821: Mailbag 10/20/23

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Speaker 1: This is the Lady Bold Podcast with your host JJ zacher rethas j Jake zacher reson What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Eson in this episode eight and twenty one of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting this week's mailback questions, I want to remind you to check out the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon. With the Patreon, you get weekly waiver wire Q and a's with yours truly, there's rest of season rankings and tiers, weekly rankings and tiers, and there's a fantastic discord community. You can learn more about it by heading to Lateround dot com. Let's get to these questions. The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Bad Books. It says did we go too far with the rookies? And year twos are always undervalued narrative This season, a team with Thielen, Moster, Kelsey, Evans, keenan Allen would be dominating. Obviously, rookies are better during the second half, so the jury is still out on whether jsn Addison and Flowers are league winners, but I think it's safe to say you're playing from behind. Is you've been holding or playing these guys over over the hill proven players. There's a lot to unpack here. There's so much to unpack. The first sentence kind of says it all to me, did we go too far with the rookies and year two's are always undervalued narrative this season? Let's stop right there. As someone who studied over a decade of ADP data to draw conclusions that rookies and year two players are generally undervalued in redraft leagues, I think there's an insane generalization going on here. That generalization being that if you're targeting those types of players, then you're not targeting older players. At least with the stuff that I've researched, that couldn't be further from the truth. And then, on top of that, use the word always year two players rookies, they're not always undervalued, and anyone selling it that way they're completely wrong. There's also a really big selection bias going on here, maybe even a confirmation bias, Like let's use your individual examples that you threw out there in this question. If you're gonna throw a late round dart like Adam Thielen into this discussion, then what about Pooka and Akua. Nakua is a rookie. Raheem Moster saw a perfect storm hit right before the season started. Jeff Wilson was randomly thrown to ir. People weren't aware that was gonna happen. And then Devon a Chan had that preseason injury, and then when a Chan returned, he dominated. And a Chan's a rookie. He's a rookie running back. He just unfortunately got hurt. Now, I don't really understand the Travis Kelcey and Keenan Allen examples. No one was drafting a rookie wide receiver over Keenan Allen. Maybe some people were drafting Jamir Gibbs over him, but that wasn't common either, And the only rookie being selected before Allen was b Jeon Robinson, who's a top ten fantasy asset. Right now, have the first year wide receivers panned out not to summon insane degree, no JSN Quintin Johnston. They've basically been zeros. Addison and Flowers have been decent, though, and both of those players are likely to outperform ADP expectation this year. Having a fifty percent hit rate, with middle round rookie wide receivers is fine. If your expectation was that they always will work out, then yeah you're disappointed. But that's a crazy expectation to have. We can sit here all day long and we can say, if you drafted Adam Thielen, if you drafted Keenan Allen, Travis Kelce, Mike Evans, you're dominating right now. But what if you drafted b Jon Robinson, Sam Laporta, Pukinakua and Devon a Chan and those guys ADPs. They were later than the ones that you listed. They were later than the veterans that you threw out in this quest question. Now, look, I haven't run the numbers to see which players and which age groups outperform expectation most this season. I'll do all of that during the off season to help discover trends. But I can confidently tell you that this is not the way that you should draw conclusions about this kind of thing. Those types of trends are just that they're trends. They're not factual things that happen. No matter what, I go back to you using the word always as part of this question, nothing in fantasy football as always there are old players who break out all the time, especially in the later rounds. There are rookies who break out all the time. We're playing a game of probability. We're not playing a game of always. The nice question is from twitters from at with Parks. It says, how are you viewing Tony Pollard moving forward? Seeing a lot of concerns with his explosiveness and the Cowboys offense seems tough to project any kind of consistency. Now. I've seen the same questions about his explosiveness, and that long play that he had in Week six did not help the narrative. I don't think he's just lacking explosion. Maybe something's going on from last year's injury, maybe not, but I don't think it's that big of a concern for him. And you mentioned the Cowboys offense being inconsistent. I think that's true from a results standpoint. But like I said with Ceedee Lamb on last week's fifteen Transactions episode, they've had some really, really weird game scripts this year. Week six finally featured a game where that game script was kind of normal, which is not what we've seen from Dallas this year. And look what happened. Pollard finishes as the RB eleven and PPR formats while seeing a season high eighty three percent running back rush share and a season high twenty three percent target share. His peripherals are still great. The main reason that he hasn't been better is touchdowns. He's only scored in one game this year. According to Pro Football Focuses Expected Touchdowns model, which looks at where these guys are seeing touches and how many touchdowns they should have based on those touches. According to that model, Pollard is the biggest regression candidate in football. He should have five more touchdowns than he currently has and for the record, second on that list is Josh Jacobs. But Pollard should be fine in my opinion. My bigger concern is that, according to my justin Fantasy points allowed numbers, Dallas doesn't have the most friendly running back schedule from here on out. The passing schedule's great, but it's not amazing on the running back side, but Pollard's peripherals should keep him as an RB one. The next question is from Patreon. It's from Sam. It says, hey, jj I was