860: Analyzing 2023's Biggest Hits

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Speaker 1: This is the last with your host JJ zacherathis Hey, J zacher Reasons.

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Speaker 2: What's up everyone?

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Speaker 1: It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode eight hundred and sixty of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Thanks for tuning in.

00:00:22
Speaker 1: When you get something right in fantasy football, it's really easy to just focus on that result, more so than when you get something wrong.

00:00:29
Speaker 2: When you get something wrong.

00:00:30
Speaker 1: It's human nature to come up with excuses as to why you were wrong about that thing.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: When you get something right, you just basking the glory.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: You're not gonna want to talk down that correct prediction that downplays what you did.

00:00:42
Speaker 2: And you want to be right to me.

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Speaker 1: If you ignore what led to that correct prediction, then you might have a hard time repeating that type of prediction. It's important to see if what you did made sense, if what led to the correct result, if it was logical, or if you just got lucky, Because sometimes you just get lucky. That's how it goes with fantasy football. But I don't know about you. I personally don't want to just rely on getting lucky at fantasy football year in and year round. A week ago, I looked at the things that went wrong for me in twenty twenty three. Today, I'll be looking at the things that went right, and I'll be analyzing those things to see what led me to the correct prediction. That way, we can all take that process and hopefully apply it to our drafts in twenty twenty four. Now, before getting too those things, I want to send another reminder about the Late Round Prospect Guide. It's ready for pre order. The Prospect Guide is information about my prospect models. It profiles every running back and wide receiver who are going to be at the combine. There's stuff on my year two model and more. If you purchase the pre ordered copy, you'll get the guide to your email inbox in March. Then when the draft is over, you'll get an updated guide with the updated prospect scores. You can wait to purchase the guide, but it does go up in price from eleven ninety nine, which is what it is right now, to fourteen ninety nine when it launches in March. Check it all out over on lateround dot com. In the Late Round Draft Guy this past year, I did something that I don't typically do. I recommended two running backs from the same backfield, Jamior Gibbs was a player to target for me and that guide, but so was David Montgomery, and it was based on a lot of things. Gibbs was a dead zone running back. I know he slowly climbed out of that zone as draft season moved forward, but he was a dead zone rookie running back. Typically a rookie running back getting drafted in the running back dead zone is something that you want to target, not avoid. They perform like end of the second round picks usually. Gibbs was also a pass catcher who scored well on my prospect model, so there were a lot of reasons to like him. But David Montgomery was listed as a target as well, because historically, when we've had running backs getting drafted in the middle rounds who had a running back teammate and a dead zone, those running backs have hit at a really, really good rate. Montgomery was also entering a situation where he was likely to take on that Jamal Williams role. That role where Jamal Williams scored a thousand touchdowns the previous season. That role probably wasn't going to see as many goal line rushes as it had in twenty twenty two. But Montgomery was a better pass catcher than Williams, so I felt good about his ability to step in and see more work as a receiver. That was whether or not Jamior Gibbs was healthy, and that health aspect is important. We saw this play out in twenty twenty three, but both Gibbs and Montgomery had contingent upside if the other player went down, and both players they went down at different times of the year. That led to some strong performances when the other running back took over as the lead back. Long story short, According to my numbers, both Jamiir Gibbs and David Montgomery, they exceeded average draft position expectation last year. For those of you who didn't listen to last week's show, and if you're not aware, ADP expectation is pretty simple. Every player at every ADP has some sort of expectation. We're expecting them to score a certain number of Fantasy points per game based on history. So let's say a running back is getting drafted forty eighth overall, that's their ADP. We'd expect that running back to score a little over thirteen PPR points per game based on history. So once the season's over, we can see if players exceeded or didn't exceed that expectation. That essentially tells us if they were a good pick in terms of value. It's not a flawless way of looking at this stuff, but it's a better way than just saying, oh, yeah, he was drafted at RB twenty four and he finished at RB twenty three. That doesn't necessarily give us enough context. In twenty twenty three, jumior Gives exceeded expectation by two and a half PPR points per game, and he caught on when it mattered most, which was down the stretch, and during the second half of the year, David Montgomery exceeded expectation by four point seven PPR points per game. Now, one of the things that I'm proud about with this take wasn't just the fact that I had them both on a lot of rosters after calling them out as players to target people forget that there was a game early in the twenty twenty three season against the Packers where David Montgomery went nuts. Jamir Gibbs wasn't seeing as much usage. In that game, Montgomery had thirty two carries, Jamir Gibbs had eight, and the backlash about Gibbs was pretty intense. It wasn't necessarily about him as a player, but how Detroit was managing him. The response to Jamir Gibbs was so interesting to me that I actually sent out an email blasted newsletter subscribers, which is free by the way over on lateround dot com. Just sign up, but I sent an email out with the subject line Gibbs pocalypses. Here in the email, I explained how David Montgomery in that game was the necessary running back to use. He was playing great, it made sense from a game plan perspective to ride David Montgomery now. In that email, I also mentioned that gibbs receiving work wasn't all that bad up until that point, which was four weeks into the season. I concluded the email by saying the following gamescript isn't always easy to predict, but in a less extreme game environment, which will be the majority of games moving forward for Detroit, We're gonna see different workloads for these two backs. I think the lesson with Gibbs and Montgomery this year is really the lesson I've been trying to push for a while on this podcast. You want rookies out of the dead zone. You want team RB twos who have running back teammates in that dead zone, and you want players who have contingent upside. David Montgomery and Jamier Gibbs did their part at different times of the fantasy season, but they were both pretty valuable for your teams in some and I'm happy that I was on them this year. Now on that same team as Sam Laporta, and what a year that he had. No one should have projected arguably the best rookie tight end season of all time.

