359: Free Agency Fallout

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Speaker 1: This is the Label Podcast with your host JJ zacher Resa JJ zacher.

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Speaker 2: Reson What's up everyone.

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Speaker 1: It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at Fandel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode three hundred and fifty nine of the Late Round podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in.

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Speaker 2: We've got a lot to go over today.

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Speaker 1: There were tons of big moves in free agency or during this free agency period this year that are going to impact fantasy football. So today I'm going to walk through the biggest moves of the last week. I'm going it provides some analysis, and then I'm gonna explain some initial player projections before digging in, though, I just want to remind you guys that even though most of the sports world is on hold, horse racing isn't, and FANDEL is doing its part to continue to bring sports fans excitement by offering users the chance to bet on horse racing. Use your existing Fandel DFS login credentials to gain access to the Towy orioles to learn more about the sport, including understanding how the odds work, the various types of bets, and most importantly, how you can win your bets. Watch all of the races live across three hundred tracks and fill the void left in your sports fandom today For more details, was it racing dot Fandel dot com or download the Fandel app today eligibility restrictions apply. The biggest move from this past week from a fantasy football perspective, in my opinion, was the DeAndre Hopkins trade.

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Speaker 2: I'm not here to.

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Speaker 1: Analyze how absolutely idiotic that trade was. I just want to talk about what it all means for fantasy football. I'm sure that's what you guys care about too. If you haven't heard, DeAndre Hopkins is now an Arizona Cardinal and David Johnson is a Houston Texan. So many things are happening. Let's start with the Texans in general. They lose Hopkins add David Johnson. Houston's one of the few teams across the league where a running back can hypothetically step in and see a lot of work. Last year we saw a tandem of Duke Johnson and Carlos Side, but i it's a free agent. In twenty nineteen, Hi accounted for almost seventy two percent of Houston's running back rushes and fifty six percent of the team's overall rush attempts. His target share wasn't very high, but his rushing work was there. That means David Johnson as of today, has a lot of opportunity in that backfield. They might decide to add a piece during the draft or something, but this is not a bad landing spot for David Johnson. This doesn't mean that it's an ideal landing spot, though. We have to remember that when we talk about teams like Houston or Atlanta, which I'll get to in a second, when we say those teams are good landing spots, we're not saying that they're ideal landing spots because Houston has plenty of issues. There's a reason that as a team, Houston's ranked twenty first, thirtieth, and twenty second over the last three years in team scoring at the running back position in PPR leagues. So let's not get carried away here, but let's be realistic and see that David Johnson has a very obvious opportunity to see work in this offense. My projections currently have them with two hundred and twenty seven rush attempts in about thirty five receptions, and then his touchdown totals are seven to eight on the ground and one to two as a receiver. And also, you're gonna hear me talk about my projections a lot on today's show. Those projections aren't spitting out full numbers. So when I say seven to eight touchdowns on the ground, I'm actually noting that his actual touchdown total is seven point four six, three, eight nine. But that's not a very consumable way to present things. Plus, I don't want people hitting my mention saying, how is someone gonna score half a touchdown?

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Speaker 2: JJ?

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Speaker 1: But David Johnson should be usable in fantasy football, and I think it hurts Duke Johnson a little bit, given that David Johnson brings a receiving element that Carlos Hide never had. Now, wide receiver things are weird without DeAndre Hopkins. If you didn't hear last week's Mailbag show, then you may have missed my thoughts on the idea of vacated targets. Basically, I don't think it's as real of a thing as the rest of the fantasy football world does. With DeAndre Hopkins no longer, there will fuller isn't just automatically set to see one hundred and eighty targets in this Texans offense. Not only will a receiver's workload or Andre Hopkins workload generally just be littered throughout an offense, but an elite receiver can't be replaced. A wide receiver target is earned. You have to get open to see a target consistently. Targets are a skill statistic, and without Hopkins, the Texans are a worse football team. They're going to be worse offensively. That means they might not score as many points and they might not be in as many advantageous situations. That hurts everyone. That's why, right now you can't just give Will Fuller, who's never come close to a twenty percent target share in his NFL career. It's why you can't just assume that he gets like a twenty five percent target share. You can't even assume a twenty percent one given the type of role that he's played in that offense. I'm not saying Will Fuller is a bad fantasy asset. I love Will Fuller. I think he's extremely good, But when thinking about vacated targets, it's not as simple as now.

