379: Drafting League-Winning Players

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachera, JJ Zacherson. What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyes and the editor in chief at FanDuel and at Number five dot com. And this is episode three hundred and seventy nine of the Late Round podcast, one of the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. We've heard the term league winner be used to describe players in fantasy football a lot over the last few years, but it's sort of an ambiguous term. No one has a clear cut definition of what a league winner is. So last week on Number five I dug into this topic a little bit. I didn't look at how exactly you find league winners, but instead I wouldn't defind where league winners came from, where they were drafted, because I think in fantasy football a lot of strategy talk is easier said than done. People will often say, oh, I can just get this position later because I feel really good about players X, Y, and Z. The wide receiver position this year is a good example of that. It's deep. There's no doubt that the wide receiver position is deep, But what are the real odds that you find a real difference maker later in your draft. If you go with a running back heavy approach, what does that mean for your chances of having a league winning wide receiver on your roster. That's what today's show is all about. We'll define what a league winner is, we'll see where league winners are typically drafted, and we'll talk through what it all means for your draft strategy. Now, before digging in, I want to remind you guys about FanDuel's Football Multiverse. It's a fun contest consisting of Madden simulations and what if scenarios. Last week there was a what if Drew Brees retired simulation and Taysom Hill in that Madden stream was the starter for the Saints and it was not pretty. But you can watch the stream of the simulation each week over on Fandel's YouTube page, where my colleague Jim Sonis and I are calling the game. This week, we've got what if Jacksonville had actually drafted to show Watson, So Deshaun Watson as a Jacksonville Jaguar and Leonard Fournette is not. So head tofandle dot com Slash Multiverse, create a lineup and enter the tournament for free that has three thousand dollars in cash prizes, and make sure you're subscribing to the YouTube page. You can watch the game with me on Wednesday night at eight pm Eastern. Okay, So how exactly do you define league winner? I think you can look at the term league winner in two different ways. One way is to see which players outperform expectation the most. The other is define players who were just the best at their position. For purposes of the article that I did on number five, I looked at things in the latter way. I wanted to simply find the players over the last decade or so of fantasy football who vastly outperformed the rest of their position. Because, don't forget, that's what we're worried about in fantasy football. That's what the basics of value based drafting tells us. That we shouldn't be worried about how a quarterback performs versus a wide receiver, but how a wide receiver performs against another wide receiver, how he's performing against his position. That's how you get value out of your fantasy lineup. And just to be clear, maybe this isn't how you define league winner. Maybe you think a league winning player is one who really outperformed expectation, really outperformed average draft position. That's totally fine. If it makes you feel more at ease, you can consider the players that we're talking about today as difference makers instead of league winners. That's fine. The question then becomes how much does a running back or a wide receiver have to outscore the rest of his position to be a league winning player. You have to set parameters somewhere. We have to have some sort of process to answer these questions that we're asking. So to figure this out, I looked at all fantasy seasons since twenty eleven, nine seasons worth of data. I then charted the average points per game that we typically see from the RB one, the RB two, the RB three, and so on. And I did the same at wide receiver, and players had to play a minimum of seven games to be included here. I also kept things that just running back and wide since those are the most important positions in fantasy football. Now, from there, I wanted to see where we saw significant drop offs and points scored from one positional spot to the next. Now, what I mean by this is how many points per game does the RB one typically score over the RB two, and how many points per game? Then does the RB two score over the RB three. Once you chart that out, you can start to see where your difference makers are. Your league winners typically finish because once you start to see that curve flatten, or once you start to see the difference from one player to the next not be so significant, then you know those players aren't giving you as much of an edge and fantasy points scored anymore. They're no longer league winners. I charted all of that in my article, and what I found was, over the last nine seasons, we've typically seen the most substantial points per game advantages among top ten running backs and top eight wide receivers. In other words, top ten running backs have typically been difference makers and top eight wide receivers have two. Hopefully you're following all of this. What this means is, since we're looking at the last nine years worth of fantasy football seasons, we've had ninety league winning running backs and seventy two league winning wide receivers. Yes, I'm fully aware that this is a semi arbitrary way of doing things. You can define league winner in a lot of different ways, but there's also at least a method to this madness, and if it's easier for you moving forward, you