945: Mailbag 11/15/24

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Speaker 1: This is the last with your host, JJ Zachera, jj Zachers, what's up everyone. It's jj zacher Eson in this episode nine and forty five of the Late Round Fantasy football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. If we're gonna mail back questions this week, want to remind you that even though you're drafted your fantasy teams back in August, you can still do snake drafts right now over on Underdog. Just head to Underdog Fantasy dot Com or download the Underdog app. In the draft section, click NFL. You'll see tons of drafts that you can participate in right now. If you're new to Underdog, make sure you sign up with promo code Late Round. That'll get you a nice deposit bonus as well as my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are updated for you each Tuesday once you get the link to them, but to get them you have to sign up use promo code Late Round, make a deposit, and start playing. Now let's get to these questions. The first question is from patrons from Mitch tre Damis. It says, as someone who doesn't own any Tampa Bay Backs, can you quickly explain the difference between Irving and White and what separates them? Do you see one or both of them ascending from here on out due to the favorable schedule. Yeah, so, first off, you're right, the Tampa Bay running back schedule, it's great. Rest of season. My numbers have it at number one in the league and it's number three. And the Fantasy playoffs, they get the Cowboys and the Panthers in Week sixteen and seventeen, and I think those games are gonna favor Bucky Irving more than Rashad White. We can kind of put Sean Tucker out of the picture because he hasn't been getting a whole lot of work since that breakout against the Saints. But White has seen a thirty six percent running back rush are per game over his last four He's also seen a fifteen percent target share per game rate Bucky Irving, He's at a fifty percent running back rush share. His target share is ten and a half percent. They've deployed Rashad White more as a receiver, according to Fantasy Life. During this timeframe, He's played eighty six percent of their long down and distance snaps. Bucky Irving's only at twelve percent. White's beating Irving fifty percent to thirty two percent, and raw participation during this time. Essentially, we're gonna get more work on the ground from Irving and more work through the air from Rashad White. But here's the thing. During this stretch, this four game period that I'm looking at, the Buccaneers have faced the Ravens, the Falcons, the Chiefs, and the forty nine Ers. They've been incredibly competitive in those games, but those games have also favored Rashad White. Just given everything that I'm talking about here, if they're in a neutral or negative game script, which they've been at times over the last month, that's gonna favor White. That's why I like Irving more than White rest of season. Not only could they just want to feature him more because he's a rookie, but he's been better than White and pretty much every rushing metric. Not only that, but target chairs will be shifted a little bit once Mike Evans returns. But the big thing is, just look at the schedule. It's winnable game after winnable game. It's the potential for a lot of positive gamescripts. They get the Giants, Panthers, Raiders, Chargers, Cowboys, and Panthers to end the fantasy season. They could easily be favorites in all but one of those games, which to me favors Bucky Irving more than Rashad White. This Beast questions also from Patreon. It's from Andre. It says, hey, JJ, have you started looking at defenses for the playoffs? What are your recommendations? Thanks? So, I'm sure I'll bring this up again in the future, but looking at my numbers, here's what I've got now. I don't think you absolutely need to have a set and forget defense through all of the weeks in the Fantasy playoffs, but there are a few who have good playoff matchups in total. One of them is Cincinnati. The Bengals get the Titans, Browns, and Broncos in weeks fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. That could be worse. Another is Green Bay they get the Seahawks, Saints, and Viking. I think the defense with the best Fantasy Playoffs schedule, though, has to be Indianapolis. They get the Broncos, than the Titans, and then the Giants. But you're unlikely gonna need to just play one defense throughout the Fantasy Playoffs. Those are the only three teams with three plus matchups in the three playoff weeks by adjusted points allowed, and some of those matchups aren't obvious great matchups on paper. What I would do is maybe focus in the first two weeks of the playoffs, first weeks fifteen and sixteen. You have to win those to play in week seventeen in the first place, and in week fifteen and sixteen you could go with Cincinnati, but Atlanta's another team who's kind of intriguing. They get the Raiders and then the Giants, and then you can kind of play by matchup in week seventeen, which you have to remember, you'll have less competition on the waiver wire for those defenses that week because more teams have been eliminated in most leagues, teams aren't going to be looking at the waiver wire if they're out of it. So yeah, those are some rough ideas here in weeks. Be sure to listen to fifteen Transactions because I'm going to talk about this more on those episodes moving forward too. And there are other defenses that you could look at too. I just wanted to give you guys some defenses who could be good across multiple weeks instead of Frankensteining one together right now, because I'm not sure how helpful that is when we're over a month away. That's questions from Blue Sky, which again I am over on Blue Sky same handle as Twitter at Late Round QB. This from King Mamba. It says, hey, JJ love the show. Thanks. What are your thoughts on JK Dobbins rest of season with Gus Edwards coming back? I worry his value takes a hit because Gus will take most of the goal line carries and