871: Mailbag 3/22/24

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Speaker 1: This is the labor of podcast with your host JJ Zachertha. J J Zacherreth. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode eight hundred and seventy one of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in before we getting the mailback questions this week. I just want to remind you to check out Underdog Fantasy. I've been doing fantasy football drafts over there over the last month or so and it's giving me a nice early prep on the fantasy football season. They've got a ten dollars entry tournament right now called the Big Board. That's where I've been drafting. But you can get into three dollars drafts, four dollar drafts, and five dollars drafts too if you haven't played bestball before. The idea is simple. You draft a fantasy football team and you can do it in minutes with Underdog and there's no waivers, trades, or lineup setting. Your team is optimized for you win season based on how your players perform. Drafts are happening right now over there, and you can use the information that I share on here in my prospect guide to help you draft If you're new to Underdog you want to check it out. Make sure you use promo code late Round when you sign up and you'll get a deposit match up to one hundred dollars. That's promo code late Round. Head to Underdog Fantasy dot com or download the Underdog Fantasy app to sign up. The first question this week is from Twitter. It's from at the Bobby Duke. It says, HEYJJ, loved the show and the Prospect Guide has been another great one this year. Thank you. My question is regarding Taj Spears. I know most of us groaned once Pollard was picked up by the Titans, mostly due to their similar play style and a more than questionable offense with Levis, But with the sky high value that he was at in Dynasty before the free agency pickup, could he be considered a sneaky buy now? Could this be a good example of an ambiguous backfield situation that benefits spears skill set, not only for Dynasty but even for Redraft. Could this be a potential Rashad White League winning type situation? Thanks again, JJ. So I know I talked about Taj Spears on the show earlier this week, but let's get a little bit more detailed about that situation. I think what's important first is to look at Spears the prospect. Fortunately, I have these prospect guides now I can see where my head was at as these players entered the league. This is what I wrote last year about Taj Spears. It says the reason why the z prospect model, which is now the ZAP model, doesn't like Spears more is because efficiency isn't what drives the model. Spears had one season with more than one hundred and thirty carries in college, and he never hit a ten percent reception share in a single season. And he did this while playing at Tulane. It's not like he was sharing a backfield with Bijon Robinson. There's optimism that Spears could become the next Aaron Jones, a smaller school player who showed off crazy efficiency in college while doing it all in his backfield. The difference is that Jones had far far more volume at UTEP than Spears saw a Tulane, and Jones's receiving profile was elite too. Tennessee isn't a bad landing spot, though Derek Henry's twenty nine years old and the team's primary backup Aisan Haskins was definitely a worse prospect than Spears. The model agrees too, given the lack of touches to his profile and his two hundred and one pound frame, it doesn't seem likely that Spears is going to dominate looks in the NFL. Could he be a really good committee back? Absolutely, that's what we should expect, honestly. Now, I don't know if the twenty twenty three season should have really changed our minds from that take. There's always a possibility that any capable running back ends up being more than a committee back. Like I had, Spears ranked relatively high before free agency started, not as high as the market did, but I recognize the possibility that the Titans could just say, hey, Taj, you're the man now. I think that's something that fantasy gamers need to understand more than anything else. We're doing our best as analysts to find talent at running back because talent will often see volume, But at running back in particular, coaching decisions are going to drive things. Kyron Williams outside of LA probably isn't the same fantasy asset. It's okay to say that there's some volatility and how this all comes about, but we can use context clues in data to help us be better than our competition at predicting these backfields. Like for Spears, the evidence I used to conclude what I concluded was that he was amazingly efficient in college. Yes, but his production profile was good based on efficiency and volume is what matters more when we're looking to see how a player translates from college to the NFL. And yeah, i'd say the model was still too low on Spears last year. Given what we saw in twenty twenty three, he's outperformed the model's expectation already. It's not like I was totally rite with Spears, but I do think the foundation of what I was saying a year ago about him as a prospect that's still very valid today, that he can be a really really really good committee back, a one A in his offense, not necessarily just the one. And seeing Tennessee go out and sign Tony Pollard it only reinforces that stance. Was it a weird signing from a fit perspective, I'd argue, yes, but Tennessee is telling us that they probably don't see Taj Spears as a full time belcal back and That's why I don't think this is the same thing as Rashad White last year. Last season, Rashad White was a screaming value because of his pass catching upside as well as his general prospect profile. He came into the league as a great prospect and then competed well enough as a rookie, and then he more or less had that backfield to himself. In year two. Spears entered the league as a pretty good prospect too, but he wasn't as good as Rashad White within my evaluation. At least he then compete. He did in a committee, just like White did in year one, and now we're sitting in year two. The biggest difference though, is that his team signed legit competition to compete with him during this second year. That didn't happen in Tampa Bay, and we can't ignore that, especially when it just