can just think, this is me looking at where you can find top ten running backs in your fantasy drafts and where you can find top eight wide receivers, because that was my next step in the process. I wanted to find where these players have typically been drafted. Like I said on the show last week on late round quarterbacks, if league winning players are coming from the sixth and seventh rounds consistently, then why not just get your quarterback early? Why not get a tight end in the second round. But as you guess, that's not what's happening. Since twenty eleven, according to my Fantasy league dot COM's average draft position data, about eighty nine percent of league winning wide receivers top eight wide receivers were drafted in the top sixty that's the first five rounds of a twelve team league. At running back, the rate of top ten running backs being drafted in the first five rounds has been a little over seventy three percent. In other words, the vast majority of league winning difference making players are coming early. But how early, Well, let's break down those five rounds by round. At running back, thirty three percent of league winners have come in round one, seventeen percent from round two, fourteen percent from round three, and then just four percent in round four and four percent in round five. And these are rounded numbers. For the record, I don't want people hitting my mentions about this. At wide receiver, about twenty eight percent of league winners have come from round one, and the same number has come from round two, just eleven percent in round three, ten percent in round four, and twelve and a half percent in round five. Essentially, the data tells us that the first two or three rounds of drafts consists of the best players in fantasy football. This is isn't shocking, This isn't surprising, and this shouldn't make your jaw drop. Yet we see people banking on wide receivers late in their drafts all the time, so maybe this is shocking. If you look at what happens post round five with these players, league winners are rarely coming from those rounds. Like I said earlier, seventy three percent of difference making running backs have been drafted in round one through round five over the last nine years. That means twenty seven percent of them have come after round five. At wide receiver, that number is just eleven percent, and it's scattered pretty randomly. Running Backs in round six and seven include about seven percent of our league winners, but the highest league winner rate is actually in rounds thirteen and fourteen at the running back position, and then at wide receiver round by round after round five, things are scattered pretty evenly. So if I were to recap all that data in a pretty simple way, it's that difference making players in fantasy football are largely drafted early, and it's more true at wide receivers than at running back, even though a large number of people seem to think otherwise. Now, what needs to be said here is that I'm not talking about hit rates. For example, over the last nine seasons and equal percent of league winning wide receivers have come from round one in round two. But that doesn't tell us everything that we need to know in order to make this actionable. Because if there are twenty league winners drafted in each of those first two rounds, what if round one had a total of twenty five wide receivers drafted while round two had fifty wide receivers drafted. All of a sudden, your round one hit rate of getting a league winners eighty percent, while round two is forty percent. And what you're intuitively thinking right now as you listen to this is right. The actual hit rate, the rate in which you draft a league winner, is better in the first round than the second round for wide receivers because over the last nine years, we've seen seventeen more wide receivers drafted in the second round than the first round. So about seventy one percent of first round wide receivers have been league wins players, while forty four percent of them in the second round have been league winners. And then all the while an equal number have come from both of those rounds. It's just that the second round had more total wideouts, so it boosted that number. If you look at the hit rates of finding league winning wide receivers by round, round one is at seventy one percent. Like I just said, so seventy one percent of wide receivers drafted in round one since twenty eleven have been difference makers. It's forty four percent in round two, eighteen percent in round three, fourteen percent in round four, and seventeen percent in round five. Once you hit round six, it's just six percent, and every round after that is very very low, oftentimes zero percent. At running back, it's fifty five percent in the first round, thirty eight percent in the second round, thirty five percent in the third, ten percent in the fourth, seventeen percent in the fifth, eleven percent in the sixth, nine percent in the seventh, eight percent in the eighth, and seven percent in the tenth. Now, I find these numbers kind of fascinating. I know that I threw a lot the mat you just now clearly average draft position will change depending on your source, and it'll change based on league structure. But it's very clear that it's far far easier to find league winning running backs in the mid to late rounds than it is wide receiver. Now, these numbers do need context. We're looking at this in a fairly binary way. We're looking at this from the perspective of was this player a league winner or was he not? And we're not looking at the actual point advantage that these guys are giving you, because that's still a very important part of this equation. Just because a wide receiver eight is a league winner by definition doesn't mean he's of equal value as the RB eight or