973: NFL Draft - Running Backs With Studly Profiles

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacheris j Zachers. What's up everyone, It's JJ zacharyesin in this episode nine hundred and seventy three of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. We got the official list of NFL combine invites last week, which means it's officially prospect season. I know some of you aren't as interested in that side of fantasy football. You'd rather just wait and see where these guys get drafted rather than learning about them over the next couple of months. And I get that my prospecting work won't be for everyone, but I do think having a general understanding of the incoming rookies each year can help you in any fantasy format. Of course, it's going to be helpful in dynasty for your rookie drafts or some of the best ball contests going on right now over an underdog, but even in your normal redraft leagues, having an understanding of these players is crucial, not just during your drafts, but with waiver wire management as well. Now I do a series of episodes each year, with this one being the first, as sort of an introduction to the class. Today's episode is about running backs. Next week it's going to be all about wide receivers. But the concept is pretty simple. I look at successful NFL players at those two positions, and I see what kind of collegiate production traits those players shared. Then I look at the current class and I see if any of the draft hopeful players appear to be studs based on their collegiate production. But we'll talk through all of that in just a minute. First, the Late Round Prospect Guide. It's available for pre order right now. You should check it out. This year's guide is even more information than ever before. You get info on everything that goes into my prospect and Year two models. You get profiles for every running back and wide receiver at this year's combine. You get year two profiles for about forty second year running backs and wide receivers. And I've added what I'm calling categories to the model this year that help categorize players into these buckets depending on their overall scores. And both the ZAP model and the Year two one, I'm putting a lot of work into this. I think you guys are gonna enjoy it. You can pre order it right now over on lateround dot com. It's fourteen ninety nine. On March tenth when it launches, that price is going to go up by five dollars. Also, even though the fantasy football season is over, is it actually over? Because over on Underdog right now, you can enter drafts for the twenty twenty five season. If you know prospects well, if you have a good grasp on free agency, you can really have an edge on your competition. And you can use today's episode to help you out. If you want to check it out, head to Underdog Fantasy dot com and sign up. When you do, make sure you use promo code late round to get up to one thousand dollars in bonus cash. That's Underdog Fantasy dot com. So the goal today is to look at successful NFL running backs and reset in history and see if their college production marks match up with any of the prospects in this year's draft class. Because whether people want to believe it or not, college production can be predictive. Who would have thought when a player is successful in college, he has a higher likelihood to be successful in the NFL. This is really where my ZAP model comes into play, where it stems from I've worked on the wide receiver and running back ZAP models for years now, and I update them with new ideas every off season. Those models are based on things like draft capital, certain college production metrics, player size, program strength, and so on. Again, all of this is outlined in the Prospect Guide. I made a semi substantial update to the running back model this offseason that allowed it to get more signal and be more predictive. I was a little hesitant to do it, but I do think it makes sense. It's just going to confuse literally everyone when I say this, but here goes the running back ZAP model no longer includes any rushing metrics. How is that possible? Why would a running back model not use rushing related metrics. Well, it uses a couple of pass catching metrics, so college production isn't just totally tossed out the window. But what I've realized is that a lot of the rushing marks are just simply captured in other things that the model's looking at, draft capital being that top thing. You see these ZAP models. They're not attempting to predict where a player is gonna get drafted or what round he'll be drafted in. Instead, they're mostly telling you post draft when you should deviate from draft capital. And it seems like for purposes of fantasy football, teams aren't factoring in receiving enough at the running back position. It's not that they don't care, it's just at the game of fantasy football, at the running back position, it's very pass catching driven. I'm measuring against full PPR output, so the receiving angle matters even more, but it matters in any format. Not only that, but when a player has a more rope bus receiving profile, it's signaling to us that they may be pretty talented. We should assume that the majority of these running backs saw a pretty good amount of work on the ground to then also be good through the air tells us that they might be pretty well rounded. And when you're well rounded, you're talented, you're good. You're gonna score more fantasy points. That's my guess as the why the receiving stuff matters so much. So. The two main production metrics that the running back model now uses our best season reception share, which is pro rated for games played, and then a metric I use called breakout score. Breakout score used to be based on yards per team