How to find value in fantasy drafts. That's what we're talking about this week on stealing bananas.

I'm Ben Gretsch. You can find me on Twitter at yards per Gretsch. You can find my substack at Bencgrash.com. With me, as always, is Sean Siegel. You can find all of his work over at Rodeviz. And we have a fantastic guest today. ESPN's own Mike Clay. Mike does all the projections at ESPN. He does sports betting, DFS, everything you could imagine over at ESPN.

If you follow him on Twitter, which you absolutely should, you have certainly seen his

projections that he likes to share on Twitter, which are just a fantastically thorough

projection process. I'm always a big fan of seeing those. Mike, how are you doing today?

Hey, guys. Doing great. Doing great. You know, busy right now. Kind of, you know, that final, that final rush, that final crunch before the season kicks off. So just setting up shop here and get ready for week one. You know, it's, it's crazy. The busy, the off season is so busy now that it just, you know, you fly through all this stuff and before you know what it's here.

So it's about that time.

Yeah, I mean, August always just like it's, in some ways it feels slow in June and even into July.

And then August hits and you're like, wow, now we're already at the end of August.

Like I feel like August just hit yesterday.

Mike, I want to start asking about those projections. You're really well

known for your projections. And you do these, I mentioned very thorough. You do not just offensive,

but very thorough defensive rankings. You look at the schedule and sort of project out potential

win losses for every team. Tons of elements that go into your projections.

How do you then turn that into rankings for fantasy football?

Yeah, so I mean, I don't think the answer is going to shock anyone, right?

It's kind of common logic, right?

So I start with the projections, of course, right after, you know, honestly, during the

playoffs from the previous season, you know,

I'm starting already that process for the teams that are eliminated, making the move over

to the following season. And then it takes a while as I crunch through everything and adjust

for league trends, team trends, coaching changes, scheme changes, all that thing.

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