339: Mailbag 1/10/20

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha. J J zacher Resa, what's up everyone. It's JJ zach Reeson, the editor in chief at fandel and at number five dot com. And this is episode three hundred and thirty nine of the Late Round podcast many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast Network. Thanks for tuning in. So I was digging into some data this week now that the season's over, and I came across a handful of what I thought were interesting stats, and instead of writing an article that would be filled with some fluff, I thought i'd talk about those stats during today's intro. So here goes. The first one that I saw is that in twenty nineteen, Jared Goff only threw one touchdown where the ball traveled fifteen or more air yards. That accounted for fewer than five percent of his passing touchdowns this year, and it was the lowest rate that we've seen since twenty eleven of a higher volume quarterback. It might be beyond twenty eleven two. That's a number that's bound to positively regress next year. Another one was actually one that I tweeted, and it's that Le'Veon Bell didn't finish with a single run at or above twenty yards this year, and he joined mckl lashore as the only two hundred plus attempt runner since twenty eleven without a twenty plus yard run. And here's a fun one for everyone who bought into Leonard Fournette's touchdown regression. He only scored three times on the ground, but that actually accounted for every Jacksonville rushing touchdown this year. He's the third running back to do that since twenty eleven. And again, I like to reference back to twenty eleven because that's when things started to get a little bit heavier from a passing standpoint, I need some point of reference. But Jacksonville only ran for three touchdowns this year. That's only happened thirteen other times in NFL history, and it's the lowest total that we've seen since two thousand and five. So even though regression was never gonna hit Fournette to the point where he'd be a double digit touchdown player, we were really working with history this year with him. I'll go with one more. We know that yards per carry is a pretty dumb stat, so I tried to give it at least some context. If I'm gonna look at it. Even doing this doesn't give it enough context, but I still think it's interesting. But what I do is I look at a player's yards per carry average and I compare it to his running back teammates averages. It's not predictive. It's a descriptive stat that tells us how well a running back did compared to his teammates and yards per carry. But I find it somewhat interesting. And in twenty nineteen, no higher volume running back was worse compared to his teammates than Tevin Coleman. His teammates ran forer point eight three more yards per carrie than he did. That's actually a pretty low number, though compared to other seasons that I've analyzed. The worst since twenty eleven is la Garrett Blunts twenty eighteen, where he was one point three four yards per carry worse than his running back teammates. But those are just some interesting stats that I randomly saw while I was looking through data this week, and they actually do have some fantasy ramifications, at least as it pertains to regression. But we've got all off season to talk about that. I do have a handful of questions to answer for today's show, But before I get into them, I wouldn't let you know that Fandal is giving you a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles. Enter a WFBBC Qualify contest and compete for your chance to win a seat in the twenty twenty World Fantasy Basketball Championship on March fourteenth, twenty twenty. Win the qualifier and earn a shot to win your share of two and a half million dollars in cash prizes, as well as a VIP trip for two to LA for the live final, and that includes hotel airfare, access to all the parties and even take us to the Houston Versus LA game and Fandel's luxury suite. For more details, visit fandle dot com or download the Fandel app today. Eligibility restrictions apply. The first question this week is from at Pel three to one six on Twitter. What coaching changes do you think so far will have a positive or negative effect on teams Fantasy outlooks in twenty twenty. So about six years ago or so, I went to number five and I wrote up a bunch of articles related to coaching hires. I looked at the coach's history and basically concluded whether or not it was a good hire based on his previous experience, usually as a coordinator. Soon after writing those I really how irrelevant that type of analysis can sometimes be. Now, I don't want that to be taken the wrong way. We absolutely should analyze coaching data to understand how offenses and defenses are going to be run. Coaches have tendencies and ways of doing things, and those tendencies are always looked at when I'm building projections. So please, please don't take what I'm saying the wrong way. But like when Joe Judge was hired by the Giants this week, I saw a ton of responses to the higher that were along the lines of he was the wide receiver coach for New England. They had the worst wide receivers in the league this year. Like, yeah, New England's wide receivers weren't good this past year. But so much about a head coach and being a head coach has to do with delegation in leadership. Do we know for certain that Joe Judge can't be a leader and he has no idea how to properly delegate. I care a lot more about the staffs that these coaches put together than the head coach himself. That's what I'm getting at here. And the thing is, generally speaking, coaches are going to teams that weren't good the previous season, and chances are that means they weren't great offensively. So almost all coaching changes will result in a good thing for an offense, even if we can't fully attribute the increase in production to that coach or not. But I think it's great that Dallas is keeping Kellen Moore. That's what's currently being reported. We saw the passing game open up under more and Dallas had the best offense that we've seen them have in years, So that's a very good thing. So I went a little less direct with the answer to this question, but I wanted to share an insight that I realized a handful of years ago with this coaching stuff for fantasy purposes, the staff is more important than the coach himself, unless the coach is handling coordinator duties as well. This next question is from at Sam hoppin when you're doing offseason analysis for the upcoming