777: The Impact of RPOs

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host jayj Zacher. Jake Zachers, what's up everyone, It's jj zachar Esen in this episode seven hundred and seventy seven of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before I get going with today's show, remember to check out the Late Round Draft Guide. It's out there, it's published, and it could be yours for twenty four to ninety nine. The guide features a ton of strategy talk for this year's fantasy football season. You'll learn ways of spot, breakouts and bust and I give my favorite players to target and avoid this season, and my top two hundred rankings are part of that too. It's a two hundred page document that's littered with information, and some of that information like the players a target and avoid, and the rankings and the tiers. They're going to be updated weekly through the end of draft season or through August. You'll get updated guides every single week to your email inbox. Go check it out right now lateround dot com. So a couple of weeks ago, I went on the Beyond the Box Score show at Jacob gibbson, Adam Mazer and Ben Gretch was a guest with me on the episode. We were talking about projections, not so much specific projections for players, but we got more into the pros and cons of projections themselves, the kind of stuff that I've talked about on the show through the years. We ended up going in a couple of different directions with our conversation, and one of those directions was something that was brought up by Gretch. He was talking about RPOs or run pass options, plays where there's a choice to run the ball or pass it, and he was referencing a sub Stack article that he had written at the beginning of June on the topic. Basically, Gretch started noticing a trend with RPO heavy offenses that in those offenses, teams seem to really focus their targets just a handful of players as opposed to spreading the ball out. This is a piece of what he wrote in that article. He said, quote the point I'm trying to make gooes like this. RPOs more or less take away the reading of a set of routes in favor of design receiver who will get the target only if the play is a pass, because it will otherwise just be a handoff that receiver is predetermined by the play design, because remember, the pass has to come out quickly if it's going to be thrown at all. Now, before I go any further here, I want to give Gretch a huge shout out. He's a great dude, he's a great analyst, and without his thinking on this topic, this podcast episode wouldn't exist. If you're interested in deeper thinking fantasy football content, which I'm sure a lot of you are, check out his stuff over on bengretch dot substack dot com. Now, I had this epiphany when I was doing that show with Gretch and while he was talking about this RPO stuff. If you recall, mobile quarterbacks are generally bad for their pass catchers in fantasy football. I talked about that on episode seven hundred and sixty six. The thing is, though, when I dug into how the market sort of reacts to mobile quarterbacks, pass catchers don't do substantially worse versus their ADP expectation pass catchers with mobile quarterbacks, meaning the fantasy football market seems to do a good job of adjusting for it. For the most part, there are pockets of your draft where it could be advantageous to fade a wide receiver with a mobile quarterback, but overall, a wide receiver with a rookie quarterback. That's a much bigger deal when it comes to rookie quarterbacks. People don't factor that in enough. But why is that? Why do mobile quarterbacks seem to not matter as much? Team Wide receivers with mobile quarterbacks absolutely see lower fantasy point totals. Objectively, they usually rank below average and fantasy points scored. But then why does that not seem to show up when comparing to ADP expectation? Why are those players not overvalued by the market each season? And I think RPOs may have something to do with it. Now, we don't have a long history of RPO data, at least I don't. I looked at Pro Football Reference and found that their numbers date back to twenty nineteen. So that's what we're working with here. We're working with the last four years worth of data. I dug into this data a little bit and I found some interesting stuff. I sent an email newsletter out about some of the findings a couple of weeks ago, but I want to dig more into this topic on today's show. Now, clearly, with an RPO, there are two end results a run or a pass. Looking strictly at teams who ended up passing the most on an RPO might not be helpful because that could simply skew towards teams who ran the most passing place. For instance, in twenty twenty two, we know Chicago barely through the ball. They finished the season with sixty eight pass attempts that came from RPO place that ranked eighth in the NFL. When you look at the percentage of pass attempts that were from RPOs, that number jumps to fourth. So I'll be focusing on that number on today's show, which is OURPO pass rate. It's the number of pass attempts that came from RPOs divided by the total number of pass attempts that a team had. Now, the reason to make the connection between mobile quarterbacks and RPOs is because teams with mobile quarterbacks tend to run more RPOs than teams without mobile