Welcome everyone to the score fantasy football podcast. I'm your host, Justin Boone. Today we're continuing our season preview series. We went over to the quarterback position in the first episode this week. We had Pat Fitzmoreson for that one, so go back, give that one a listen if you haven't already. And I told you on that show, I've lined up the most accurate analyst at each position, and that's based on last year's results from the fantasy pros accuracy contest.

So today's guest, Jared Smola, draft sharks, he was the number one ranker for running backs last year and we're going to get his thoughts on how to approach the position, the players

he likes, the ones he shine away from, all that great stuff.

And really the goal here is just to try to make this as straightforward as possible, right? We want to give you everything you need about this position, how you should approach it in fantasy. We want to do it in the shortest amount of time. So we're going to try to cram a bunch in today. If you want more after today's show, you can go find all my rankings, trade value charts, all our fantasy content in the score 2021 fantasy football draft kit that's available

for free at the score right now but let's get Jared in here you can find his content

at draft sharks and he's on Twitter at Smola d s he finished 10th overall across all

positions last year in fantasy pros in season competition finished fourth in fourth in draft accuracy last year. So one of my rivals near the top competing for that crown every season. This is his third time on the show. We're welcoming them back. It's great to have them here. Jared, how's it going, man? It's going well. You know, we're in the thick of things here now in early August. You know, we've kind of started the five week or the five month grind, you know,

from now until the end of the season.

But I love it.

You know, I love getting all the training camp buzz, training camp news coming in.

Yeah, I'm surprised I beat you at the running back position last year because, you know,

you are kind of the gold stand.

You're kind of the goat in these rankings accuracy competition.

Super impressive, how consistent you are. Yeah, I mean, you've been up there now almost every year, I think, for the last few seasons. So I feel like I'm seeing your name up there all the time. And with the other guys like Pat yesterday, John Paulson, there's a few of us that kind of seem to be regulars near the top. I was joking with Pat yesterday that if there was like a champions dinner, sort of like the Masters, that we'd all be at the front table or whatever at this point. But unfortunately, there isn't anything like that. But we get to hang out digitally. We get to go over all this stuff. And you're right. I can't stand like that time of you're right before training camp kicks off when everyone's kind of got

their thoughts out there and now people are just making insane statements when it comes to fantasy

and projections and it's nice once the players are finally back on the field and we're getting some

real news that we can go off of as opposed to just all the speculation that happens over the summer

yeah it just gets stale right in like may and june you know there's really nothing to do with your rankings. If you're in drafts, kind of every draft looks the same. But once training camps hit, you know, you get the news. You can start adjusting things based on what you're hearing out of camps. You get in these drafts and, you know, guys are rising, guys are falling. So I love this time of year. And, you know, we're only a month the way now month away now from the start of real football all right well i want to keep a similar format for these shows so we'll talk a bit about some breakouts some bus some sleepers at the end i'm going to hit you with some rapid fire questions about the running back position but first things first i want to get your general approach to rbs this year are you grabbing them early are you a zero rb guy or you a hero rb guy or whatever they want to get your general approach to RBs this year. Are you grabbing them early?

Are you a zero RB guy? Are you a hero RB guy or whatever they want to call it at this point? There's a lot of ways to come at it. So without naming specific players, if you can avoid it off the top here, because we're going to talk about a lot of guys and the other questions. Just what's your general strategy when it comes to running backs and drafts this year? So just super generally, like not even just this season.

I'm all about volume and that's at every position, but I think it's especially true at running back.

Like the correlation between volume and fantasy production at running back is super strong.

So I mean, we obviously prefer talented running backs.

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