776: Mailbag 6/30/23

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachera j J Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zacher Esen in this episode seven hundred and seventy six of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Hey, thanks for tuning in. The Late Round Draft Guide is finished. It's out there for anyone who pre ordered the guide. The two hundred plus page pdf is in your email inbox. For anyone who didn't make sure, you had to lateround dot com and check it out. The guide is some of the evergreen things from last year in it, but there's a lot of new information too. I dig into a lot of philosophical and strategy related items before get into my favorite players, the target and avoid in drafts, and my top two hundred rankings are in there too. Those sections are updated weekly until the end of August, so you're always getting the most up to date information for your drafts. You can learn more about it and purchase the guy over on Late Round dot com. The first question this week is an email. It says, hey, JJ, hope all is well with you. Congrats on the adoption. Thank you so much. I've got both George Pickens and Deontay Johnson on the same single quarterback PPR Dynasty team. I'd rather only keep one, but I honestly don't know which is the better choice. Deontay obviously has positive touchdown regression coming after not catching a single touchdown last year, and he's a target hawk, but didn't a lot of his catches come from Trubisky. It appeared to me that Pickens had a better connection with Kenny Pickett. Do the numbers back this up, Richard, So, Deontay Johnson's actually ahead of George Pickenson Dynasty in some spots, like Dynasty League Football's most recent ADP, their June ADP, it had Pickens two spots below Deontay Johnson. Now, I think Johnson is the better player just as a wide receiver, but I do think that Pickens should be ahead of him in dynasty, just given where the market could go with him. The big knock on Pickens or his peripheral numbers from last year. His rookie season, he had a yards per route run rate of one point thirty eight. That's pretty ordinary. He had a target's per route run rate of point one five, which again pretty normal. His target chair per game sixteen percent nothing special. It's not bad for a rookie wide receiver, but he had an opportunity to really capitalize there and he didn't, especially post Chase Claypool trade. There's nothing elite about those numbers. Now. The Steelers also made him almost strictly a vertical wide receiver last year. Here's what reception perceptions. Matt Harmon said about that and his George Pickens right up on the site, he said he Pickens ran a nine on a whopping thirty two point four percent of his sampled routes. That's nuts. Anything over thirty percent is borderline unreasonable. When you also add that he ran a corner on nearly ten percent of his routes, It's really wild how the Steelers didn't add more diversity to his route Pickens got next to no work going over the middle. The slant, dig and post made up less than a quarter of his routes. You almost never see this at the NFL level. Matt Canada doesn't have a very creative offense and Pickens was largely just used vertically last year. As Matt said, that's why we saw him with such a poor catch rate. But according to next Gen stats, Pickens actually had the lowest expected catch rate in football last season among all players with fifty or more targets, and he ended up exceeding that at a higher rate than anyone else in the league. He had the best catch rate over expected. Now, I do think they were running into a situation with George Pickens here where he's this traditional X receiver and a lot of times we see those guys get over valued in fantasy football and sometimes they fall off the face of the earth too, like Kenny Galladay. But I don't think we're seeing that with Pickens right now. In Dynasty. We're not seeing him be so overrated. It seems like people are being reasonable looking looking at him, and they're saying there are elements to his profile that scare me. So I'm staying away. But I do think there's still some potential with Pickens, all things considered. If we're gonna use yards per row run against him, then we should do the same with Deontay Johnson, because the two were really close to one another in that statistic last year, and we know that number is predictive, and Pickens also saw that number get better as the Steelers' offense got better last year, So that's a plus. Now, I think that you can make the argument easily either way in Dynasty. If you're trying to win now, Deontay Johnson might be your guy. If you're trying to build equity, a decent to big season with George Pickens could really boost his Dynasty stock. There's more of that market related ceiling with Pickens than there is for Deontay Johnson. We sort of understand what Deontay Johnson is at this point. But to your question, Kenny Pickett played meaningful snaps in eleven games last year, Deontay Johnson was definitely his preferred receiver. During those games. Johnson had a target share per game rate of twenty five point five percent. That was about ten percentage points higher than George Pickens. Now, Pickens did outscore Johnson in PPR points per game, actually it was eleven to nine point one, but as we know, Johnson had some touchdown related issues. I like Johnson more this year. Straight up. I lean towards Pickens though in Dynasty, but if you're looking to win now, Johnson's probably your guy. The sas questions from