868: Mailbag 3/8/24

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host, JJ zacherreathas j J Zacherreth. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode eight hundred and sixty eight of the Late Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Before we get into this week's mailbag questions, I've got some pretty cool news to share. There's a new official partner of the Late Round Fantasy Football Podcast, and that partner is Underdog Fantasy. As a lot of you know, Underdog is the easiest place to play fantasy sports. They've got fantasy football drafts live on their platform year round. It doesn't get much better than that. I'm sure you're wondering what this means for you the listener, and I can confidently say that the answer to that is only good things. I'm gonna be diving more into the best ball format this spring and summer, and I'll be sharing my experiences along the way, and that includes more episodes of this podcast. More to come on that, and then in season, we've got an opportunity to learn and get better with their pick'em game. I couldn't be more excited to partner up with Underdog Fantasy this year. Now If you're into all this and you want to go on this journey with me, make sure you're on Underdog Fantasy. Sign up with promo code Late Round when you're making an account, and when you do, they'll match your first deposit up to one hundred dollars. So head to Underdog Fantasy dot com or check out the app and sign up, and when you do, make sure to use promo code Late Round. I sincerely can't wait for what's to come. I hope you're as pumped as I am. Now let's get to some mailbag questions. The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from the Wasted Picks. It says, is it just draft Capital that has Zay Flowers ahead of Jadenreid? So I don't know if this is in reference to me having Zay Flowers ahead of Jaden Reid to my Dynasty rankings, or if it's in reference to the market having Zay Flowers head of Jaden Read. Either way, consensus has Flowers ahead of Read right now, So let's talk about it. You guys all know that I love me Jaden Reid. He was one of my favorites in last year's draft class. I liked him more than the masses did. So I don't want this at all to be taken as shade towards Reid. He's great as a lot of you know. I've got my year two model that looks at second year players and tries to predict how well they're going to do in year two and year three in their NFL career. It takes rookie season numbers alongside a player's prospect score, and there is still signal to that prospect score, and then it spits out a year two score. Zay Flowers has a better year two score than Jayden Reid. Reid beat Flowers last year in yards per route run, and he was better in PPR points per game two, but other metrics like first downs, yards per team, pass attempt, target share per game, they favored Flowers. And Flowers also entered the league with a prospect score that was about eight points higher than Reeds. That's out of one hundred. Flowers now has a year two score of ninety six point eight, Reid ninety four point two, and the grand scheme that's not this uber significant difference. If someone wants to go with Red over Flowers, I don't think that's egregious at all, but I do prefer flowers, even if it's slightly. One of the big things with Reid last year, and that worries me a little bit, is how his target share really fluctuated when more competition was added to that offense. I wrote about this in Reid's year two profile and the Prospect Guy, which, by the way, that Prospect Guy drops on March eleventh, and I'll probably be able to get it out to people Sunday night, so March tenth. But in Reid's year two profile I wrote the following quote. We saw Reid's usage in production dip when competition was added to the offense. For instance, during last year's regular season, when Christian Watson was sidelined, Reid averaged a target share per game of twenty one point six percent. When Watson was active, that number fell to just fourteen point six percent. His PBR points per game average went from sixteen point five without Watson to eleven point three with him. Now, I get it, Reid was a rookie, so that's not necessarily a surprise. But the Packers did do a really good job last year at finding value in the NFL draft, which includes Reid Dantavian Wicks, though he had a really impressive yards per route run rate. Two both tight ends look legit, and Christian Watson wasn't one hundred percent throughout the year. The Packers all of a sudden have pretty good weapons in that offense, and that means more distribution to other players. Now, Talent leads to opportunity, there's no doubt, but it's easier for a player to do well in Fantasy on the volume front when there's less competition. And look, the Ravens could go out and they could add another pass catcher to the mix. But number one, it's not there right now. Number two, we don't know how good that pass catcher is gonna be. Dantavian Wicks has a year two score of eighty six, that's not that bad. Christian Watson's was above ninety last year. We know there's a lot of talent potential in Green Bay, and we know that those guys are going to be there with Reed for at least the next two years. So again, I actually like both as Day Flowers and Jaden Reid, and I actually think that you could consider both of them targets right now. But I'm giving flowers the edge, though I think it's a little bit more of like a fifty five to forty five thing rather than a ninety to ten thing. This last questions from Twitter, it's from a handle that I cannot pronounce. It says, what's the reason nobody saw Kien Williams coming last year out of the blue to be the lead back day one? Assuming there is open portion of training camp for media and fans, And what's the lesson learned so we don't miss such moves