975: Mailbag - Travis Hunter's Analytical Profile, Rome Odunze's Outlook, and More

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha J J zacher what's up everyone, It's JJ Zachariesen in this episode nine and seventy five of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Before get into the mailbag questions this week, remember that the Late Round Prospect Guide is available for pre order right now and you should check it out. This year's guide is even more information than ever before. You get info on everything that goes in my prospect and Year two models. You get profiles for every running back and wide receiver at this year's combine. You get year two profiles for about forty second year running backs and wide receivers. And I've had what I'm calling categories of the model this year that help categorize players in the different buckets depending on their overall scores in both the ZAP model and the Year two model. I think you guys are really going to enjoy the Prospect Guide. You can order it right now now on Lateround dot com for fourteen ninety nine. On March tenth, when it launches, that price is going to go up by five bucks and then also even though the fantasy football season is over. It's not actually over over on Underdog right now. You can enter drafts for the twenty twenty five season. If you know prospects really well, if you have a good grasp on free agency, you can have an edge on your competition and win some of those contests. If you want to check it out, head to Underdog Fantasy dot com and sign up. When you do, use promo code late Round to get up to one thousand dollars in bonus credits. Again, that's Underdog Fantasy dot Com promo code Lateround. The first question this week is from Twitter. It's one that I'm gonna spend some time on, but it's from at Stevens zero one two eight. It says, what are you doing with Travis Hunter? So I'm just going to be completely upfront before I start this deep dive into my process and my general thoughts on Hunter as a player. I really have no idea. Hunter is actually a tough evaluation for me. I hinted at this on Tuesday's episode, but his analytical profile it's not nearly as good as I thought it was gonna be because there are some really really smart people like Matt Harmon over at reception perception saying that Travis Hunter is unbelievably legit at wide receiver, but the stuff that I look at analytically doesn't fully agree. Now, I think it's a good time to say that for the record, I don't look only at my prospect model and say this is definitely the way that it's gonna be. Someone like Matt, a friend of mine who I have on this show each year. He's brilliant at what he does. I really respect his work. So part of the reason the Hunter evaluation is really tough is because I respect his work that much and others throughout the space. But let's just look at this analytically. In the ZAP model, Hunter has a breakout score of sixty six point nine. Now that's not a death sentence, but it's also not nearly as high as the other high end light outs in this class, and it's not close to a lot of the wide receivers from last year's class. So the question is why is the breakout score so low. Well, breakout score is driven by receiving yards per team pass attempt, and that's age adjusted. Some players can increase their breakout score even with a later breakout as long as that later breakout is unbelievably good. A good example of that Trey Harris. When Travis Hunter was at Jackson State, we didn't get that much out of him as a freshman. Nothing there counted towards his breakout score. Then in twenty twenty three hit a receiving yards per team pass attempt rate of two point zero three when pro rated for games missed. That was bumped up to two point one to three when adjusted for strength of opponent. That's what breakout score does. So that two point one to three number is what's being used for his sophomore season. And then last year happened his monster season, his Heisman winning season, and last year his yards per team pass attempt was two point six y one. That dropped slightly to two point four to eight when adjusted for strength of opponent. Now you heard it earlier this week, but with stud wide receivers in the NFL, their average best season receiving yards per team pass attempt rates are over three. Plenty of them were below that market. I wouldn't call Hunter's number bad. I'm just saying that, versus the hype, his number in that category is not as good as I expected. Maybe my expectations were just too high. That's just how I feel now. A question I had was, well, maybe this is like a Puka and Akua a Lad Maconkie situation where they're receiving yards per team pass attempt rates they were kind of low, but their yards per route run numbers were really high. Nikua and Maconkee had awesome per route run numbers even though they're receiving yards per team pass attempt numbers weren't that strong. Basically, their teams weren't giving them enough routes. That's not really the case for Hunter. I mean, it kind of is. When you look and see that he was third in routes run by a decent margin for Colorado as a sophomore. He trailed Xavier Weaver and Jimmy Horn by almost two hundred routes run that year, and that will impact his receiving yards per team pass attep numbers. But his career yards per out run according to PFF, it's ninth best in this class. His best season yards per rout run, which came last year twenty ninth out of the forty nine wide receivers of this year's NFL combine among qualified FBS wide receivers. Last year, according to PFF, Hunter was eighty seventh and yards per route run against man forty second against zone. Now, going back to breakout score from twenty eleven to twenty twenty two, so we're giving wide receivers at least three years of NFL experience here. But from twenty eleven to twenty twenty two, we had forty three wide receivers get drafted in the first two rounds with a breakout score below eighty. Remember Hunter's at sixty six, so he's a decent bit below that mark. We've had some hits in there, Courtland, Sutton, Deebo, Samuel T. Higgins. Again, I'm not trying to sell Hunter as a bad prospect, but of those forty three, only eight of them gave us fourteen or more PPR points per game in one of their first three years in the league. That's a rate of eighteen point six percent. Wouldn't look at the alternate group of players with breakout scores above eighty That rises to almost forty five percent, and you might be