519: Mailbag 6/23/21

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zacher Resa JJ zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharesen, the editor in chief at Fandel and at number fire dot com in this episode five hundred and nineteen of the Late Round podcast so many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. I'm heading to the beach for a long weekend, so you get an early mailback episode. I hope your podcast feeds are cool with that Before getting into the questions this week though, Hey basketball fans, the NBA Conference Finals are here and Fandel is offering a special new user bonus. Place a bet on any single team's money line and you'll receive exclusive plus three thousand odds for that wager. All you have to do is head over to Fandel Sportsbook, create an account and take advantage of this amazing NBA playoff odds boost. Maximum bet of five dollars. 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I've used this in the past to represent a heavy running back strategy, but maybe that can be shifted to superhero RB. Considering that the first five rounds of players tend to represent the majority of league winning players, what would you think of using a model similar to NFL offensive personnel groupings to describe a fantasy team draft strategy based on those picks, using the tight end spot to represent both one Z positions. Thanks Kevin, so honestly, and I mean this just truthfully and without any filter. I don't care. I really just don't care. I don't care if you call it hero RB, modified zero RB, anchor RB, belcow and chill. I just don't care. I tweeted about this last week, but it seems like people in general, and Kevin, I don't know that you're part of this group per se, but it seems like people have cared more about the name of the strategy than the viability of the strategy itself. And for the record, it's an awesome strategy. Aside from late round quarterback, a modified zero RB approach or a hero RB approach or an anchor RB approach. That's been my most used strategy in fantasy football over the last five or six years. I've talked about it on this show frequently, especially in PPR formats where you're starting three wide receivers in a flex, Getting that anchor at running back and then pounding the wide receiver position can be super effective. That's essentially with league winning player study that I did last season showed, So I'm just being honest here with my answer. Whatever someone comes up with that becomes generally accepted, I'm all for it. And if that's coming up with an interesting way to model after the NFL with personnel groupings, let's do it. The next question is from at cal Rodo. Well, someone in my league hoarded running backs last year, so now we have a roster limit of five same for wide receivers with six bench spots. The limit will require rostering backups at onesie positions like quarterback and tight end. How would something like this change your draft strategy, if at all. So these restrictions change the supply and demand equation for those positions. You don't have the benefit of having a fruitful waiver wire that's filled with obvious streamers each week, specifically a quarterback. Instead, Now that everyone's going to be rostering multiple quarterbacks and tight ends, you've got to play that game as well. Because the positions are more valuable. You don't have as easy of a fallback plan. So I may reach a little bit more for safety to go along with a typical upside that look at for quarterbacks at tight end, I'd probably more or less approach things similarly, but if you're worried about what that waiver wire might look like, going with a Kelsey or a Darren Waller. That makes sense in cases like this one, though, The key is remembering that the supply and demand shifts a little bit because the supply shrinks with the waiver wire becoming thinner. This ask questions from at Treker thirty four. Hi, JJ, who are your top upside tight ends if you're completely punting on the position this year? So last season, I did a study in an episode of the Late Round podcast on spotting breakout tight ends. The trends that I found for tight ends who have broken out over the last ten years is that they typically don't come from nowhere. They either had some sort of target share of the previous season before they broke out, and they weren't rookies. They're often year two or year three players. They usually play with good quarterbacks, and they're typically very athletic. I'm not sure anyone fits that criteria flawlessly in the later rounds this year, but I have three tight ends that my projections seem to like and I seem to like more than the consensus. The first one is Adam Troutman from the Saints. A lot of projecting has to be done in order for Adam Troutman to hit. But you're in the late rounds and you're trying to tell yourself a story for Troutman. That story is that he was a pretty dominant college player with strong measurables and he's playing in his second year now on a team without a clear cut number two receiver. I guess number three if you want to count Alvin Kamara. So opportunity could be there if he ends up just hitting as a player, Like, if Adam Troutman is good, he should have a breakout season hypothetically. I also like Blake Jarwin. The quarterback situation is there for him with Dak Prescott, and while he could end up being like the fourth or the fifth option on this Cowboys team, it's a team that should be one of the more pass friendly in the entire NFL. When I worked out my projections, I was surprised by how well Blake Jarwin looked, or at least the kind of potential that he had, and that potential rises with an injury to one of the pass catchers there. I do think that Adam Troutman is the better pure upside pick though, and I think probably my favorite later round tight end. You're gonna be shocked here, but it is Gerald