787: Mailbag 8/10/23

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zacher Retha Ja Ja Zacher reson. What's up everyone. It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode seven and eighty seven of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. It's an early mailbag this week because I have some traveling to do. But before I get into the questions, I want to give a shout out to my friends that Established the Run. On the Late Round podcast, you get bite sized analytical episodes that can help you win your season long leagues. My friends at ETR have the Established the Run podcast where they cover some of the things that I might not get to on this show, whether that's related to Best Ball or NFL betting, So check them out too. If you're looking for another podcast to throw into that rotation before the NFL season starts, just search Establish the Run anywhere you get your podcasts, and remember to check out the Late Round Draft Guide too. I'm sure a lot of you have drafts this weekend and the Late Round Draft Guide is the best way to prepare for those drafts. You get strategy philosophy players to target avoid in rankings and tiers in a cheat sheet that's updated weekly. You can check it out over on lateround dot com. Now let's get to these questions. The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Mike. It says, Hey, JJ, I'd love to hear your philosophy on how to approach running back handcuffs in general and specifically, if you've got Bijon Robinson in the first round of a ten team limited keeper league, does that make Tyler alge Or a late round must draft. I know my team needs to be great, not just good, in order to win a ten team league, so it's a handcuff worth a whole roster spot if there are higher ranked players than Algere available at the end of my draft. Thanks for all your awesome work. This is my first year following you, but I've already gone through the Draft Guide and now the Prospect Guide, and I feel more prepared than ever to crush my draft. Awesome. So, years and years ago, I did a study on handcuffing and fantasy football, and what I found was that not not only to handcuffs usually not come to fruition because players don't automatically get hurt in front of them, but even when they do get called upon to be the RB one on their team, they underperform there RB twos on their team For a reason, we don't even get the handcuff correctly all the time. Now. To be clear, part of the problem with this discussion of handcuffs is that the definition is all over the place. We have no single way to define what a handcuff is like. I saw a discussion happening in the Late Round Fantasy Football discord this past week where someone was asking which handcuffs to prioritize, and someone responded naming running backs like David Montgomery and Rashad Penny. But I wouldn't call those players handcuffs in my opinion. They have plenty of standalone value. They just have upside if something were to happen to the RB one by adp on their team. I even feel the same way about someone like Jalen Warren. He's not really a handcuff to me because there's a chance that he's gonna have some flex appeal this season. To me, running back handcuffs you're not using them without an injury. And as time has gone on, we've had fewer and fewer of those true obvious handcuffs. In my opinion, the term should just be removed from fantasy football because teams just don't split backfield so cleanly these days. Now that being said, my stance on handcuffing has been somewhat controversial through the years. When drafting, I do not handcuff. Handcuffing is a floor play. It's an insurance policy. There are times where it's okay to go that route, especially in season when you're adding guys off the waiver wire. If you're in first place, if you're feeling great about a championship, you can add that insurance policy for some of your players. In that case, you might need the floor play. But during my draft, I want players who have a shot to take over their backfield or see a significant role early on in the season right away. I don't want players doing absolutely nothing on my bench. That's especially true in a ten team league like the one that you're describing, because those ben spots are filled with far better players. If you're in a deep league. The opposite occurs. If you're in like a sixteen team league, you're bench players. They're not very good players. It's easier to swallow than handcuff. If you're gonna handcuff early in the season in order to optimize upside, which is what you generally want to do in fantasy handcuff someone else's back. I'd be more inclined to roster Tyler Algier if I did not have Bjeon Robinson. And I know, I know that sounds so backwards. Trust me, I've heard about it for years and years. People have gotten angry at me for this take. But in fantasy football, I'm trying to get first place. If Bjeon Robinson goes down and he's on my roster and I don't have Tyler Algier, yeah that sucks. I recognize the downside. But what if Bjeon Robinson goes down, I do have Algier and Robinson was never on my roster. All of a sudden, my team is that much better. I have a solid team to begin with, and now I also have Tyler Aljier Without Bijean Robinson, the ceiling is starting to hit. But overall, I don't handcuff, and in that range where Algier goes, you can find other running backs with similar upside who also have more standalone value. Now I don't mind Algier in certain builds but I