352: Mailbag 2/28/20

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha JJ zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at fandel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode three hundred and fifty two of the Late Round Podcast, one of the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Did I get you? Thanks for tuning in. I want to kick off this week's mailbag with some thoughts on probably the most polarizing prospect for fantasy purposes in this year's draft class, and that's Henry Ruggs. On the wide Receiver prospecting episode that I did last week, I mentioned that Rugs struggled in my model, and that's true. My model looks at college production, and Ruggs's college production was lacking a lot. The common comeback from someone who likes Rugs is something like, well, yeah, you can't expect him to have great production if he's playing with all these really good teammates. And it's a fair thing to say. It's just that, from what I've tested, it's really hard to find signal that good teammates drastically do something like this to a player's production profile. But I don't think that this means a player's teammates are irrelevant. I think it's just really hard to judge when we're entering a draft. Think of it this way. Each year we can probably make this excuse to some degree with a handful of players. Sometimes it's valid, sometimes it's not. But the only way to be super sure that it's valid logic is if we look back years later and we say, you know what, Henry Ruggs actually didn't have strong college teammates because Jerry Judy and the rest of the Alabama skill players are actually trash. If that's the case, then chances are Rugs just isn't very good because he couldn't beat out his trash teammates at Alabama. But maybe we look back three years from now and every single Alabama skill position player is just wrecking in the NFL. If that's the case, then it would make sense that Ruggs didn't have a good production profile whatsoever. And what I'm saying here is it's likely going to be very difficult for a model or even someone who scouts in a more traditional way to accurately know the impact that teammates are having on a player. This is why it's just hard for me to use that as an excuse for Ruggs's lack of production. Now, let's assume that Ruggs goes in the first round of the draft. The wide outs who have had a negative stats score in my model, which is what Ruggs has. The players with a negative stat score in my model since two thousand and six who also went in the first round of the draft, every single one of them were fantasy football bus. There were ten of them. But to be clear, like I just said, they were fantasy football bus. Remember, I'm modeling for fantasy football. A scout isn't a scout in the team is looking what works for a particular team when I input draft capital. Once the draft is over, Ruggs is still going to look fine in my model because that capital matters. I'll likely not have him as the third best wide receiver in rookie drafts this year. I'll probably have him outside the top five. But you guys know by now that I don't look at fantasy football and player analysis in a very black and white way. Henry Ruggs can still be valuable in some way, even if I think that he's not as valuable as others do. The way I view him is that he's going to end up being a much better real football asset than a fantasy football one. Deshaan Jackson is someone who maybe never dominated fantasy football, but you look at how he impacted his offenses throughout his career and it's evident that DeShawn Jackson was one of the most valuable wide receivers of the last decade. His quarterbacks consistently saw rises in yards per attempt when they had him. That's the kind of impact that Henry Ruggs could probably have. But when modeling for fantasy football and when playing probability of translating college production to fantasy production at the NFL level, things don't look great for Rugs. Always keep in mind that at times we're going to like players more in real football than in fantasy football, and the reverse of that is true too, and that's the case I think with Henry Ruggs. Now, before get into the questions this week, I just wanted to send another reminder to check out the XFL contest over on Fandel. I wrote up my XFL primer for the two slates here in Week four, and you can check that out over on number fire dot com, but head to Fandel click xfl in the lobby and find the right contest for you, and feel free to use my primer to help. This first question is from at TJ. Sumter fifty five Dynasty question. With the news of Sammy Watkins not returning to Kansas City, would you pull the trigger on a deal like Hardman for Kirk? So the news is more that the Chiefs likely aren't going to pay Sammy Watkins's scheduled salary, and that's not a surprise given how impactful he was throughout twenty nineteen. So you could still be there. He just wouldn't be as expensive if he is there. But Hardman for Kirk straight up, even if we assume Watkins is gone, I would rather have the Kirk side by far, and the market is saying the exact same thing by a pretty wide margin. He's the wide receiver thirty in startups, whereas Mikol Hardman is the wide receiver forty