Everett, someone that I've been touting throughout the offseason. Everett has the athleticism, He's not coming from nowhere, He's got an elite quarterback throwing him the ball, and he could very easily be the number three option in that passing attack. We've also got a new offensive coordinator in Seattle and Shane Waldron, who coached Everett with the Rams and over the last two years as the Rams passing game coordinator. For what it's worth, LA ranked fourteenth and seventh in tight end target share. We're in a similar situation with Seattle as we were last year. If Seattle ends up being a little bit more pass heavy than the adp of their skill position players suggests, we could see big years from players in that offense. It's not crazy to think that could happen. So once again, I'm buying the Seattle passing attack. This has questions from at not Gump three love the podcast. JJ. Thanks won my first championship last year following your advice as much as I could do, You stay away from players on bad teams. If so, are there any teams you think will be bad this upcoming year? So I've done analysis on this in the past, and yes, good fantasy players generally come from good teams. I don't think that's very surprising. But what I think I failed at articulating way back when I did a study on that, when I think goes missing from that sort of analysis is cost and predictability. What I mean by cost is just adp generally speaking, players and perceived bad offenses aren't being drafted early in fantasy football drafts. And what I mean by predictability is our ability to accurately forecast which offenses are actually going to be the best. We can do a decent enough job at it by looking at the quarterbacks who are leading each team, Like we know that the Buccaneers offense, the Chiefs offense, those offenses are going to be good. But there are going to be offenses that we predict in correctly and vice versa, so there's at least some variance there. So while offensive situation does absolutely matter, it's important to recognize that it's often baked into a player's average draft position in some way and since we can get offensive performance predictions wrong, can sometimes actually be beneficial to be contrarian by taking players in those bad offenses, especially when you get in spots in your draft where the opportunity cost is just a lower Like no one wants players on the Jets right now, but you're not spending up to get players on the Jets. Michael Carter's on a third round draft pick now. Meanwhile, Detroit's a team that does project pretty poorly as well, but you do have to spend decent draft capital to get DeAndre Swift and TJ. Hawkinson. That's a little bit scary. It's fine to factor in offensive situation in your analysis. You should do that, but always relate that back to cost, because your goal is to extract value, not just fade players for the sake of fading them. And that's especially true in the middle in the late rounds. So if I were to wrap this answer up a little bit more cleanly, I'd be more inclined to take players in those perceived bottom tier offenses later in my draft, because there's always the chance that we're just projecting that offense wrong. Early in the draft, when stakes are high, I'm less inclined to do that. This last question is an email says, hey, JJ, I have a question for the mailbag, but honestly I need help sorting out what my question actually is. It's more like a theory. I keep getting this nagging feeling that the Steelers offense, Big Ben in particular, might be better than we all think. In twenty twenty, it felt like the Steelers were rolling. Then they got hit with maybe the worst set of COVID game adjustments of any team in the NFL, with football being a contact sport, Ben being old and coming off injury and no running game. Doesn't it feel like there were a lot of mitigating circumstances as to why Ben in the offense looks so bad at times? I guess what I'm asking is, do you think we kind of forgot that stuff and the Steelers pass catchers might actually be values? Thanks? JJ, hope you're settling in well after the move. Thanks Dustin. I've changed my view on the Steelers offense a little bit from early May after the draft until now. I still don't think them drafting a running back in Round one made a whole lot of sense, even though I think Naji Harris is gonna ball out. Happening with Pittsburgh is one of those cases where everyone's making this generally accepted assumption, let's call it a floor assumption, where the assumption is essentially a projection of the team's floor, and that assumption surrounds the offensive line. The offensive line is really what hurt the Steelers last year. Now, Roethlisberger wasn't great coming off that injury, and I'm not trying to give him a pass or anything, but the offensive line was a disaster and it's likely not going to be great in twenty twenty one either. But I feel like everyone's working under the assumption, this is the floor assumption I was talking about that is going to be just as bad as an offensive line when it's almost hard for it to be that bad. And if that changes, the whole offense changes. We could see more down the field throws than we saw last year, where last year Roethlisberger saw his lowest fifteen plus air yard attempt rate of the last decade, And if that was because of his elbow injury, there's the chance that his elbow just feels better now than it did last year. He's already alluded to that. I mean, granted, Ben Roethlisberger's a little bit dramatic, but he has alluded to the fact that his elbow feels even better this year than last year. But yes, I would agree overall with your thoughts here. I will say though, it's hard to envision a scenario where all three wide receivers for Pittsburgh that they all really hit. But I do think people are a little bit two down on the Steelers offense given the weapons