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Speaker 2: But something I really really.

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Speaker 1: Started to shift my attitude on throughout the summer was the idea of fading rookie tight ends for the sake of fading them, because that's.

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Speaker 2: What the fantasy community was largely doing.

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Speaker 1: Historically, rookie tight ends had not been very good in fantasy football.

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Speaker 2: Very true.

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Speaker 1: I wrote about that in the Draft Guide even I wrote, rookie tight ends are usually pretty awful bets and redraft leagues. Since twenty eleven, only one first year tight end has finished as a moderate breakout. Evan Ingram did it in twenty seventeen after being drafted as a tight end. Seventeen, only Ingram and Jordan Reed were able to finish his top ten options in points per game as rookies. Kyle Pitts was tight end eleven. We were looking at way fewer than one rookie tight end being relevant fantasy across the entire season per year over the.

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Speaker 2: Last decade plus.

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Speaker 1: The thing is, and again this is part of the draft guy, because I had Laporta as a player to target. But the thing is, rookie tight ends just hadn't seen a lot of opportunity during this time period. It was no coincidence that the top two rookie tight end seasons in routes runs since twenty eleven came from Evan Ingram and Kyle Pitts, two of the best rookie tight end seasons that we'd seen up until that point. Rookie tight ends just hadn't been used as full time pass catchers. Now, I clearly I think that looking at trends and looking at history can be very helpful. It helped tremendously with the Lions backfield this past year. But I'm always gonna tell you to first look at the players, analyze the individual player as a talent, and analyze his situation. With Sam Laporta, no he didn't fit this obvious mold of a breakout tight end because he was a rookie, but my tight end model that I created last offseason absolutely adored him. He was just as good of a prospect as the other guys who hit as rookies, and just as importantly, he was sitting on a team that lacked a true pass catcher a tight end. The Lions had nothing substantial. Why not take a shot on that? Again, process wise, I thought Laporta could be a decent value play a tight end. Clearly, results wise, though I didn't necessarily expect this. I didn't expect one of the greatest tight end seasons of all time. So there was some luck involved for sure, But I also think that luck was created by giving proper context instead of just fading a player because he was a first year player.

00:09:04
Speaker 2: I decided to go further and that paid off.

