Nostra-dumb-ass

Every year before fantasy football starts, experts everywhere develop their own list of the players they feel are being under-hyped or over-hyped. This is usually believed to be great advice to follow because, let's face it, they are experts and you are an inpert (opposite of expert).

Let us go back and look at some of those great predictions made by these experts. Matthew Greber from RotoExperts.com for Sports Illustrated in an article entitled "Potential fantasy sleepers in 2008". He then singled out 3 players who he did not consider good bets to produce. 2 of the 3 were:

Aaron Rodgers QB - 32 total TD's, 4038 Yds passing

DeAngelo Williams - 20 total TD's, 1515 Yds rushing

(note: the third player to be singled out was Donte Stallworth and unless your league count's DUI's, he was pretty much correct on that one)

Gregg Rosenthal from Rotoworld.com in a column called "Post-Hype All Stars" in which he names people who were once hyped up, failed to live up to said hype, and will now match their hype-ness.

Quarterbacks:

Vince Young - 219 Yds passing, 1 TD, 2 Int's, 2 fumbles

Matt Leinart - 264 Yds passing, 1 TD, 1 Int, 2 fumbles

Runningbacks:

Brandon Jackson - 248 Yds rushing, 1 TD, 1 fumble

Wide Receivers:

Reggie Brown - 18 Rec, 252 Yds receiving, 1 TD

Finally, here are some excerpts from Matthew Berry (aka The Talented Mr. Roto) from an ESPN.com article called "You Heard Me":

Leonard Pope will catch seven touchdowns. (He finished the season with a grand total of 0)

Michael Turner will finish the season with less than 1,000 yards rushing and seven touchdowns. (Turner amassed 1699 yards rushing to go along with 17 touchdowns)

Troy Smith will net 24 total touchdowns. (Smith fared better than Pope but still fell 23 touchdowns short of this prediction)

What this goes to show is that predictions made prior to the start of the season often fall flat and that you shouldn't necessarily listen to experts when constructing your fantasy team because the experts predict just as well as any person with general knowledge of the NFL.

(Note: Obviously there were some predictions that actually turned out to be startlingly accurate but we decided to exclude those on the basis that they would make us look stupid)