1007: Mailbag - Auction Draft Strategy, A Surprising Player to Avoid, and More

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachera Jake zacher reefon what's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode one double oh seven of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by DraftKings.

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00:02:42
Speaker 2: Thanks?

00:02:43
Speaker 1: Okay, this time of year, I get so many questions about auction drafts. I had like four of them this week on Patreon alone, So let's talk about them. I've said this before, specifically in episode eight hundred and ninety one, which is an auction draft strategy episode, But people overthink auction drafts It's not like you're playing a totally different game. You're just playing with a different currency. Instead of spending draft picks, you're spending dollars. But regardless of your format, Jamior Gibbs is gonna be good in both of those formats. In a regular snake draft and in an auction draft, Nicocollins is gonna be good. The game of fantasy football is played the same way.

00:03:24
Speaker 2: Now.

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Speaker 1: I have some thoughts on auction drafts in the Late Round Draft guide, which you can find on lateround dot com.

00:03:29
Speaker 2: But there are two.

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Speaker 1: Major things to think about with your individual auction draft. Number one, understand your league's total economy, and then number two, be reactive to how teams are spending as the draft goes on. With number one and understanding your league's economy, I'm essentially saying that one league to the next is gonna spend differently on players based on two major factors, league size and league lineup requirements. When the league size is larger, players get more expensive because more money is in the draft. When league lineup requirements are also greater, it means that you're likely and I stress likely, going to allocate a smaller dollar value to each lineup slot. Now, in general, and this is the Charlie's question, you should be thinking about your bench as just one dollar players because in fantasy football, we always want to maximize our starting lineup. That's what's actually scoring fantasy points for us. So if you have a short starting lineup, let's say a quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, and a tight end, you're gonna want to be spending more money on those players in a twelve team league versus another twelve team league where you have like three wide receivers and like four flex spots or something. Because when you have more starting lineup slots, that equates to a need to have a more robust lineup. In general, it's more difficult to go stars and scrubs in that environment because your scrubs are gonna be hitting your starting lineup. Now, you can still do that. You can go stars and scrubs, and league size is more important than the lineup requirements themselves. But hopefully all of that makes sense. I'm just trying to get this information out there in a concise way.

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Speaker 2: Now.

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Speaker 1: The being reactive thing is unbelievably important. That's point number two. There's not one singular answer for every auction draft. Now, I have a formula that gives me base dollar values for my rankings, and you can find those on Patreon or in the draft guide. But one auction draft is going to be totally different from another. What you can do with those auction values, though, is use them as a baseline for when your draft is taking place. Let me give you an example. Last weekend, I was in the King's Classic in Canton, Ohio at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It's a fourteen team league and the rosters are pretty deep. You have a quarterback, two running backs, three wide receivers in three flex spots, and a tight end spot. It's a full PPR league. Now, I didn't want to go full blown stars and scrubs because that would mean that I'd have little depth in a league where depth isn't easy to come by, in more of a home league environment.

00:05:58
Speaker 2: That's totally different.

00:05:59
Speaker 1: With the King's Classic, we do a snake draft followed by an auction draft. It's literally like seven hours of drafting.

00:06:05
Speaker 2: It's glorious.

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Speaker 1: But the draft starts and I have my dollar values for players for a twelve team league, like I said, and I noticed that all the expensive guys are going for like ten to fifteen dollars less than my stated dollar values, while more of the middle round players they're going around the stated dollar values, which tells me, Man, I better start spending up on some of the players who are first three round picks in the draft because they seem to be going for a little bit cheaper. Which does make some sense because it's a deep roster, right, people don't want to spend up and use so much of their budget on just one or two players.

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Speaker 2: But immediately when I saw that I bought devon a chan.

