533: Mailbag 8/13/21

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J. Zacher reson. What's up everyone? It's JJ Zachareson, the editor in chief at fandel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode five hundred and thirty three of the Late Round podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in, Hey golf fans. Fandel has a special free to play game centered around PGA Tour events. Make Golf Prop picks on the final round of any PGA tournament on CBS for your chance to win a share of five thousand dollars. Prior to the start of the final round, go on the Fandels sportsbook app and submit answers to all the games prop questions. Answer the most correctly for a chance to win money prizes. Head over to fandle for the next PGA Tour event and pick some props for the final round. Agent location restrictions apply, no purchase necessary, void where prohibited payouts paid, and non withdrawabal site credit that expires seven days after receipt. For more information, visit fandle dot com Slash Free Games Slash Swing for the Green. The first question this week is from at Korean Rye. Last year, you pushed Deontay Johnson as the next Godwin? He did pop Who is this year's Deontae. I don't think I pushed Deontay as the next Godwin last year. That was more so Calvin Ridley given ADP. Ridley's ADP was a good bit higher and closer to where Godwins was before his breakout. But I was very high on Deontay Johnson last season and he worked out. That's very true. I think the obvious place to go with this year's Deontay Johnson is Jerry Judy. He's also a second year wide receiver who's a great route runner, who's coming off a rookie season with a really strong target share, and he's going in a similar spot in drafts as Deontay Johnson did last year. The difference with Judy this year and Deontay last year is that the Steelers were projected to be a pass heavy team, and they were a pass heavy team. But Judy also should see more down the field looks or finished with a higher average depth of target than what we saw a Deantay Johnson last year. The parallels are there, though, when you look at the type of players that they are. And remember, I'm high on Judy for all the things I talked about on Monday's episode. This last question is from at the Calm Mitch JJ. Can you explain why regression happens? I mean, is there anything more going on than just chance? We talk about regression a lot, but our team's actually doing things significantly different from season to season. Do defenses force the hand of the offense based on film? Thanks? Quite simply, regression is about sustainability. We see it in a lot of things that we do as humans, specifically sports. I always go with the golf analogy when I'm talking about regression and answering questions about regression. I like to golf. I shoot in the low nineties. Usually I'm not great. I don't play as much as I want to, but I enjoy it. Every once in a while, I'll shoot in the eighties. But that's not necessarily because I've been practicing more and I'm just a better golfer. All of a sudden, it just happens. Sometimes a ball bounces my way, sometimes I feel a little bit better putting one day. Whatever the case may be, I'll shoot in the eighties. But I can't just simply expect to shoot in the eighties every single time I play golf. After I have a score in the eighties, I'll usually regress to my meen. And the same goes if I have a day where I shoot over one hundred, because that'll happen. Sometimes that's not my norm, though I likely just wasn't feeling it that day because I'm human. That's no different in football, Like you can think of regression on a season to season level, like you seem to be doing in this question, but just think of it on a play by play level. Patrick Mahomes starts out a game with a deep ball touch on a Tyreek hill. He's one for one in that game with a really long touchdown. Should we then expect Mahomes to do that every single time he throws the ball for the rest of his game, for the rest of his life. No, of course not. And there are a lot of factors at play as to why. And I think that's what you're really asking about in this question. There's no single answer. It's a multitude of things. It's how human beings work. We're not robots. We have emotion, we have physical limitations. It's how our environment reacts in football. It's defense is changing, its offense is changing. It's all of those things. So we can't pinpoint this one thing that's the reason for regression. What we know is that sustaining a really high level of play above some norm for a long period of time that's tough to do. Understanding all of the inputs that go into regression in football would be kind of impossible because we're looking at human beings reacting to other human beings. But we know regression exists based on mountains and mountains of historical evidence, and that's what's most important for us fantasy football managers. That was a little philosophical, but hopefully it made sense. I might have just sounded like an idiot there. I have no idea this ask questions from at M Garifola. Hey JJ, thanks for all the great content. Thanks. I was curious about your thoughts on Austin Eckler. Given he should get one hundred plus targets, his offensive line is improved, and he has little competition in in the backfield, can he emerge as the overall RB one. I like him as the top back in Tier two In any case, Thanks I like Austin Eckler. I actually love him as a player, and I like him in fantasy. The issue with eckler ceiling is goal line work period, it's finding the end zone. We typically don't see running backs with few touchdowns in the top ten in a given season. And I'm referencing top ten here because it's typically been where we see league winning running back seasons. I talked about that last summer on Drafting League Winning Players. That's episode three hundred and seventy nine. But this isn't surprising. Players who find the end zone less tend to not be as good in fantasy football. Since twenty eleven, we've had one hundred different running back seasons in the top ten ten per season times ten seasons, that equals one hundred total seasons. Of those one hundred, a quarter of them scored fewer than ten total touchdowns. Just twelve of them had seven or