certainly wouldn't force it like you're essentially saying in this question, He's absolutely not a must have selection because fantasy football is about ceiling, not floor. The SU's questions from Twitter says, love the show JJ with the hype train going full speed on Justin Ross. Given his lack of draft capital and combine measures, it would be hard for your model to give him a score. However, can we get a sense of his range of outcomes based on his best season college production? I mean, to be fair, Justin Ross still has a score of my model because he was invited to the combine. The problem is that his profile is just incomplete because he didn't play a full collegiate career. With that being said, I just mentioned now fans football is about ceiling and not floor. Right, Justin Ross to me is an obvious redraft pick. You can argue that you don't need to invest in him in dynasty right now, given the injury history and all of that. I get it. But in a redraft league, he's gonna be close to one of your last picks. He's gonna go in a range where opportunity costs is so so low, where it's insignificant, and the upside is evident. He's playing with Patrick Mahomes in an offense that lacks alternatives outside of Travis Kelsey. Ross had an elite breakout age below nineteen years old, and as a freshman at Clemson, he led that team in receiving. Oh and by the way, that team had Hunter Renfro and t Higgins, and Ross played one fewer game that season than both of those wide receivers. These are the kinds of dart throws that you want to make in your season long leagues period. He didn't look great in my prospect model because he was undrafted, but the model doesn't know everything. There were a lot of things surrounding Justin Ross as he entered the NFL, a lot more of those subjective things. The barrier to entry right now with Ross is very, very low, so you should be in on him and redraft. This last question from Jacket says, Hey, JJ, curious to hear your take on the current running back situations with the Colts and Seahawks. If Jonathan Taylor is moved, who is your favorite backup on that roster? And is Sharboney getting run with the ones? While Kenneth Walker is out significant or does this not move the needle for you in his ranking? Thanks? So, I was actually gonna talk about the Seahawks running backs on last week's Mailback episode, but then Sharbonay showed up at practice and apparently his shoulder injury was fine, which is great, but it meant that my take on the injuries mattered a lot less. So at least I get to talk about it on today's show. I've said this before, I'll say it again. Kenneth Walker is a home run hitting running back who's got that explosiveness. We know he has that upside per rush, but he was arguably the worst running back in the league last year in terms of consistency. He gained positive yards at the worst rate in the league among one hundred plus attempt backs. He had a really, really bad success rate. It's just that when he was successful, he was really successful. So I do think the Seahawks drafted Zach Charbonet for a reason. Sharboney is more of a grinder and he's a solid pass catcher. He's like a James Connor tight back. And sometimes those players are beloved by coaching stabs because they just do everything fine enough. They're just solid players. So my fear with Kenneth Walker is that he won't be the primary pass catcher in that backfield. And we now have not just an NFL season showing that he didn't have an amazingly high target share, but his college receiving numbers weren't great either. And then on top of that, there's a chance that he's not the goal line guy. As I talked about on the Regression episode a couple of weeks back, Walker was bad at converting at the goal line last year, one of the worst in the league and according to data at fantasylife dot com, which you guys can actually check out for free. But according to fantasylife dot Com, Kenneth Walker was the only player to see a goal line rush for Seattle last year. He was the only back with a one hundred percent goal line rush share, which means probable regression. Now they're going to run more plays at the goal line than they did last year. They were dead last in the league in goal line rushes. But I would almost guarantee, as long as everyone's healthy, that Kenneth Walker will not see every single goal line rush for the Seahawks this year. So there's a non zero chance here that Walker doesn't see the high value touches that we won our fantasy backs, to see the receiving work and the goal line work. I'm not saying that's how this is going to go down. We're talking in range of outcomes here, and I've seen the reports. I've seen the blurbs the beat reporters in Seattle saying that this is still Kenneth Walker's backfield. I don't doubt that. I think that's coming from the right place. But if you pay close attention to those notes on him, you'll notice that they're just talking about volume, and usually volume on the ground. There's a recent blurb talking about how Sharbonney would hypothetically be used that two and four min an offense, which tells me that they're thinking about him more as the pass catcher, which is very valuable in fantasy football. Sharboney playing with the Ones right now is largely because Kenneth Walker's been hurt, and by the time this episode releases, Walker might be back. But all of this just feeds into my thoughts about Sharbonay being involved in this offense this season and why the