00:09:09
Speaker 1: One of the things that I enjoy least about being a fantasy analyst is how one take, one simple take, can make or break how someone views you as an analyst. We know that I'm going to be wrong, that analysts are going to be wrong. It's silly to let one take mean that much, but that's how it was with me and Rashad White this year. For a lot of people, White was probably the most glaring running back value that you could find when you looked at my pre draft rankings this season, I had him over ten running back spots higher than adp and clearly I'm very proud of that given the result. But it also wasn't all butterflies and rainbows with White this year. I'm only speaking about him as a player to target today. Throughout the year, there were times where I wasn't high enough on him, but as a player to draft, yeah, I mean it ended up being arguably the best call of my fantasy football season. A lot of people faded Rashad White because his rushing numbers, in particular were pretty bad during his rookie season back in twenty twenty two, that he was playing in an offense that wasn't projected to be that good. And I talked a bit about why and how I missed on Mike Evans last week, but I was in on White, and some of that had to do with my approach to running back metrics, some of it had to do with how I viewed White the player, and some of it had to do with market trends. Let's start with my approach to running back metrics in general. I don't mind looking and seeing who was good and bad within a metric like rushing yards over expected per rush. I do it all the time on the show. I use it as evidence all the time. But we have to recognize that there's a whole lot influencing most rushing statistics more than you see at other positions like offensive line play. That matters so much for running backs. White's numbers in twenty twenty two they were pretty in line with Leonard Fournette's numbers, And you can say, okay, well, Leonard Fournette, who was his teammate.

00:10:57
Speaker 2: By the way, you.

00:10:58
Speaker 1: Could say that Leonard Fournette isn't a good running back, and I'd come back and probably agree. But I'd also remind you that Rashad White in twenty twenty two, when playing alongside Leonard Fournette, he was a rookie. We can't expect the world from him. White was a good prospect, at least in my eyes. He compared really favorably in my model to David Johnson, and we had evidence of Rashad White being a good pass catcher both in college and in the pros. In college, he had one of the best reception shares that you were going to find in my database. But as a rookie in twenty twenty two, while sharing a backfield, White had a respectable seven point seven percent target schhair per game rate, and in a single game that Fournette missed in twenty twenty two, White saw a twenty one point four percent target chair. I felt good about him seeing a lot of work out of that backfield as a receiver, and I had found that players in his ADP range who saw a double digit percentage target.

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Speaker 2: Share they hit at a really really high rate.

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Speaker 1: Not only that, but with middle round running backs, you want to buy into ambiguity. And I'm not talking about ambiguous backfields here. I mean that you want running backs who really haven't proven that much in the NFL. And I know that that sounds counterintuitive, But let's say that you're looking at a seventh round running back, and let's say that running back is a little bit older and we have some more information on him, you'd have to wonder why that player was a middle round pick and not an earlier round pick. He's probably a middle round pick because he's not very good. There's not that much going for him. Meanwhile, the reason why Rashad White was a middle round pick this past year is because people didn't know there was a lot of ambiguity. Ambiguity is a good thing in fantasy football, not a bad thing. Basically, Rashad White checked every box that I'm looking for in a middle round running back. Truly, it's the stuff that I write about and I talk about each year. He's young, he was unproven, he's a pass catcher. You want those kind of running backs in your fantasy teams, and for White, he ended up being one of the best values of twenty twenty three. The process nailed that one. I've actually got a lot of running backs on today's show, so we'll move on to the next one.

00:13:11
Speaker 2: We'll talk about Devon ah Chan.

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Speaker 1: I mentioned ambiguous backfields just a second ago, and that's a market related trend that I talk about every single year. You don't want to shy away from backfields where we don't know who the starter is. You want to embrace those backfields. You want the ambiguity. And something that I found last year was that embracing ambiguous backfields where the RB one by ADP is being drafted very very late, like we saw with Miami and what we saw in Chicago in twenty twenty three, that's usually the right call. My bet in that Miami backfield was on Devon A Chan. Raheem Mostert clearly the big winner from that group this past year. A lot of that came together closer to September with the injuries of that backfield outside of Mostart, including one to a Chan.

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Speaker 2: But Chan was still a very good value.