fewer touchdowns. And if you look at the fifty top five running back seasons over this timeframe, forty five of the fifth ended up with double digit touchdowns. Is that possible for Austin Eckler, Yes, of course it is. Again, I think Eckler is priced appropriately. I'm certainly not saying to avoid Eckler, but it's hard for me to just simply ignore the fact that we know touchdowns matter for these high ceiling seasons, and Eckler has not been a goal line back. He's seen no more than nine goal line carries in a single season of his career. He's totaled six goal line touchdowns and four seasons in the league. And yeah, this is a new coaching staff, so maybe they use Eckler differently. The only issue is that it's not being reported that way. Fernando Ramirez of Sports Illustrated, who covers the Chargers, he said Austin Eckler is the back that will get the Chargers down the field, but Joshua Kelly and Larry Roundtree will likely get goal line touches. That was what he said during an interview with NFL fantasies Michael Florio. Not to be confused with pro football talks, Mike Florio. If Eckler doesn't see goal line work, then it'll be tough for him to be a top five running back in fantasy football period. That shouldn't be debatable. But don't get me wrong, it's still in his range of outcomes. Maybe not the RB one in fantasy football, but a top five back. Sure, I can see that. We just have to play probability a little bit here. That's what this game is all about. And to me, Eckler's a super high floor bet with some decent upside, and he's being drafted around players with more of a ceiling but not as much of a floor. So to me, he's properly valued. And I'll have some Austin Eckler this year, but he'll need a lot to break his way to be the overall RB one in fantasy football. Goal line work is one of the places he's got to see improvement, period. I'm just not one hundred percent convinced that he's gonna see all that much goal line work this best questions from at doll EMJV. Do you think there's a benefit to early onesie positions given the resultant roster clarity that it results in. For example, drafting Kelsey means you don't need to consider a tight end caddy, whereas drafting a guy like Jarwin might tempt you to draft a caddy to a complete positional punt if the sleeper never awakens, giving you an extra burner spot on your bench for speculating. Yes, absolutely, yes, this is something I've talked about on this show for years. I haven't been someone who says you absolutely need to take an early round tight end, especially a few years ago, but what's been consistent is the benefit that you have when you have a plug and play tight end like Travis Kelcey. You don't have to worry about the position clogging your roster. Not to be fair, in most leagues, if you go with a late round tight end approach, you don't need to be rostering a ton of tight ends. You can usually play the waiver wire in most leagues. But yes, this is and has always been an added benefit, specifically with the tight end position, and for the record, another sort of unnoticed benefit is the predictability side of things. A top tight end gives you x amount of points more than a baseline player at the position, Sure, but he's also just more predictable and that helps. That's valuable. This isn't the end all argument, though, because you still have to weigh supply and demand, and you still have to look at the kind of players you can get late, but specifically for tight end, yes, this is absolutely one of the benefits at quarterback, it's a little bit different. Before last year, quarterbacks have not been predictable at all on a season long level. The correlation between preseason expectation or adp versus how many points of quarterback scores has been close to zero on a weekly level. Quarterbacks are predictable on a season long one, they're not. What that means is is that you make the wrong assumption when you get the QB one in your draft. And that's historically. It's a little bit different in today's game, given all the stuff I've talked about over the offseason, but you make the wrong assumption that the quarterback that you're taking early is absolutely going to be a plug and play starter, and that you can't get replacement level points from the waiver wire. High end tight ends, and I'm only talking about the top tier ones. They've been more predictable on a season long level than quarterbacks have through the years, So it's different with them than quarterbacks. So this idea, to me carries more weight for tight ends than quarterbacks. This last question says a few years ago, when Gronk was the consensus tight end one, he was going in the late first round, if I remember rightly, many analysts felt that was too high. This year, Kelsey is going in the first. How do you feel about Kelsey in the first and has something changed about how we view early round tight ends. So I was against Gronk in the first round for many years, and I actually stand by that assessment given what we saw with Gronk year over year. According to my ADP expectation formula, Gronk wasn't someone who far exceeded ADP very often as an early round pick. And you can see that even based on how the market viewed him year over year once he got into the first round, which according to the data that I used for my fantasy league, that was in twenty fifteen. But from twenty fifteen to twenty sixteen we saw a slight drop in ADP. From twenty sixteen to twenty seventeen, he dropped in ADP some more. He kept falling an ADP year over year because he wasn't necessarily meeting expectation the way you should have been meeting expectation. I think the difference these days was so like Kelsey is at number one, Kelsey's ceiling is higher than what we saw from Rob Gronkowski. Gronk had that insane twenty eleven season where he scored seventeen times. But we've seen a more consistent target chair and more consistent production from Travis Kelcey, and like I just talked about in the previous question, there's value in that and an inherently unpredictable position week to week opportunity costs is a little bit different these days too. Kelsey still isn't being drafted ahead of the running backs who project to be true belcal backs. He goes ahead of more questionable running backs. There