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Speaker 2: Will Fuller is going to be a beast.

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Speaker 1: There's always that opportunity, but you can't assume it in a projection. So right now, none of the Texans wide outs are really really popping from a projection standpoint. Will Fuller is the guy that you want without a doubt, but we're gonna need some more information on how this Texans offense might operate before we go all in. Now, let's talk about Arizona Without David Johnson, Kenyan Drake becomes a very viable option and a candidate to be an RB one this season. He was seeing a really good workload down the stretch last year, so we can currently expect him to see a high rushing share in that offense. And since he was also being used a ton as a receiver, he's got a ton of potential to be in earlier round value in drafts, but we have no idea where he's gonna go right now. The wide receiver situation is interesting. One of the things that we have to keep in mind with DeAndre Hopkins is that while he's arguably the most talented wide receivers in the game, he also was in a perfect situation to see a really high target share year in and year out. Since twenty eleven, we've seen nineteen wide receiver seasons where the wide out saw a thirty percent target share or better. DeAndre Hopkins owns three of those seasons, and his lowest target share since his rookie year was at twenty six percent. Generally speaking, that's where we'll see target shairs hover for elite wide receivers, the really good wide outs, we'll always see a ton of targets. But when we're talking tons and tons of targets, like top tier target shairs, it's usually because of a lack of competition. I landscape those nineteen wide receivers, the nineteen guys with a thirty percent target share over the last decade or so, Every single one of those seasons happened when the number two pass catchers on those teams were either not very good or they were injured, every single one. I mean, this is why we saw the splits that we did last year with DeAndre Hopkins. When will Fuller was healthy, his target share dropped by over five percentage points. With a healthy will Fuller, it didn't fall on the range that made him not elite. It just fell to a range where he wasn't seeing a top target share, like the best target share in the league. So now you insert him on the Arizona Cardinals, where you've got Larry Fitzgerald, you've got Christian Kirk, you've got Kenyan Drake out of the backfield. Even though the quarterback situation might end up being a wash, we can't ignore or that it's incredibly unlikely that we're gonna see those spike seasons in target share from DeAndre Hopkins without an injury to another player. Now, with that being said, there's enough reason to believe that he can still be in that twenty six percent target share range, which is again where we see elite wide receivers all the time, and when you combine that with a good offense, Hopkins is still going to be a very very good fantasy asset. He's still a wide receiver one. He just may not be as close to that Michael Thomas here as.

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Speaker 2: He was before.

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Speaker 1: My current projection for him is a very solid one hundred catches, eleven hundred and seventy seven yards, and eight to nine touchdowns. I talked about Tom Brady in some detail on last week's Mailbag show, and a lot of the info that you're gonna hear right now is similar to last week. But like I said on that show, I think that there's a misunderstanding around Tom Brady. Just because he hasn't thrown the ball deep at a high rate doesn't mean he's incapable of doing it. The Bruce Arians offense loves intermediate and deep ball throws. His offense is dating back to his days in Arizona, They've ranked inside the top ten and deep ball rate throws that travel fifteen or more air yards in every single season. Brady's offenses haven't. But Brady's also ranked in the top half of the league and deep ball completion percentage in each of the last five seasons, and that was without Chris Godwin, Mike Evans, and Oj Howard, And like I also said last week, it's important to not overstate what this means for Oj Howard. I was wrong last year with Howard. An Arian's offense really didn't feature the tight end at all, not because he was bad, but because the offense didn't ask much of him as a receiver. Tom Brady loves tight ends, though you say, if he loves tight ends, then why did the Patriots rank dead last and tight end target share last year because they didn't have any because Tom Brady was targeting his tight ends historically at a high rate, because his tight ends were really good, Like Hall of Fame Good Howard is a fine later round dart throw. But I do have some fear that his price is going to be a little bit inflated. Brady's a lower end QB one in my projections right now. It's hard to not be bullish on him. With the weapons that he now has, and Evans and god Win, according to my projections, they should be just fine if you have them.

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Speaker 2: As your wide receiver ones.

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Speaker 1: I've got a feeling that Mike Evans could be discounted this year because a lot of people do, indeed think that Tom Brady can't throw it deep.