reinforces what we already thought about the player, or what I already thought about the player now in terms of him being a buy in dynasty. Now, let's see where his cost falls to because in situations like this, I actually think that players usually don't fall enough. When a player gets steamed up because he's potentially going to take over a backfield, he gets a whole lot of truthers. And when you get truthers, those people become stubborn. They don't want to let go of their priors. I've said this many many times before, and I had an in depth conversation about this with Scott Connor weeks ago on Late Round perspectives. But the RB two landscape in fantasy football is really really big. There are a lot of players who could potentially put up RB two numbers here in twenty twenty four. The RB one landscape is really small. The players who could potentially give you true top six numbers at running back and fantasy there aren't many of them that we could feel confident in. Some are gonna emerge, but there's not gonna be many. So to me, there's no point in buying the upper end of that RB two group. Right Like, if you were to say that RB ones the guys who this year can make a legit difference in fantasy football and the projection front, if you were to say that there were maybe eight or nine of them, that would seem reasonable. There are like eight RB ones in fantasy football. Even though we say RB one to mean top twelve running back. Realistically, there are only eight guys on the projections front that we can feel confident can really give you league winning upside. That leaves us with a whole bunch of potential RB twos. And if Taj Spears is near the top of that list on the cost side of things that we don't want to buy into that we want to buy at the bottom of a tier, not the top. And right now I'm afraid that Spears's price just won't budge enough because of that Pollard signing. There are too many people out there who love Taj Spears, and I get the allure. He's an exciting player who's gonna produce. He's gonna give us something. Even in a committee, Like I said, I think he could be a very very good committee running back. My fear, and this has been my fear all along, is that he's just not someone who's gonna totally totally own his backfield. That's the problem, and that's the fear that I have with Taj Spears. This ass questions from at Skull Actuary. It says is Swift a buy sell or hold. His offense looks spectacular and he's clearly the lead back. So, like I just said, we can only do so much when projecting how a backfield might be split. If a coach wants to do a specific thing, he'll do that thing with Swift though, so I think he's probably the lead back, But what exactly does that mean when we say lead back. That's a lot more meaningful for someone like Christian McCaffrey than DeAndre Swift, who's still competing with Roshan Johnson and Khalil Herbert, and that competition is a big deal. Rochean Johnson was at least solid enough as a rookie. He showed that he could be a three down back in a pinch. Khalil Herbert has been one of the more efficient runners in football since he entered the league. He's got other issues as a player, but as a pure runner, he's great. You could argue that Chicago has the best depth in football right now at the running back position. The fact that there are two capable backs behind DeAndre Swift. That's what scares me most about this being an ambiguous backfield. The ambiguous backfield a lore is that a player can just simply outperform our expectation, our projection, and overtake a backfield. Naturally, we may think a backfield gets split a certain way entering the season, but then it ends up going to different direction and a player's cost is lower because of our preseason expectations. But when a player like Swift is then competing with two pretty capable players, that means there's more of a hurdle for him to overcome. Now, historically, when we've had three running backs get drafted in the late rounds from the same backfield with no middle or early round back from that backfield, we often see some wins. I wrote about this in last year's draft guide, and last year the two backfield that sort of fit that mold were Chicago and Miami, and Miami gave us some huge wins last year. This year, though, we're probably not going to see that market trend with Chicago because Swift is probably going to be a middle round pick. He's RB twenty six right now over on Underdog, which honestly, I think that's a fair enough price. My projections have him slightly lower than that, but that's making some assumptions about that backfield split, So I don't think I'm necessarily in or out on the best ball front. What I can tell you, though, is that with middle round running backs, we usually don't see big league winners. When those running backs are attached to a rookie quarterback, they can outperform expectation, but they usually don't outperform expectation by a huge, huge number. They're usually not huge breakouts, and that's a trend that we've seen since twenty eleven. So my guess is that I'll be more out than in when it comes to my managed league teams. But I wouldn't fall to you necessarily for getting a piece of that backfield like swift and best ball, where the opportunity cost is also lower, because running backs generally get pushed down draft boards. This best question is from Zachary on Patreon. He says, should we expect a downtick in production from the Colts wide receivers next year due to Anthony Richardson's return? So I think some people are gonna hear that question and say, why would we expect this? They're getting a better quarterback under center, And the reason this is being asked is that Richardson's a mobile quarterback, and mobile quarterbacks historically have not been good for their pass catchers. It's not a good thing. Go check out episode seven hundred and sixty six for more on that. But let's dig into this. We don't have a huge sample size of Anthony Richardson, not yet. We have only two games last season where he led the Colts and pass attempts. He was getting injured, Gardner Minshew was stepping in, and then eventually Anthony Richardson was out for the year. He had a season ending injury. But in those two games, Richardson threw for two hundred and twenty three and two