year, do you include Week seventeen stats. It's very seldom that re draft league's play into week seventeen nowadays because of the implication of teams resting players, So should we include a week of play that doesn't count for fantasy Look, I think it depends on what you're trying to analyze. If you're looking at things like where a player finished this season and how many points he scored, removing week seventeen does make sense. We want everyone to be on a level playing field, and we know players rest and they don't play full games in week seventeen, But it likely won't change a whole lot, especially if you look at things from a points per game standpoint. I think including week seventeen is a good idea if you're looking at an individual player. It gives you another data point and a small sample season. But overall, if we're being honest, it probably won't drastically change the way that you view a player or a group of players, regardless of the direction that you go in. This text was an email which you guys can email me at jjat number fire dot com with a mailbag question, but this is an email from Andy. It says last week a listener asked a question about Lamar Jackson and touchdown regression. In your response, you mentioned that Lamar's regression needed to be analyzed separately in terms of his passing and rushing touchdowns. Can you discuss how to analyze rushing touchdown regression for quarterbacks. Yeah. So the reason I separated things out is because it's a lot easier to comprehend when we do that. When we can focus on just the passing, it's easy to see how there would be some regression there. But you can just focus on the rushing too. I can tell you that over the last nine seasons, so since twenty eleven, we've seen pretty decent correlation between rushing yards by a quarterback and the number of touchdowns of that quarterback scores. It's not as strong as we see at running back. And my hypothesis for that is because of quarterback sneaks. You'll have guys like Drew Brees and Tom Brady score rushing touchdowns because they sneak it in at the one. We see that with running backs, but those running backs are usually the ones who are getting a pretty big workload anyway and running for a lot of yards. We don't have that many goal lines specialists or running backs who are only seeing touches when they're at the goal line. Quarterbacks have scored rushing touchdowns for every one hundred and seven rushing yards over the last decade. Based on that, Lamar Jackson should have had four more rushing touchdowns this past year. But again, those numbers are skewed a little bit because of what I just talked about. It's not like Lamar Jackson was consistently seeing rushes close to the goal line. I also think it's very, very hard to determine what the norm is for a player like Lamar Jackson. He's been anything but normal. We've seen a large sample of passes in the NFL, and we know that touchdown raids do regress. We can take educated guesses to wear his touchdown total should be on the ground. But we're also talking about the best rushing quarterback in NFL history. He's not the best throwing quarterback. He's the best rushing quarterback. If we were talking about Tom Brady and we saw that Tom Brady had like seven rushing touchdowns this year, then it would be easy to say that Brady's not going to come close to that mark in twenty twenty. But with Lamar Jackson, the historical information that we have is like Michael Vick, but that was also in a different era. I do think, just based on the typical yards to touchdown conversion and what Jackson did during his rookie season, there's a chance that we see in uptick and rushing touchdowns next season, as long as he's able to maintain his effectiveness on the ground. But that's gonna come at a cost, and that's passing touchdowns. So maybe you're sitting there thinking, well, that'll just even out, right, if Lamar Jackson loses some juice through the air, he'll just gain it with his legs. Proportionally, that's true, But should we assume Baltimore is as good offensively next year as they were this year. Usually teams with as high a touchdown totals as Baltimore had this past year see fewer touchdowns the following season. That's something that I talk about a lot when I do regression podcasts during the offseason. So basically what I'm saying here is the following Lamar Jackson will regress in the touchdown call him as a passer next year. There's not a lot that tells us that he can't maintain what he did on the ground, though, and he may actually see more rushing touchdowns next year, but the likelihood that the rushing touchdowns completely offset the lack of passing touchdowns is not very high because the Ravens offense isn't likely to be as good at scoring as they were in twenty nineteen. That's why Jackson should still be the QB one, and he's still going to be projected to give you an edge, but that edge isn't going to be like the one that he gave you in twenty nineteen. Thissk question says what's one or two things every fantasy player should do between now and prep season? So I'm assuming that this is more of a redraft focus question because obviously in dynasty you're looking at a lot of contract stuff. You're checking out the market and average draft position data, you're doing player analysis, you're doing all of that. Things don't stop in dynasty. But this is also something that I talked a little bit about last week. If I were you and I was serious about fantasy football, I'd go through each of my teams, look at the transactions that I made, and ask myself if the decision that I made during the season or before the season, like during your draft, had the right process, you can then start to refine your process. The off season to me is about reflection and enhancing the way that you think. This next question is an email from Mike. What are some metrics that you use to evaluate running back and tight end college prospects? What are some benchmarks to look for? So I wanted to keep this question on today's Mailbag show because I'll be doing shows that walk through this during the off season. I did the same for last off season as well, if you want to check those out, But probably most importantly, I did a show last offseason with Anthony Amiko and we talked about the metrics that we look at when prospecting through data. That's episode two hundred and thirty. This next question is from at dominate FF. If he re signs with the Buccaneers, what does Breshad Perriman's fantasy value look like