475: Mailbag 1/22/21

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha JJ zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharesen, the editor in chief at Fandel and at Number five dot com, in this episode four hundred and seventy five of the Late Round podcast the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast Network. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting into the questions this week, I want to let you guys know that the FanDuel Podcast Network Listener League it's back. This week. Enter the Rake free weekly NFL contest made exclusively for you the listener for just five dollars and compete for your share of the fifteen hundred dollars prize pool, including a one hundred and fifty dollars first place prize. To enter, visit fandel dot com Slash League Slash Listener League. Eligibility restrictions apply. The first question this week is an email. It says, hey, JJ, huge fan of your work, Thanks for all the analysis and entertainment. Thanks for those of us who play in lead legues with waiver wire priorities instead of free agent auction budget money. How does starting off the year with a high waiver priority impact the way you think about roster construction. For example, if you have the number one waiver priority after your draft, would you feel more compelled to trade a handful of usable starters for a single stud knowing that you could pick up a backup running back off waivers when a starter inevitably gets banged up in the first few weeks. Think Mike Davis, Giovanni, Bernard, Boston Scott from last year. Thanks Skyler. Well, First, keep in mind that it's not automatic that we're going to see some league winning player off the waiver wire, or I should say it's not automatic that you're then going to choose that league winning player. For every Mike Davis, there are ten not Mike Davis's waiver wire players in most leagues are not very good. Even the players that you mentioned in this question, like Giovanni, Bernard and Boston Scott, they weren't that good. Bernard didn't give you a usable week until week six, and you weren't even starting him then, and he had plenty of duds in between some big games. Boston Scott was actually even worse. He had a top twelve performance once in twenty twenty. I think a lot of times in fantasy football. We look at things in hindsight and we think that we'd easily be able to capture hindsight takeaways when we're actually making decisions. What I mean by that is we see Mike Davis and we say, oh, wow, I could have just had Mike Davis instead of going hard after an RB two, I would have been fine with Mike Davis. And that's true, you could have been fine. But you also could have gone hard after other players and not gotten Mike Davis. I mean, even the week that Mike Davis was a big waiver wire ad. It's not like people were sitting there saying, blow your budget on Davis. You've got to absolutely get Mike Davis. So I think what's happening here is you may be overreacting our ability to predict who's going to be usable off the waiver wire in a given week, even when an injury occurs. I did a study on running back handcuffs a few years ago that actually showed that when a handcuff finally had their opportunity, they still didn't really produce. They were typically just RB three's. Now some of them are going to hit, yes, but the majority of them are not. And banking on that. That's tough. Now from the standpoint of in season roster management and who you sort of hold on your roster in a given week, having that top priority could mean that, let's say you get a defense for the following week before heading into a slate of games, versus getting a running back handcuff. Like, if you have a roster spot available and you want to fill it, you could look for a defense in the next week to stream as opposed to a random handcuff. That way, you know that you can still get that handcuff if the low percentage injury occurs. Because you have the top priority, that's fine, and trading bench assets to improve your starting roster that's more than fine. I just wouldn't be drastically changing my roster construction because of that waiver claim spot because once you use it, it's gone, and the chance of really hitting on a player after using that claim it's not as high as you probably think. The next question is also an email. It says, hey, Jay, first off, love the show. You helped me take second for the fourth time in nine years and for the second year in a row. And then it says, hey, it's money at least yeah, my question is going to bother me all off season. We are a two player keeper league, and the only caveat is your two keepers can't play the same position. My first keeper is Travis Kelce. Not much to think about there, or I think I have a serious debate is which running back do I keep? Sakuon Barkley or Nick Chubb. I think I'm overthinking this because of Barkley's injury is the last two years. Would love and appreciate your insight and knowledge. Thank you, Casey. So, first off, I've gotten a lot of keeper questions, and I gotta say, if you don't have to make a decision right now, at least let the off season play out a little bit. And remember to listen back to episode three hundred and ninety one where I talk about keeper league strategy. But since this is a pretty straightforward question that's basically asking would you rather have Saquon Barkley next year or Nick Chubb next year? My answer is Saquon Barkley. Nick Chubb might honestly be the best runner in football, but he doesn't have nearly the pass catching ceiling that Saquan has. Chubb hasn't seen a double digit percentage target share in his career yet. And that's even if you look at his pro rated numbers. Saquon gets that high of a target shair in his sleep when he's healthy. As I alluded to earlier this week, Chubb did outperform touchdown expectation this year, so you've got some regression working against him as well. It's not that I'm mind Chubb. I don't mind Chub at all. I think he's really good. I just would assume that Barkley's going to have a higher ADP, and for good reason. The receiving component to his game makes him an elite asset when he's healthy. This last question says, can DFS strategies help out in season long leagues with tons of parody? Could stacking, double stacking, et cetera lead to even higher point ceilings? What about streaming correlated players slash defenses. Yeah, they can lead to higher point ceilings. It's not like you're scoring points in a different way in season long than you are in DFS. The same concepts apply. So if you have a quarterback and you have his wide receiver, and that wide receiver scores a touchdown, you're getting points for the quarterback too. The difference is that it's obviously a lot easier to do in DFS, and it's clearly more applicable too. In DFS, you've got the whole player pole to choose from each and every week, and you can base your decision off of that week's game. In season