeks. Coming off a bye, he and most of his teammates should be refreshed and ready to roll. We've yet to see Brady put together a stretch of games where he produces at a high level consistently, but I think it's coming right now!
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. He's also won nearly $30K in recent seasons of the FFPC High Stakes Main Event. www.ffmastermind.com. Nazarek can be reached via email at miken@ffmastermind.com.
DAVID DOREY
The MVP of the fantasy playoffs will be one of the players that should be in the running for the 2020 Offensive Player of the Year -- Derrick Henry. He's been a difference maker each week, if not the highest-scoring fantasy player regardless of position for a couple of weeks. And it isn't that he's just so good that he is due to be a fantasy playoff hero. It is that he faces a three-game stretch for Weeks 14 to 16 of poorly ranked defenses - Jaguars (No. 27), Lions (No. 32), and Packers (No. 30). Now that is the way to enter fantasy playoffs.
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.
IAN ALLAN
Tennessee plays Jacksonville and Detroit the next two weeks. I’m expecting Derrick Henry to be very good in those games. Both of those defenses rank in the bottom 5 against the run, and the Lions have allowed a league-high 20 rushing touchdowns. I’m expecting Henry to come up big over the next two weeks.
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.
ANDY RICHARDSON
It kind of looks like it's going to be someone who disappointed for a lot of the season: David Montgomery. He's been big the last two weeks, and in his next three he'll face Houston, Minnesota and Jacksonville -- two near-perfect matchups with terrible run defenses, and a third that isn't very good (and should be higher-scoring, so his all-around numbers should be solid. I'd have Montgomery on a lot of teams if not for an August groin injury that drove him down the board; oh well. He should be very good in the leagues I do have him rostered.
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.