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Speaker 1: Now your league is going to essentially create prices as you draft, and when you have the price for players, you can then estimate what a player in his tier will go for or should go for, or that you'd be willing to spend. So all these questions that are like, hey, how would you approach an OPT in this specific format, the answer, honestly is pretty similar across the board. Follow the process had just laid out, and you should at least have more success than you were having before. And listen to episode eight hundred and ninety one, and like I said, there's a little bit more in the draft guide to make you feel even more comfortable as you draft. This best question is from Martin. It says, Hey, JJ, great stuff with your chat with Evan Silva. Your discussion got me wondering who some of your small hit, big miss guys are for this season. So look, I think there's a ton of them, and I have an entire section in the draft guide on players to avoid that philosophy is littered throughout that section. You have to remember that the big miss that we talk about isn't just about that player being completely terrible. I don't think Chewba Hubbard or even Jerry Judy to some degree. I don't think they're going to be terrible fantasy assets. The big miss is the opportunity cost side of things, except when you draft Chuba Hubbard, you're not drafting some potential league winning players. When to me, for his decent as Hubbard can be this year, I just don't think he has that type of ceiling The players going around him they do, and in the end, fantasy football is really about hitting.

00:08:11
Speaker 2: On those true league winning players.

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Speaker 1: Now, I think one player who fits this mold and doesn't get talked about nearly enough, but in my opinion, he should it's Zay Flowers.

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Speaker 2: Now. I love Flowers as a player.

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Speaker 1: I think he's actually really good, but situationally things aren't really ideal for him. The Ravens have been bottom three and pass rate in each of the last three seasons, and he's not used in the red zone and close to the end zone. Despite the fact that they threw forty one touchdowns last year, Zay Flowers only had four of them his expected touchdowns according to PFF over the last two years, four point two and four point nine. He's finished as a wide receiver three and PPR points per game over his first two seasons.

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Speaker 2: In the league.

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Speaker 1: He's yet to score thirteen PPR points per game in a season, and where he goes is among legitimate league winning wide receivers atually running backs too. According to consensus expert rankings over at Fantasy Pros, Flowers is wide receiver twenty four. He's going ahead of Tedoro McMillan, Jalen Waddell, Jamison Williams, the Chiefs wide receivers, George Pickens and Calvin Ridley. He's way ahead of Travis Hunter. He's getting ranked way higher than Trayvon Henderson and RJ.

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Speaker 2: Harvey.

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Speaker 1: I would take all of those players that I just mentioned over Zay Flowers.

00:09:27
Speaker 2: But it's a player.

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Speaker 1: Whose likely outcome is giving you a single or a double when he's being drafted, in my opinion, amongst players who can be home run type players, because what's really changed. He's already been a really efficient player with a really high target share. Like don't get me wrong, he's a peripherals king. I love watching Zay Flowers. I think he's a good player. I just think in that range you're drafting him amongst a lot of other good players in more advantageous situations, he's likely not going to burn you. But does he have a top twenty ceiling in him? I'm not so sure. So I think he's a pretty good example of small hit big miss. The small hit is that he's more of a single or a double if things go relatively his way. The big miss is the opportunity cost of missing out on all those good players that I just mentioned.

00:10:17
Speaker 2: This has questions from Twitter's from.

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Speaker 1: At Coffee snob It says is the Saquon Barkley hate valid. He's twenty eight, He's behind a stud line on a team that runs, runs, runs. I believe the mileage argument doesn't apply in this situation. So I have a hard time seeing hate out there because his ADP is still pretty high. But I do think the narrative surrounding Saquon Barkley is generally wrong, and I wrote about it in a newsletter not that long ago. You can subscribe to the newsletter for absolutely free over on lateround dot com. But I can take some of that newsletter and talk about it here now. In that newsletter, I looked at whether we should worry about Saquon's twenty twenty four workload. So many people talk about these curses or running backs who hit certain thresholds one year and then they fall off the next, and there's some truth in that. I looked at running backs who ran the ball two hundred and fifty to two hundred and seventy five times and placed them in a bucket. This is since twenty eleven. Then I placed the running backs who ran the ball two hundred and seventy five to two hundred and ninety nine times in a bucket, and in the final bucket was running backs who ran the ball three hundred times or more so three total bins.

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Speaker 2: And what I found was that as the.