wondering what should be the best plan of action if you are the highest scoring team and also have the highest points against. Because of this, I'm two and four and three and three and two leagues where I lead the league in scoring but also in points against. Should I make moves or stand pat and hope the wins come in? Thank you for all your heart work. So I get this question multiple times every year. I see people freak out when they have good teams with their records don't reflect it. But you can't control your points against. It's why there are all play leagues out there where you play each team each week, and why there are leagues where you play against the league media each week too. The thing that you can actually control is clearly going well. You're scoring a lot of points. There's no need to change things up because you'd be changing up the thing that's actually going well for you. Now, I got another question that's loosely related to this one from at Avinnner on Twitter. It says do you change your season long strategy based on your record? Do you take more risks when having a winning record or losing record? When is it good to just stick course? So this is different from Sam's question because we've removed points from the discussion with Sam's team, it's likely pretty good he's gotten unlucky. With a team that has a bad rend, there's a good chance in total that's just not set up that well. And in those cases, yes, I do manage things differently. I'm in a league where I'm not happy with my team, so I wanted more variants on that team, and I started upgrading a position like wide receiver while downgrading running back as a result. Now that's typically the opposite approach for most fantasy managers, but I did that because running back injuries can catapult totally irrelevant running backs into being legitimate options, and I'd rather take a shot on that happening off the waiver wire than having to start someone like Wandel Robinson, who's this high floor, low ceiling play. And at the end of the day, in situations like that, I'm more willing to take on trades that may look worse for me on paper. Like people need to remember that in fantasy football, if you're not first, your last generally speaking, or just aiming for first place. So if my team is struggling, what's the difference between finishing eighth place and eleventh place? As long as there's not some sort of punishment for that last place team. Of course, now all the while, I've got a team that's sitting pretty In that case, I don't need to take on that variance or take on trades and take on moves that may favor the other team. I might start handcuffing my own running backs in that kind of league just for safety, whereas if my team is bad, I'll handcuff other teams running backs in order to get multiple starters out of it. But yes, overall, you should be managing your teams differently based on how good they actually are. Those are just some examples of how I do it. This next one's an email from Chris. It says, hey, JJ love the show. Thanks. Was wondering if you think Christian Watson is a buyer a cell rest of season. Seems like he's just been okay so far this year, But worried a bit about Jordan Love. I'm more on the optimistic side with Christian Watson. He saw a nice uptick and route participation from week four to week five. Week four being his return, week five being his second game back from injury. He went from a forty six percent an eighty four percent route participation that resulted in target shairs of twelve percent in his game, back to twenty four percent the last time we saw him. Now, Watson's obviously a deep ball specialist. He can generate some big, big plays. He finished Week five the last time we saw Green Bay, with one hundred and eighty nine air yards that was the second most in the league. The Packers meanwhile rank first in air yards per attempt this season. Jordan Love is throwing the ball down the field. The Packers have also now had their buy that gives Watson managers an advantage you don't have to worry about that moving forward, and their schedule is top ten in the league from here on out when looking at justin fantasy points allowed to wide receivers. So I'm definitely still in on Watson and I might still consider him a bye. I know in my rest of season rankings I was higher than consensus on him, So that's where I stand right now. The last question this week is from at the Real Adam Colt. It says my quarterbacks are Jordan Love and Sam How should I trade Brandon Ayuk for two A tongue of ailoa? Knowing I have Cooper Cup A'm and Ross, Saint Brown and Dj Moore as well. This is another type of question that I get almost every single week. And well, I understand that some leagues may favor a player like Tua over Ayyuk in a typical format, I would not do this. Just because you have excess of something doesn't mean that you should be willing to give it away at a lower cost. Not only that, but assuming that you can start three wide receivers, I would love to have that rotation of wide receivers. With the quarterback situation in Chicago, I'd love to have a player like Brandon Ayuk to throw into my lineup. I mean, I like Ayuk more than Dj Moore straight up by decent margin. Moving forward, Ayuk, like I talked about on the ten Trend show, He's far more of a buye for me than a cell. And this is nothing against Tua. I think Tua is a mid range QB one rest of season. It's just that you should be able to get more out of a situation like this brand and Ayyuk should be able to fetch more in a trade, and realistically, you should be able to platoon Jordan Love and Sam Howe together to at least get you QB one production, maybe lower end QB one production, but the two of them are fine as a platoon. It might not match too as production. I totally get it, but you're at least getting something usable, and you're not getting rid of Brandon Aiyuk as a result. The real reason I wanted to bring this up, though, is that you shouldn't be giving something away at a lower cost just because you're able to. This isn't a charity. You're not donating to some good cause. You're donating to your competition. That to me, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. That's it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've 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 follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I got a Late Round Perspectives episode for you later today, so be on the lookout for that. Otherwise, enjoy your weekend and I will talk to you next week. Two