Seahawks drafted him. They don't want a one man backfield. I don't know why we would think that they would won a one man backfield after they took Zach Sharbonay in the second round. The only way to me that Kenneth Walker's a belcow this year is if Zach Sharbonay gets hurt or if Zach Scharbonay is just really, really bad. But his profile as a prospect is that he's more of a high floor, low ceiling player, So my ranking isn't really changing just yet. If you're a little bit worried to draft Walker, that's totally fine, that's totally understandable. But I've been ahead of the market with Sharbonay all off season because of all the reasons that I just talked about, And these really aren't best ball takes. For the record, the weekly upside is there with Walker, and if you're in a tournament setting sometimes it's all unique. I'm just speaking in terms of managed season long leagues. I sincerely worry about pass catching and goal line work for Kenneth Walker, more so the former than the latter. Not regarding Indianapolis. Chances are if Taylor is gone, and again he's still a cold at the time of this recording. But if he's gone, I'm going to take my chances on a player who brings more ambiguity to the mix, who we haven't seen before, and someone who I liked a good bit as a prospect, and that's Evan Hall. I think Dion Jackson would probably get some run as the RB one to start, and he actually looked pretty good at times. Last year they signed Kenyan Drake, but we already know sort of what Kenyan Drake's all about. The reason I'm saying Hall is because I want to feed into the uncertainty, and he had a good prospect profile. This is from my prospect guide from this past year. But before this year's draft class, my model's database had nine running backs with a twenty percent best season reception share of better that since twenty eleven. Christian McCaffrey, James White, and Tony Pollard were all hits among that nine. Rashad Whites in that group as well, So it's a solid group to be part of when you consider the draft capital for some of those players. Hall has good enough size too. It was two hundred and nine pounds of the combine size and pass catching ability. Those are two things that I'm always looking for in a running back, so I think the most likely outcome here is a committee approach of Jonathan Taylor's gone. But Hall is the one that I'm most intrigued by because the numbers seem to like him a lot as a prospect I want to shoot for that upside seems like a consistent theme for today's show. This last question is from Twitter. It says, hi, JJ, love your work. Thanks. When explaining draft strategies for different league sizes, you talk fundamentally about supply and demand. I imagine tackling keeper leagues as something similar, right, do you have any thoughts on how to draft knowing everybody's keepers? Well? With keeper leagues, the demand side really isn't changing, right, or at least how I viewed supply and demand here. You're starting, however, many running backs and wide receivers that your league tells you to start. That doesn't change when you do and don't have keepers. What changes is the supply side of things. Your player pulls shifts and that can impact who's available in each tier. Now, as in the side, I get keeper questions all the time, and I try to point people to a keeper selection episode that I did a while ago, but it's a little bit outdated now. When it comes to keepers, ninety five percent of the time when someone asked me a question, I don't have enough information to answer that keeper question. And I say that because your opportunity cost that's what matters most when you're making that decision. And in order for me to understand opportunity cost, I need to understand the entire league and who the entire league is keeping. In other words, let's just say that you can keep Saquon Barkley for the first overall pick in your draft. Now, I have no idea what kind of player would be available first overall, because if you don't keep Saquon Barkley, that means you get the first overall pin. If it's Christian McCaffrey, I'd say just don't keep Saquon Barkley and draft Christian McCaffrey. But if it's Aaron Jones, then yeah, keep Sakwon Barkley. You should be doing that sort of exercise with your keeper decisions. You're the one who knows who's available in the player poll. Find players who would hypothetically be drafted where you're keeping that player, and think about which player you like. More So, this doesn't exactly change the demand side of things, because your roster requirements are still the same. It more so changes the supply side, and it changes how you might approach your draft structurally because your tiers would be altered. Like if everyone's keeping a running back and there are not good running backs available, it might force you to draft a running back higher than you thought, higher than anticipated, because there may only be one in a high tier, whereas there are plenty of them in high tiers otherwise. But hopefully if that's the case, if you decide to go against keeping a running back in that case, it means that you did keep wide receivers. So hopefully in that scenario, your wide receivers are pretty good. My thing here, though, don't overthink it. I say this with auction drafts too. It's still the same game. Use your tiers and you'll be able to extract value. Your tiers just will look a little bit different because there are guys being kept. Hopefully that made some