Christopher Harris' Fantasy Football Mailbag Week 14

Join Christopher Harris live on VICE Sports' Facebook page on Sunday at noon ET to ask him your game day fantasy questions, and for fantasy football advice based on film review every single weekday from now until 2017, listen to the Harris Football Podcast at www.HarrisFootball.com.

Jeff R.: How does your lineup strategy change in the fantasy playoffs? Do you force yourself to get less "clever" picking players? Do you shy away from bad-weather games, or games where both teams have been eliminated?

I wish I had catchall advice, but as is so often the case in football and in life, different rules apply to different players. Some cleverness is fine. If you've been living on the Todd Gurley Misery Express for 13 weeks and you'd prefer to take a crack on Kenneth Dixon, how could I get mad at you? But I take Jeff's point: the moment you bench Tom Brady against the Baltimore Ravens and start, say, Colin Kaepernick against the Jets, that's the moment Brady throws four touchdowns, thereby taking out his handsome, handsome scalpel, drawing it gently against your breastbone, and calmly removing your heart.

Listen, different people can tolerate different levels of risk. My cousin Josh, if he hears that a single snowflake has touched down at LaGuardia, he's out: no Giants or Jets will sniff his lineup. If Julio Jones has a hangnail, he's calling up Cordarrelle Patterson. Me, I try and incorporate risk factors into my ranks, but I try not to weigh them overmuch. In my experience, if conditions are slippery, that's sometimes good for the offensive players, who know where they're supposed to go, whereas the defense can't react as quickly. If a NFL team is "out of it," that may remove pressure, or at least create an environment where players realize they're playing for 2017 jobs. I won't tell you not to take a chance on someone you haven't been starting, or not to change kickers if weather looks bad, or stab a goat and set to reading those entrails. It isn't how I roll—as I believe we've covered, I'm vegetarian—but I get it. The dirty truth of fantasy football, especially when we get down to these final few weeks, is that it's damn random. It's half luck. I tend to roll with the players who got me here, but I don't always win.

James M.: To accentuate your love of music and remind readers to pick up your new novel, compare five music acts to five current NFL players. Thanks!

Indeed, my new book is called War On Sound and it's an epic about an indie rock band, and thank you for the plug, James. OK, here we go:

Carson Palmer = James Blunt

A certain subset of people had some hope for him in 2004. That has since faded.

Alshon Jeffery = Oasis

A copy of a much better act—Alshon is to Brandon Marshall as Oasis are to the Beatles—that can't stop self-destructing.

Jared Goff = Fiona Apple

He pretty, but he skinny.

David Johnson = Kendrick Lamar

Just a kid outta nowhere, and now he runs the world.

Tavon Austin = Macklemore

God, they both suck.

Aaron F.: In what year will Blake Bortles be out of the NFL?

I have no personal animosity toward Bortles, but I did pretty much spend the entire 2015 season telling podcast listeners how little I believed in his 35-TD season and how I wouldn't draft him with a ten-foot pole. That's not clairvoyance. I watch every play of NFL game film, and Bortles was lucky. He had 18 interceptions last year and probably should've had 28, plus played badly enough in first halves of games that he was allowed to rack up meaningless stats late. But really, all I do is just report what I see. I like to say, "Film Don't Lie" (it's one of my podcast's 73 mottos, my theory being a show's quality is directly proportionate to its number of mottos) but of course that's crap: there's no such thing as objectivity, the watcher brings his or her biases to everything, postmodernism, Schrödinger's cat, blah blah blah. What I'm trying to do is go beyond stats and relate what I think about ability. But that doesn't mean a kid can't change.

Take Kirk Cousins. As was the case with Bortles, I viewed Cousins as a candidate to bust hard this year. He racked up nice numbers late in 2015, but there were several games where I thought he deserved worse, and in the first month of '16 I wasn't impressed, either. But Film Don't Lie, and Cousins has been legit impressive for six weeks. He hasn't been an annoying check-down thrower, he hasn't been inaccurate, and for the most part he hasn't had would-be interceptions dropped by opponents. So I'll just say what I see: not that Cousins is incapable of smooshing Washington souls in the near future, but this midseason production hasn't been a mirage. Heck, Derek Carr's rookie tape was execrable, but he was immediately better last year (if not last night). Stuff changes.

