473: Mailbag 1/15/21

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Speaker 1: This is the Label podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha JJ zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyeson, the editor in chief at Fandel and at number five dot com and this episode four hundred and seventy three of the Late Round podcast, so many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. I've got two reminders for you before digging into the questions this week. The first is that I'm taking mailbag questions via email during the offseason, so right now, if you have a question, hit me up at JJ at number five dot com. I just asked that you try to be concise with the question if you're emailing me, that's it. The second reminder is one about Fandel's sportsbook. Right now, new users can wager up to five dollars on any team to win their divisional or conference championship game at plus twenty five hundred odds. That's right. A five dollars bet on any team to win any game before the Super Bowl can win you one hundred and twenty five dollars. So download the Fando Sportsbook app and make your first deposit to see your enhanced odds today must be twenty one years or older in president New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, West Virginia, Tennessee, Iowa, or Indiana. New user's only must wagerund designated boost market deposit required max bonus one hundred and twenty five dollars. See full terms at sportsbook dot fandol dot com. Gambling problem called one hundred gambler in Colorado, called one hundred and five to two forty seven hundred in West Virginia visit one hundred gambler dot net. In Indiana call one hundred nine with it, or in Tennessee called Tennessee Redline one one hundred eight eight nine nine seven eight nine. The first question this week is from at Urban Underscore bobcat Hijj. I love to make dynasty trades, but I feel like I have a solid dynasty team that just didn't have a championship year. How do you recognize the difference between making deals just to trade and potentially damaging a team that is already good to go. I think this is a question that a lot of people probably have all the time. When you're proposing a trade, you're generally setting an initial offer that you know favors your side. I mean, in the end trade should favor you in some way. You should feel like you're getting a good deal, that your team is improving. But also in the end trade should be mutually beneficial. That's what makes a good trade. But that initial offer might be a little bit more in your favor than what the trade ends up actually being. Now, don't low ball the crap out of your opponent, but you get what I mean. Overall, when your team is really good, you've got leverage. You don't have to negotiate that much further from the initial offer because you have to ensure that your team is unequivocally getting better. If you're on the other side of things, if you're in rebuild mode or something, then you have to take more risks to get that reward of having a really strong team. You're going to be more lenient. So if you have a good team and you're really itching to do a trade, my advice is to offer up a ton of different trades in order to balance the fact that you won't be as accepting of trades. You have to offset that with more volume you have to just say and more trade offers. But also sometimes it's okay to feel pretty good about your team. I'm a believer that teams can always get better, but you don't want to make unnecessary sacrifices if things are fine. Next question is from at Shift Work Life HIJA. First question in a while, Thanks for all you do? Is it me? Or is the wide receiver position becoming flat over the last few years? Fifty usable options any given week with less and less consistent studs. When you change your handle to at mid round QB, should there also be a at late round wide receiver? So I'll start off the answer to this question by saying that yes, I'd generally say that things have become flatter at wide receiver. If you plot the ranking for each player next to the amount of Fantasy points that they've scored, there used to be a little bit of a sharper decline among wide receiver ones in Fantasy than there have been the last couple of years. And what that indicates is that high end wide receivers aren't necessarily giving the same edge that they did in the past. Just as an example, the wide receiver won to the wide receiver six this year. The difference was eighty four points. That's a lot, but that doesn't necessarily say much because the wide receiver won a given year could have just had a monster season. If you look at the wide receiver six versus the wide receiver twelve this season, there was a twenty nine point gap. Last year, it was twenty four points. The average over the eight years prior to twenty nineteen, there was a thirty six point gap from wide receiver twelve to wide receiver eighteen. This year the gap was seventeen points. Last year it was fourteen points. The previous eight years it was thirty four points. I'll do this one more time, wide receiver eighteen to wide receiver twenty four. This year that gap was sixteen points. Last year it was eleven. The eight year average was over nineteen points. So the gaps at the top have traditionally been a little bit larger, whereas the gaps at the bottom and that wide receiver three range, they weren't as drastic five or ten years ago. Basically, if you look at it from this really basic you find that where wide receiver production really flattened with wide receiver threes and fours in the twenty fifteen twenty sixteen year range, we now see it. There's a little bit more separation from those players, and it could be because teams are using their depth charts a little bit more. Here's the thing, though, with any question like this, you have to think about what the utility is, what does this actually mean? And I think we get enamored with final season results without associating it with where players are getting drafted or how we thought about players before they did what they did. As I alluded to in a study done this past offseason on where we draft league winning players, wide receivers in rounds two through five generally have a much higher hit rate than running backs do. And by hit rate, i'm referring to finding a league winning player, which is defined as a top eight wide receiver and a top ten running back. That definition is all laid out in the study that I did, and I talked about that study in episode three hundred and seventy nine, and the same generally held true that season. Running Backs in that round four through five range were pretty bad this year. That's when it makes a ton of sense to take wide receivers. And given the difference that we see in wide receiver hit rates to running back hit rates in the super early rounds, you can still argue that a wide receiver heavy approach in PPR, especially when you flex a position and you can start three wide receivers, that still makes a lot of sense despite the flattening that we're seeing. If anything, I think the fact that we have this dead zone for running backs and that we have this flattening a bit at wide receiver, if anything, it should make you feel a little bit more confident in getting an elite tight end when they're there in round two, because the opportunity cost is becoming a little bit less significant. The overall point here is that looking strictly at postseason results without actually analyzing where these players are coming from in drafts, it only tells you part of the story. Like imagine a world where every year we had eight running backs who always finished way, way above the rest of the position. But now imagine that in that world, those eight running backs were always drafted after round seven. That wouldn't