775: Using the Market to Spot High-Powered Offenses

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Speaker 1: This is the last with your host JJ zacheras j je Zacher reson what's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode seven hundred and seventy five of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. I sort of view my season long fantasy football player evaluation process and two distinct buckets. The first is the projection. How am I just generally feeling about a player and his situation. There's a lot of research that goes into that. I'm looking at historical peripheral numbers for each player, digging into coaching changes, looking at the type of role that he might play, looking at his prospect score if he's a younger player, all of that stuff. I'm grouping all of that research up. I'm just calling it a player's projection. I'm projecting how I think a player might perform. That's the bucket that a lot of people probably stop at, which is understandable. When you have a good feel for a player based on your research, you can start to put players in a list, you can start to rank them. But I think there's another component that's really important here too, and that's historical market trends. If you've listened to this podcast in the past, then you know that I'm very, very into analyzing historical average draft position data. I think we can learn a lot from the fantasy football market. The reason I see it as so important is because it's a glimpse into how we felt about these guys entering a season. When average draft position is formed, it's not being formed after games have been played. It's essentially another form of forecasting. It's just collective forecasting. It's how tons and tons of people are viewing a player, not just how I'm viewing a player. Analyzing current season ADP is important too. Of course, with current season average draft position analysis, you're able to spot where there might be values in your draft. But when you're looking at historical data, you're able to see trends. You're able to see areas of drafts that might be places to target or avoid certain positions in players. You're really taking advantage of human behavior when analyzing historical ADP data. This leads to discoveries like the running back dead zone, or how year two wide receivers are usually good bets in the middle rounds, or how the masses generally undervalue young, unproven players. As I was working on my draft guide this month, a trend that continuously popped up is one that's not super surprising. When players broke out, when they exceeded their ADP expectation and gave your fantasy team a lot of value, they often came from strong offenses. That is, they played in offenses that did well in the very basic statistic of touchdowns per game. But the obvious point to make with something like that is that it's hindsight based. Right. It's easy to say that our running back will perform better when he's in a good offense, But how do we know which offenses are actually gonna be good? You can have some general idea. We know the Chiefs, as long as Patrick Mahomes is healthy, they're probably gonna have a good offense. The same goes for like Buffalo or Cincinnati. But there aren't so many obvious situations like that. What about a team like Pittsburgh, What about Green Bay? What about Atlanta? What if I told you that there's a very easy way to come up with an educated guess as to how well a team is going to do in touchdowns per game in an upcoming season and it's something that's twice as predictive as a team's previous season touchdowns per game rate. That's what I'm gonna be talking about on today's show. But first, the Late Round Draft Guide launches this week. On Friday, June thirtieth, the Draft Guide will be in your hands if you've already pre ordered, you'll get a download link to your email on Friday. If you haven't pre ordered, make sure you do that by going to Lateround dot com. The guide is currently nineteen ninety nine that's going to jump to twenty four ninety nine when Friday hits. The guide has everything you need to dominate your drafts this year, and it's updated weekly so you're always getting updated rankings. Players are target players to avoid and late round dart throws to make check it all out at Late Round and make sure you pre order before that price goes up. So we know that players tend to do better in fantasy football when they're in good offenses. But people who aren't doing a ton of analysis, which is the vast majority of fantasy football players, you're not gonna have the easiest time knowing which offenses are gonna be good. I mean, I look at this stuff as my job. I don't even have the easiest time knowing. But there's one method that can help all of us, and it's through analyzing average draft position. Remember ADP is a projection. It's how we're feeling about a group of players entering a season. When a player's ADP is high, it means we feel good about that player and how he's gonna produce. When it's not high, it says that he's probably not gonna be very good. What if an NFL team had a bunch of high ADP players, what if an NFL team didn't That's what I started investigating more. Now I've done this in the past as it relates to fantasy quarterbacks that if a quarterback is a late round pick, but he's a bunch of early round wide receivers and tight end, does that mean the market is wrong with that quarterback? Clearly the market likes as pass catchers, but why is that quarterback going so late? Turns out there is some signal to that when a late round quarterback as early round teammates, you should probably draft that quarterback. But I wanted to take that a step further to analyze team offenses. So that's what I did. I started testing different ways to try to predict an offenses touchdowns per game in the upcoming season. One of the best results that I found was that teams who had multiple top seventy pass catchers they ended up scoring more touchdowns per game compared to teams who didn't, and running back adp was irrelevant. So, for example, in twenty fourteen, the Denver Broncos, led by Peyton Manning, they had four pass catchers get drafted in the top seventy overall in fantasy drafts. That's wide receivers and tight ends that year was Damarius Thomas, Emmanuel Sanders, Wes Welker, and Julius Thomas. They were all essentially top six round picks in a twelve team league. If you think that's absolutely bonkers, it's because it is. That's only happened one other time since twenty eleven. The other time was New England in twenty twelve. That's when they had the tight end duo of Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez. Both of those teams, the twenty fourteen Denver Broncos and the twenty twelve New England