five, and that includes rookies. And this is according to Dynasty League Football dot Com. I don't think Hardman's a bad buye though I actually almost talked about him last month when I was talking about my buy candidates for the offseason, but Kirk was a better prospect. He had a better rookie season compared to Hardman in a much worse environment overall. And even though Hardman's got the quarterback edge, he's still playing behind Travis Kelcey and Tyreek Hill for the foreseeable future in terms of target share, And it wouldn't be shocking to see both of those teams, the Cardinals and the Chiefs, go for a wide out in this year's class, And at least with Arizona, we know that Kirk's going to be on the field a whole lot given the way that Cliff Kingsbury offense uses its wide receivers. So even though I like Hardman, I think Kirk is the easy answer here. This best questions from at B Ball Club. What do you project for Josh Jacobs in year two in the way of getting more reps as a pass catcher out of the backfield? Yeah. One of the weirder things that happened in twenty nineteen is Josh Jacobs being more of an early down back for Oakland than a pass catching one. He had two hundred and forty two rushes to just twenty seven targets, but his college production profile and his skill set showed a dude who was a pretty strong pass catcher. Despite being in a split back yolde in college, he still had a six point six percent reception share during his final collegiate season. Anytime a running back is going to be on the field a lot, and anytime a team clearly likes a particular running back, and clearly the Raiders like Josh Jacobs giving the draft equity they spent on him. But anytime you have that combination, that player is likely only going to see the ball. More reports are already coming out saying that Josh Jacobs is going to be used more as a receiver, and last year Oakland targeted their running backs at the eighth highest rate in the league. If they get Jacobs more involved, he could easily get to the sixty target range when you break everything down. So I'm cool with Josh Jacobs next season. We obviously just have to see what happens at the quarterback position for them. This next question is an email which you guys can email me questions at JJ at number five, but it's an email that says, HIJJ love the podcast. Thanks, and that's all. It says not just kidding, it says what do you think about dynasty trade value charts? I like to consult different ones to see if they agree or disagree on the value of a trade offer that I'm sending, But I sometimes think that they tend to be a bit behind the market, so undervaluing players whose value is increasing and overvaluing players whose value is decreasing. For example, I would be happy to get trade value that most charts say Sony Michelle has, but the best deal I've completed to trade him away was a late second David. I tend to look at average draft position a little bit more, only because you're getting inputs from multiple fantasy managers instead of a formula that someone might have created. But it also depends on how that chart's being generated. You can generate them in a lot of different ways. If it's just one person, then you're likely going to see different results than what the market value would dictate. But I'm a fan of looking at that kind of thing as well as trade calculators, because you can at least check your own brain to make sure that you're not doing anything radically so stupid. It's also just good to know where the market is on players in dynasty, because that's really what you're fighting against when you're trying to extract value. This last question says, hey, boss, I was wondering something about your running back projection model. I know you always talk about the yards to touchdown ratio, and that's how you estimate the amount of touchdowns and running back should have or should have had. Example being that Aaron Jones and Derrick Henry will probably regress in touchdowns based on the absurd number that they got last year. Does your model include something with red zone touches, for instance, the amount of red zone touches the running back got versus the amount of plays run in the red zone. I feel like that would be a better predictor than yards, or at least if that heavily influenced the model, it might be more accurate. From the games I watched their teams, Jones and Henry loved using them in the red zone and force it into their hands as much as possible when they're really close because they're so proficient. Seems to me that red zone usage percentage should far outweigh yards per game when predicting touchdown thoughts. Sorry, it's so long. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack here. I feel like I'm not doing the best job in the world talking about the yards to touchdowns conversion that I talk about on this show because I get questions on it all the time. So my bad there for real. But yes, red zone carries and carries close to the goal line matter, so do raw attempts. They all correlate to rushing touchdowns in the same year at about the same rate. It's really really close. So you may be asking, then, JJ, why do you talk about yards to touchdowns as opposed to red zone attempts, touchdowns or goal line rushes to touchdowns? And the answer is that yards are easier to predict than goal line touches are. So if the correlation between touchdowns and all these different statistics is relatively the same, when I'm projecting a season long stat line for a player out, I'm gonna want to use the stat that I'll be most successful at projecting now during the NFL season, like when I'm talking fifteen transactions, I'm looking at everything. I'm not basing decisions solely off of yards to touchdowns. And as I've said a lot in the past, I like using that metric because it's really easy for people to comprehend and do themselves. I'm trying to teach people how to be better fantasy players here. I'm not just giving you guys the answers. That's not fun, that's not engaging. But I also always reference things like Mike Clay's opportunity adjusted touchdown metric, which weighs these factors. It looks at where a player is getting his opportunities, not just the number of touchdowns that player has versus how many yards he has. So please, I hope I'm being totally clear here, and you guys don't think that I'm a fraud. I'm not blindly using yards to touchdowns. That would be idiotic. Of course, a player in a good offense who's also seeing goal line work is going to outperform in yards to touchdowns, but it's a starting point for a lot of people to investigate further, and projecting yards is going to be a lot easier of a task than projecting something like goal line rushes. Thanks for getting me fired up. This next question is from at mister neely b. Which of last year's rookie wider or do you think will have the biggest twenty twenty. Yeah, this is easily AJ Brown. The only potential concern is the fact that Tennessee could continue to be pretty run heavy. But he was the most impressive and best rookie wide receiver in twenty nineteen. Now, I don't mind Terry McLaurin, but Brown has a lot of production metrics that look favorable for his future. For example, and this is a fun one for my buddy Evan Silva, who you guys know from established the run, but he tweeted back in January that the top ten rookie wideouts in yards per route run over the last ten years were Martavis Bryant, who obviously had off the field stuff, OBJ, AJ Brown, Percy Harvin Tyreek Hill, Hakeem Nicks, Doug Baldwin, Juju Smith, Schuster, AJ Green, and Julio Jones. That's pretty good company. And then if you go in you query rookie wide receivers with at least seventy targets in NFL history, or at least since they started tracking targets. AJ Brown is first in yards per target as a rookie. Efficiency metrics don't always seamlessly translate year to year, but aj Brown is probably special. The sast question says, Hey, JJ, big fan of the podcast. Thanks you helped lead me to a first and second place finish in my two leagues this year, So thank you. You're very welcome. My question is about a potential late round quarterback target, Tyrod Taylor. Why hasn't there been more buzz around him after the departure of Rivers? I remember riding ty God in twenty fifteen through twenty seventeen, kind of like a current Josh Allen light. Every indication I've seen suggests that he'll be the starter for the Chargers this year. He provides a decent floor with his legs, and the Chargers offer more weapons than he ever had in Buffalo? Am I crazy for being the only one high on him for late draft value? Thanks for all your great insight, Anthony from Boston. Yeah, I mean I don't think that you're hearing about him that much for a couple of reasons. The first one being that quarterback is so deep and it generally doesn't matter in fantasy football, so talking about a guy who you'd likely add off the waiver wire is just kind of not worth it. This time of year, things can change. The to the Chargers could go after a quarterback in the draft and make people less confident about Tyrod Taylor. But I think the main reason that there's not a lot of buzz is because there just doesn't need to be a lot of buzz unless you're playing in superflex. But that's not the majority. But yeah, I do think that he's going to be a very very interesting late round quarterback slash waiver wire ad entering next year. This last question is from at FFBMN. How are you feeling about Devonte Freeman next year and dynasty? There's a lot of speculation about him getting cut and whatnot. I'm higher than most, but curious what your thoughts are. I mean, it's really hard for me to get excited about almost any veteran running back who's getting cut, let alone one who's going to be twenty eight years old who's had a history of injuries. And then on top of that, you've got a really good running back draft class this year. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for a team that's looking for a running back starter to do that via free agency versus the draft, which means Freeman would likely be going into a committee maybe we see him in like Pittsburgh's thing, but it's hard to get excited about a profile like that, especially with this particular draft upcoming. That's gonna do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. As always, if you get subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, always appreciate you listening. Enjoy your weekend