thinking, okay, but Travis Hunter's group of players include some really low breakout scores, some really bad players. Like breakout scores of zero, and that's fair. Let's look at players with breakout scores of sixty to eighty who were drafted in the first two rounds. Their rate of getting to fourteen or more PPR points per game is twenty percent. That's still way lower than the other group. Now, another pushback would be but those guys don't have the same draft capital as Hunter. A lot of those players aren't first round talents, so of course they're not going to be as good. Okay, that's fair. Once again. In twenty eleven to twenty twenty two, we've only had four wide receivers get draft in the top sixteen the front half of the first round with breakout scores below eighty. Travis Hunter, for all intents and purposes, is going to be the fifth wide receiver added to this group. Those four wide receivers Taevon Austin, Kevin White, Mike Williams, and Henry Ruggs. Now I could go on and on about the different iterations here with breakout score. The point is to say that Travis Hunter's analytical profile it's lacking, or maybe lacking is not even the right word. Let's just say that it's not elite. Does that mean he can't or he won't be an elite player in the NFL. Of course not. We're playing a game of probability here. We're using historical evidence to help us play that game, and I do think that he had a disadvantage compared to a lot of the normal wide receiver prospects. He wasn't constantly playing as a full time wide receiver. That can obviously impact and age adjusted production profile. The model is not going to fully comprehend that. Trust me, guys, I'm not so strict with the data that I can't contextualize this in any way, shape or form. I understand that his numbers should probably get a subjective bump. My thing, though, is that there are going to be people who see Hunter as by far the best wide receiver in this class, like in a tier of his own. That's before we adjust for how much he might actually play the position. If I see Hunter more in the same tier as the other big three wide receivers in this class, then there's a real chance I'll be slightly lower compared to how others view him. Now it's still February. Some of you might be listening to this episode in March, but it's February. Right now, as I record this, I don't know exactly what the market is going to say about Travis Hunter and rookie drafts. What I do know is what the ZAP model is saying, and it has him as an elite producer, which is the highest tier for a wide receiver. But his scores below ten at McMillan, A Mecca, A Buca and Luther Burden. And I was surprised by that because not only is draft capital a factor here and has projected draft capital is insanely high, but there are so many smart people who are also really high on him. We have to take this day by day. My hope is that when he's drafted, whichever team picks them, they'll talk about their plans soon after the draft, and it's going to be on Night one, and hopefully we learn about some of those plans before we have to actually make an action in our rookie drafts. But that's where I'm at analytically with Hunter. I want to be totally transparent. It's a really really difficult evaluation for me, and I do think he's a solid prospect. I just don't think as a wide receiver he's as good as like a Malik Neighbors last year. This last question is from Twitter's from at Mike Underscore f Football. It says, what to make of Quentin Johnston's second year after a bad rookie season. Look, I think QJ probably exceeded expectation last year, but he also exceeded expectation from a Fantasy Points scored perspective. What I mean by that is he scored eight touchdowns last year. His expected touchdowns total according to PFF was closer to six. And yeah, he was definitely better year over year, there's no doubt, but we didn't see something spectacular from him. A one point seven to seven yards per route run rate with a good quarterback and a pretty efficient offense. That's good, but it's not great. And I think the fear with Johnson is that the Chargers go out and add somebody. He had a twenty one percent target chair per game rate last year. Lad mcconkeye showed that he's a very very good wide receiver. If they add another piece in that offense, what's that twenty one percent share gonna really look like? And of course we know that rookie season numbers are predictive. I don't have a year three model, but Johnson still probably wouldn't look that great in there because of how bad his rookie season was. I just highly, highly doubt that we ever see him be a player that we're confidently starting week in and week out as a depth piece, someone who can find your lineup when your rosters are larger. Sure, I think what we saw last year was QJ at least saving his dynasty value. He now can be usable moving forward, but I don't think we're gonna see him be a starter weekly in our leagues. This as quastions from at Ankar Diora. It says, is the college offensive system somehow incorporated into your model run pass ratio mobile versus pocket passer, et cetera. So I get questions like this all the time. Is your model accounting for this thing or this thing? And usually the answer to those questions is that it's not directly accounting for the specific thing that you wanted to account for. Now. Some of the reason for that is just data limitations, but some of it is because it's just not necessary. But I lay out everything that goes in the models in the Late Round Prospect Guide. But I also think when these questions pop into your head, think about what's being asked, and then layer on top what's going on in the model. Like this is a seking about pass rate or run to pass ratio. The model doesn't have an input that says this team was run heavy, this team was pass heavy. But you all know that receiving yards per team pass attempt is a huge input for the model for breakout score, that's per pass attempt. A team that has few pass attempts is probably gonna have a lot of rush attempts. But there's nothing raw going into the model here. I talked about that earlier this week with Nick Nash. He won the wide receiver Triple Crown, but his per attempt numbers weren't anything super special. That team threw the ball a lot. Or at running back, Caleb Johnson played for a team that was bottom five and pass attempts last year in college football, his receiving numbers will suffer, right Well, that's why I'm using reception share. These