play by a running back, which would include both rushing and receiving yards. But now it's just based on receiving yards per team pass attempt, which is the exact same thing that the wide receiver model uses. It's called breakout score because it's looking at that from an age adjusted perspective. I won't bore you with all the details here, but it looks at the age of a play when he does certain things in the receiving yards per team pass attempt metric, and then it adjusts for strength of opponent. Breakout score gets pretty good signal in the running back model, especially when attached to all the other stuff that goes into that model standalone. Though it wouldn't make that much sense for me to only talk about receiving metrics on today's show, because remember what the goal is here world looking at stud NFL running backs and seeing how their collegiate production compares to the guys in this year's class. Only looking at receiving metrics wouldn't tell us that much of a story. It's just helpful for the model. So this is what we're gonna do. I'm gonna look at those two main ZAP model production metrics, which, by the way, ZAPP stands for Zacharyice an adjusted prospect model. Very creative, I know. But those two metrics are reception share and breakout score. But I'm also going to look at best season yards per team play. That's a metric that's proven to correlate to NFL success. It takes a player's total yards, so both rushing and receiving, and divides it by the number of plays that his team ran in a given season. Well, then take those metrics and then layer on top. Are two different samples. One sample includes our stud NFL running backs. The other sample includes players who are invited to the twenty twenty five NFL combine. The latter samples is really easy to define. They're players who were invited to the combine, but the former not so much. What exactly defines a successful NFL running back? Well, arbitrarily, I've defined them as players since twenty eleven with multiple seasons of fourteen or more PPR points per game. Basically, players who were giving fantasy managers multiple RB two or better seasons, so they didn't just get there once and then fall off a cliff. They had some sustained success. The ZA model includes running backs who were either drafted or at the NFL Combine since twenty eleven. So some of the stud players like an Adrian Peterson, he can't be part of our stud running back sample because he was drafted before twenty eleven. I don't have a breakout score for him. So after removing those players, we get thirty three running backs. Thirty three stud NFL running backs running backs who gave us two or more seasons of fourteen plus PPR points per game since twenty eleven. Now, the idea here is to compare their collegiate profiles those thirty three stud NFL running backs to the collegiate profiles of the thirty one running backs who were invited to this year's combine. So let's start with pro rated reception share. This just looks at the number of receptions a player had versus the number of receptions his entire team had. A solid number for best season reception share is usually over ten eleven twelve percent. If a player is over fifteen percent, that's really solid. Our running back stud sample had an average best season reception share of thirteen point nine percent. It's not surprising that that number is high, because, again, when running backs are good in the NFL. They were generally good in college. I also wouldn't be using these metrics if they were worthless. Meanwhile, this year's running back draft class, their average best season reception share was eleven point seven percent. That's honestly really good. This class. For those of you who don't know, this class looks great on paper. The ZAP model likes a lot of backs in this class right now in February, it looks like a top three class since twenty eleven, depending on how you measure it. Breakout scorer is again based on receiving yards per team pass attempt. The score is a raw number that gets translated into a number between zero to one hundred. To make things a little bit easier to comprehend and consume, The STUD NFL running back sample had an average breakout score in college of nearly seventy seven. This year's class was at sixty two. So once again the STUD sample was better. And then, like I said, I'm also going to look at best season total yards per team play, even though that metric is no longer in the model. The STUD sample had a mark of two point zero one in that metric. This year's class one point seventy nine. So across the board, our STUD sample is better than this year's class, which is not that surprising because this year's class is going to include a whole lot of Day three and undrafted picks. The STUD sample will have some of those guys in it, but they already hit. And then there's a lot of first rounders and second rounders. So the question now is which of the backs in this year's class seem to match some of this criteria. Well, before I give you the list of players who did match it, let's look at some of the higher profile running backs in this class who didn't get there, guys that I refer to as having red flags. Now, keep in mind, a player being lower in one of these production metrics doesn't mean that that player is going to look bad in the ZAP model or even be bad in the NFL. It's just one input of many inputs. We'll start with pro rated reception share. In our study sample. We only have seven running backs who failed to reach a ten percent reception share, and some of them are some of the lower tiered players in that STUD NFL sample. But the list of guys who didn't get there were Carlos Hide, Doug Martin, Nick Chubb, Josh Jacobs, Devonte Freeman, Chris Carson, and Derrick