quarterbacks. The correlation between RPO pass rate and quarterback rush attempts during this four year period is roughly forty percent. That's a pretty strong correlation, a pretty strong r squared. When we're talking football, The more mobile team's quarterbacks have been the more RPOs they've typically run. You don't need the most mobile quarterback in the world to run an RPO, but teams with these athletic and mobile quarterbacks tend to run them at a higher rate. Now, remember, when a quarterback runs an RPO, he's not going through his standard progressions. Offensive linemen are blocking as if it's a run, so quarterback doesn't have all the time in the world to look at which wide receiver is open. As Gretch says, it's more of a design target. Now, if this is true, then we'd probably see RPO heavy teams with wide receivers with super high target chairs. Right, well, we kind of do. Again, we're working with just four years of data, so the samples here aren't massive, but there's some signal to all of this. I group teams up into RPO pass rate buckets. I looked at teams who had fifteen percent or more of their pass attempts come from RPO plays, than ten percent to fifteen percent, than five percent to ten percent, and then zero to five percent, So there are four groups. Hypothetically, if all this target related stuff were true, we'd expect the teams with a higher RPO pass rate to see players with higher target shairs, right, they'd be hyper focusing their targets to specific players because those throws are to designed receivers, and we generally see that. The fifteen percent plus group, so these are teams who have seen fifteen percent or more of their attempts come from RPO plays over the last four years. That group consists of fourteen teams. Again, sample sizes, they're not gigantic, but fifty percent of those teams ended up having two or more players with a twenty percent target share or higher. And for the record, twenty percent is totally arbitrary here, and this is measuring on a per game basis among players who played eight or more games. But what these results mean is that a high percentage of their targets were being focused to just two guys in an offense. When you then move to the group that had ten to fifteen percent of their pass attempts stem from RPOs, that fifty percent rate drops to thirty seven percent. The next group it was thirty two percent, and then the final group, which is zero percent to five percent of pass attempts coming from RPOs, that was twenty five percent. So you're going from fifty percent to thirty seven percent to thirty two percent to twenty five percent. There might be something here. Now, this data doesn't necessarily tell us how teams performed with mobile quarterbacks. There's a correlation between RPO pass rate and quarterback rushes, yes, but teams with high RPO pass rates don't necessarily have super mobile quarterbacks. Let's look strictly at teams with mobile quarterbacks, and let's split those teams up by the teams who ran a lot of RPOs and the teams who didn't. We'll split them up by teams who had an RPO pass rate above ten percent and those mobile quarterback teams with an RPO pass rate below that mark. I'm defining teams with a mobile quarterback as ones who ran the ball eighty or more times with their quarterbacks since twenty nineteen, so eighty plus rush attemps by their quarterback. If they had eighty or more, then they had a mobile quarterback. So I'm taking all of those teams, and then I'm splitting them up into two groups, the mobile quarterback teams who had an RPO pass rate above ten percent and then below ten percent. Now of the mobile quarterback teams with an RPO pass rate above ten percent, forty four percent of them saw multiple pass catchers with a twenty percent target share. That number was cut in half when focused on the mobile quarterback teams who had low RPO pass rates during this time period. Of the teams with eighty or more quarterback rush attempts who then ranked in the bottom half of the league in RPO pass rate, not a single one of them had multiple pass catchers with a twenty percent target chair. Not one. Not to be fair, there were only six of those teams, but three of those six didn't even have one player who had a twenty percent target chair. Meanwhile, when you look at the mobile quarterback teams who also ranked in the top half of the league in RPO pass rate, those numbers are completely different. Only one of the twenty one teams in this category failed to have a single player with a twenty percent target chair, and ten of the twenty one had multiple players with a twenty percent target chair. Let me just spell out with a memes. Teams with mobile quarterbacks who run few RPOs tend to not hyper focus their targets. Teams with mobile quarterbacks who do run RPOs tend to focus their targets on one or two players. This could explain the market related things that we're seeing with mobile quarterbacks. It's not that those mobile quarterback teams are performing well in fantasy points scored. The wide receivers on those teams all t together. They're not performing exceptionally well. It's that the top pass catchers on those mobile quarterback teams are usually seeing a high target share. I actually tested this theory. I looked at all of our teams since twenty nineteen who had eighty