going forward. I feel like the masses have totally forgotten about what happened with Kien Williams last year, and as we sit back and reflect, it's important to remember how we acted in the moment with the information that we had at that time, in this case, how we were acting in August of last year, before drafts when it came to this Rams backfield. Cam Akers was in that Rams backfield to start the year. The reason nobody saw Kien Williams coming to this degree was cam Akers. But make no mistake, people saw Kyan Williams playing a role in this offense. I even wrote about it in last year's Draft guide. This is one of the reasons I love having these guides because I can quickly reference how I was actually feeling in that moment. And in that guide, I had Acres as a player to avoid, and when I wrote him up as a player to avoid, I referenced Kien Williams, not as a standalone player to target. I wasn't shouting from the rooftops to get Kyrien Williams late in drafts, but in the moment, Kyen Williams was on my radar, and the radar are of many analysts and players. I said this about Acres quote. You could see that as a good thing, but I see it as probable regression. Since twenty eleven, we've had thirty five running back seasons minimum eight games played where the back hit an eighty four percent running back rush air per game rate. That's roughly three per season. Banking on Acres being one of those players this year doesn't seem wise. That's only emphasize by the fact that backup Kyen Williams has reportedly done very well in all phases during camp, and he could end up playing a receiving role on the team. Williams isn't the most explosive back in the world, but he did see a fifteen percent reception share during his best season at Notre Dame. He can play that role. So my thought going into the season was that Williams is going to sort of be a satellite back for the Rams. I had even called him out on the Week one sleeper show before he started producing. And I'm not saying this to be like, hey, look at me. I was right. The question that's being asked here is what's the reason nobody saw Kion Williams coming? And I'm trying to explain that people, including myself, did kind of see Kyon Williams coming. The difference is the degree in which it all happened. If the question is about Kyen Williams being the bell cow that he became, No, I don't think that that was a reasonable outcome for him last year from a projection standpoint, but things happened and helped him get to where he got to. Cam Akers was traded in Week one, even though Acres did see a lot of work more as the closer in that backfield, Williams saw forty and a half percent of the team's running back rushes. That was his lowest mark of the season by far. Acres was then inactive in Week two and week three, which gave Williams the backfield, and then cam Akers was traded. I do think the Rams would have started giving Williams more and more work regardless, because he deserved more and more work. But if there was nothing going on with Acres and he was just a capable body in that backfield, we probably wouldn't be sitting here today talking about Kyen Williams the exact same way. And that's not to take anything away from Williams. I've talked on this show this offseason about how Williams was actually very good in twenty twenty three, but being very good doesn't automatically mean arguably the best workload in the NFL outside of like Christian McCaffrey. The question here is saying that Kien Williams was the lead back day one, but he wasn't. He was in a committee and he worked his way to good playing time in week one after a good camp. Anyone following along with Rams beat writers knew that he had a good camp. Jordan rod Rieg from The Athletic in particular was talking about it a lot, and then after that Week one, his biggest backfield competition was inactive and then traded. That played a huge role in Williams becoming a bell cow. So the question is what can we do in the future to try to capture this sort of breakout. Our first and foremost say that there was nothing in William's profile to suggest that he would see this big of a workload in the NFL. He's undersized, he tested poorly, he even surrendered a little bit of ground game work in college. It's okay to say that his profile, the profile of Kien Williams, is an outlier, and that he number one found a team who was willing to give him a monster workload, and that number two he got better. The Kien Williams that I saw in year two in the NFL was a better place than the Kyron Williams that I saw at Notre Dame. So good don Williams for improving and clearly working on his craft. But I don't think that we should just throw our hands up and say he's an outlier. Like, yes, he's an outlier, but a good process can help you increase your probability of hitting on outliers. This is where I think market trends and taking a step back can really help the Rams backfield preseason was a relatively ambiguous backfield with a running back getting drafted in the dead zone. Those are the types of backfields that we should pay attention to in our drafts, which is what I did. I just took more of the middle ground and said that Williams is gonna hurt Acres as opposed to taking over the backfield himself. But it was at least the right kind of backfield to target for this type of thing to happen, which is why I wrote about it. There was at least something there for us to not have been so totally blindsided. And while I think Williams himself is an outlier as a player, the situation he was in that wasn't unique. We see ambiguous backfields get blown up all the time, so I don't think it's fair to say that this was completely out of nowhere. I think it's just one of those situations where no one saw a top five running back season based on the player, and no one should have