that they have. I'm into Chase Claypowl this year because I think he has the highest ceiling of the three wide receivers on that team. But anyone who's been listening to the show knows that I'm a Deontay Johnson's stand too. This last question is from at TFF Dad's assuming standard half PPR scoring and roster construction. Give your philosophy on your bench strategy, carrying a second quarterback or tight end, loading up on running back, flyers, target high upside, et cetera. So when I first started at number five back in twenty thirteen, I think it was I was tasked to build out our content team and help build out our content business. I looked at myself and I said Okay, I know that I can write about football, and since we're a startup, I'll write about football all day and all night. But we were a site that did more than just football. We needed content for other sports as well. So instead of recruiting football writers because I knew how to write football, I recruited writers who could write about those other sports that I didn't know that much about. They filled the holes on the site. That's the same philosophy that you've got to take with your fantasy football lineup and bench. You use your bench to back up the areas that need improvement in your starting lineup. So if you're not looking that hot at wide receiver, then your bench should be more wide receiver focused than running back focused. And then I'll usually try my best to have one flexible spot on my bench with a super high upside low floor play because he's easy to drop in an instant. It's nice to have that flexibility as you manage your roster throughout the season, but it obviously depends on scoring and what positions matter the most in that particular league. Generally speaking, though, I'll try to beef up my bench with the positions that are lacking a little bit in my starting lineup. The last question this week is an email from Daniel that says, hey, JJ love the show. Thanks. I heard your recent episode on the running Back Dead and it made sense. But it seems that this year there are some genuinely interesting running backs going in rounds four through six. For example, Mike Davis and Miles Gaskin are currently the presumed starters on their teams and could get a decent workload, while Javonte Williams could overtake Melvin Gordon early in the season. How should we be thinking about those players given the poor historical output of running backs taken in this range compared to wide receivers. Thanks, so, honestly, this is precisely what the running back dead zone is. People have made these arguments every single year. Last year was Mark Ingram and Todd Gurley and Leonard Fournette and Devin Singletary. I don't necessarily see why Mike Davis and Miles Gaskin have substantially better odds or a different situation than those players did. Now, my hypothesis as to why the running back dead zone exists is because of what you're saying in this question. We go through a couple of rounds of our fantasy draft, where were drafting running backs who look like workhorses, who are young, who have a ton of upside, and that dries up fast, and then we panic and we start to draft players soon after that who have this perceived workhorse upside, but they may not have the same pedigree as the running backs being selected in the first couple of rounds. That's precisely what we have with Miles Gaskin and Mike Davis. Especially Davis. Now, I can understand drafting either guy. Don't get me wrong, Like I understand the allure. I'm not saying there's a zero percent chance that these guys hit, but I won't be drafting them that much this year because they're in that range. But they're in that range for a reason, and the wide receivers in that range are just so good. Mike Davis is a twenty eight year old journeyman running back who's never been a true workhorse in the NFL. Miles Gaskin's more intriguing to me, but he's still a smaller back without strong capital who thrived into Miami system last year that we saw other running backs thrive in, namely savon akmad Gaskin was an underrated prospect, but we don't see players like him hit very often. My greater point here, though, is that a lot of times these stories feel right in the preseason, they feel fine, but they're not nearly as clean as they seem to be. Throughout recent history, the running back dead zone has been filled with running backs who project to have a big workload. This is no different. These guys project to have a strong workload, but we see this every single year, and maybe both of those guys do pan out this year. Of course that's possible, after all, they are projected for that big workload. It's just that their situations are less secure than the players being drafted around before them, and that's what we've seen historically from running backs in this range. They project well enough, but there's variants because of something like age and a player hitting that cliff, or because the actual talent of those players isn't necessarily as good as we might think and we're merely projecting them for that big workload because of what we see as a lack of competition. I see this year's running back dead zone is no different than the ones that we've seen before. Running back may be slightly deeper at the top, but there are still some running backs that I'm generally avoiding in that range in favor of wide receivers because the wide receivers in that range are very, very good, and we have to remember that's more so what the running back dead zone is all about. It's the opportunity cost side of things. It's the fact that you can get good wide receivers instead of getting these running backs who don't pan out at a really high rate. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've get subscribed to Late Round podcasts, 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, I will catch you next week.