the RB nine or the RB ten. Running Backs historically have given teams more of an edge in points per game versus the rest of their position than wide receivers have. So even though wide receivers are safer bets, even though your odds of getting a league winning wide receiver early is better than at running back, you shouldn't ignore the edge that running backs are giving you in fantasy football. To me, what this exercise was about wasn't to say this is exactly and unequivocally how you should draft each position in fantasy football. It was to give perspective. It's very very clear that the first three rounds of your fantasy drafts have by far the highest hit rates at wide receiver and running back. If you want league winning players at those positions, the most important positions in fantasy football, you need to spend to get them, or else you just need to get lucky. It also means that your opportunity cost in those three rounds is really really high, which is another reason going for a lesson demand position like tight end and especially quarterback isn't necessarily the best idea. But I think this research is a great example of what I always talk about. We think we usually know more than we actually do. We're looking at the wide receiver position this year and we're saying as we seemingly do every single year, but we're saying, man, wide receiver is really deep. And I'm not disagreeing with you. Not only do I think the same thing, but I did a podcast earlier this offseason on the death of the elite wide receiver. I get it, but I don't want us to take that notion too far. I don't want us to say, well, wide receiver is deep, so I'll just get a tight end early and maybe a quarterback early because the opportunity cost in doing so isn't significant, And maybe it's not as significant as it was six years ago or seven years ago. But I would argue strongly that you're making that decision off of an overconfidence in your ability to find true difference makers at the position in the middle and late rounds of your draft. Like the numbers show this. Since twenty eleven, one hundred and eighty wide receivers have been drafted in round six through ten. Of those one hundred and eighty, only three of them. Three of them have finished as top eight wide receivers in points per game in round six through ten, You've had a league winning hit rate at wide receiver of just one point seven percent over the last nine seasons. There's a different approach in other data that shows this too. Jack Miller of Rodoz, who's at Jack Miller two on Twitter. This past week he sent a series of tweets that were along the same lines of what I talked about today, but it's framed from the perspective of Best Ball win rates. His original tweet and the thread of tweets said quote, there exists this misconception that you can wait to take wide receivers in best Ball because you can get starting caliber weeks late. That's not true. Win rate based on how many wide receivers you draft in the first ten rounds. So then he lists the win rates by how many wide receivers are drafted in the first ten rounds by particular teams. If a team selected just one, they had a six point six percent win rate. It's the same win rate at two, and then it's seven point eight percent at three, eight and a half percent at four, eight and a half percent at five, eight point six percent at six, and then it drops back down to five percent at seven. To put this another way, the best win rates that we've seen since twenty fifteen, which is where this data goes back to, but the best win rates that we've seen over this time have come from teams that's selected between four and six wide receivers with their first ten picks. Jack also shows your win rate based on which round you take your first wide receiver, and the win rates are eight percent and above through the first four rounds, but it's six point nine percent when it's round five and five point five percent when it's round six. It's pretty interesting when looking at when teams are taking their wide receiver two as well. If your wide receiver two is taken in round two, so a wide receiver wide receiver start, you have a seven point six percent win rate, which isn't great, but it rises to an above average win rate if you get your wide receiver two in round three and it stays that way until round six. Best ball leagues are not the same as regular redraft leagues, and average draft position data is going to be different, but this is the general concept that we're looking at here. Teams that aren't totally punting the wide receiver position and teams that are putting a decent investment in that position. They're still winning despite what our the rains might be telling us about the depth of the position. They're still winning. That's the lesson here. Don't let your perception about certain players completely and dramatically shift your draft strategy. If you want to go a little bit more running back heavy early on, be my guest you should probably do that regardless, especially with what we know about elite wide receivers being less and less common. We know it's hard to find the super elite unicorn wide receiver these days, but don't think that you'll get away with waiting on your wide receiver for a long while. And don't assume that you can easily take on the opportunity cost of drafting a tight end or a quarterback early, especially especially a quarterback, because in the end, league winners are coming in those rounds. They're coming in the early rounds. The best players at the most important positions in fantasy football are drafted early, very early. You've got to spend money to make money. That's going to do it for today's show, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at late round QB. Thanks for listening to everyone. I will talk to you later in the week.