already took half of the carries in general during his first game back. Thanks. So I don't know if Edwards is just gonna take on all of the goal line carries. In fact, look at the goal line last week. They had three running back rushes. JK Dobbins had two of them, Hassan Haskins had the other one. It's not like JK Dobbins just never going to see a goal line rush. Ever. Again, I think we often look at that kind of thing in two binary of a way. Yeah, I think Edwards being there does hurt Dobbin's upside rest of season. You could argue that it's gonna keep Dobbins healthier. Such your optimistic way of viewing this that if Dobbins were to maintain his backfield share without Edwards, he would inevitably have gotten hurt. But Dobbin saw a fifty six percent running back rush share in week ten. That was his lowest since Week two, which was with Gus Edwards. Now, the good news is that Dobbins still saw a really good route participation and maybe that gets a little bit better with Edwards active because Camanie Viidell could be considered more of a thread as a receiver and Edwards is more of a thread on the ground, which means if the Chargers are going to decrease Dobbin's ground game workload, they may increase his receiving workload or at least give him a little bit more sustainability there, because there have been times this season where his route share has dip below that fifty percent mark, like well below it. So I would say that Edward's being bad. It's a downgrade for Dobbins in some but I think there is still some positives to take away here. He may not break down as easily now and there may be more work for him as a receiver. It just really depends on how you want to frame this Now, I only have one more question for you, but it's a deep dive and I think it's kind of interesting. I hope you guys find it interesting too. But this one's also from Blue Sky. It's from Ben. It says, how do you see this year's tight end debacle affecting how we view top tight ends next season? And for the record, top is in quotes as if we don't have top tight ends, so you guys might remember. But earlier in the season, when tight ends were performing like absolute garbage, I talked about the position on a mailbag episode. Essentially, what I found was that, yes, the position was not doing very well, but it wasn't for the reasons that some thought. Really Their percent of pass catcher PPR points was pretty similar to what we've to take seen over the last ten years. Their target share wasn't that bad. Teams were using tight ends the way they typically do at a high level. The biggest difference was touchdowns. In weeks one and two, tight ends accounted for just twelve percent of all receiving touchdowns dating back to twenty fourteen, so the last decade, the lowest mark that we had seen through the first two weeks was eighteen percent. Some years we were up to thirty five percent. But what happened in weeks three to eighteen or weeks three to seventeen in some seasons was regression. The seasons were tight end touchdown shares started slow, they saw an increase in touchdown share from week three through the end of the year. During the seasons and weeks one and two when touchdown shares at tight end were really high, guess what happened. They regressed. Their touchdown shares dropped from week three through the end of the year. The opposite happened. All this data is published in a thread on Twitter. It's also talked about in the third Mailbag episode of the regular season when tight ends aren't scoring as many touchdowns because remember passing was also down to start the year. But when touchdowns are down, then obviously fantasy points are going to be down. And since tight ends don't have as many receptions as many yards as wide receivers do, then that means that touchdowns make up a larger proportion of tight end scores in fantasy football. So if they're scoring less, which they were after Week two. They had eight total receiving touchdowns through the first two weeks of the season. The lowest number since twenty fourteen prior to this year was sixteen touchdowns through the first two weeks. If they're scoring fewer touchdowns, that would be impacting their bottom line a lot, like even more so than what we'd see from wide receivers, because touchdowns make up a larger proportion of a tight end score, and I think that fantasy managers have an anchoring bias with that. Because things haven't been nearly as bad since regressions hit, it hasn't been quite as good as we'd want. I'm not trying to paint this as like a good year for tight ends, but get this. From weeks one to two, tight ends accounted for eleven point eight percent of all wide receiver, running back and tight end receiving touchdowns. That number from week three through week ten is about twenty three percent. Now. That still paces this season to have a below average touchdown share for tight ends, but it's not nearly as bad as it was during our small sample size to start the season. Not only that, but just look at general performance. Look at points per game at tight end. Right now, we're pacing towards eleven tight ends finishing the year with ten or more PPR points per game. That's right in line with what we typically see Last year. We were also at eleven. The year before that was one of the lower marks that we've seen since twenty eleven, when we were at eight. Okay, you're thinking yourself ten points per game, that's not that high of a mark. We're looking for more elite numbers. So let's look at twelve and fourteen points per game. Two. Right now, four tight ends have twelve or more PPR points per game. The average since twenty eleven among tight ends with eight or more games played has typically been around six, so we're below the mark there. And then two tight ends have fourteen or more PPR points per game. We've typically seen a little over three tight ends get to that point each season. So if the season were to end today, we'd have a down year for tight ends. I think we'll probably look back and see that. But keep this in