Establish The Run

Establish The Run is fantasy football’s sharpest shop: the analysis company co-founded by Adam Levitan in 2019 with fellow analyst Evan Silva that treats season-long and DFS like the high-stakes disciplines they are.

In a sea of take artists, ETR sells something rarer — actual edges. The product is depth. Projections, rankings, matchup breakdowns, and the kind of proprietary analysis that serious players pay for, built by people who play the games themselves.

The founders’ résumés are the pitch. Levitan built his name in the daily fantasy world — a sharp, high-volume player and content mind who lived inside the numbers before most analysts took the format seriously. Silva was one of fantasy football’s most respected voices at Rotoworld, where his NFL analysis — most famously his exhaustive weekly “Matchups” column — set the standard for how the game should be broken down. When they launched ETR in 2019, it was a bet that the audience for genuinely rigorous fantasy analysis was bigger than anyone was serving.

The bet paid off. What started as a fantasy football subscription has grown into a year-round, multi-sport operation. The NFL in-season package remains the flagship — projections, continuously updated rankings, articles, livestreams, and a draft kit — but the machine now runs on several tracks at once.

Best ball is where ETR has made its loudest mark. The company’s $60 best ball product ships uploadable rankings for DraftKings and Underdog — the kind of plug-and-play edge that serious drafters swear by — and the results speak loudly: the guys behind ETR’s rankings won both the DraftKings and the Underdog best ball flagships in a single season, $2 million apiece. When Levitan says on Market Monday that the sharpest people in the room upload ETR’s rankings, he has the receipts.

The content engine never sleeps. The official podcast is well past 1,000 episodes: the flagship team-by-team shows with Levitan and Silva, Market Monday’s best-ball ADP deep dives, showdown breakdowns with specialists like Cody Main, and Levitan’s solo pods on everything from $100K buy-in leagues to prediction markets. On video, Establish The Show runs Friday evenings through the season — Levitan, Silva, and Andrew Wiggins walking the main DFS slate position by position — while the pair’s last-minute Sunday livestream has become appointment viewing for anyone setting lineups.

The bench runs deep. Mike Leone — a high-stakes tournament crusher — brings the DFS and showdown expertise. Pat Corain and John Ferguson anchor the dynasty operation, running startup drafts and maintaining year-round dynasty rankings. Drew Dinkmeyer and Sam Brott sharpen the projections and tournament theory; John Daigle, Mark Dankenbring, and Jack Miller drive the rest-of-season and weekly rankings; producer Luke keeps the YouTube machine humming. And when golf or the NBA come around, ETR covers them with the same machinery — projections, articles, shows, sims — as it does the NFL.

The philosophy is stated plainly on the site: “We don’t sell lineups or claim to have all of the answers.” The pitch is not picks — it is preparation. The analysis is designed to be digestible and actionable, so subscribers walk into their drafts, their DFS slates, and their waiver wires as the best-prepared person in the room.

That ethos is what separates ETR in a crowded field. Plenty of outlets will hand you a ranked list; ETR will hand you the list, the reasoning, the matchup data, the market signals, and the discipline to use them properly. It is an operation built by grinders, for grinders — the solver draft assistant, the continuously updating playoff rankings, the FFPC and NFFC-specific tools — all of it aimed at players who treat fantasy as a game of skill.

Seven years in, Establish The Run has become what it set out to be: the highest-quality fantasy football content on the internet, expanding into basketball, golf, and prop betting without losing the core identity. For the serious player, it is less a subscription than a competitive advantage.

The draft-season machine deserves its own mention. Every summer, ETR’s draft kit becomes the operating system for serious drafters — tiered rankings, positional strategy, schedule analysis, and the kind of training-camp news synthesis that separates preparation from guesswork. The dynasty wing, run by Pat Corain and John Ferguson, keeps the same rigor year-round: startup drafts are live-blogged, rookie classes are dissected before the NFL Draft, and the rankings never go stale. And underpinning all of it is the podcast archive — more than a thousand episodes deep — a free library of reasoning that doubles as a masterclass in how sharp players think.