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Speaker 2: Todd Gurley is returning to Georgia to play for the Falcons.

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Speaker 1: Atlanta got a pretty friendly one year deal, and it presents a good opportunity for Gurley in fantasy football. But like Houston, let's not confuse a good opportunity for an outstanding opportunity.

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Speaker 2: Atlanta.

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Speaker 1: Over the last two years, they've ranked twenty second and twenty six in fantasy scoring at the running back position. You might say, but Todd Gurley is better than what they had before. He's a better running back, And I'd say sure, But we also know that situation drives running back value more than the running back himself. There have been tons and tons of studies on this. A running back can get more individual volume to boost his fantasy totals. And sure we can see a slight spike in production, especially if a team thinks that they need to utilize their good running back. But offensive line play is huge. How a team calls plays is huge, and I think that ladder point is key here. Gurley wasn't amazingly effective last year, but he found the end zone twelve times on the ground and twice through the air. But keep in mind that the Rams were fourth in the NFL in run rate at the goal line, while Atlanta ranked nineteenth. And then on top of that, the Rams ran the fifth most goal line plays Atlanta ranked twenty ninth. That's not to say that the same thing is going to happen in twenty twenty. It's to say that Todd Gurley was in a pretty advantageous situation last year, despite an offensive line that was a lot worse than previous seasons, and Atlanta is not an automatic upgrade at all, especially if the Falcons continue to lean on the pass a little bit more close to the end zone even without Austin Hooper. Atlanta's also in a situation where they're not projected to be some powerhouse team. They've got their issues, and they're in a division with the Saints, who have one of the best rosters in football, and the Buccaneers who just got Tom If there are negative game scripts, and we should expect some negative game scripts, then we might not see the Falcons become so much more run heavy to really allow Gurley to hit that two hundred and fifty carry mark. And then, on top of this, Atlanta is still a candidate to take a running back in the draft, so there's an even scarier floor to Gurley's overall outlook. If the Falcons get a back with an earlier round pick, it wouldn't be smart in my opinion, but it's still possible. I know that I just sort of crapped on that situation for Todd Gurley, but it was a really, really good landing spot all things considered, My initial projections have Girley with two hundred and thirty five attempts about sixty one targets, and if nothing changes, I do think he's got an opportunity to be a lower end RB one in fantasy this year. But there are risks he may not be used as much as we think. They could draft a running back and Gurley's knees could end up giving him trouble. He continues to just be a volatile fantasy asset. Stefan Diggs wasn't a free agent, but he was traded, and even though this episode is mostly about free agency moves, I can't ignore the trades that went down this past week.

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Speaker 2: So here we are.

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Speaker 1: Stefan Diggs is a Buffalo Bill and I'll be honest with you, guys, I don't love it. He's going from a run heavy team to another run heavy team, and he's moving from a quarterback with a career yards per attempt to average of seven point seven to one who hits six point seven in his second year in the league. I'm not saying that Josh Allen can't improve, but let's not pretend that he's been efficient through the air. And to the point made earlier about elite players seeing those insanely high target shaars, this isn't one of those situations. I mean, first off, Stefan Diggs has never been a super high target share player. His highest single season target share was twenty five percent, and even when you pro rate his seasons because he's never healthy, he's hovered the twenty three percent mark. And that's actually where I have him from a target share projection in Buffalo, and it brings him to just one hundred and ten targets overall. And because of the offense he's playing in and the quarterback who's throwing it to him, the projection has him at eight hundred and eighty nine receiving yards and six to seven touchdowns. I'm not sure where his ADP is going to fall, but I'm likely not going to be very bullish on Stefan Diggs this year. Another big name wide out who changed teams this past week was Emmanuel Sanders. He was a free agent, so it was a little bit different, but he landed in a really interesting spot with the Saints.

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Speaker 2: This is a.

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Speaker 1: Scenario where yes, of course Michael Thomas is going to get his Michael Thomas is my number one ranked wide receiver in fantasy football, but having Emmanuel Sanders there is going to bump down his projected target chair at least a bit. It doesn't do nothing. Emmanuel Sanders is more competition, and he's better competition than anything that Thomas had last year. The Saints are a really strange team to project every year, if I'm being honest, because they're.

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Speaker 2: Just so efficient.

