1091: Mailbag - ZAP Model Misses, Zero RB, and More

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Mail Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha JJ zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode ten ninety one of the Late Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting the mailbag questions, I want to send the reminder for you to check out the Late Round Prospect Guide. It's one hundred and seventy pages of analytical information about this class and it includes information on second year players as well, all for nineteen ninety nine. If you purchase now, you'll also get the post draft version of the guide emailed to you just hours after the NFL Draft is over. So check it all out lateround dot com. Okay, let's get to these mailbag questions. The first question this week is from Patrick on Patreon. It says, what's the biggest miss in the ZAP model database and what is the takeaway? So I get this question a lot, and I do think my answer in the last mail back about publishing the database publishing historical scores, it kind of goes back to this question being asked so frequently. And I'm not saying that you're guilty of this, Patrick, but there is this fixation on finding these individual instances where something was wrong. I'm gonna be honest with you, guys. The ZAP model has gotten tons of things wrong. But the NFL has two teams get this stuff wrong all the time in the NFL draft. It's no different for me when it comes to prospecting and when it comes to the ZAP model, I get stuff wrong all the time. I don't know exactly how to answer this one though, just to be honest, because I'm not sure exactly how to measure biggest miss. It's all relative to expectation. Like the current model has Jalen Polk with a negative draft capital delta, and that's good because it means that the model likes Polk less than the NFL did or where he was actually drafted. But it's not like the model said, run for the hills. Jalen Polk is gonna be one of the biggest bussy you'll ever see a wide receiver. So is that a winner or a loss? Is it a huge miss because the model didn't get the exact outcome. I think there have been guys who have come out in recent history, and I want to keep this to recent history just to make the content more engaging for you guys, But there have been players in recent history who I've just completely whipped on. You can see that in the Prospect Guide each year. Bucky Irving. I did not expect Bucky Irving to be as good as he's been. Now. I've made some model changes and some iterations over the last couple of years, and he does look better than he did coming out a couple of years ago. But where my process has also changed is more on the subjective side, not even talking film watching here, but with the analysis that I do that isn't ZAP model focused. I've leaned more on the advanced metrics in my writeups and in my analysis that I didn't have as much access to even just a couple of years ago, and some of those advanced numbers definitely paint a more favorable picture for a player like Irving, and hopefully I would have caught that this time around if another player exactly like Bucky Irving were to come out. A good example of that is with Zachariah Branch this year. Technically, the ZA model doesn't like despise Branch. I wouldn't say it likes him. He has a negative draft capital delta, but it's not so horribly negative that he'd be an obvious avoid when you only look at the model's inputs. But a lot of the advanced data paints a scary, scary picture, which is what the analysis shows in the prospect guide itself. And now I know a lot of people are probably thinking, then why don't you just include that data in the model? And the reason I don't is because modeling isn't about throwing as many data points together in an attempt to find the best answers. That usually creates a lot of issues. You're double counting things, you're overfitting, it can get messy. Usually the best models they're relatively simple when it comes to the inputs that they're dealing with. Second, a lot of the data that people use just doesn't go back far enough so you can't reliably trust it, at least very easily in a model if you're looking to test it properly. And I'm not even getting into the issue of proprietary data, which isn't something that we need to talk about on today's show. But back to the question, I think for a player like Irving, it's about understanding what the model says and then looking beyond those inputs. If any of you guys read one of the original late Round Prospect guides when I first launched this business, the analysis in those are like night and day compared to what I'm doing now. Just objectively, I don't want to say the old guides were horrible analysis, but I've learned a lot over the last five years, and I try to get better every year that I do this now. As for some other misses, Rashi Rice was a recent miss. I couldn't boost him simply because of landing spot, and I don't think that was necessarily wrong. We've seen Kansas city wide receivers fail pretty frequently in this Mahomes era. I do think Rice could have been another case of leaning in more on the advanced metrics though, But like he had a thirty one percent slot rate in college, his wide yards per route run was pretty average for a wide out in that database. His yards after the catch profile that was great, and I think it ultimately mattered a ton for Rashi Rice. It's just hard to know exactly how a team might deploy a player like Rice. Just last year, the model didn't mind Caleb Johnson. I wasn't quite as bullish as the model was, and then we're fantasy managers who really liked him. But it's a big, big model miss. Even with some of the fixes that were made to the model this offseason, he still has a pretty good ZAP score. Maybe the low explosive run rate, the kind of more middling combine, maybe those things should have been reasons to col off of Caleb Johnson, But I don't know. I think with prospecting work, oftentimes we see a miss like this and we overstate what it actually all means. We take it so far and we live or die by that one player. That's just not how I view this stuff, or how I think anyone should view