Patriots, finished the season first and touchdowns per game. As that number of top seventy pass catchers decreased, so did a team's touchdowns per game rank. Since twenty eleven, a team with three top seventy pass catchers had an average touchdowns per game rank of nine point four. That's well well above average. The average in this case is a rank of sixteen point five because there are thirty two teams in the league. Next, a team with two top seventy pass catchers, they finished around twelfth in touchdowns per game. Teams with just one would finish fifteen point three, and then a team with zero top seventy pass catchers they finished on average twenty second in offensive touchdowns per game. We've had one hundred and two of those types of teams since twenty eleven. One hundred and two teams had zero top seventy pass catchers. The twenty nineteen Ravens were the biggest outlier in that group. Lamar Jackson broke out that year he won MVP. They finished first in touchdowns per game, but that's far from the norm. Only twelve percent of these types of teams have finished as top ten offenses in that given season. Now, there might be somebody to the idea that teams with mobile quarterbacks are the ones who buck this trend most because mobile quarterback pass catchers usually don't have super high eightps. There might be something to that. We've also seen instances where rookie quarterbacks just really played above expectation, they surprised us, and that helped the entire offense. It doesn't happen frequently, though, but RG three, Cam Newton, Russell Wilson, those guys led their teams to top ten offenses in touchdowns per game. There doesn't necessarily seem to be an obvious trend with this, though. The thing to know is that when a team has zero pass catchers getting drafted in the first six rounds of a twelve team league, that's not a good sign for that team's offense in the upcoming season. And to reiterate something I mentioned earlier, the correlation between top seventy pass catchers and offensive touchdowns per game is much stronger than the correlation that we see from previous season touchdowns per game to upcoming touchdowns per game, So it's more predictive than looking at last season's touchdowns per game rate, which is pretty cool. Now, one thing that I've realized in doing this year's guide is that more and more fantasy platforms are launching and more game variations are launching two, so overall ADP doesn't always match from one platform to the next. Like Underdog is incredibly wide receiver heavy, it's gonna be more wide receiver heavy than the ADP source that I use, which is my fantasy league. So rather than look at overall ADP with his data, I thought it might be more helpful to look at positional ADP, to look at top twenty four wide receives or top thirty six wide receivers, or top twelve tight ends top six tight ends. I then also wanted to test this with quarterbacks. We don't need to just stop at pass catchers. Quarterbacks drive offenses, so chances are if the quarterback is drafted early, that offense is probably going to be pretty good too. Now I won't bore you with all the iterations that were tested with this, but I will tell you that there seemed to be one combination that predicted touchdowns per game best, and it was when a team had top thirty wide receivers, a top six tight end, and a top twelve quarterback. And if you give a little bit of way to the quarterback. There there's even more signal. Now, it's important to remember with this stuff that you can be a little bit loose when you're trying to use it for yourself. Every ADP source is going to be different, so there's natural variance to this kind of thing. What we really want to do is see where there are glaring instances where a team has absolutely zero, like for sure, zero players who are in these data points, or when a team might have a lot of them. But essentially, you can just count up how many top thirty wide receivers, how many top six tight ends, and how many top twelve quarterbacks a team has. Just add them together and that gives you a number, and the higher that number, the better that team generally will be in offensive touchdowns per game. Now, to give you some data, since twenty eleven, four teams have five of these players, those teams average a touchdown per game rank of four point eight. Two of them were the ones that I talked about earlier. They were the top offenses in the league that year. Then the other two were also top ten offenses. When you have three or four of these players from a team, teams average a touchdowns per game rank of ten to eleven, so they were fringe top ten offenses when there were two of these players. So again we're talking about top thirty wide receivers, top six tight ends, and top twelve quarterbacks. When there were two of them, that touchdowns per game rank was closer to fourteenth. If there's only one, you're looking at a below average offense. They've ranked on average seventeen point five. And then up the seventy eight teams since twenty eleven who had zero of these players, their average touchdowns per game rank was almost twenty third. Only five of the seventy eight teams with zero players in these ranges ended up ranking better than tenth and touchdowns per game. Like I said, these numbers can and will fluctuate from one platform to the next. For instance, if you use Fantasy Pro's expert consensus rankings right now and you apply this methodology, you get six teams who have zero players, zero players that are ranked high in the passing attack. But one of those teams is Pittsburgh, who has wide receivers who are very very close to the top thirty, and they also have Pat Fryermouth who's close to the top six. So just making the assumption that they would be awful this year probably isn't that fair, especially compared to a team like Houston or New England. Now, I'd say using this technique, the best teams in touchdowns per game this year look like the Eagles, Chargers, Bengals, Dolphins, and forty nine Ers. And then the teams that are close to that would be teams like Cleveland, Kansas City, Minnesota, Dallas, Buffalo, Jacksonville, Baltimore, and Seattle. And this is good news for a team like Chicago because Justin Fields is an early round quarterback and now they have DJ Moore. Now this is, of course, nowhere near a guarantee. That's not what I'm about. Nothing in fantasy football is a guarantee. It's about finding small edges to help you win out in the long run, and this does appear to be a small edge that doesn't get talked about enough in this fantasy space. 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 podcasts can be found. You know, to follow me on Twitter at late round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week.