Should fantasy managers buy the James Cook hype?

Yahoo Fantasy analysts Matt Harmon and Andy Behrens looks the Bills' second-year running back and some similarly ranked players in fantasy drafts.

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- Rich Rebar got my gears turning on James Cook, who I hadn't put a ton of thought into. And then when Rich said yesterday that essentially, James Cook is the arbitrage version of Jahmyr Gibbs, who goes much earlier, and the arbitrage version of DeAndre Swift, who actually goes a little bit significantly earlier than Cook as well. Is the gap in the range of outcomes that big of a difference between James Cook and, like, a Jahmyr Gibbs?

And there's not a lot of buzz on James Cook really in fantasy. But I don't know, man. He's got me thinking about this, and this report also got me thinking about it as well.

- I'm surprised that DeAndre Swift would be going ahead of James Cook because James Cook has received a-- it isn't necessarily a ton of fantasy hype until recently. But he's been one of the buzziest early stories in camp.

I don't think-- and they were super honest with us when they actually drafted Cook. Like, they described him as sort of a part timer, maybe a head of a committee, maybe a committee member sort of type, somebody that was gonna catch a lot of passes for them. And I still think that's his role. But could he get to 55%, 60% of the snaps? I think that's certainly a possibility.

They didn't-- I don't think they brought in Damien Harris's depth. I think Harris is going to play. I think they still envision it as sort of a two man backfield. Most NFL teams are not trying to get their backfield down to one guy. I don't think the Bills are trying to do that. I don't think it is in Cook's best interest, long term, to do that.

I have him in close proximity to a couple of other second year running backs. Like, he jumps out to me as an exception from, like, the RB dead zone a little bit, as a guy that I actually really do want. And he kind of goes in that range. And I think there's an opportunity for him to make a big leap forward.

But then, I look at some of the other second-year guys in that range. I have them really close to Rashaad White. And I just think, like-- with James Cook last year, I thought his most, like, unfortunate moments or the biggest problem with him often was that he and Josh Allen would, almost once a game in a meaningful way, they would be on different pages, right? And I assume that Josh Allen was correct 100% of the time, and Cook was always wrong.

But that's correctable. My problem with Rashaad White is that he literally didn't make anybody miss last year. And I don't know how correctable his issue is, you know? I know that we can fix what went wrong for James Cook last year.

- Again, the Cook thing is fascinating because when Damien Harris first signed there, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna be probably almost all in on Damien Harris because I think the Bills need a grinder back. We're probably all going to get way too excited in fantasy about Damien Harris, who's a two down banger, a touchdown threat on a team with a quarterback who's going to take most of the rushing touchdowns himself.