twitters from at j Man one nine nine to zero four Redraft players starting to prepare a lot of chatter on wide receivers getting pushed up. Is this strictly for best ball or do you see this trend continuing into late August for redraft broadly? How can we leverage a lot of the info currently being shared for redraft? Yeah? Look, a huge problem in the fantasy football space right now is that everyone is making the assumption that these best Ball drafts are the way that home league drafts are going to go. I mean, you could just go look at Fantasy Pro's expert consensus rankings right now and see how different those rankings look versus a typical underdog draft. So to answer your question, while I do think we may see more wide receiver heavy drafts this year, we're absolutely not gonna see home league drafts take the form of an underdog draft. That's just not logical to think that. The problem is I tend to play fantasy football more in a wide receiver heavy way. I've done that forever. People have always asked me why my rankings skew towards wide receivers, And now we're seeing these best Ball drafts go even more wide receiver heavy than I typically go, which is wild. Now, I do think that there is value in zigging when others are zagging when the platform calls for it. So in Bestball drafts, for instance, not always going as wide receiver heavy as the room says to or what ADP says to. But I would bet that your home league drafts are going to stay fairly normal, are the same as we see each year, because if you look at other platforms and other rankings, running backs are still being pushed up. Those bigger platforms like ESPN will still be dictating that people get running backs, and I think that fantasy analysts should point that out when declaring that drafts are simply wide receiver heavy. Now, they might lean that way a little bit more, but it's probably gonna still be more or less the same. This as questions from Patreon and says what's your favorite under the radar stack and best ball? Right now, Man, there's a lot of stacks that I like. I'm stacking a lot of different teams, But clearly, if it's under the radar, then we're talking about lower tiered players in general, right Like, this isn't Jared Goff and Amenas Saint Brown or Deshaun Watson and Elijah Moore and Amari Cooper or Geno Smith and the Seattle guys. I'm into those stacks. For the record, we're talking lower key here. I do think that Kenny Pickett is interesting this year to make a second year leap, so I've paired him with the Steelers pass catchers. Russell Wilson himself is in someone I'm necessarily higher or lower on versus the Mark, but there's an outcome where it gets back to his old form a Sean Payton. And while I like Jerry Judy, I also like stacking him with Greg Dolcic. Dulcich is my favorite late round tight end this year. If I get stuck with a forty nine Ers pass catcher, I'm not drafting a ton of Debo and Kittle, but I don't mind Ayyuk where he goes. But if I have one of them, I think Brock Purty is a huge value right now. It sounds good for him starting this season, and the fact that the market has so many forty nine Ers pass catchers rank so high that's a good sign for their potential as an offense. Now, Purty doesn't bring that much juice with his legs, but he's still undervalued. And then Sam Howe is kind of interesting as well. I don't mind going how with someone like Johan Dotson or Terry McLaurin or both. Obviously, now there's a chance he doesn't even play the whole season as starter. But how has a mobility backbone, given what he did at Carolina in college, and then last year in his lone start he ran the ball five times for thirty five yards in a score, So I think it's a pretty intriguing late round dart. And he has stackable wide receivers too. I think we're just assuming as a market, as a consensus that Washington's offense is going to be bad, which it very well might be, but with a new coordinator in there, and with how being such an unknown, I like throwing those types of darts and tournaments. And also I can't lie. I've got Jordan love stacks too. He's an easy guy to stack when you need a late round stack, because Romeo Dobbs and Jaden Reid go late with him. The nice questions from twitters from at Underscore, p Underscore, w Underscore it says, Miles Sanders talk to me, am I alone, thinking he is in a great sitch to produce this year. Maybe not top five or even top eight or ten level, but extremely solid RB twelve to sixteen range. Yet ADP is RB twenty plus. Is the writing not on the wall here with running back depth plus contract plus coaching equals smash city. I sort of think your question itself is answering this for me, but not in the way that you'd think. If you look at this question, or you re listen to this question, you'll notice that everything in the question had to do with situation. None of it had to do with Miles Sanders himself. It was all situation based. Historically, this is the kind of running back that ends up burning us. Not to say it's a lock for Miles Sanders, I'm not saying that he's absolutely gonna burn you. I'm saying that running backs in the dead zone or even the middle rounds, when you're making an argument about situation and not the player himself, that's bad news. That's why these guys get pushed up and end up having inflated ADPs, and then they don't meet ADP expectation or they don't far exceed it. At least here's my take. I think Sanders is fine. He is the definition of fine. If you want a running back who's gonna be drafted at like RB twenty, who