Henry. Henry had the lowest. He was the only one below five percent, but he's also been the outlier of all outliers throughout his NFL career. Also, the ZAP models predicting point per game output across the player's first three years in the NFL, Henry didn't really have his breakout until year four. Anyway, in this year's class, we have twelve players who failed to get to a ten percent reception share. That's actually a pretty low number all things considered. It just goes to show how good this class actually is. Now. Unfortunately, both Ohio State running backs fall into this category. Trayvon Henderson had a nine point seven percent best season pro rated reception share, he barely missed this arbitrary cutoff. Quinch On Judkins was at eight point six percent. Now, the good news is that the ZAP model has something in it called a teammate score, so both of those players are being helped by that. But overall, I'm not gonna be overly concerned about this, especially for Henderson, who the model seems to really like, and Judkins is fine too, but Henderson has a breakout score of about ninety one. Judkins is at fifty five and Henderson in the higher total yards per team play in his best season. But overall, I wouldn't call this a huge red flag because both guys were at least competing with good players in the offenses that they were in. Now, the running back with the highest projected draft capitol according to NFL Mock Draft database outside of the Ohio State guys who is below that ten percent reception share mark is Dylan Sampson. You know, it's funny. Sampson would be pretty okay in last year's draft class, last year's draft class not being nearly as strong as this year's. Like, he's better than a lot of guys that we saw a year ago. But right now the model doesn't hate him. It just doesn't love him. He's got an eight point five percent pro rated best season reception chhare, a number that was exceeded by twenty eight of the thirty three guys in the NFL stud sample. And for what it's worth, he has a breakout score of fifty three. That's fine, but nothing elite. There's nothing that really stands out about his analytical profile in the model. Now, the nice part is outside of those three players, there aren't really any running backs with huge projected draft capital who had low reception shares. Damian Martinez in Miami, who is at Oregon State. He's another one who didn't have the best receiving profile, but he's projected to go like one hundred and fiftieth overall. So let's just move on to breakout score. I think breakout score is more interesting because it's more predictive, but it's also age in program adjusted. In the NFL stud sample, just six of our thirty three running backs had a breakout score below fifty, and unsurprisingly, many of them coincide with the ones that I talked about earlier. Derek Henry, Chris Carson, Doug Martin, and Carlos Hyde are all on that list. So the vast majority of running backs in that stud sample or at least average when it comes to breakout score. It's obviously a little bit different in this year's class, but just to show you how freaking good this class is, we only have nine of the thirty one with a breakout score below fifty. For context, In twenty twenty four, fifteen of the twenty nine running backs in the model had a breakout score below fifty. So we're talking just twenty nine percent from this year's class and over fifty percent from last year's class. Anyway, the good news on this front is that no big name players below that mark in this year's class. Again, I'm gonna reference NFL mockdraft database dot com for projected draft capital here. But Damien Martinez, who I just talked about, he's the top projected running back who didn't have a breakout score of fifty. Not only was his score forty seven, so he was really close. But again, he's projected to go one hundred and forty six th overall. Right, now, give or take a handful of spots. Phil Maffa is another one who just didn't get it done as a receiver in college. He played four years at Clemson. His top season in reception share was under seven percent. His breakout score didn't register because he maxed out at just one hundred and eight receiving yards in a given season. That gave him a low receiving yards per team pass attempt. But that's really it. I mean, it might be frustrating that I'm not revealing something huge here. But at the same time, it's kind of awesome that the running backs who are projected to get drafted high this year also come with pretty strong production profiles. In the ZAP model, we don't always get that now. Lastly, there's yards per team play. I don't have this in the model anymore, but it can't hurt to look at it because there is some predictiveness to it. In our stud NFL sample, just six running backs were below a one point five max season yards per team play rate. Again, that's total yard so rushing and receiving divided by team plays. We only have seven in this year's class. Can't stress enough how good this class looks. Analytically. We'll see post combine, but right now it's looking good. One player below that mark is Trevor Etn, and honestly, the early results of the ZAP model actually really like Etn. He had a best season pro rated reception share of thirteen point three percent. His breakout score is about seventy seven. Those are very strong numbers, especially for a guy who should come in around two hundred pounds hopefully a little bit heavier, who's not even twenty one years old and who's projected to be a Day three pick. A huge reason his yards per team play profile is lacking is because he didn't see a ton of work on the ground throughout college at Florida and Georgia. He was really efficient per touch, but volume is generally a lot more predictive than