just used to be more running backs that we could feel good about in drafts when Gronk was in his prime. And then there's also the market side of things. Average draft position, especially on some platforms, has gotten so incredibly efficient. I look at the tight end rankings this year by ADP and I can barely disagree with it. In the past, we had an easier time spotting breakout tight end candidates. It's just not that easy anymore. So I think those are the reasons that things have changed from Gronk's peak to Kelsey's peak. This s question is from at D Mendy zero two. Where are you ranking Michael Carter this year. My man, I'm bullish on him as RB twenty four and wondering your thoughts. Yeah. So, as my breakout running back study from last month alluded to you want team RB ones instead of team RB twos, Michael Carter fits that since he's the first running back being drafted from the Jets. He's also likely going to fill a pass catching role on that team. That's another thing that you should be looking for with your middle and late round running back picks. That alone makes me into him. RB twenty four is a little bit too rich for me, though I have met RB twenty nine, and he's behind someone like Trey Sermon, who I think presents more upside. But Carter's a good RB two pick for teams going with a more modified zero RB or an anchor RB, whatever you want to call it RB approach. I think he'll at least provide a safe enough floor in PPR formats this year. I just don't know if that ceiling is incredibly high. This that's questions from at every Sport is Bad Love the show? Thanks? Do you think your and everybody else's ADP studies this year have shifted people's tendencies enough that they're not relevant anymore. I'm thinking especially in terms of the running back dead zone and best ball drafts pushing running backs lower than ever before. So I have a lot of random thoughts on this. First, I don't think I have the ability to move ADP. I really truly don't. I think general ideas that get picked up by a lot of analysts, like the running back dead zone idea that can change and alter ADPs for sure, But me individually, I don't think I can. But here's the thing about this question. In my opinion, I think with the rise in best ball drafts throughout the offseason and so many hardcore fantasy players doing those best ball drafts, it's really easy for us to get a warped understanding of ADP. Like my podcast is one where I capture a lot of hardcore fantasy football players. I know that, but I also get a little less hardcore of an audience during the season. I know this factually because my podcast numbers are much better in season than out of season. We have to keep in mind, whether you're listening to a show or if you're an analyst yourself, we have to keep in mind who makes up the fantasy football population, and even though Best ball leagues are our fantasy football world during the off season, the people participating in those best ball leagues are still quite small compared to all the people who play fantasy football. What that means is that this super sharp ADP that we see in best ball leagues, it's not going to be nearly that sharp in your typical season long league, and the majority of people who listen to my show are still focused on their home leagues most That's just the truth. So yes, I would absolutely agree that the more detailed and hardcore a game is like a Best Ball league during the month of May, the more likely we see pretty sharp ADP because people who are playing in the off season and drafting teams are more into this stuff, and they're likely listening to more podcasts and consuming more content. But that ADP is not going to be the ADP that we see from home leagues at all. You can even see that when you look at Yahoo or ESPN ADP. So as a result, all the strategies that I've talked about are that others have talked about, they're still incredibly valid. We're just reaching a point in time in the fantasy football world, where there are more platforms, there are more players out there, there are more types of players out there, so there's more ADP, and that ADP is coming from a wide variety of fantasy managers. Some are more hardcore and some are more casual. This ask questions from at Bailey Griffin seventy five. You talked about Aaron Jones getting hit by team touchdown regression, but also that possibly getting canceled out by past to rush touchdown ratio regression in his favor. Does this mean DeVante Adams is in for double negative regression? Should we lower his ranking? Or is he just that good? So I wouldn't think of it as double negative regression, It's just regression. His touchdown totals last year happened because of all the things that I've talked about around the Packers offense and Aaron Rodgers. Rogers had a really high touchdown rate and he threw the ball a heck of a lot close to the end zone. The Packers then, in turn had a high pass to rush touchdown ratio. So I wouldn't think of it as like compounding regression. It's just regression. I still have Adams as my wide receiver one, though, because regression doesn't mean that the dude is all of a sudden bad. He still projects to have one of the highest target chairs in the league. He's still playing with one of the best quarterbacks in the league. He's still in an offense that will likely be above average at scoring touchdowns this year, and he's still gonna see a lot of red zone work. I mean, the guy averaged twenty five point six PPR points per game last year. He was almost four points higher than Tyreek Hill, the wide receiver two, and Hill himself had seventeen total touchdowns. Regression still puts Davonte Adams at the top of wide receiver lists. I can understand if you want to go with another elite wide out there, that's fine, but regression doesn't take away what Davante Adams can do, and what he can do is ball out. The last question this week is from at Eddie Underscore Straight. Not really fantasy related, but can we hear the Reeves self airhorn again? It's been too long? Okay for all you Late Round podcast ogs. Here you go. That's gonna do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've get to subscribe 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, happy drafting, and I'll talk to you next week