649: Team-Level Regression

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zachersa JJ zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyeson in. This is episode six hundred and forty nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. We're at this point in the NFL offseason where people are getting back into the swing of things with fantasy football, but people have also forgotten about what happened last year. I'm not talking about who won the Super Bowl or anything like that. I'm just talking about statistics. I'm talking about what went down on the number side of things. I try to do a couple of regression related episodes each year around this time as a result, because it's a good reminder about the crazy things that happened the previous year, and it can then help us better prepare for the upcoming season. But what do I mean by regression? The definition of regression is a return to a former or less developed state. In math, it's a statistical method that it's tempts to determine the strength and character of the relationship between one dependent variable and a series of other variables. Let's just talk in Layman's terms Basically, with regression, we're worried about when things look a little bit funky. We're concerned about a player or a team when that player or team does something out of the ordinary statistically. And I'm not talking about a player just being really really good or really really bad. I'm saying like a player scoring ten touchdowns in a season without a single red zone look, or a team converting all of their red zone trips into touchdowns. We know that those things are not common, based on history and based on logic. They're far from expectation. They're far from the normal variables that we analyze traditionally. When that's the case, we see those numbers shift back to expectation. Maybe it happens in the next few games, or maybe it happens the following year. We know that regression is largely inevitable, and that can help us with our choices in fantasy football. To really drive home this point about regression, I'll go to my standard golf example. Let's say you shoot an eighty five at this course that you play all the time. You love this course, it's your favorite course. One day out of nowhere, you shoot a seventy five. There you were just really feeling it. Things were going your way. You hit a drive on a par five and it started to slice into the woods, but it hit off a tree and it kicked into the fairway. Those kinds of things were going your way over and over and over again. That helped you shoot a seventy five. The next time you golf, would you expect to shoot a seventy five again, or would you expect to shoot an eighty five. You'd probably expect the eighty five because that's your average. That's your expectation. You'd then be regressing to that average or to that mean. It's not that you necessarily got any better or worse at golf. It's just that you know that things aren't always going to go that cleanly. In football, we can do the exact same thing, and we can do it with essentially any statistic that we want. We can also look at this on a team level or on a player level. I like to kick things off with team level regression because team level the numbers will naturally feed into player level ones. If a team does something really crazy one year, then the players on that team likely did some crazy things too. So today I'm going to talk about five things at the team level that are bound to regress. A lot of these are in my draft guide, which officially releases this Friday, July first, so you can always get notes from there too. Go pre order that sucker over on late round dot com right now, but I think it's a good start to get your brain going about regression and about this twenty twenty two season before getting the team regression Candidate's just a reminder that there's no better time than today to sign up for Fandle Fantasy. For users who have yet to make a deposit on Fandle Fantasy, you can deposit today to receive two free entries. All you have to do is deposit a minimum of ten dollars in your Fandle DFS account. You'll be instantly rewarded with two free vouchers. There is a limit of time offer, so be sure to deposit now and play for free. Head over to fandle dot com or download the Fandle Fantasy app today. Eligibility destrictions apply. Go to fandle dot com or download the Fandle app for more details. The Ego are a really interesting team to project this season. On one hand, last season they ran dead last in the NFL and pass rate. On the other hand, they changed their approach after about week seven. Last year. They started the season as an above average team and pass rate, and then they just ran the ball like no other team was running it down the stretch. After Week seven they had by far the lowest pass rate in football. Thirty nine percent of their attempt totals were passes during that stretch from Week eight onward. That wasn't only by far the lowest in the league, but it was almost ten percentage points lower than the team that was second run heaviest, which was Tennessee. Even without factoring in the moves that the Eagles made this offseason, like the addition of one of the best wide receivers in football, we would have expected some regression. Since twenty eleven, there have been thirty four teams with next season data who ran the ball more than they threw it. Only four of those teams had a decrease in pass rate the following year, and this spilled over into how the Eagles scored touchdowns last year. There's going to be some correlation between how much a team runs the ball and how they score their touchdowns, and there is a little bit if a team is running the ball over and over and over again, then we'd probably expect a lot of their touchdowns to be on the ground rather than through the air. That was the case for Philadelphia last year. Just forty four percent of their touchdowns last season were passing touchdowns, and of the team since twenty eleven who saw a lower rate, the average increase among those teams was by twenty percent. So we should probably expect maybe closer to a fifty five to sixty percent pass to rush touchdown rate this year instead of forty four percent. Now, think about this trickle down effect. Jalen Hurts may not rush for as many touchdowns as he rushed for last year, and those count for six points in fantasy football, but he'll fortunately be able to throw for more assuming the Eagles score as many touchdowns, And if they score more touchdowns, then Hurts can still be a better fantasy asset even with the decline in rushing touchdowns. I'm fully expecting the Eagles to have more of a pass heavy approach in twenty twenty two, and that should help every player in that offense. Something as simple as