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Speaker 1: In fact, Chan ended up outscoring his ADP expectation this year by over nine PPR points per game. He was basically the same as Mostart. That's not to say that he was a better fantasy asset. We know that a Chan had that monster game early on. That's skewing these results a little bit, and not a lot of people started him during that game. Moster was more available than a Chan was. If you were to choose one of those guys this past year to have in your roster, all of us would probably choose Mostar. But for all intents and purposes, Achan had a great, great season two, and I think this is really just about attacking those backfields. Achan had the prospect profile aside from size, but he was.

00:14:37
Speaker 2: In the right spot.

00:14:38
Speaker 1: The lesson learned here is to stop fading ambiguous backfields because there's not a clear cut starter at the beginning of the year. Sometimes one will not emerge, but if one emerges, you can find massive, massive value. Now I've mostly talked about draft day takes thus far, but there was one in season take that I think was my best all year, and that was after Week five on the fifteen Transactions podcast and then the fifteen Transactions newsletter. One of my recommendations was to buy cd Lamb now right now today that seems like an obvious move, but it wasn't an obvious move back then. At the time, Lamb was a low end wide receiver too. In points per game. He was coming off a game where he had eight point nine PPR points. Through Week five, Lamb was averaging fourteen point two PPR points per game. After that point in time, he averaged nearly twenty eight. A lot of that recommendation had to do with how weird Dallas's game scripts had been through that point in the season. On top of that, Dallas had a cake schedule moving forward where I think there was some luck involved is that Dallas changed their offense a bit.

00:15:47
Speaker 2: From that point forward.

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Speaker 1: Lamb not only saw his target share per game rate rise by eleven percentage points, which is crazy, but Dallas also shifted to being a lot more pass heavy. I think the process of calling Lamb aby definitely right. He's an elite player. He was still seeing a decent enough target share. Dallas had some pretty funky game scripts, and their schedule was opening up a bit. We could take all of that away and use it again moving forward, but that turnaround was pretty crazy. We can't expect that type of turnaround, even if it's a player as good as Cede Lamb. What Ceedee Lamb did this past year pretty unprecedented. A lot had to go right, but I'm glad that a lot did go right. I thought Miles Sanders was pretty overrated in drafts this year, and that ended up being a great call.

00:16:34
Speaker 2: Let's talk about it.

00:16:36
Speaker 1: I genuinely think that Miles Sanders was boosting up in ADP this offseason because of a video of him talking to Frank Reich and Scott Fitterer. They were discussing Miles Sanders catching fifty balls just like he did as a rookie, and look, I'm all for taking in as much information as possible, but when there's a coaching narrative like this, we need to at least try to match it with what we see and what the data says. But that showed was that Miles Sanders just wasn't a fifty catch running back. Since that rookie season, his yards per rout run rate had been brutal, like one of the worst pass catching running backs in the league. But then, in addition to that, Duce Staley was Carolina's running backs coach at the time, and Staley himself was quoted saying that he believes in using multiple running backs because the position is like being in a car wreck. Miles Sanders just looked like the typical dead zone running back. We make excuses for these guys every single year. But number one, he wasn't a proven pass catcher, and number two, he was playing at an offense that had a rookie quarterback. Data suggests that's bad for a running back. Obviously, it's not always bad for a running back when you get a quarterback like CJ. Stroud, but chances are you're not gonna get a quarterback like CJ.

00:17:52
Speaker 2: Stroud.

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Speaker 1: I think in these situations too, people often say, well, who else is going to carry the football for that team? We have to remember to make arguments for player talent, though not for his teammates lack of talent. That's what gets you to draft Mike Davis in the fourth round. It's quite literally why the running back dead zone exists and why people overrate veteran running backs in that area of drafts every single season. So this section of today's show, yeah, it's about Miles Sanders, but it's also about approaching the running back dead zone. Embrace the younger players in that zone who haven't proven anything and who you think are going to be pass catchers. Don't go after the players who have shown us that they're average to above average players, that they're not elite talents.

00:18:39
Speaker 2: Sanders ended up.