seen a top five running back season, but everyone could have seen that backfield as a volatile one. When you're projecting fantasy football, we don't have to be exact to have been right about Kyan Williams this past year. You didn't have to project him to be a top five running back in fantasy. You just had to say that you thought that he'd play a big enough role to have some value. Because you can play this game all day long. You think people projected pukin Akua to have one of the best rookie wide receiver seasons ever. No, of course not. But Akua was drafted by a lot of fantasy managers. He was called out as a player to target in my draft guide, and a lot of draft guide readers benefited. They then just got lucky that he far exceeded anyone's expectation as a player, which is gonna happ happened sometimes, that's how fantasy football works. I think it's unfair to call out these situations as we didn't see them coming, because we don't see a lot of things coming in football. No one knew that CJ. Stroud would be this good, or that Raheem Moster would dominate, or that Dak Prescott would throw four more touchdown passes than any other quarterback last year. Now, the reason I'm being so particular with this question isn't because it's a bad one. It's a great one, it's a necessary one. I'm being so particular though, because the way you win in fantasy football it's to look beyond the singular outcome. Yes, Kyron Williams himself came out of nowhere and he dominated. We couldn't have seen him dominating to this level, but we still could have forecasted an unpredictable and volatile backfield. We see backfields like this one one with RB ones who are dead zone running backs. We see those types of backfields get blown up every single year. We then can take that information at a high level and start to dig in. Now, Kyen Williams was unless as a player to target for me this offseason. I recognized that he was going to play a role, but I didn't think that he'd have that much standalone value. You know who I thought might have some standalone value as an undersized back, Ty Chandler. He was a late round dart in a backfield with a questionable starter too. Chandler just didn't really hit until everyone dropped him, and Kyen Williams hit immediately. Understanding the ebbs and flows of these ambiguous backfields is the absolute top thing to remember when evaluating running backs in fantasy football. It's why I talk about it relentlessly every offseason. It can lead you to getting outliers. It can lead you to getting to someone like Kyen Williams. We may not be projecting these outlier seasons on an individual player level, we can still be ahead of our competition with them by understanding how backfields work in general. This es question is from at Andy Hingo. It says, combine in pre draft, how does this draft class stack up against previous draft classes? It feels like I should be holding on to my second round picks this year at running back. In my opinion, you have a pretty weak class. The depth isn't terrible, but there's no obvious high end talent. Trey Benson could end up being the RB one, like I talked about earlier this week, but he's got some concerning production marks. I don't think he's a full blown stud as a prospect. He could definitely become something, but he's not there. And like I said, I think Jonathan Brooks would be the consensus RB one had he never gotten hurt. I still have favorites in this running back class, but overall it's very weak. There's a chance that we don't see a single running back get a score of ninety in the ZAP model, which has never happened dating back to twenty eleven. Now, the tight end group has a stud and then some players who could be reasonable options. Tight End is always a crapshoot, but I can confidently say that this year's class is nowhere near last year's. And then there's wide receiver. This wide receiver class is being touted as a very very good one, and I've gotten back and forth on how I feel about that. Here's where I've landed. I sent a newsletter out about this the other day. You can sign up for the newsletter for free, by the way, just go to Late Round dot com click newsletter. But in that newsletter, I talked about this wide receiver class being potentially overrated. Right now, over on NFL mock Draft database dot com, there are fifteen wide receivers projected to get drafted in the first two rounds. The high that we've seen since twenty eleven is thirteen wide receivers getting drafted in the first two rounds. That's happened three times now. As you guys know, I now have a metric called breakout score at wide receiver. It measures age adjusted production within the yards per team pass attempt metric. In that newsletter, I looked at the average and median breakout scores by class since twenty eleven, and I look specifically at the first two rounds of wide receivers selected. If the fifteen wide receivers projected to go in round one in round two end up going in round one in round two, then they'll produce the worst median breakout score since twenty eleven. Their average is a little bit better than what we saw in twenty thirteen when Taevon Austin, DeAndre Hopkins, Cordero Patterson, Justin Hunter, Aaron Dobson, and Robert Woods went in rounds one and two. The thing is, because there are so many wideouts that could go this high, we're bound to get hits from players who have lower breakout scores. It's not like breakout score is the only thing that goes into the ZAP model. So I think it could be a year to trade back. Once you get past the obvious elite players in the class, increase your odds of hitting on. These guys get a lot of picks as opposed to higher end ones. I think it's a wide receiver class with good talent after the top three or so wide receivers are off the board, because there is elite talent in