efficiency from college to the NFL. But he got it done through the air, and he did so at a young age. So he's one of the laterish running backs that I'm currently interested in. And there are some others too. Now, not all of them hit on every average of the three metrics from our NFL stud sample, meaning the average that we saw at a reception share, breakout scorer, and yards per team play. But there are some later round running backs this year who look good within the two metrics that go into the ZAP model. Again, there's a reception share and breakout score. One of them is Woody Marx out of Southern col His best season reception share was sixteen percent, his breakout score about eighty one. But this is one of those scenarios where we do have to give these numbers some context. We should always give these numbers some context. That's gonna happen the model's predictive, but it's also just a guide. Mars played at Mississippi State for four years before going to USC, so he's an older prospect, which is a red flag. But when he was at Mississippi State, his head coach was the late Mike Leach. Leech is known for his air raid offense, and he was also known for getting his running backs involved in that offense through the air. So I do think that Marx's numbers are a little bit inflated here, and you can make a similar argument for Burshard Smith out of SMU his numbers being a little bit inflated. That's because he played wide receiver for his first three years of his collegiate career at Miami. Now, some of you might consider this a blind spot with the zap model, because every once in a while we get a player like this. Tyrone Tracy was one of these players last year. But Tracy was also a nice hit versus his draft capital. So Tracy's breakout score is awesome, but it was also kind of warranted. Smith isn't as high, and for what it's worth, as a running back at SMU this past year, he still had good receiving numbers it wasn't just a function of him playing wide out, but I'm excited to see what he might be able to do at the combine. I'm also interested in bea shall Teuton. His reception share numbers are a little bit boosted because he played at North Carolina A and T for a couple of years before transferring to Virginia Tech. Now, his breakout score adjust for that program strength, but the reception share does not even Still, in twenty twenty four with Virginia Tech, he got to almost a fourteen percent reception share, and with all the necessary adjustments with receiving yards per team play, Touten still has a breakout score of seventy four. He was honestly pretty close to meeting the criteria of a stud running back. And then the last player that I want to get to before revealing the true production studs from this year's class is Lequin Allen. Allen absolutely checks the production boxes in the ZAP model because his receiving profile was absolutely bonkers at Syracuse. He caught sixty four passes for five hundred and twenty one yards last year, and he was productive as a pass catcher before that too. That gives him a breakout score of ninety one and a best season reception share of almost twenty percent. Those are some of the better marks that you're gonna find in this year's class. But there are three running backs who hit the averages from the stud NFL sample and all three metrics that we're looking at today, So they have better than a thirteen point nine percent reception share, better than a seventy seven breakout scorer, and better than a two point zero one best season yards per team play. Ashton Gent is one of them. Surprise, surprise, anyone who follows college football even casually knows about genty. He's an elite prospect in this class who's gonna immediately become a top running back in dynasty. I mean, he's kind of already there. He did face slightly easier competition, but it didn't matter. His best season reception chare is over twenty three percent. His breakout scorer, which adjusts for all that, is ninety five point two. His total yards per team play is two point eight two, which is best in the class. Gent is an elite prospect. The next one is Cam Skataboo. He looks great analytically. He is a best season reception chair above twenty percent, a breakout score of ninety five point nine, a high end yards per team play. The zap Moodel really likes him. And then the last one is another pot popular back in this year's class. It's Caleb Johnson, albeit barely. I'd say Genty and Scataboo probably have the most well rounded analytical profiles in this class, and then there's a little bit of a drop, but Johnson's still good. His breakout score was eighty point four though, so it was barely above that seventy seven mark, but he's a very solid looking prospect early for me, so to the ZA model and just general analytics, Genti, Scataboo and Caleb Johnson look like really solid bets. And for those of you wondering Amari and Hampton, he's pretty close. His breakout score though ended up being sixty four, so he was just off there, but he looks like a really good prospect too. It's just a really good class overall. The higher end players look solid, and like I said, there's a lot of Day three picks that I'm excited to watch at the combine. It's obviously still very very early on in this process. But this is at least giving us a nice baseline to work off of. I can't wait to put it all together in that Prospect Guide. That's it for today's show, so thanks Solvy for listening. If you yet subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are budshirting for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Remember you can pre order that Prospect Guide right now over on the site. Otherwise, I've got a great Late Round Perspectives guest for you later this week. I'll talk to you then