market share numbers are looking at the player within the context of his environment. Johnson's top season reception share, which came last year, it's totally fine even though he only caught twenty two passes a lot of times too. I like to push back on these questions, not because I want to be a jerk, but because I want to learn. We have questions like this all the time, but do we even know if the questions that we're asking matter, Like, for instance, what would a mobile quarterback versus a non mobile quarterback Due to my particular model, maybe that quarterback dump the ball off a little bit less, But these metrics are all still within the context of a player's team. If a mobile quarterback's offense has fewer pass attempts because he's a mobile quarterback, he's throwing it less for the entire team, not just one wide receiver or one running back on that team. Now, if the pushback is that it's not accounting for enough, that the model doesn't account for enough of the other things going on in football, I totally agree. I said it earlier this week. Receiving ours per team pass attempt or what's better breakout scorer. It's not going to capture every single nuance. That's impossible. The goal with these models is to get a good idea of who's good and who isn't good, and it's to get a good idea of when you during your rookie drafts should deviate from draft capital. And I've got to just say this too, why don't we ask these questions the people who only evaluate through film. And that's not shade to those people at all. Some of them are brilliant. They're doing brilliant things. But are they accounting for the style of offense? Are they accounting for strength of competition? The bottom line is that we're all out here just trying to find the best ways to do this, and there will always be better ways to do it. But if any of you want to know exactly what's going into these models, I talk about it openly and transparently in the guide. It's all out there. That's one of the great things about prospecting through data, in my opinion. The last question this week is from the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon is from Brofilio. It says, HIJJ would you be open to discussing Romadounza. There seems to be such a disparity in how he's being rated. I know you can't know what others are thinking, but what do you think is going on there? How do you view him as a target in twenty twenty five in both Redraft and Dynasty formats. So Dunday's another tough evaluation because the Bears were an absolute mess last year and he had good target competition for a rookie wide receiver. I can talk to you though about sort of the objective analytical profile, similar to what I did with Travis Hunter. The year two model has a Dunsay with a score of ninety four point seven, and all of these Year two scores are in the Prospect Guide. That score doesn't place a Dunza in the top category of players, which is the elite producers. Instead, he's in the weekly starter category, which is really good, but we generally see most cornerstone pieces in Dynasty in one tier up from that. I've got probability tables and charts in the guide to help you see kind of the odds that a player has in all these different categories. What brought a Dunzay's prospect score down? Because his prospect score was over ninety six. What brought it down was his year one just was not very effective. A one point one to eight yards per row run rate is pretty weak. His points per game average was not strong either. I said the following in a Dunzay's profile page in the guide quote, they are over one hundred and fifty wide receivers in the year two model who record a yards per round run rate south of one point three zero as a rookie, a number a good bit higher than Adunzay's one point one eight. To qualify here, the why not had to run at least fifty routes. Among those players, just six were able to give us a season a fifteen or more PEP Pier points per game, and either year two or year three DeAndre Hopkins, Davante Adams, Tyler Boyd, DJ Shark, Michael Gallup, and Nico Collins. Those aren't very good odds, but I think this is a situation where we move past the analytics a little bit and just look at context. He had competition, he played with a rookie quarterback, his offense was terrible, but his zapp score, his Prospects scorer, was really solid. Now, as I was researching at Dounsay, I just couldn't stop seeing DeAndre Hopkins. When you look at all of the year or two wide receivers who had a yards per route run rate below one point three, the one player who led all of them, and there were a ton of them. The player who led all of them in yards per team pass attempt was Roma Dounze. The player in second was DeAndre Hopkins. So we're shifting the denominator here from yards per route run so route run to team pass attempts. But the similarities don't stop there. Hopkins had a low yards per route run rate two it was one point two to eight as a rookie, a Dunza's again one point one to eight. Hopkins had eight point nine PPR points per game, A Dunza had eight point five. Hopkins generated a first down on six percent of his routes run a Dunza five point nine percent. All the while, Hopkins was a camp for a Dunze coming out of college for a lot of people, and he played alongside a stud wide receiver during his first year in Andre Johnson. Now, I'm not one to latch onto a single camp and say this is definitely the direction that this player is going to go in. It's just that the similarities with Hopkins are really striking. Adding the Ben Johnson impact, the fact that Caleb Williams was an elite prospect, I think there's plenty of reason to be optimistic about Romadunze despite his weaker production profile in year one. Now, I play fantasy football in an upside driven way oftentimes, and I have to recognize that there's a lot of variants here. I just shared some numbers that don't paint the best picture for Romadoonze, but I thought for today's show, i'd share that comparison that I found pretty interesting. That's it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you yet subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are bestarting for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Remember to pre order that Prospect Guide. We only have a little over a week left until it launches. The pre draft version launches, so pre order right now fourteen ninety nine over on Lateround dot com. Otherwise, everyone, enjoy your weekend. I'll talk to you next week.