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Speaker 1: So I do expect Emmanuel Sanders to finish maybe third or potentially fourth and target chair on that team. Given Michael Thomas, Alvin Kamara, and Jared Cooker there, I've got him projected with the third highest target chair on that team. But because of the Saints tendencies and how good they're going to be, the passing attack may not see a ton of volume. Last year they were relatively average and overall attempts, and then the two previous years saw them with below average attempt numbers. Basically, what I'm saying here is Manny Sanders may be an eighty to ninety target player, but those are high quality targets in an offense that not only is efficient through the air, but they're also efficient at scoring touchdowns. So right now, my projections have them in that high end wide receiver four or low end wide receiver three range. That might seem absurd to you, by the way, because wide receiver four means that wide receivers are ranked thirty seventh to forty eighth. That's what the wide receiver four range is. But guys, the wide receiver position right now is insane. It is so deep with usable assets. And keep in mind that it won't take much for Sanders to move up in those rankings, since the projected numbers are relatively flat outside of Michael Thomas at the wide receiver position. Good move for the Saints. Sanders should be usable, and it does ding Michael Thomas at least a little bit, but he's still easily the wide receiver one in my projections. Rivers landing in Indianapolis should help things for that offense.

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Speaker 2: In general.

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Speaker 1: In fantasy football, you can feel more confident with someone like t Y Hilton. Maybe Paris Campbell ends up emerging. Jack Doyle should have a nice floor. But I think the biggest impact that we could see there is with the running backs. I always try to be level headed when it comes to looking at historical positional data and how it relates to certain coordinators or even quarterback tendencies. What I mean by that is when someone is saying something like this coach doesn't like using his tight ends, it's very, very important to first look at the type of personnel that that coach was working with before you just avoid that coach's tight ends in a fantasy draft. It's no different than how I feel with the Tom Brady narrative that I talked about earlier. Does he like the tight end position? Maybe, but you can't ignore the fact that Rob Gronkowski is one of the best tight ends of all time, and that when Brady didn't have Gronk last year, we saw that team's tight end target share plummet. So take this all with a grain of salt. It's not everything, but this is something I think since twenty eleven, here where the Chargers have ranked and running back target share per season second, second, sixth, fourteenth, third, fourteenth, tenth, third, and first. That's all nine seasons where they ranked in the top half of the league, seven where they were top ten, and six where they were top six. Clearly personnel matters here. Rivers has played with good pass catching running backs, but there's still been some rotation of who those running backs have been. There have been coaching changes, and there have been personnel changes at other positions. In other words, the one constant throughout that entire period has been Philip rivers. Logically, there might be something to this, and if there is, even if it's a slight bump, there's a bump in target share projection to both Marlin Back and Nihim Heinz. Mack only had seventeen targets in fourteen games last year, but if you look at his routes run data according to Pro Football Focus, that number doesn't make all that much sense last season. And this is according to Pro Football Focused data, but last season, targets at the running back position correlated to routes run with an R square of point eight seven. The two are very highly correlated. That's not shocking. It makes sense if someone's going to run a route, if they run a lot of routes, they're probably gonna see more targets. On average, a running back saw a target on every five point two routes run.

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Speaker 2: Based on that.