mind. Most seasons over the last decade and a half have seen tight ends start slow, which means we have to give the season more time because at the moment, those first two weeks that are accounting for a larger share of tight end production right now, because we've only played ten weeks. To put that another way, tight ends are trending to do better than what these numbers are suggesting. Now. The one thing that I haven't talked about here is average draft position. And that's key because what I think people are frustrated with isn't only the fact that tight ends have underperformed, or their assumption that tight ends have underperformed. I think people were frustrated with the cost to acquire some of these underperforming tight ends. Here's the thing, though, back five or six years ago, we had a good idea as to who the top tight ends were gonna be. You know, Gronk had his time, and then it was Kelsey and we had Andrews in there a little bit too. We always had these one or two elite tight ends that we draft, and we were essentially guaranteed that those players would finish at the top of the position. We objectively did not have that this year. I wrote about that in my guide, I talked about that on this show. But what we did have was a poll of tight ends who had that ability, who had that upside. You see, that's the thing that's being missed with this discussion. We weren't paying the same premiums for the elite tight ends this year for a reason, because we didn't know which tight ends were actually going to be difference makers. That's why we were getting Kelsey later, and McBride later, and Kincaid later. We got them later than where we'd usually see a quote elite tight end. They weren't getting drafted in round one and two. But what was clear to me, and this is something that I wrote about at length in the guide, this is not just hindsight stuff. What seemed clear to me was that some of those tight ends would emerge. In twenty twenty three. We hit this perfect storm of early round tight ends kind of underperforming and late round ones coming from nowhere and dominating. Sam Laporta, Jake Ferguson, Trey McBride. This year we didn't feel as confident, and if you look at the tight end rankings right now, we were largely right. There's always going to be a tight end or two who comes from nowhere and gives us great production, and that's looking like Kate Otten the year, but it's really just Kate Otton, maybe Tucker Craft. There aren't many out of nowhere tight ends that are giving us elite production, especially compared to what we saw last year. The top tight ends right now are George Kittle, Brock Bauers, Travis Kelcey, and Trey McBride. Those are the four tight ends who when we look back on the season, they're probably gonna be the ones who made the biggest weekly difference. Kate otten Aside, Kelsey and McBride were early round selections. George Kittle, according to Fantasy pros ADP, he was a top six tight end. Brock Bauers was typically right in the top ten. I think what we've seen play out this year was kind of predictable, you guys. It seems crazy to say, but I think a lot of it is because our views are a little bit distorted by what happened in the first couple of weeks of the season. It's just that we've been really burned by Dalton k and Kaid. We were burned to a degree by Kyle Pitts. We've been really burned by Sam Lapor. But what's interesting about some of those names, they were kind of predictable. Now. I didn't straight up fade those three guys, but I talked about the drawbacks to each one of them. Entering the season, Laporta was a regression candidate. Kincaid and Pitts were earlier a round tight end picks who had poor previous season yards per out run rates. Typically that wasn't a good sign. Historically, it had not been a good sign when that was the case. Now here's what I'm getting at. We knew that these tight ends had warts, all of them. There was downside for all of these tight ends. For some of them, the downside has hit. For others, it hasn't totally hit. That was going to happen because this year was objectively different. We didn't have elite tight ends the way that we had historically had elite tight ends. But some of these tight ends that were drafted relatively early, the quote elite tight ends of two twenty four, they've been totally fine. Some of them have been great. George Kittle is having an unbelievable season right now. Now. Maybe no one's really following this, maybe some people just disagree, but I don't see tight end as some massive debacle this year. It started that way for sure, but it slowly become exactly what we thought it might become a place where some guys hit and a place where some guys busted. That's no different than any other position most seasons, and I would anticipate that the numbers, like I said earlier, I'd anticipate that they continue to favor tight ends through the end of the season, at least versus what we saw to start the year. Now, my guess is that we'll see the Kittles and McBride's and the Bowers of the world have strong ADPs next season, but probably not reach the levels of Gronk and Kelsey and their prime. Maybe we do with Bowers and maybe McBride, but we'll see. That's because we don't have a large enough sample size to go off of for some of these players. But make no mistake, that doesn't mean that elite tight ends are dead. It just means that we have to keep playing this game each year where we're trying to nail who those tight ends are gonna be. And to me, that means opportunity. It's opportunity to beat the market at the position. That's it for today's show, though thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by shorting for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, you know for it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB and Blue Sky as well, same exact handle. Thanks for listening everyone, I hope you give Late Round perspectives a listen this week. There's a lot of data talk if you're into that kind of thing, but otherwise enjoy Week eleven. I'll talk to you next week.