this stuff. One player shouldn't change your approach to prospecting or how you should model things. It shouldn't make you completely change your process. We have no idea what's going on behind the scenes, how these players are off the field, what kind of work ethic they have. Usually that all comes out in age justine, production and other predictive analytics, but that's never a given. Again. NFL teams are missing on these guys all the time. And they're not nerds living in their mom's basement like I am. They're spending millions of dollars on this stuff. But those are just a few of the names that came to mind when I saw this question. I know there are plenty more, and I'm sure some of you are screaming, what about this guy that you missed on? But I think those three players sort of capture my process and how I've evolved pretty well. Just remember, there's gonna be a lot of misses. That's how it goes with prospecting. This next one's from John on Patreon. I shortened it a little bit for podcast purposes. It says, JJ, what does the optimal preparation schedule look like? This would be for a redraft league? For reference, I usually spend time on the following in the summer leading up to the draft, ADP rankings, and subsequent updates. Positional tiers, strategies for both the overall draft in each position. Your draft guide is extremely helpful. Pick specific strategies, i e. Pick number one versus seven, et cetera, intel gathering, big board review my previous year's process. So John is asking this because he says he wants to take his game to the next level, that he's always knocking on the door. But he doesn't want to leave any stone unturned. He says, I think what you're doing is more than what ninety nine percent of fantasy managers are doing. It doesn't guarantee success, but you're positioning yourself really well against your competition. It's kind of weird and counterintuitive, but I think the next step here is to be less strict. I see this with a lot of people. They have all these tools, they've consumed all this content, they have this big board, but when the draft comes, they become overwhelmed because they have the tools, but they have been thought enough about how they actually are going to use those tools. This is why I talk so much about embracing variants and being reacted in the draft guide each year. The truth is, any fantasy manager can gather a whole bunch of information. It's the application of that information that actually matters. And the application can come in the form of just knowing ball. Don't get me wrong. You could just know ball and you can do better than your competition to some degree. But this is a game against other humans. There's a psychology component to it. There's a huge market component to it, which means having the information isn't always enough. To elevate your game, You've got to think about how other drafters are gonna think how they might draft, and you need to be more reactive. Fantasy football drafts are about being nimble and about being able to react to new information on the fly. Like I said, people will often be super strict with their rankings, but when they do that, they get stuck when they're on the clock and the plan shifts just even a little bit. It's like watching Jared goffplay unbelievably great when things are working well, but when that rhythm gets interrupted, we can sometimes see some really bad quarterback play. You want to be like Josh Allen. When things break down, you can still make something big happen. And the way you do that is by understanding the various outcomes and the way that things can go down, and you can usually do that by just getting reps. Bestball is not the same game as season long fantasy football from a managed perspective, but it teaches you how to be nimble in those situations. People will snipe you left and right. You've got to have a plan almost immediately when that happens. You can't just sit back with the same plan no matter what you really have to open your mind to coming up with your own strategies. At times. Yes, certain strategies they're going to be better than others, but there are many many ways to win at fantasy football. You can have a predetermined strategy going into a draft, but I would say that you should just have an understanding of all strategies. That way, when your initial one doesn't work, it makes it a lot easier to pivot to another one. So I would almost tell people to not be so so detailed and so specific to one or two outcomes, because when you get to that point where you've got all this information, you sometimes start missing the more important parts of being a good drafter, which is being able to change your approach on the fly when things start to go south. Your preparation is fine. What you said in this question, it's fine, John, You're doing great. I would just say it needs to be expanded. Rather than only looking at your specific spot in a draft or your specific strategy that you want to use, think about as many as you can. That way, you can pivot, and trust me, more often than not, you probably will want to pivot. This last question is from Matt on Patreon. It says it looks like Carnel Tate is the odds on favorite to be the first wide receiver selected in the draft. How much does the hit rate for receiver increase with a top ten selection? Would his prospects score potentially increase above say Tyson's if Tyson was selected in the of the first round. So this is sort of why I did that episode on the Truth about Draft capital back in early March, basically showing that draft capital matters, but there are parts of the draft where it matters a lot less than people generally think. Expanding on that using arbitrary thresholds. It's good for content delivery, it's good for communicating ideas, but it's not something that we need to strictly apply, as in, if Carnel Tait is the tenth overall pick versus the eleventh overall pick, his outlook does not meaningfully change. And what gets people in trouble and I'm guilty of this at times too, because I'm human, But what gets people into trouble is the arbitrary threshold analysis that we do, where we say, here's a look at all top ten wide receivers and their hit