608: Analyzing 2021's Biggest Misses

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha J J. Zacher Reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zachareson, the editor in chief at fandled at Number five dot com in this episode six hundred and eight of the Late Round podcast. So many shows that are part of the Fandel podcast Network. Thanks for tuning in. When I signed up to do this job, I knew what I was getting into. I'm speaking to a group of people and telling them what I think is going to happen on a football field. I'm predicting what human beings are doing in a game. When I signed up to do this, I knew that I would be publicly wrong, over and over and over again. That's the nature of the game. That's why admitting when I'm wrong about this stuff is not that big of a deal to me. It would be absolutely exhausting to defend every bad take that I've ever had. Now, I'll defend takes. If someone's misrepresenting what I said about a player, about a situation, I'll defend that all day long. But if I said something in my analysis that very clearly was wrong, what's the point in trying to make it seem like it was right. Not only is it important to be realistic, but I learned from my mistakes in fantasy football every single year and that was no different this season. I got a lot wrong, I got a lot right. But today's not about that. Today's about the stuff that I got wrong, why I think I got it wrong, and what I can do in the future to not let that happen again. People may see this as an unimportant exercise, but I see it as a chance to see flaws in my process, and when I can point out those flaws and improve on them, it'll help me be a whole lot better in the future. So, like I say on the show each year, today's the day that I poop on myself. Today's the day I share what went wrong for me in the twenty twenty one fantasy football season. Now, before talking about the things that I got wrong, I want to send another reminder that the World Fantasy Basketball Championship is scheduled to take place on March thirteenth. That means there's still plenty of time for you to qualify for the live final. To get in on the apps, enter your best nine man MBA lineup into a WFBBC Qualifier and finish in first place. Each finalist VIP package includes a trip for two to New Orleans, two luxury box game tickets to the Hornets Pelicans game on March eleventh, VIP entry to a special fan event, and so much more. The live final will be here before you know it, so head to fandle dot com slash WFBBC today and compete for your chance to party by the Bayou Eligibility Restriction supply. Go to fandle dot com or download the Fandalle app for more details. I fell into the rookie quarterback trap this year. I thought it was going to be the year of the rookie quarterback, and it was not at all. Now a few things about that. I was in the Justin fields, I was in the Trey lance, but looking back at my preseason rankings, I still was taking the lower end QB one pocket passers over them. So I didn't get as crazy as I could have with how I viewed those two mobile rookies. But I wrote an article in July on whether the late round quarterback strategy was dead or not. What I talked through in that piece was similar to one that I wrote the year before. How it seemed like the market was becoming more efficient with quarterbacks, and how elite quarterbacks were actually separating themselves again in fantasy football. And that was more or less the case again this year. It wasn't to the extreme like last year, but top quarterbacks generally were giving you some sort of edge. We just didn't have quite the correlation of preseason adp versus postseason result like we did in twenty twenty. Now, let me first start with that. At a high level, I do think going after high upside players and largely ignoring floor at the quarterback position, I think that's the right thing to do. In redraft leagues. That's always been the case in ninety five percent of leagues. You're gonna be able to replace that position with usable pieces on the waiver wire. Maybe not to the point where you'd have like a top five or top six season out of a quarterback. You can either hit on a waiver wire player, or you could stream at a baseline. You can get low end QB one numbers by doing that at the very least, so there's generally no reason to just play it safe. The problem is, I think I took that a little bit too far. With rookie quarterbacks, despite data telling us that rookie quarterbacks generally don't produce in fantasy football. You know, I was thinking about this the other day, and I think the mistake could be summed up in a really really simple way. With guys like Trey Lance and Justin Fields. I liked them because of their mobility, similar to why I like Lamar Jackson coming out. But Jackson was if here to become starter during his rookie year. But we could have easily looked at Lamar Jackson as almost a prime example of what we want from Fields or Lance. I think they had more upside with their arm entering the season, but neither guy had the upside with their legs that Lamar had as a rookie. In Jackson's rookie season, he had seven starts, and in those starts he averaged eighteen point six points per game, which is really good for a rookie quarterback. But eighteen point six points per game, that's not really going to destroy your league mates. I mean, you can stream that or come close to streaming that. I ended up not relying solely on Lance and Fields in my redraft leagues. I would platun them if I did draft them hoping that they would hit later in the season. So I don't think it necessarily burned me. It's hard for quarterback picks or any late round pick to really burn anyone. But I was a little naive when it came to the ceilings for both of those players. Ironically, drafting them was probably more of a floor play because their rushing would allow them to be reasonable fantasy assets, but they still needed the passing element to really work out to really have a high ceiling season. And then obviously Trey Lance barely even played. Field started to