long, you have to ensure that you've got the right stack just naturally through the draft or through a trade. And then in DFS you're usually running highly correlated lineups and tournaments to capture the high side of the variants. In season long, you may not have to go that deep because it's typically a head to head environment. Now that being said, established the runs. Mike Leoni did a really great article on this last offseason. One of the findings is that it can be advantageous to stack during your draft because when a quarterback hits, his piece is hit as well, and by pieces, I mean pass catchers. If your goal is a high ceiling, then of course the same strategies can be utilized. In season long. You're scoring points in the exact same way, even if your player poll in the structure of the game is a little bit different. This last question, says hi JJ Love the show. Thanks. Do you expect Zeke to return to form next season? From a quarterback, offensive line and health perspective, his situation should be the same or better across the board than it was through Week five, at which time he was the RB three. Overall. It seems like people were ignoring a lot of key factors, his hamstring injury affecting his performance, the loss of Zach Martin when evaluating the poor finish to his season. Thanks Jason and Wisconsin. I couldn't agree with his more. I shouldn't say I'm surprised by how people were viewing him in redrafting dynasty, but like you said, he was totally fine when things were optimal in that offense. This year. He was averaging over twenty two PPR points per game when Dak Prescott was healthy, and that was on a little over seventy percent of the team's running back carries and a thirteen and a half percent target share. And look, I like Tony Pollard, I think he's a good running back, but Zeke wasn't even that bad this year in comparison to Tony Pollard. Elliott actually finished with a better success rate than Pollard did, and his yards per Carrey versus his teammates yards per carry. It was in line with what happened in BOUTH twenty nineteen and twenty seventeen. So yes, all of this combined, I'm almost definitely going to get Ezekiel Elliott in drafts in August. This asked questions is from at D mend two. As it stands right now, how are you feeling about Miles Sanders and Joe Mixon next year? So I tweeted this when Doug Peterson was fired, but I don't really think his firing affects Miles Sanders either way. This past year, Sanders had the eighth highest running back rush share per game in the NFL, and he had a high target share too, and of course that's when he was active. I think there's this idea that Miles Sanders wasn't getting a full workhorse workload this season, when that was really more driven by the Eagles being bad than anything else. They couldn't just force feed him the ball because they were trailing. His peripherals were more than fine. Now, will the Eagles be better with a different coaching staff? That's the hope, right That's why they fired Doug Peterson, and I definitely believe in Sanders as a talent, so I would feel fine about Miles Sanders moving forward. I just don't think the logic for liking Sanders now should be tied to Doug Peterson. And then, regarding Joe Mixon, I'm sort of surprised by how easily people are forgetting what happened with Joe Mixon this season. The Bengals did start using him more as a receiver. He only played in six games, but his pro rated target share was twelve point three percent this year in sixteen games. Last year's target share was seven point six percent. With the hopes of a better offensive line and hopefully, hopefully a healthy Joe Burrow, mixing could be a strong value next season. This last questions from at Jazaris why has auction drafting not become more popular, especially in the pro slash industry. Realm auction waivers are consistently cited as part of weekly waiver columns, but it seems that auction drafting has remained relatively flat. What gives Well, keep in mind, whatever the largest number of people do, that's what what content is going to be focused around. If everyone's playing snake draft leagues, we're gonna write and talk about snake draft leagues. So to your question about why auction isn't the focus in the industry, it's because content is going to be geared towards the most common league, and that's a snake draft. But like I personally actually do just as many auction drafts every year as they do snake drafts. It's just not smart for me to only do content around auction drafts, since it won't be worthwhile to a large portion of my audience. I also think there are two reasons they haven't caught on the way that some want them to. And look, I'm a huge, huge auction draft fan. I think they're better than snake drafts. But number one, they take a lot of time to do, and it's more of an investment, not just in time, but in knowing the values of each player. You're not just forced to pick. But the second reason is that it doesn't mimic the NFL as much. I think a lot of people enjoy snake drafts because it has the NFL draft feel to it. You don't get that in an auction. The last question this week is from at' at d White. How large of a role do you envision Miles Gaskin having next season. Look, I mean, gas can go in a lot of different directions. One of the issues for him is that Miami has a lot of early round draft picks, and those early round picks would be what really derails him from seeing a lot of volume, and in turn, it would derail him from being a high end fantasy asset. We know that all players in fantasy football need volume to be good, and even though if I were the Dolphins, I wouldn't be spending at running back, the fact is Gaskin wasn't highly sought after when he came out a couple of years ago, and it wouldn't be that hard to see a coaching staff not be all in on him as a workhorse because of his size. And then, in addition to all of that, the Dolphins will probably need a running back anyway. They found some success with guys last year, but the running back room doesn't have a ton of solid, reliable depth. That means they'd even be more likely to draft a running back this year, regardless of round. Again, this isn't my opinion of what I would do if I were running the Dolphins. It's just my opinion based on how I've seen teams run in the past and the type of running back they currently have on their team. Gaskin to me, if we look at the rest of his career, he's likely more of a part time player that might get a boost with an injury. That's just my guess. Of course, anything can change, especially at the running back position, because at the running back position, all it takes is a coaching staff who believes in a player for him to get a lot of work. That's going to do it. For today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round 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 hope you enjoy your weekend and I will talk to you next week.