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Speaker 1: Previous season rush attempts increased, so did the average number of games missed the following year. And as the volume increased the previous season, as we went from one bucket to the next to the next, there was a larger drop in fantasy production the next year too. So essentially, three hundred and more carries has historically been worse for games played than two hundred and fifty carries, but that also has some variants in it. Our sample size is are twenty four running backs who had three hundred more carries. It's not super super significant. A few players could hypothetically skew that data. But what's arguably more important here is that I just don't think people sit back and think about what it actually means for a running back to get three hundred and more carries. If a runner gets to that mark, he's likely stayed healthy for at least all but one game. At the very least, If a running back has three hundred or more carries, he probably just played the entire season. So when a player plays every single game, he has a higher chance to see a large drop off in games played the following year.

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Speaker 2: It can only go down.

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Speaker 1: It's like when people talk about the one oh one in a draft and how the one oh one rarely repeats that performance year over year. Yeah, because it's really hard to repeat that performance. Even a player who had two hundred and fifty carries instead of three hundred, they may have missed a game or two. The idea here is that it's just very difficult to sustain high volume period Like I bucketed players in the three attempts per game bins as well, and I categorize them as low, medium, and high. A low group had sixteen attempts per game in their end season, The medium one was at seventeen point seven attempts per game, and then the high one had twenty point one attempts per game. When you look at the change in attempts per game from one year to the next, this is on a per game basis, Each group saw a relatively similar drop. They saw a dip in about two to three rush attempts per game. But that high group, the group who averaged twenty point one attempts per game in that end season, they still averaged seventeen point six attempts per game the following season. That was significantly higher than the other two groups. So basically, the players who had high attempts per game one year, they were still seeing high attemps per game numbers the following year. Just because there's a drop in volume doesn't mean the volume disappears. So to me, this Saquon Barkley stuff is less about the injury and just assuming that he's gonna break down.

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Speaker 2: He's a running back. They all break down.

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Speaker 1: It's more about the fact that Philly's bound to be a more pass heavy team this year. It's just almost impossible for Barkley to see the same type of workload and efficient see that he saw a year ago. But to me, that doesn't mean that he's a fade. I still have him in the top tier of running backs now. I like Bjeon Robinson more or sorry, Bjeon Robinson more, and I think that you could argue Gibbs given what he's done without that full backfield, But Saque still belongs where he's being drafted. The Eagles still have an elite offensive line. They're gonna be a good team more than likely, and it all adds up to Berkley seeing another huge workload and if and when that injury hits him, it's not simply because of his previous season workload. I think that's what's really important here. We shouldn't create these narratives just for the sake of creating these narratives. Now, that might play some role, he's a human being, but it's also just because he plays a violent position and that position gets hurt a lot.

00:14:48
Speaker 2: That's just the reality of football.

00:14:52
Speaker 1: This last question from Ranch Dressing on Patreon's had a couple of good questions for the show this summer.

00:14:56
Speaker 2: It says, Hey, jj am, I.

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Speaker 1: Crazy that I think Keenan all might be a nice mid to late round draft pick. What is your take on Keenan Allen right now? Yeah, Look, I actually think Keenan Allen is a very reasonable pick in every format, mostly because no one seems to really won him. But there are a few things that I don't think we can dismiss. First Off, Keenan Allen's a type of wide receiver who hypothetically could play for a long time. Separation has never been his thing. He's a great route runner, like we saw that with An Kwon Bolden throughout his career. Now, the second thing, he actually wasn't that bad last year. I mean watching him I'd say he wasn't prime Keenan Allen, but his peripherals were actually fine when you give him some context. Last season in that crappy Bears offense, Allen had a twenty six percent target share per game rate. He had a one point three to six yards per hour run rate, which is not good, but it was also just point zero eight yards away from DJ Moore, who led the team. And DJ Moore is currently being drafted as a top twenty four wide receiver in fantasy football, and Allen was targeted at a higher rate per route run than DJ Moore last year.

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Speaker 2: Now people are.