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Speaker 1: Number, Austin Eckler over exceeded in targets by the highest margin. His routes run told us that he should have had closer to seventy targets last year. When PFF had him at one hundred and four. Melvin Gordon ranked tenth, where he had fourteen more than he should have had based on his routes run You know who is fourth from the bottom. That's right, Marlon Mack. Based on his routes run total, he should have had eighteen more targets than he had. The only running backs ahead of him were Todd Gurley, Carlos Hide, and Ezekiel Elliott. So I'm intrigued by what this could do for Marlon Mack. As long as the Colts don't draft a running back, Philip Rivers should help him out a lot. My projections currently have him setting a career high with twenty eight receptions, and it's easy to see that number rising. Lots of tight ends found new homes this past week. We had Jason Witten going to Vegas, which should just be more annoying than anything else. We had Jimmy Graham signed with the Bears, which gives Chicago forty five tight ends on their current roster. But I saw four tight end transactions that were at least intriguing, so I felt it was necessary to cover it quickly on today's show. The first was Hayden Hurst and his move to Atlanta. I mean, say what you want about Hurst the player, if there's opportunity for volume in an offense, you have to be intrigued. He's likely going to be a late round dart throw, but there's a lot of volume for the taking if that player is good in Atlanta. So if he shows up and he lives up to his draft capital, he all of a sudden could be fantasy football relevant. Blake Jarwin is kind of in a similar situation. He re signed with Dallas this week. Dallas's offense was a lot more pass heavy last year than in previous seasons. That allowed them the rank tenth in pass attempts. If they keep moving in that direction, Jarwin could carve out a role. Given that they don't have a true No. Number three receiver right now, they can and should draft one, but as of now, Jarwin is at least interesting. The two bigger names that signed this past week, though, were Austin Hooper and Eric Ebron. Hooper went to Cleveland, Ebron went to Pittsburgh. I'm not totally thrilled with either signing from a fantasy perspective. We've got good players in Cleveland. I talked about this on the Mailback Show. Hooper's going from a situation where he had two good wideouts, sure, but now it's two good wide outs running backs who can catch passes out of the backfield, and a less friendly passing offense and a worse quarterback and another capable tight end to compete with. He went from being a higher end tight end one in Atlanta to probably a lower end tight end one in Cleveland, or no better than a mid range one. My projections have Hooper at seventy two targets. That's just not going to cut it as a reliable option.

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Speaker 2: And then there's Eric Ebron.

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Speaker 1: I think some people are going to be excited about this signing because we've seen his career rejuvenated in Indianapolis. But Vance McDonald is still in Pittsburgh, and the Steelers have some young wideouts that are going to see the field a lot in three wide receiver sets. So Ebron, like Hooper, has a fairly met outlook with sixty eight targets in my projections. It doesn't help that Pittsburgh hasn't given the tight end position a twenty percent target share since twenty sixteen. That number was hit by fifteen different teams in twenty nineteen.

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Speaker 2: The last move I.

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Speaker 1: Want to talk about a little bit more in depth today is one that I've gone back and forth a lot on since it happened, and that's Melvin Gordon going to the Broncos.

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Speaker 2: I've made an.

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Speaker 1: Initial projection and posted it to Twitter when the signing went down, but that was before I saw the investment, and it was before putting more emphasis on Philip Lindsay's end of season receiving workload, which was not great. During the second half of last season, Lindsay averaged a target share per game that was south of seven percent. It was basically double that during the first half of the season. So Gordon does have an opportunity to carve out a role as a receiver, which we've seen him do in the past. But then on top of that, he clearly profiles as the most stereotypical early down back that they have. The Broncos have now used Philip Line for two seasons, he's been in the NFL for two years. In those campaigns, Lindsay has seen a fifty four percent and sixty two percent running back rush share, with the bigger number coming last year. And then they go out and they sign Melvin Gordon to a two year deal. This seems to show us that at the very least Royce Freeman could be on his way out. Freeman's not going to see that much work at all. But then if you look at Lindsay's capped attempt ceiling or how they've used them thus far, and then you add that to a diminishing target share, you can actually start to see a role being carved out for Melvin Gordon, like a decent role. I'm definitely not super bowlish on him, though. You've got to split backfield in some way that's coming and it's not like the Broncos are a lock to be great offensively as of now. I've got Gordon with two hundred and three attempts, a little over eight hundred and eighty yards and six to seven touchdowns on the ground to go along with forty catches, another two hundred and seventy five yards through the air and one touchdown as a receiver, and then Royce Freeman gets crushed while Philip Lindsay maintains about one hundred and thirty carries and twenty three recent Basically, Melvin Gordon going there has made Melvin Gordon a far worse fantasy asset while also torpedoing the values of Philip Lindsay and Royce Freeman. Gordon, though, has the most upside in that backfield by far.

00:22:12
Speaker 2: Now.

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Speaker 1: I know that there are a lot of other things that happen in free agency or over the last week, like Jordan Howard's signing in Miami, Teddy Bridgewater going to Carolina, but I wanted to highlight the top moves in order to get the most important information out to you guys, so that your minds are on the right track as we head into April. The draft is going to change a lot of projections, but that doesn't mean that we can't be projecting right now. The more prepared we are now, the better we'll be able to react when we need to react. That's going to do it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got to subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone. I'll have another rewind episode for you in the middle of the week, and then, as always, the mail Bag will be out on Friday,