overall touchdowns that can regress the mean year over year as well. For a team to do really really well or really really poorly in the touchdown column, something probably went in their favor or didn't go in their favor. For teams who did well, maybe they avoided major injury throughout a season. For teams where things went poorly, maybe they lost their starting quarterback. That's part of the reason we see these numbers regress season overseason. It's also just really hard to be incredibly good season after season after season, and for teams who didn't do all that well, they typically shake things up, and when you shake things up, good things can happen. Like take the New York Giants. Over the last two years, the Giants have been absolutely dreadful offensively, probably even worse than you realize. In twenty twenty, they were tied with the Jets for the lowest offensive touchdown in football. They had twenty five touchdowns. In twenty twenty one, they were dead last in the league with twenty three touchdowns. Now I now, I just said that touchdowns tend to regress, and that didn't happen for the Giants from twenty twenty to twenty twenty one. You can blame a lot of things for that. Quarterback injuries are one, so it was a completely incompetent coaching staff and offensive coordinator. I won't name names, but the Giants were under one point five touchdowns per game last year. Over the last eleven seasons, we've had sixteen teams with next season data with that low of a touchdowns per game rate. All but one of those teams saw an increase in touchdowns per game year over year, with the average increase being point eight to two scores per contest across a seventeen game season. That's like fourteen more touchdowns for the Giants. And why can't they get there? Why can't they score in the high thirties in terms of touchdown totals. Brian Dable is head coach now, and he helped the Bills become the powerhouse they are today. The offensive line is improved, players on offense there are healthier, and when looking at strength of schedule by team win total, the Giants had the easiest schedule in the league. I said this before on the show, but I think that Giants players are pretty good values in fantasy drafts this year, and this is one of the big reasons why I've talked about on the show before and this is on episode six hundred and thirty nine, which was titled Insights from Building Projections, but it's the Ravens offensive philosophy. Two things happened for Baltimore this past season. Number one, they were more pass heavy than what we've seen from them during this Lamar Jackson era. They ran twenty third in pass rate. They were dead last in pass rate in both twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, and the year before that they were thirtieth. The other crazy thing is that despite ranking well into the back half of the league in pass right, the Ravens were ninth in total pass attempts. How is that possible? How can a team ring twenty third and pass to rush ratio but ninth in total pass attempts? They ran a ton of plays. They ran almost seventy plays per game last year. They had the eleventh highest mark in that category. Since twenty eleven, we've had sixteen teams with next season data who have run at least sixty nine plays per game across an entire season since twenty eleven, and of those sixteen, none of them saw an increase in plays run the following year, while the average drop was a little over four plays per game. I think we should just naturally expect the Ravens to not be as pass heavy this season with hopefully healthier running backs Marquis Brown not being on the roster, and a healthier defense. But then on top of that, they've got regression coming in the plays run department that'll have a compounding impact on the number of pass attempts in that offense. I still really like Rashad Bateman because he can combat that with a high target share in that offense, but do be aware that it may be tough for some of the secondary options in that offense to truly emerge this year without an injury to someone like Rashad Bateman or Mark Andrews. There are a lot of reasons to expect the Buccaneers to not be as pass heavy this season. Chris Godwin's hurt, Rob Gronkowski retired, Antonio Brown is gone, Tom Brady's another year older, Bruce arians handed things out to Todd Bowles, who wants more of a run for his philosophy. But it was gonna happen naturally regardless. Tampa Bay has thrown it more than any other NFL team over the last two years and last season they threw at seven hundred and thirty one times. They had a one point nine passed to rush attempt ratio. Only four teams have had a higher pass rate than that since twenty eleven, and each of them saw a huge dip year over year in pass rate. How doesn't mean that you should avoid Brady Evans or Russell Gage in fantasy drafts. Evan should be able to capture more of a target share in that offense because of the lack of competition, and Gage is going to see a lot of work before Chris Godwin returns. But this is why on last week's Mailbag show, I talked about not fitting this year's personnel into last year's Tampa Bay offense. The offense is not going to look the exact same. It could be quite different for a lot of reasons, and regression is one of them. The last team level regression example that I want to talk through today is with the Super Bowl winning Los Angeles Rams. Matthew Stafford was one of just two quarterbacks with forty or more passing touchdowns last year, and he was also second in the league in goal line pass attempts that helped push the Rams to way pass to rush touchdown rate of eighty percent. Eighty percent of their touchdowns were passing time touchdowns. Since twenty eleven, the point in time that I always reference, we've had twenty nine teams with that high of a rate, and of those twenty nine, just twucsaw an increase the following year. The average decline was thirteen point four percent. So let me just run this math by you. A decline like that, all things being equal, for the Rams, it would drop their passing touchdowns from forty one to about thirty four and the rushing touchdowns would go from ten to about seventeen. So this is good news for someone like cam Akers, and it's one of the reasons to probably opt for another lower end QB one outside of Matthew Stafford this year. There are more of these examples in my Draft guide, which again it publishes on Friday. I'm so excited for all of you guys to read it. There's a ton of strategy information in it, and you can get my player takes for this year as well, so remember to check it out lateround dot com. But that's going to do it for today's show. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, appreciate you listening. I'll talk to you later in the week.