00:18:40
Speaker 1: Playing over five PERO points per game below expectation this year. He was one of the worst running back selections of the season. The only worst dead zone pick was Damian Pierce. And that leads me to the next good call of the year. I said it on the show when it was going down, but I felt like I was on an island during the season when Singletary started seeing more work in that Texans backfield. It was bizarre, but I felt good about being early on Singletary this year. And I know that I was early because he's one of the players that people bring up most when they talk about me in the season that I had. And look, I'm not sitting here saying that Singletary was some league winning player. I think this is more so a good example of a smaller transaction that you could have made to help your fantasy squad. This really comes down to monitoring usage. Typically, when a running back takes over a backfield, it's not gonna be some dramatic event without an injury. It's not like one dude is seeing all the touches one week and then the next week they decide to bench him that he disappears. In the case for Houston, it was a few weeks until they realized, oh yeah, Devin Singletary works better in this offense. So the Singletary transaction and my talking about Singletary, it really just came down to monitoring volume in backfield. Chairs On top of that, it was easier to go in on Singletary because Damian Pierce was just struggling in this offense.

00:20:01
Speaker 2: That combination made Singletary a.

00:20:04
Speaker 1: Worthwhile ad, and he came through for teams during the second half of the season, considering he was on the waiver wire in most leagues. Now, last, but not least, let's talk about Pooka Akua. I take pride in the work that I do. I want to be right. I want to help you guys win. It's important to me on a ton of different levels, and I'm proud to have had pokin Akua featured as a player to target as a late round dart throw in my draft guide this past year. I'm also proud that when Nakua broke out in Week one, I told people to be aggressive in adding him off the waiver wire. Basically, I'm glad with how I handled pokin Akupa this year. With that being said, I got lucky, so did anyone who touted pukin Akua this season.

00:20:47
Speaker 2: Not a single person predicted this.

00:20:50
Speaker 1: Not a single person predicted that Pooka Nakua would have arguably the best rookie season of all time at wide receiver. But this is a great example of Hout having an analytical process or thinking in terms of probability. You can still hit on outliers. The goal with fantasy football analysis is to inch your way closer to the right answer. Outliers are always going to exist. You don't need to nail the exact outcomes. You just need to prefer the right players the right situations. You need to prefer those more than your league mats, and you'll be able to hit on those outliers as a result. So no, I didn't nail Pookin Akua this year because I didn't expect him to break rookie records. I did nail Pookinakua within the context of the game that we're playing, and that game is being better than our league mates. The game is not getting everything perfectly correct. I saw Nakua as an undervalued player because he wasn't that bad of a prospect and there was enough camp pipe surrounding him.

00:21:48
Speaker 2: I think it's.

00:21:48
Speaker 1: Totally fine to buy into that camp pipe when we're talking about late round dart throws. It literally doesn't matter if you're wrong when you're talking earlier round pick like I just talked about with Miles Sanders. Yeah, you may not want to buy into that sort of hype because there's an opportunity cost involved with a guy like Nakua. He was a rookie, which I love targeting late. He had some interesting analytical marks as a prospect and beat reporters out of la We're loving on him all summer long. We're not going to get another pooka Nakua for a very very long time.

00:22:21
Speaker 2: More than likely. It just doesn't happen often.

00:22:24
Speaker 1: But you can still use that type of process to get other rookies who then end up having very very good seasons. Now, just like the episode last week, there are things that I didn't talk about on today's show that I could have talked about, whether it was the Pittsburgh backfield or Jaden Reed or Brock Purty. I just wanted to cover interesting items that give us a lot of different things to think about. Admittedly, I think going through the things that you get wrong, I think that's a more beneficial exercise. But this one can be helpful too, and I hope that it helps you out. That's it for today's show, though, Thanks Olivy for listening. If you yet subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, makes you here, you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found and don't forgit to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. I'll be back in your ears on Friday with a new episode of Late Round Perspectives. Remember during the off season, I'll be switching back and forth between Perspectives episodes and mailbag ones. I've got a great guest this week, and I'm super excited for you to hear that episode.

00:23:20
Speaker 2: I'll talk to you then