sense and hopefully it helps you out. The last question this week is from T. Jimenez twenty three. It says zigging while everyone is zagging has shown to be advantageous in the past. So while everyone is starting wide receiver heavy this year, do you think there's an edge to say start with an RBRB approach like Chubb and Barkley. I'm a little nervous this year missing out on the elite wide receiver to piggyback. Are there any wide receivers with a third round ADP or maybe even the fourth round that you would be comfortable with as your wide receiver one? Okay, so I know the narrative out there is that this is such a wide receiver heavy year and that everyone has gone crazy because they're drafting wide receivers so early. I think that whole narrative is being very, very overblown. Yes, it's a more wide receiver heavy season, especially if you're playing on certain platforms like if you're doing Best Ball drafts on Underdog. Definitely wide receiver heavy, but don't confuse that with how the typical draft is going or gonna go. If you look at my Fantasy League dot COM's redraft ADP so far this season and you compare it to pass seasons, yes it's wide receiver heavy, but it's not some extreme outlier. We've actually had a more wide receiver heavy first round over the last decade. That happened in twenty sixteen after a horrible year in twenty fifteen by running backs. It's just that early second round portion of drafts that's really changed this year where we have more wide receivers. But we've had seasons in the twenty sixteen twenty seventeen range where we had a comparable number of wide receivers get drafted in the first two rounds of twelve team leagues. You can even look at a place like Fantasy Football Calculator dot com. I'm not here to say that their ADP is the best or most accurate or anything like that. I'm just saying that this is another data point. This year. According to them, five wide receivers are going in round one, another five are going in round two. Last year on that same platform, that same site, four wide receivers went in round one, four went and round two. That's not that dramatic of a difference. Maybe the arguments that we're drafting wide receivers at the top were more wide receiver heavy at the top of drafts, and that's something we don't typically see. Okay, fine, but are we gonna just generalize and say that we're all going wide receiver heavy because of those three or four spots. And this is not me saying that you shouldn't go wide receiver heavy. I've been preaching anchor running back builds for years and years on this show. I just think that when people enter drafts thinking, oh man, this is going to be this really wide receiver heavy draft, it can cause them to make pretty poor decisions. This season, in your home league and your typical league, it's gonna look like most seasons, maybe a little bit more wide receiver heavy, but it's not gonna be so dramatic. That's what we're seeing on average. So starting with two running backs not gonna be the end of you. In fact, I think we might see that being a decent strategy in some parts of the first round this year, depending on what's available. A Barkley Chubbs start is totally fine. Now to your second question though, about third round wide receivers who I wouldn't mind as my wide receiver one, I think that you should sort of view this a little bit differently. Instead of thinking of the spots in your lineup as wide receiver one, wide receiver two, and so on, just think about what you can do to increase your chances of hitting on a true wide receiver one in fantasy, like a true difference maker. What can you do to get that guy, especially if you're opting to not get those players in the early rounds. There's no doubt that hit rates at wide receiver tend to get worse in the middle of round three. Round two wide receivers are better than round three wide receivers. I'm not arguing this. I talk about that a lot in the draft guide, but you should always be cognizant of the type of capital that you're spending at each position. If you go with two running backs in the first two rounds, that means that you're not getting an elite wide receiver. So in order to up your chances on getting that elite wide out, you should draft a lot of them in the next rounds. It sounds obvious, but this idea gets missed far too often in fantasy football. Like let's say that you've got two wide receiver spots to fill in your lineup and two running back spots. You go running back running back you feel good at that position, which you should, Then you go back to back wide receivers. So your first four rounds are running back, running back, wide receiver, wide receiver. Don't stop there at wide receiver. The quality of those wide receivers is not as good as the quality of those running backs. Just play probability instead of stopping at wide receiver for a bit, keep drafting them because that increases your chances you're gonna be able to get one of those high end onie Overall, though it's fine to go rb RB this year, just make sure you're then going pretty heavy at wide receiver because that position. The wide receiver position isn't always has been very important in fantasy football, even if it doesn't always seem that way. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you 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 forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening, everyone, enjoy your weekend. I'll talk to you next week.