tell you to draft a running back early, despite the fact that those eight running backs really separated themselves, despite the fact that things weren't very flat at the position. You really need that other information of where players are being drafted to really direct your draft strategy. This a'st questions from at NFL and AFL in dynasty rookie drafts, do you hold to the mantra? I've seen around quite a bit of draft best player available, trade for need. I have a weird relationship with the phrase best player available. One of the earliest episodes of the Late Round podcast was actually just a giant rant about that phrase because it doesn't make any sense to me. The word best is subjective in and of itself, but in order for something to be the best, it needs to be excellent when compared to something else. And when you're comparing things in real football or in fantasy football, you're automatically doing some sort of positional evaluation. Like if best player available thing, then why aren't kickers drafted in round one of the NFL draft. A team could have a super high grade on a kicker, but they're not taking him in round one because kickers aren't as important as quarterbacks and edge rushers and cornerbacks and wide receivers. The same can be said to a degree with fantasy football. As Trevor Lawrence the best player in Dynasty this year, I don't know how you really define that without doing some sort of positional evaluation. So basically this comes down to running backs and wide receivers and non superflex leagues because those are the positions that matter most in fantasy football. And I'll draft off of tiers if I have a wide receiver and a running back in the same tier, which are still subjective. A lot of player evaluation that we do is subjective in some way. But if I have a running back and a wide receiver in the same tier and I need a running back, I'll likely just take the running back. If the running back is in a tier below that wide receiver, then yes, I'll take the wide receiver in that case. That's probably what people mean by taking best player available. Now, I know that I'm being picky about the phrase. I know I'm going to sound like a huge nerd to some of you guys given this answer, but I think the phrase doesn't capture what's actually going on. But I hope this answer helps. The next question is from at Myron isaacs HIJJ. Which factors do you consider in your coaching changes analysis? How much will this affect your initial ratings? The first general question I ask is what's their philosophy? What do these coaches believe in. I think a lot of times, and I've said this a lot on the show in the past, but a lot of times fantasy analysts overstate what a coaching change means. They attribute things to a coach that shouldn't necessarily be attributed, like running back, target share or something. What I've found is that personnel largely dictates a coach's history. I always go back to the example with Kyle Shanahan. There was a narrative a while back that Shanahan feeds his ex receivers because Julio Jones, Andre Johnson, even Pierre Garson really thrived under Kyle Shanahan. But when you dug in, you realize that those players so many targets under Shanahan because they were either really good at football, or they were really good at football compared to their teammates. There wasn't any other choice. But you can still find evidence of general philosophy when you have a decent sized sample, or even when you just listen to them talk about what they want to do, and from there, I'll let that shape my team level projections with things like pass rate, and then that trickles down to how the individuals are. Then projected, but it's all individualized. I don't hit a button and watch my projections change based on a coaching change. There are manual adjustments and projections and coaching changes, and coaching philosophy falls into the bucket of manual adjustments. This last questions from at JC Jack Rabbits, Hey, JJ love the show, thanks giving the uniqueness of the twenty twenty season, no preseason by week changes, et cetera. How are you handling the twenty twenty rookie class. Are you more forgiving of this class or perhaps more interested in the twenty twenty one class, as these guys might have more chance to make an impact. I also got one from at what the Chain that asks rookies who didn't do much this year how much is due to COVID related issues and how much is due to poor performance that would have happened in any other season. So I don't know how to quantify that second question. I don't think that you can. Obviously if a player got coronavirus that impacted that player. But what I think this season taught us flat out is that good players will ball out no matter the circumstances. Like in the first question, you're asking how I'm handling the twenty twenty rookie class, and I guess I'm giving them a slight bump in my mind given the circumstances. But I don't even think that you have to, because they did really well. Justin Jefferson just broke the rookie receiving record. We had guys like Brandon Ayuk being a stud down the stretch. T Higgins looked awesome, Ceedee Lamb looked awesome, Chase Claypool showed a big ceiling. The list goes on and on at wide receiver and the running back class. They really came through during the second half of the season two. So I guess I don't know how I'd otherwise be handling these players or viewing them, because it's not like they perform poorly. I can at least say I'm probably not gonna make a ton of excuses for them. Maybe that helps, Like, yeah, there were pretty crappy circumstances surrounding their season, but there were pretty crappy circumstances surrounding the season of their opponents too, and the defenses that they faced. I just don't think this is very quantifiable. My answer is the same answer as it usually is, and that's that you should be looking at these players on a case by case basis. If there's reason for concern because COVID very clearly impacted their individual season, then you change the way that you view them, like aj Dillon for instance. If not, you treat them like any other player in any other class. The last question this week says, did the twenty twenty challenges open you up to anything that made you see the fantasy game different? What is the biggest strategic lesson you learned that you'll definitely take with you in twenty twenty one. Appreciate you and your perspectives as always. Yeah, I think one of my previous answer sort of touches on this. If a player is good at football, he'll be good at football, no matter if there are fans or not in the stands. I know that's such a basic and dumb answer, but it's just so true. This season showed that so much. This rookie class, even though it was incredibly good, it really showed that because realistically, had they all underperformed, we'd probably be sitting back and saying, well, it was a tough year to learn the game at the pro level. But they didn't. Maybe it's because the class was historically good, and that might be the case, but it still set the standard. It really showed us that good players show up and are good. Some players might not have developed the way that they otherwise would have, but on the whole, the big learning for me is sort of what I believed in from the start. It's what the episode last year on bailing on unproductive rookies was really all about. That when a rookie doesn't live up to expectation at all, and I'm talking just plays like absolute garbage during his rookie season, it's not a good sign for his future. And that's clearly no different when a player lacks the normal amount of preseason reps. 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 it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, enjoy your weekend. I'll talk to you next week.