come alive down the stretch, which was good to see, but that was another factor that just made it not super worthwhile to go after them in a draft off the waiver wire shore and the draft wasn't worth it, So I'll take that out now. Speaking of quarterbacks, I missed on Ryan Tannehill this year as well. I think the injuries of that offense definitely played a role into why Tannehill was so average is but with Tannehill was pretty simple. I made way too many assumptions he'd been incredibly efficient over his first two seasons as Titans quarterback, But number one, he was losing Arthur Smith, so there was at least some variance there. Number two, I borderline banked on that efficiency. Now, I did note that with more volume, the efficiency had a chance to matter less. If the Titans threw more, the efficiency didn't matter as much. But Tannehill's efficiency dropped, and his touchdown rate was one of the things that did pretty heavily. He had touchdown rates of seven point seven percent and six point nine percent over his first two years as the Titans starter. That's really really good, Like, we don't see touchdown rates that high year over year. And I know this, and I knew this going into the season. I've done a lot of work on touchdown rates. I just didn't expect the drop to be as significant as it was. He finished twenty twenty one with a four percent touchdown rate, and even though he still found the end zone seven times on the ground, that was really the difference for Tannehill being a top six guy versus the lower end QB one or a higher ENQB two. But take a step back too, Tennessee had scored fifty nine and fifty touchdowns over their last two seasons. Again, that's something that I talk about all the time on this show that when teams do really well in the touchdown column one year, they tend to just not do that well the next or as well. It's regression. It's really hard for teams to repeat those types of performances. And even though I knew that what happened to Tennessee to some degree, I didn't factor in that regression enough. Yes, they had injuries, but the Titans scored just forty five touchdowns this year. They had an extra game and still scored fourteen fewer offensive touchdowns versus twenty twenty. Looking back at my projections, I had the Titans projected for about ten more touchdowns than they actually scored. It was one of my biggest whiffs in terms of projected offensive touchdowns this year, and that was my downfall. Tannehill ended up being essentially a streamer and I got it wrong. I guess now we should talk about Derrick Henry. Henry got hurt and that ended his fantasy season. Some might say that me not being very into Henry this year, that it was a win, but that's not a w for me at all. The man was crushing souls before that injury, and I was on a path to being absolutely wrong about him this year. I had him ranked as the RB five pre draft when the consensus had him at RB three, RB four. Now some would say that's not significant, but it is, and I talked about the in the preseason. I wasn't as into Henry because he was coming off a literal historic campaign, and even with that historical campaign, in twenty twenty, he still didn't come close to Alvin Kamara or Dalvin Cooks points per game averages in PPR formats. So regression was likely to hit Henry on the ground because you can't just project historic seasons right right Well, as we know, Dereck Henry's built different. In twenty twenty, Henry averaged twenty three point six rushes per game That converted to about one hundred and twenty seven rushing yards per game, and he averaged five point four yards per tent. Twenty twenty one, Henry's yards per carry average dropped to four point three. So you must be thinking, well, he was averaging almost twenty four carries per game last year, and if his yards per carry dropped that significantly, then he must have really seen a drop in total rushing yards per game. Nope, his yards per game on the ground dropped by less than ten because the man was averaging twenty seven point four rush attempts per game in twenty twenty one before he got hurt. I don't think I would ever have come up with that number in a projection, genuinely, And that's why I'm not that upset that I was wrong about Derrick Henry, at least from that perspective. Where I am sort of mad about being wrong was on the receiving end. I talk about this all the time, and I talked about it specifically with Austin Eckler entering the season. You have to ask reasonable what if questions when you're evaluating players. In Eckler's case, it was what if with this new coaching staff, Eckler c's goal line work, and with Derrick Henry, it's what if the Titans start to use and more as a pass catcher. I largely dismissed that idea because we had five years of Derrick Henry not being a pass catcher. But I should have been more open to a little bit of an uptick, like he doesn't have to be Christian McCaffrey to see a difference in his bottom line as a receiver, and it was dumb for me to not think of it that way. But Henry had a target share per game of seven point seven percent this past year. In twenty twenty, it was six point seven percent. Now that alone isn't all that different, but it starts to add up. Tennessee went from thirty pass attemps per game in twenty twenty to about thirty three in games with Derrick Henry. And then Henry converted those twenty targets across eight games at a far better rate compared to twenty twenty. He had a catch rate of ninety percent this year. It was sixty one percent last year. Not only that, but he had ten rushing touchdowns through eight games. While all this was going on, he was pacing to have his best season in the touchdown column, even though the Titans were worse offensively, way worse. So I do think that a lot went Henry's way before the injury. He's a beast, but I already knew that he was a beast. That's not what I got wrong. What I think I got wrong was just not factoring in the receiving enough. But I think I can live with that. The other stuff is regression related stuff. It's not only hard