can maybe get to RB fifteen or something, sand fine, You even mentioned that in your question. But drafting an RB two to finish as an RB two does not do it for me. That's not difference making production. That's not gonna win me a fantasy title. Process wise, Sanders is not the kind of guy that I usually go for. I'd rather take Rashad White than Miles Sanders straight up, and I can get White a good bit later. Sanders hasn't been much of a pass catcher throughout his career. He's hit a double digit percentage targets here per game in two of four seasons. Okay, that's fine, but since his rookie season, his yards per round run rates have been abysmal. They've been really bad, well below average. He's also playing with a rookie quarterback. We haven't seen a ton of breakouts with rookie quarterbacks since twenty eleven, and by breakouts, I mean players far exceeding ADP expectation. You can listen to episode seven hundred and sixty eight for more on that. For many reasons the Panthers aren't expected to be great offensively this year. As I talked about earlier this week, teams with pass catchers and quarterbacks who have good ADPs they tend to do better in offensive touchdowns per game than the alternative. The Panthers have zero pass catchers or quarterbacks with high ADPs this year, which is not surprising because they have a rookie quarterback. So the Panthers probably won't be that great offensively unless Bryce Young really is the next Drew Brees. And Sanders has been a rough pass catcher efficiency wise, And this doesn't seem to be talked about enough, but Doce Staley. Yes, he has this connection with Miles Sanders when he coached in Philadelphia, but Staley has openly talked about committee backfields. Just this offseason, when he joined Carolina, he was quoted as saying that he believes in using three running backs because playing the running back position is like being in a quote car wreck. You may look at that depth chart and you see no one else, but they can still sprinkle in Chewba Hubbard and Raheem Blackshear and Blacksheer in particular could still receiving work, which would really limit Sanders upside. Again, this is more of a how I play thing than anything else. This is how I approach fantasy football. You, of course want to pick players who can outperform ADP. I just don't know if Sanders is set up to do that by a big enough gap to warrant drafting him. I'd rather just drop a little bit and get other running backs in that range, like a Rashad White. His situation may look okay, Miles Sanders' situation does not look horrible, but there are still a lot of red flaps. The last question this week is from Patreon. It's from Scott. It says, can you talk a bit about the dynasty projection difference between Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson. Most other ranks have Wilson significantly higher, So I'm curious about the difference in your process and how close they are. Love your work and glad to be a new patron. So yeah, I'm assuming when you say most other ranks have Wilson significantly higher, you don't mean my Wilson ranking itself. You mean that most ranks have Wilson significantly higher than Chris. Because I've got Wilson as the sixth overall player in single quarterback Dynasty right now, and I have a Lave as the seventh, Whereas if you look at a place like Keep Trade Cut, Wilson is five, but a Lave is eleven over on DLF. Wilson was eight in June's ADP, A Lave was thirteenth. So this is really about my gap between Wilson and a Lave, which there is no gap. They're back to back in my rankings. I'm basically at market value with Wilson and then I'm high on Chris A. Lave. Now, I do prefer Wilson clearly because I think his short term output is more attractive. With Aaron Rodgers there, that's really the key difference for me. Both players, though, to me, are stud cornerstones. The reason I have a Lave so close to Wilson is because he was arguably better than Garrett Wilson last year. I had no problem with Wilson winning offensive Rookie of the Year, but what was really wild to me was that Chris A. Lave wasn't even close to Wilson from like mid October on where and Rookie of the year odds. People just completely forgot about a Lave. It was all about Garrett Wilson. Meanwhile, yards per game A Lave had more touchdowns per game. They both had four total touchdowns, but Garrett Wilson played more games. Yards per target a Lave beat Wilson by one point twenty six yards per reception. A Lave was better by one point two yards per route run. A Lave was at two point four, Wilson at one point eighty five. Target share per game A Lave wins that yards per team pass attempt A Lave targets per route run a Lave. This isn't to say that a Lave is a better player no matter what than Garrett Wilson, or that he'll end up being better when the careers are over. It's to say that we should be giving Chris A Lave a lot more love than we're currently giving him as a player. I'm not talking twenty twenty three. I'm just saying as a player, as a dynasty asset, Garrett Wilson is very, very very good, But so is Chris A Lave. So I'm at market value with Garrett Wilson, maybe even a little bit above. I'm just way ahead with Chris A Lave because I think that he's special too. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If yet subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't for to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'm gonna be away next week, but I'll still have two episodes for you, so i'll be back in your ears. Then enjoy your weekend