rates. But let's say that Tait goes ninth overall. Technically, a player who gets drafted eleventh overall has more similar draft capital to Tate than someone who goes third overall, But the third overall player is now part of our comparison sample, the eleventh overall player isn't. So just to be clear, I wouldn't be thinking of top ten or not top ten or anything like that. I know I speak that way at times, but that's just for me to communicate certain ideas. Everything lives more in this gray area where one spot to the next you're losing a little bit of that overall prospect score. Going from tenth to eleventh to twelfth and so on, you lose a little bit. The drop offs aren't necessarily linear, they're not consistent, but there are dropoffs. I think the question here really comes down to, if Carnel Tate has X draft capital, what type of capital would it take for Jordan Tyson to not be ranked ahead of Tait and as that model because right now the model just really loves Jordan Tyson. I have these guys ranked in the same tier because there's at least some things in the model can't fully comprehend about Tyson, but objectively Jordan Tyson is the best age adjusted production profile on a per game basis in this class. I don't really think it's that close. Now. In the pre draft version of the Prospect Guide, draft capital assumptions are being made via NFL Mock Draft database, and when that guide launched, Tate had projected ninth overall draft capital. Tyson was at fourteen. Right now, according to that same site, Tate is now at eight. Tyson he's still at fourteen. Let's say that Tate goes eighth overall. That gives him a very good ZAP score of eighty five. That's a very good score for Tyson. To have a score under eighty five, he basically need to go into round two. This is the same problem that we ran into last year with Luther Burden and Tedoroe McMillan and probably Travis Hunter two because the model was a little bit scared of Hunter. The model right now loves Luther Burden. He had incredible age adjusted production in college. Now, I don't think it's necessary to rank Burden ahead of t Mac and I didn't do that last year. But I think it's a signal of two things. Number One, it speaks to the idea that I talked about in that Draft Capital episode. Draft capital matters, but don't overstated, especially a wide receiver. We get first round busts at wide receiver all the time, even in the top half of the first round. The model's intent is to properly weigh draft capital for you, and then number two, the model is just a guide. It's merely telling you that Jordan Tyson is a really good prospect analytically, when I test the model, those tests aren't gonna sit there and say, oh, well, Jordan Tyson was two points above Carnell Tait and prospect score, So if Tate outscores Tyson, this is a big miss that will really ruin the predictedness of the model. It's essentially just saying that their outlooks are similar despite that draft capital difference. And I think more subjectively, if you want to play it safe and if you don't want to force the issue, you can then just draft Carnel Tit over Jordan Tyson in your dynasty leagues, especially in this hypothetical situation where Carnell Tate is a top ten guy and Jordan Tyson goes in round two, which, by the way, I don't think that's gonna happen. I would be shocked at George Tyson is not the wide receiver one in the ZAP model post draft because he has such an insane age adjusted production profile and the model really cares about breakout score. But this is why I had them in the same tier in my rankings, because there are concerns about Tyson and his health and that could lead the worst draft capital, which leads to a little bit more variance to his overall profile. We saw the exact same thing with Luther Burden last year. When you're spending an early first round rookie pick, there's natural comfort and going with the guy who had a really strong draft capital. There's nothing wrong with that, but that at least gives you the answer of what the model we'll see we should be caring about the big gaps from one score to the next, and if you aren't quite sure if there's a big gap or not, or how to interpret that, that's exactly why I have the blurbs for each player in that guide to explain things, to talk through it, and to get us hopefully the best answer that we can get to. The last question this week is from Twitters from at they're in one, two, one, four, three two. It says, why is the analytics community, who have always leaned heavily towards zero RB principles now recommending more fragile, robust running back builds so far this draft season? Is that specifically a best ball thing? If so, why why the seemingly sudden shift. It's alarming. Now. Look, I can't speak for other analysts, and I certainly can't speak for other analysts who have hyper focused on zero RB because that hasn't been what I've done. That's not how I do things. But I can at least talk about why I think you might be seeing what you're seeing. First, from a football perspective, I talked about this in a lot more detail on episode ten to seventy five, the first one of the off season, titled the Death of the Fantasy Football Wide Receiver two. In that episode, I spoke about two big things happening in the NFL. Teams are more run heavy, and that's likely as a result of countering the speedy, smaller defenses and two high defensive alignments. And then on top of that, we're seeing heavier personnel. It's been a trend in the last few years. This past year, though, was really a big outlier. There was a big shift. A lot more teams are using heavier personnel. When that's the case, we get different competition for targets in an offense. Teams are targeting tight ends more because they're on the field more, and teams are using their running backs more on the ground and not as much through the air. This has resulted, though, in a lot of flatness at the wide receiver position. When you get a stud like JSN doing what he did last year, that's a huge advantage in fantasy football. But from a game theory and a draft standpoint, we don't have fifteen Jackson Smith and jigbas at least when we're forecasting. There aren't that many wide