to predict, but we have no idea what would have happened with Derek Henry through the rest of the season, and how his touchdowns may have fluctuated and changed, or how the Titans would have utilized him with such a huge workload. We didn't get to see that because of the injury. So again, hand me that l I got Henry wrong. But of the players on today's list, it's one of the ones that I can live with the most, partially because I still had him ranked pretty high entering the season. Sometimes you have to take chances on players who we don't have a big sample on. Chase Claypole was one of those guys for me this year. I thought it made sense to shoot for upside with Chase Claypole this past year if you went with a wide receiver heavy approach, I loved getting him as like a wide receiver three or a wide receiver four on those wide receiver heavy teams because you didn't necessarily have to rely on him. You didn't need production right away. He didn't absolutely positively need to hit, but the ceiling was there, and obviously Claypole didn't hit. I got plenty of Deontay Johnson in my leagues as well, but I did get a lot of Claypool too, and it was not a fun experience. So where did it go wrong? Well, I think a few things happened. Number One, he went from scoring eleven total touchdowns last year to two this year. That's not regression, that's an over correction. He should have had closer to five or six based on Pro Football Focuses Expected touchdowns model. Now, he was banged up a little bit this year, but let's just be honest, it wasn't a good offense for him. Claypole wins on the outside and he can make splash plays. The Steelers were eleventh worst than fifteen plus are ard attempts the season, and among the thirty quarterbacks with fifty or more of those throws, Ben Roethlisberger ranked only better than Jared Goff and Sam Darnold in completion rate. Claypool was very much a draft specific pick for me. I got him when I went really wide receiver heavy because there was obvious variance to his profile. I still expect bigger days ahead for him, but this year just wasn't it for him. For a variety of reasons. Another wide receiver missed this year was Jerry Judy. As much as the fantasy community talked about how bad Courtland Sutton was this year with Jerry Judy in that lineup, Judy himself was not very good. After he came back from that injury. Things were looking good. In week one before that injury, he had seven targets, he got six of them. He had seventy two yards. It looked like he may end up being sort of like a Deontae Johnson for that Denver Broncos offense. But from Week eight through Week eighteen, which is weird to say, by the way, Judy had about a twenty percent target chair per game. That's good, it's not great, and he averaged just eight PPR points per game. The problem is that a target share of twenty percent in an offense like Denver's, it's not gonna get a player very far. Denver this is year ranked twenty fourth in pass attempts and they were bottom half in the league and down the field attempts, they were bottom half of the league and passed to rush touchdown ratio, and they were bottom half of the league in total touchdowns. And Jerry Judy finished the season with three red zone targets three. You see how these things sort of like compound. When a player is in a below average situation, he needs something to get him out of that situation to make him stand out in fantasy. Usually it's a massive target chair, but Judy wasn't able to get that. Sometimes it's high usage in the red zone. Judy wasn't able to get that. That resulted in bad output. Now, my hope is that it was partially due to his injury, that he just never totally got right. Because I'm very into Judy as a player, but he was just a case of where everything was just kind of below average around him and he didn't do anything special in an area to help him emerge from that. Now, I don't know if there's a clear cut lesson here. I'm gonna bet on talent, especially at wide receiver, and I think Jerry Judy has talent. A learning though that if you've got a player being drafted among players in better situations, definitely just don't ignore those situations. After Week two, I infamously called Tom Brady a cell in fantasy football. The logic was that he was playing out of his mind statistically, and at the time the Buccaneers had nine passing touchdowns and zero rushing touchdowns. Ratios like that do not keep up. And at the time people were saying that Brady was going to break the touchdown record. You could trade him away for almost any quarterback that you wanted. Now that transaction ended up being both right and wrong. It just depended on your return. But from weeks three through seventeen, Brady was the QB four and points per game. He averaged about twenty one points per game from then on out. I don't think the process to sell Brady was the wrong process Necessarily, if you could have gotten a serious return, then your fantasy team had a shot to improve. The reason I'm bringing up Brady is because I wasn't high enough on him in general this year. I entered the year with Brady as like my QB nine that was too low. I missed. Why did I miss well? I think part of it is that I did too much comparing of last year to this year. What I mean by that is I had a good feeling, based on data, that the NFL's passing numbers were gonna regress from twenty twenty to twenty twenty one, and they did. Offenses were way worse in twenty twenty one than they were in twenty twenty. But I did two things wrong with Tom Brady. Number one, I weighed the rushing component way too much. Does rushing and mobility matter at the quarterback position in fantasy football? Yes, absolutely, it one hundred percent does, But it's not binary. It's more of a to what extent. And with Brady, given the weapons around him, I should have been more forgiving to the fact that he's a dad runner because I knew the weapons were there. I knew the offense was gonna cook. I knew the offense would be pass heavy. We all did. It was just a calculation on the rushing versus the non