this class, but there's a lot of those players. A lot of those just good players, whether you're talking Lad McConkey Rookie, piersoll Ady Mitchell. There are just a lot of good profiles, but not great profiles analytically at least, but some of them will hit, So I'd want to have a lot of shots at it rather than getting one wide out at the top of that tier, So hopefully that helps. This last question is from at Lim Lenning. It says, how does Roma Dunzay's profile change if he was in early declare without his first season during COVID. He's the same age as Marvin Harrison Junior and basically all the rest not named neighbors Worthy and Keyon. So I was wondering how much of a hit his profile gets. Yeah, so it's not that much of a hit. His score in the ZAP model is currently ninety five point seven. If he was an early Declare wide receiver, his score would be ninety six point two. The thing about making statements about early declare status is that you still have to keep in mind when these players saw their big productive seasons. With the Dunsay, he had nice progression year over year. He saw good improvement every year, which is something that you always want to say. But his best season in yards per team pass attempt was by far in twenty twenty three. We can't make the assumption that he would have performed just as well had he declared early because his most productive season came when he was a senior. But overall, A Donzay's score wouldn't be dramatically different if he was an early declare. He's a very good prospect regardless. The last question this week is from at Big Fence Fantasy. It says, hey, JJ, can you please explain in more detail why your tight end model and maybe running back I can't remember, takes speed into account, but wide receiver doesn't. You mentioned that it's because draft capital captures this for wide receiver, but wouldn't it also do the same for other positions? No, not necessarily. The first thing to remember with this is that teams are trying to solve something different than what I'm trying to solve. Tight End is a great example of this, tight ends do a lot of different things on a football field. They're asked to do more blocking than a wide receiver, would they run fewer routes as a result. So the likely answer at tight end and why speed score in athleticism matters more at that position, It's likely because teams aren't only looking for their tight ends to be receivers when they draft them. But we are as fantasy managers. We want players who are first and foremost pass catchers. It helps when they can block well. Don't get me wrong, but that's probably weighted more by a front office, which means we get weighted more in draft capital. So athleticism and how well a player can get down the field that's probably weighted less than in draft capital at tight end. Now at running back you might see the same thing, to be honest, but speed score isn't as big of a factor in the running back model as it is a tight end. As I said earlier this week, it only matters at the extremes. So maybe that means that there's a chance that teams just aren't valuing weight adjusted straight line speed enough when it's really really good. Like with Isaiah Pacheco, a couple of years ago, or when it's really really bad, like when smaller running backs are slow. Why that's the case, I can't really answer, because I'm not in a front off. But it could be that they're concerned about other things that running backs do, like pass catching and blocking. But another point to make here is that running backs don't get drafted early like wide receivers do. We may only see a couple of Day two running backs this year and none on Day one, but there are gonna be a ton of wide receivers. That means that a lot of these running back profiles are being pushed to round three and into Day three, and when you get to that point, the difference in draft capital becomes less important. There's not a dramatic difference between a Round four player and a round five running back, and there's a huge difference between a Round one running back and a round two to one. So because so many running backs are being pushed down draft boards, draft capital is just not meaning as much of them in the model, which then leads to something like speed score getting a little bit more signal at wide receiver, though you don't have that problem. Wide receiver is also a position where there's like positions within the position, there is some degree tight end and running back, but it's more glaring at wide receiver. A wide receiver can be effective without straight line speed, look at someone like Keenan Allen. It's more difficult for that to be the case at running back. So not only does draft capital play a different role at wide receiver because they're drafted earlier, but I think speed just in general matters more at other positions compared to wide receiver too. You don't want a player at the extremes, but obnoxiously slow wide receivers are rarely drafted early. You can say the same thing for running back, but like I said, we just don't see a ton of running backs getting drafted early in general. So there are so many layers to this, But that's why I think we see speed just not mattering as much at wide receiver. And let's be honest, I think that teams are just more enamored with fast wide receivers because the position is just more important to today's NFL. So they get excited when one's really really fast, pushing up that player's draft capital more and then in turn, draft capital is capturing that speed that's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you had subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found. It to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening this week everyone, I greatly greatly appreciate it. Enjoy your weekend. I'll talk to you next week