receivers that we can look at as locked in obvious studs, and even the ones that we can lock in, it's no guarantee. Now, you could definitely argue that this means that we should be drafting wide receivers early and often in fantasy football. If we only have a few of these wide receivers, they be come even more valuable versus the rest of the position. They're unicorns. And I agree with that. In theory, But if you're in a twelve team league and there are six of those wide receivers, you shouldn't just take the position just to take the position. They dry up really fast. And to be clear, I don't think it's only the shift to heavier personnel that's doing this. There's been an influx of talent too. We have a lot of good wide receivers in the league, which means there's a lot more competition, which makes it difficult for receivers to truly stand out and to see those like twenty eight twenty nine percent target chairs unless they're uber elite talents and good to great situations. So essentially we have some elite tier at wide receiver and then a bunch of flatness. You can just look at consensus rankings right now in twenty twenty six and see this. You get Tteroro McMillan and T Higgins and AJ Brown in that wide receiver thirteen to fifteen range. They're not even necessarily unfairly ranked. But then you get the Lad McConkie and Luther Burden and DeVante Smith and Amecca Abuca and that wide receiver twenty two to wide receiver twenty seven range the delta in ceiling projection, which I'd argue is what we should be far more focused on. But the ceiling projection for a lot of those players is not so significantly different, whereas you're going to eventually hit a bigger wall at running back, and all of that is just becoming more obvious to people. If you go back and you read any of the draft guides that I put together, I say the same thing every year. Running back still rules the fantasy football world. If you have one of the elite running backs, you have the biggest edge in fantasy football. And usually the way to get those players is by spending up. And right now we have even more incentive to do that because wide receiver becomes flat very quickly. So that's the football angle. Let's look at this from a game type perspective. I think strictly with Best Ball, there were a lot of claims made about what strategy works and what strategy doesn't before we really had enough data to make those claims. I've done becoming a Best Ball bro for two seasons now. Season one I didn't do very well, and I talked about this on the show, but I think a key reason for that was because I was far too strict and going with specific strategies. I didn't feel my player picks were that bad, but the team construction, the lack of nuance that I approached that best ball season with that was very wrong. I changed that up last year. I had a wider variety of builds and the results were great. I ended up getting a top fifty finish in the DraftKings Millie and I also had a great advance rate. Now and managed season long leagues. The approach in general doesn't dramatically change year to year. There are definitely instances where we like the running back player poll one year more than another year, and that might force you to go maybe more zero RB one year than you do another season. But most of the change is relatively gradual. The season long game, it's been around for a long time. Like if you think about my strategic takes that I've had on this podcast through the years, like one year it's draft quarterbacks late, and in the next year it's draft quarterbacks early. It's gradual. You can see some of these things coming. I always reference this. But my absolute favorite advice that I've ever given, what I think was the best thinking that I ever did in my career from an analyst perspective, was after Lamar Jackson's first MVP season. I was very in on Jackson, sure, but the greater picture was what was to come after that season. I wrote an article on Number five about it, talking about how we were on the verge of seeing more unicorn quarterbacks in the league and that the late round quarterback strategy could be morphing because the consensus fantasy football world was recognizing the importance of rushing. In other words, finding the obvious late round quarterback wouldn't be as easy. People saw what Lamar Jackson did and they wanted more of that. So each year we did get like a Josh Allen emergence, a Jalen Hurts emergence. It would still happen, but it wasn't as frequent as previous seasons, and we were getting more and more of those players. The ADPs of these mobile quarterbacks started to rise, and I'm unbelievably proud of being ahead of that trend because that trend quite literally shook my brand. I created all of this, this podcast, this business. It all stems from my original ebook in twenty twelve called the Late Round Quarterback and I was willing to say, hey, that's not exactly right anymore. And nothing frustrates me more than when I go on podcasts and they say this guy only drafts quarterbacks late. If you've been listening to my content since twenty twenty, that's not the case. There are many instances where you shouldn't be going late round quarterback. But all of this didn't happen overnight. It happens gradually, which is what we're seeing in today's game too with this heavier personnel stuff. But best Ball is different. It's a game that's not been around as long, so we're bound to see more extreme variation in the way that people are approaching the game year in and year out. And that's why I think you might be seeing the best Ball and gals talk about not going zero RB as much or whatever the case may be. They're realizing they were probably too strict with that approach, that it wasn't the best and only way, and that best Ball is just a different beast where there's still a lot to be learned. But 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 bestwarching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'm actually gonna be out next week, but you're still gonna get an early week podcast and then an episode of Late Round Perspectives, so definitely tune into those. Otherwise, thanks for listening. I hope you have a great weekend.