or more quarterback rush attempts, and I found the teams who had a wide receiver draft in the top one hundred overall in fantasy drafts. I started with twenty seven teams, but not all of those teams had a top one hundred wide receiver. Twenty two of them did. Some of those twenty two teams had multiple early round wide receivers, but I was curious to see how many of these players exceeded ADP expectation. How many top one hundred wide receivers with mobile quarterbacks outperform their draft slot. Turns out, eighteen of the twenty nine actually exceeded ADP expectation. They were better than where ADP had them, which is a better than average hit rate. Again, the market is accounting for this. Now, that means that eleven hyde receivers failed to exceed that expectation. And when you look at those eleven, a disproportionate amount of them came from teams that didn't run a lot of RPO pass plays. Let me put it this way, five teams who had mobile quarterbacks and who ranked outside the top half the league and RPO pass rate had a wide receiver drafted in the top one hundred fantasy drafts. Just to give you an example, in twenty twenty, the Patriots ran the ball at their quarterbacks more than eighty times. That's when they had Cam Newton. New England also had one wide receiver rank in the top one hundred and eightp That was Julian Edelman, who ended up playing just six games that year. The Patriots also ranked in the bottom half of the league and RPO pass rate. They didn't run a ton of RPOs and Edelman also didn't exceed his ADP expectation. And for the record, this is on a per game basis. You can't just blame injury. We had five of those instances since twenty nineteen, and only one of the wide receivers on those teams actually out per formed expectation. Yes, I understand small sample sizes. I'm not saying all this as a total fact. What I am saying is that there seems to be some signal here that perhaps this mobile quarterback stuff that I've been talking about doesn't apply to teams who have RPO heavy offenses. It applies more to the teams who don't. And this goes beyond wide receiver too. Remember how mobile quarterbacks tend to lead offenses that have lower running back target chairs. Well, there's a little bit of a correlation between running back target chair and RPO pass rate. The higher percent of passes coming from RPO plays, the lower the running back target chair. In other words, RPO heavy teams might be bad for running back volume, not just mobile quarterback teams. Now, this is all good and fun, but the question would then be, how do we know which teams are going to be RPO heavy in an upcoming season. Well, you can obviously do some research. Shane Steichen is the Colt's head coach now, after coaching the Eagles offense in twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two. Over the last two years, the Eagles have ranked first and second and percentage of pass attempts that came from RPOs, and the Colts just drafted Anthony Richardson. Chances are they're gonna be an RPO heavy team, and that could be the thing that saves Michael Pittman. He could end up seeing a super high target share, or at least he's gonna maintain the target share that he's been seeing over the last couple of years, which is a good thing. But here's the other piece to this. There's a pretty strong correlation between RPO pass rate rank one year and how that translates to the next year. The r squared is forty three percent. So if a team ranked high in RPO pass rate one season, especially if the coaching staff and the personnel is nearly identical, then you'd probably expect that team to run a lot of RPO passes the next season. That's good news for someone like DJ Moore because the Bears were fourth in RPO pass rate last year, and it might mean that we don't see this huge emergence from a New York Giants pass catcher. Last year. The Giants were a team with a mobile quarterback who ranked seventeenth in RPO pass rate, and you know who ranked first last year in RPO pass rate, the Falcons. That's a reason to be more bullish on Drake London and Kyle Pitts that they can truly see that crazy target share ceiling. Now, this is all very new. There's not enough data to really make super strong conclusions, but I do think that the data all seems logical when you think about what an RPO is. It's not easy to target a running back in an RPO play. It's not easy for the quarterback to have multiple reads. So what does that mean. It means a lower target share to running backs and a higher target share for one or two guys in one of those offenses. That's all logical, But do keep in mind pass plays on RPOs aren't happening at some fifty percent sixty percent rate. The top team last year, Atlanta, saw twenty nine percent of their pass attempts come from RPO plays. That means seventy percent of their past attempts over seventy percent, we're not RPOs. That's the majority of their attempts. This is simply a small edge, but it's an edge that may explain why we see what we see in the market with wide receivers who play with mobile quarterbacks, and to me, that's pretty cool. 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, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'm away this week, but I've got a special mailbag episode for you on Friday, so i'll be back in your ears then