with a healthy Chris Godwin and Mike Evans. Should Jamis Winston remain the starting quarterback for the Buccaneers. Basically, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the fantasy assets in Tampa Bay for twenty twenty. So I'm of the belief that Jamis Winston isn't nearly as bad as people think that he is. I don't think he's some stud, but I'd do my best to at least give him another year in that system. I'm not a GM, but I'd like to see him there for another year. Now. As for Paraman, as good as he was down the stretch, it's hard to say that he's going to be fantasy relevant with a healthy Godwin in Evans. I mean, ask yourself, how often were you starting Breshad Perriman when Godwin and Evans were active? The answer is you weren't. With those two demanding such a high target share, Paraman would just become more of an inconsistent piece. He'd be great and best Bay, though, since he could have spiked weeks, and then we know that there's upside if an injury does occur. This best question is from at time to pivot based on how the season finished, who do you think will be a good late round quarterback target in twenty twenty. Now. I've thought about this a good bit over the last couple of weeks, and I think my current answer is that I have no idea. More than any other season I can remember, I have no idea how quarterback ADP is going to look next season. Kyler Murray is an easy go to answer for me right now, but Murray's probably gonna be drafted as a top ten quarterback next year. Josh Allen's pretty intriguing, but he finished well this past year, so I can't imagine that he drops very far. Basically, I don't know. It's a crappy answer, and I'm sorry that it's a crappy answer, but I have no idea since ADP could really be all over the place. This last question is from at Tony Strow. Would love to hear your position on the disconnect of a player's evaluation between fantasy analyst and the player's actual team and coach. For example, every Dynasty analyst seems to love Isabella, but he was struggling to get on the field over wide receiver like Bird and Cooper. Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack here. I think the first thing to remember is that being accurate when evaluating prospects is a very hard thing to do. You can even see that when looking at Rookie Draft ADP versus regular redraft ADP. Rookie draft average draft position data is all over the place compared to regular redraft, because in the latter case, we know who these players are and how they perform at the NFL level. With rookie drafts, we're projecting whether they'll be good as a pro, whether their landing spot will help them with that, and then we're projecting not just in that current season. So the number one thing here is to remember is that prospecting is hard. Predicting the future with these players is very difficult. But I think using Isabella as an example is interesting because I really don't think that there was a disconnect at all. Isabella was a smallerist school player who had insane college production and ninety nineth percentile speed. I was one of those analysts who loved Isabella coming out. I thought he had a chance to make a Brandon Cooks type impact, and Arizona clearly thought that he was good too, because they spent a second round pick on him. Now, to me, Isabella was always someone who probably wouldn't hit in year one given his background and where he was coming from. But I don't think that this is the right example to use when talking about the disconnect between a dynasty analyst's evaluation and a team's evaluation. The team clearly liked Isabella as much as a lot of draft analysts did. They took him in the second round. Now, let's remove the example here because I think it makes this a more confusing question. The real question should probably be why do draft analysts and dynasty analysts see things in players that coaches and teams don't. Why is it that draft analysts like certain guys and then those players bust or those players get drafted later than expected. And I think the obvious answer is process. Coaches and teams are looking at different things than your typical dynasty analysts like myself, who's sitting on a couch in my mom's basement. About someone who's a financial advisor, they generally know what they're doing with money, they invest and have a process with how they invest. You someone who's not a financial advisor, you can still invest your money, and if you're good at it, you can actually secure a better ROI than a financial advisor, and you can do it in a completely different way. We're predicting something that's pretty volatile, and if we're being honest, all it takes is one team for us to get some confirmation bias. Now, let's look back at Isabella. Andy Isabella as a prospect, and when you look at draft capitals spent on him, he looked like a good prospect. But what if Arizona was the only team in the NFL who valued him as a second round pick. What if every other team in the league valued him as a fifth rounder. Because if Isabella went in the fifth round, he wouldn't have been thought of so highly by dynasty analysts after the draft, but thanks to the Cardinals, he was so all of a sudden, you've got sort of this compounding effect. You've got a player who a lot of people thought was good, including myself, but we know that we get things wrong. We know there's volatility. So to sort of help with that volatility and for dynasty analysts to be more accurate, you've got another layer to player evaluation, which is draft capital. But if just one team screws up the evaluation, if one team values Andy Isabella as a second rounder when every other team values him as a fifth rounder, then you've all of a sudden got an overrated prospect on your hands. And then once things get going and he actually hits the field, the team might realize that they made a mistake and they don't use him as much, and then the Dynasty manager is screwed. I don't necessarily feel that way about Isabella, but I do think that that's how these disconnects are created and why evaluating prospects can be so difficult, and it's why it's important to have your own process to back test and make sure that it's going to give you an edge over your competition, because in fantasy football, it's not just about being right one hundred percent of the time. That's never gonna happen. It's about being right more than your opponents are right. That's going to do it. For today's show, though, 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,