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Speaker 1: Gonna look at Allen with the Chargers and say, isn't this basically a duplicate of Lad McConkey. But while Allen did play fifty four percent of his snaps from the slot last year, according to PFF, his perimeter yards per route run rate was actually better a lot better than his slot one. I don't think it's a lock that Keenan Allen is a slot only player for the Chargers, that he's only out there in eleven personnel, because that wouldn't be very fun for fantasy football. To me, this is a sign that Trey Harris, he's not there yet. And even though KeAndre Lambert Smith is flashing, he's not a high volume receiver at the moment. And we know that Quinton Johnston, he's likely not the answer. They got versatility with Keenan Allen and someone who's gonna be able to handle seven or eight targets in a given game, maybe the upside isn't insane. So if you're in a ten team league, you're in a shallower league, no, you probably don't need to draft Keenan Allen, But in a best ball format, in deeper formats, I think he's actually kind of a decent pick right now. This last question is from John on Patreon. It says, have you done any research on streaming strategies? My definition of streaming is waiting to draft a position usually kicker, defense, or tight end and sometimes quarterback into the latest possible round, with the intention of playing him or someone off waivers week to week depending on the strength of their matchups. My question is how predictive is matchup on performance for players who typically fall into this category. But another way, are managers who choose to stream a position just wasting a bunch of time playing the waiver wire and hunting matchups because performance of players who are that far down in ADP is essentially random, or is there some evidence that you can predict performance even for players who go undrafted based on matchup? So I know not everyone that's part of the Patreon or who listens to this podcast knows every single thing I publish in the fantasy football space. But I have another podcast. It has been around for like twelve or thirteen years. It's called Living the Stream, and it's a show that I've co hosted with Rotal World's Denny Carter for years and years and years. Not to be clear, that show's kind of turned into just as much of a lifestyle show with two dads just talking about life as it's been a fantasy football show.

00:18:12
Speaker 2: But we spend a good.

00:18:13
Speaker 1: Half hour each week during the season on streaming recommendations. That's the entire purpose of the show. So we recommend defenses, tight ends, and quarterbacks each week, and we use Yahoo's percent roster numbers to help us know if the players are widely available or not. So it's good that we can find players who should be available in your league based on that percent roster number.

00:18:35
Speaker 2: But it's rough.

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Speaker 1: It's bad for us because like last year, we stream Baker Mayfield immediately, but then this percent roster number, it just got too high. We didn't have the benefit of streaming him each and every week, even though in a league that we were managing, we could have just kept Baker Mayfield. Now, with all that being said, I've been tracking things since twenty fifteen. Quarterback streaming it's gotten a little bit tougher because the market's just smarter with these mobile quarterbacks and it's just harder to match those dual threat guys.

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Speaker 2: But we were at QB ten and points per game last year.

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Speaker 1: Again, that's not with the benefit of being able to use Baker Mayfield week in and week out, or when he had good matchups. Back in like twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, when there was a lot more variance at quarterback, we would stream the QB six and points per game. At tight end, we're usually in low end tight end one territory with our streamers. There was one year where we were at like tight end three, but that was more of an outlier season. And then when it comes to defense, that's by far the easiest position to stream. We've been defense two in defense three most seasons, as in the second and third best defense in fantasy football. With just teams off the waiver wire, things are not going to be totally predictable. I get stuff wrong all the time in the Sleeper Show each week during the season, and Denny and I we're gonna miss on some streamers, but we've done a pretty good job through the years of looking at player data, looking at matchups, and finding spots to stream. So to answer your question, yes, you can stream, especially when your league has a strong waiver wire. I do like to say, though, I don't think that should be your go to strategy. You should always try to find players who can just be your options week in and week out, but it is a nice fallback plan. 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 searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Remember to check out everything going on over on Lateround dot com.

00:20:34
Speaker 2: Check out the draft guide.

00:20:36
Speaker 1: Make sure you're subscribed to this podcast, and also check out the YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash at lateround FF. Thanks for listening this week everyone, hope you enjoyed it. Good luck in your drafts this weekend, and I will talk to you next week.