All of which is to say: I don't want Bortles to be out of the NFL. I'd like it to work out for him, because why not? He's a good athlete, has a big arm, it would be fun to have more fun and good QBs. But the same mistakes we saw from Bortles in his first two seasons—awful footwork, weird variable throwing mechanics, head-clutching judgment errors—are on display this year. Whoever's coaching Jacksonville next year will probably be under a mandate to try and make it work with Bortles, but if he's bad again in September, he's headed to Gabbert Country, where the mansion is presumably still air-conditioned but people don't ask you to sign their jersey. They line their iguana cages with it.

Jim C.: If you had to give someone five indie-band albums that everyone should own, what would they be?

I'm starting to get known as an "indie rock" guy, I guess, but my philosophical question here is: Is there currently rock other than "indie rock"? Are the Big Three record labels lavishing huge deals on non-ossifying rock bands of which I'm unaware? (And are we still on the Big Three, or has UniWarSony collapsed up Clive Davis's asshole?)

Bitterness aside (for more bitterness, buy the book!), I rotate music on and off my phone pretty regularly because I do nothing but shuffle while in the car (hi! radio is the fucking worst!) and have a low threshold for repetition. But I can't remove these five records, which doesn't necessarily mean they're "essential," but I do love them:

Spoon, "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" (2007)

How is it possible this came out almost ten years ago? I'm old. At just 36 minutes, it's funny and fucked-up and catchy, and Britt Daniel has one of the world's great voices. It also features maybe the greatest song of the 21st century (OK, probably not, but I love it).

Grizzly Bear, "Veckatimist" (2009)

You might remember "Two Weeks," which is awesome and accompanied by one awesome weird video, but the whole thing is slow and sweet in a way I often don't love, but in this case, I sure do.

Cayucas, "Bigfoot" (2013)

Any band composed of twin brothers is either great or creepy. It's really hard to listen to this album and not smile. There's a song about former San Francisco Giants first baseman Will Clark. It's good.

New Pornographers, "Brill Bruisers" (2014)

OK, they're a Canadian supergroup, but via the current exchange rate, doesn't that translate to being a midlist American indie? (That was mean!) The Pornos are one of my all-time fave bands, and their most recent has nothing but gems.

Hop Along, "Painted Shut" (2015)

Frances Quinlan can sing better than I can do anything. That kind of pisses me off. I want to be as good a writer as Quinlan is a singer. But I'm just not. She's insane. I'd listen to her sing a Donald Trump speech. Fortunately, I don't have to.

Oskar: Trade/Cut/Keep: Davante Adams, Randall Cobb, Jordy Nelson.

Ooh, is this the fantasy football version of Fuck/Marry/Kill? I don't love any of the Packers receivers this week against the Seahawks, though I'm receptive to the argument that while Cobb has been a dog for the second straight season, at least there's no chance of him running into Richard Sherman (or Earl Thomas!), while the outside guys Nelson and Adams may find themselves staring down the barrel of #25 in white.

I think beyond this week and into next season, the only Green Bay wideout I truly trust is Nelson. Even if he's been a reduced version of himself speed-wise in '16, he's still reliable and a dagger of a red-zone weapon. The only person who seems to actually like Davante Adams is Aaron Rodgers, but that counts for something! Adams seems to do something at least once per game that pisses off A-Rod to no end, yet he'll go out there the next week and give Adams 73 targets anyway. Give Adams credit: he was actively terrible last year and while he sometimes does mess up simple plays, he's made some berserk catches in traffic over the past month. Do I trust him? Maybe not quite.

Cobb is the one you have to wonder about. Maybe he's hurt. Maybe he was hurt last year. But stop being hurt, dude! The Packers are fixing to blow $24 million in cap money on Cobb over the next two seasons and he sure isn't playing like it. He looks slow and maybe a little gun-shy, and his contract gets super-cuttable after '17. If he played anywhere else he'd be Jeremy Kerley.

Joël M.: I'm not all the way through War On Sound, but every time a character is left speechless, you go "…". I know you're trying to tell us something about that silence, but can you elucidate what those moments mean?

They mean I'm a fucking thief.

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