hundred passing yards. Nothing special. In their first game with Richardson, they had a plus four percent drop back over expected rate, but in their second game that felled a minus nine percent. Overall, last year, according to Fantasy Life data, their drop back over expected rate was minus four percent. I definitely think that we're looking at a team that's going to be more in the bottom half of the league in pass rate this year. In twenty twenty three, they ranked twenty first in overall pass rate. I don't see that necessarily improving. But another point to make here is that Indy ran at a pretty fast paced last year. They were third fastest in the NFL when looking at seconds per play. So if they're running more total plays, that can at least help the volume aspect. If they have a low pass rate but they run a lot of plays, that can at least help things out a little bit. But if we're comparing to twenty twenty three, which was largely without Anthony Richardson, the Colts were bottom half in the league in total team targets. When I look at my projections, I've got them with about thirty four fewer pass attempts year over year. So yeah, technically that could hurt the offense, the pass catchers in the offense, But I think there's a chance that we just see better efficiency in scoring from that offensive unit, and that should make this not that big of a deal at least when you're strictly comparing twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four. The Colts also currently have a pretty condensed volume tree, meaning only a few guys are really relevant in that offense. I'm talking Jonathan Taylor, Michael Pittman, and then probably Josh Downs. There's not a whole lot going on elsewhere in that offense at the moment. Now that may change post draft. There's a good possibility of that, but right now that's helping them out because higher backfield chairs and higher target shairs can help out tremendously in a run heavier offense on the projections front. And even if you consider them getting an early round wide receiver, I wouldn't make that big of a deal of this as long as you're approaching it from how they're going to improve or not improve from twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four. As long as that's your angle in perspective. The last question this week is from Twitter. It's from at good Underscore Ecosystem. It says how many wide receivers drafted in the first round since twenty eleven finished as a wide receiver one? This is a Marvin Harrison, Malik Neighbors, Romadunze redraft question. How high is too high in redraft to take shots at these guys. I did a best Ball draft and Marvin Harrison Junior went in the second round. Seems high, but maybe not so. Yeah, Marvin Harrison Junior has a very firm second round adp over on underdog. I would imagine that's gonna surprise a lot of people when they're doing their first drafts. There of the season. So let's look at history. Let's look at how good or bad of an idea this is. Now, I don't want to look simply at round taken here, because a place like Underdog is gonna skew wide receiver heavy more so than a managed redraft league. He's wide receiver ten there, but the wide receiver ten will go earlier in those drafts. So instead, let's just look at rookie wide receivers who were drafted high within their position. Let's look at rookies drafted as top twenty wide receivers since twenty eleven. That's happened once. That's according to my fantasy league's redraft ADP. That was Amari Cooper back in twenty fifteen. And I know what you're thinking, what about Jamar Chase. The reason Chase is 'enlisted there is because you might remember, people started talking themselves out of Jamar Chase after his preseason because his preseason wasn't going. So that year, Amari Cooper played around expectation based on where he was drafted. His thirteen point three PPR points per game was about what we'd expect. Now, let's approach this from a different angle. If Harrison ends up going wide receiver ten, based on history, his expectation would be around fifteen and a half to sixteen PPR points per game. Since twenty eleven, seven rookie wide receivers have gotten to that averager around that average Pukinakua, Odell Beckham, Justin Jefferson, Michael Thomas, Jamar Chase, Mike Evans, and Julio Jones. Many of those wide receivers, like Obj, Jamar Chase, Mike Evans, Julio Jones, they had elite Prospects scores. Like Marvin Harrison, they were looked at as elite prospects, and Justin Jefferson had a really good prospect score too. So I don't think it's crazy to think that a player like Harrison in a spot like Arizona hypothetically could get there. I think my current beef with his ADP is more so the fact that I don't see how it's gonna get higher now. I actually think that Nico Collins might be a little bit overvalued right now in redraft, but I'll very likely have Garrett Wilson ahead of Marvin Harrison Junior this season, even if Harrison Junior goes to a place like Arizona, which I think at this point Arizona is probably the best realistic spot for Marvin Harrison Junior to produce in year one. I want to gain value out of my picks pre and post draft. There are so many rookies where that'll be the case over on underdog, so many of them. I just don't know if that's the case for Marvin Harrison. And remember I have Harrison in the same tier as Malik Neighbors as a prospect. In Neighbors right now, Marvin Harrison's wide receiver ten. Malik Neighbors is wide receiver twenty three, which in my opinion, is a huge problem in the market. It just goes to show that Harrison Junior's ADP is probably a little inflated now. I highly doubt that he goes that high in your leagues this summer, though. But what we're seeing with Marvin Harrison Junior is definitely only unprecedented. When it comes to Malik Neighbors in Roma doonesday not so much. It's not that strange that they're being drafted where they're being drafted. Their current cost in relation to the position is a lot more reasonable. That's it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by starting for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and no for it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening this week everyone, I greatly appreciate it. Enjoy your weekend and I'll talk to you next week