rushing, and in a season where there were some really good pocket passer season, Brady was able to stand out the most. Meanwhile, players like Dak and Russ and Ryan Tannehill, Lamar Jackson, they all ended up being a lot less reliable than projected when that transaction was made and at the beginning of the season. So it was a combination of just a bad call with the fact that some quarterbacks who were ranked higher than Brady just didn't perform. This then extends into someone like Mike Evans, who I didn't like a whole lot either. This year. I didn't mind Godwin as much, and I liked Antonio Brown a lot at his ADP, but Evans was someone I largely faded because of the same logic. I thought there were better alternatives and Evans was likely going to continue seeing a smaller target share in this offense filled with playmakers. He was gonna rely heavily on touchdowns when those all hit. Evans was totally fine in fantasy. But I'll tell you what, every couple of years, I have a transaction that people troll me endlessly for months. For the Brady transaction was one of them. It was not a great call by any means, but things did even out. Russian did hit to some degree. He was still really good, though I'm not taking anything away from him. He balled out, and that's why it was a miss for me. I think the common trend here is that I went a little bit too hard this year pushing for upside at quarterback. In most cases, that's okay to do, but it's important for me to remember that non mobile quarterbacks can still have that upside especially when the mobile guys don't come through. That's what was really clutched this year, is that a lot of those mobile players, they just didn't have great seasons. And there is a reverse side to all of this as well. I'll talk about that next week when I talk about the things that I got right now. The last player on this list, it's not going to be surprising to hear to anyone who listened to the show all year, it's Damian Harris. I consistently called Harris a cell on this show. In the first fifteen Transactions article of the season, I wrote the following quote. Since twenty eleven, the Patriots have had just four running backs hit the two hundred carry mark in a single season. The highest target share of those four backs was three point four percent. What's interesting is that over this timeframe, New England's ranked in the top five and running back target share. How is this all possible? Quite simply, they don't utilize their early down backs as pass catchers, or at least they haven't historically. Instead, they throw James White onto the field in passing situations, or Shane Vereen or Danny Woodhead. Now it seems like it was a totally different season, but James White did play in twenty twenty one. Who knows what things would have looked like for Damian Harris had James White stayed healthy. But I do think that you could argue that it would be close to the same because Damien Harris had decent target shairs in weeks one and two, and that was with James White. But Harris averaged a target share of three point five percent per game this year. He finished the year with a three point eight percent target chair so he sort of broke the mold for Patriots running back, but not really. It was still a low target share for an early down Patriots back. Now, continuing on with what I said in that article, I said the following, and I find this stuff fascinating because we now know how everything played out. But I said, if we make the assumption that Harris is a sub five percent target chair player, then the way for him to be a top twenty running back, which isn't even league winning, mind you, is through touchdowns. The average touchdowns scored of those nine low target share backs was twelve point three. Is a thirteen or fourteen touchdown season possible for Damian Harris? Sure is that something I'm buying into as a reasonable outcome. No, not really. Not only could New England still split the backfield close to the goal line, but Harris may also have to deal with Ramandre Stevenson throughout the season. And then I finish it by saying, for Harris to be a true difference maker in fantasy football, he'll need to either see a workload that a Patriot back hasn't seen in over a decade, or he'll need to find the end zone at one of the highest rates in the league. Well, guys, turns out he found the end zone at one of the highest rates in the league. Among the top eighty running backs in Fantasy Football the top eighty, Harris ranked first and percentage of PPR points that came from touchdowns, forty three percent of his points scored were on touchdowns. That was more than James Connor, more than Boston Scott, more than Austin Eckler. That was more than everyone. I will take l's like this one all day long. I genuinely don't think the process was wrong. The result was wrong because Harris was an RB two with spiked weeks this year. And I mean to be fair, I didn't have Harris as like an RB four or something. But if this was the way he had to be relevant, if he had to score touchdowns at the highest rate in the league, I'm totally fine with not banking on that kind of outcome year over year. Now. I know I only went through a handful of my misses this year. There are lots and lots more. You don't need to hit my mentions on Twitter to let me know I had more misses. I know I had more misses, but I wanted to give you guys a nice, diverse group to talk through, and I wanted to truly represent the misses that I had this year, the bigger ones. So hopefully you were able to learn something from this exercise, because I know that I did. On next week's show, i'll go over the things that went right to see if it was predictable or if I just got flat out lucky. I think the exercise on today's show helps us a little bit more, but that one's still helpful too. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you had subscribed to Late Round podcast, make sure you are bestarching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found and knowfore it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week.