344: Mailbag 1/31/20

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha JYJ ZACHERSA. What's up everyone. It's JJ Zachareson, the editor in chief at FANDEL and at Number five dot com in this episode three hundred and forty four of the Late Round podcast of the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. As you can tell from the title of today's show, it's a mailbag episode. A shorter mail bag episode because of the off season and fantasy football isn't as important, but it's still a mailbag episode. Before get into your questions, though, I want to let you guys know about FanDuel's Super Bowl Free to Play contest. FANDEL continues to give you more ways to win, this time with its big game props pick'em contest. Log into your FanDuel or FanDuel Sportsbook account and answer fifteen questions on the Super Bowl. If you get between twelve and fourteen questions right, you'll learn one hundred dollars. If you get all fifteen questions correct, you'll earn fifteen thousand dollars. And the best part is it's completely free to play. Seriously, to enter, visit fandle dot com or Sportsbook Dot Fandle dot Com. Eligibility restrictions apply. The first question this week is from Twitter. It's from at he Hate Me Underscore seventy three. Any early favorite prospects in the upcoming draft. Yeah, so I inputed this year's prospects into my model to see who the model liked and at wide receiver. This isn't much of a surprise to anyone who prospects through data, but it's Tyler Johnson. He's going to be pretty polarizing over the next couple of months because it seems like there are a lot of people who are down on him, and I've seen some speculating that he could go later than expected. But the market share numbers are definitely there when looking just at his statistical profiles, not his age, height and weight, and obviously combine measurements since that hasn't happened yet. But his stat profile, according to my model, isn't about the ninetieth percentile of relevant wide receiver since two thousand and six, and basic includes guys who went to the combine as well as players who were drafted who didn't get that invite. He's out on DJ Moore type levels from a couple of years ago. But he's got production on his side, and it was sustained production from last year. He's got a really good breakout age as well. So Tyler Johnson is someone that I like at running back. Even though some running backs decided to go back to school, this is a pretty good class overall. My model likes Jonathan Taylor the most right now because he had great market share numbers, but Keishaan Vaughn is probably one of the running backs that I'll probably end up liking more than the consensus. He was really involved as a receiver. He had one of the highest final season reception shares in this class, and he dominated volume on the ground as well. He's not the top back in this class, but he's something that I'll be watching closely over the next couple of months. This asked questions for my buddy at Davis Maddock non trolling question. Does the lack of mega high end wide receiver seasons other than Michael Thomas make zero running back a sketchier proposition moving forward? So I talked about this a little bit on an episode of this podcast from about a month ago called the Death of the elite wide receiver, and I think the answer is yes. Generally speaking, you want the scarce resource in fantasy football. Michael Thomas gave you a nice edge over the rest of the position this year because there weren't wide receivers doing what he was doing. Christian McCaffrey was better at running back, of course, but the idea here is that you want running backs and wide receivers players who play positions that aren't replaceable in fantasy football. You want players at those positions who are way better than their competition. So in theory, Michael Thomas and any other elite wide out should be highly sought after. The problem is that with the elite players at the position sort of dying down, your hit rate then becomes worse. Drafting early wide receivers based on recent trends means that you're running into more of a risk than you have in the past. Basically, there's a break even point. I haven't built out projections or looked at rankings to definitively say what I'm going to do next year, but at some point we have to say that the probability of hitting on that Michael Thomas next year isn't worth it. When we know that we can get usable wide receivers later, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case this year. I mean, I've always been someone who tries to get an elite running back early, especially if I have a top five pick, and then I'll turn to wide receivers in a format that tells me that I should do so, like a full PPR league where you start three wideouts in a flex. I've also been someone who thinks that you should do the opposite of what the market is generally telling you to do. But it's getting uglier and uglier out there at the wide receiver position in terms of it being top heavy, and that gives the position less appeal. But I'll have a better answer to this in the summer when we actually are drafting and we have a clearer look at what ADP is going to look like. This is naict questions from at NFL Junkie one zero one three. What players are you paying the most attention to in free agency? As far as where they go? I think the obvious place to start is with Melvin Gordon and Derrick Henry. I'm a believer that the and are gonna keep Henry around. But Melvin Gordon's an interesting case because he's going to be twenty seven years old in April. He wasn't overly effective last year, and he's already got about eleven hundred rushes in the NFL so far. With a pretty good running back draft class, who's gonna pay Melvin Gordon what he wants to be paid. Maybe some team will, but there are only so many situations in the NFL where a running back can walk in and become a workhorse. That's usually the problem that we run into each year with free agency. In the draft, We've got all these running backs who we assume can be three down backs, but there are more running backs than there are spots for those running backs to see every down work. So Gordon's going to be interesting to follow. And then at wide receiver, I think the big name of someone who has at least a decent shot of signing elsewhere is aj Green. He's getting up there in age and he's coming off an injury, but the last time that we saw him, he was pacing towards a twelve hundred and fifty yard season. A win Now team could go after him. Amari Cooper is technically the bigger wide receiver free agent, though also paying close attention to Robbie Anderson Noo. I think would be a great fit for the Packers, and it'll be interesting to see what the market for Kareem Hunt looks like too. And I know that tight end matters less in fantasy, but there are some decent tight ends out there. Hunter Henry's a free agent, Eric Ebron's a free agent, Austin Hooper's a free agent. There's a lot that can change at the tight end position this offseason. This asked questions from at Jerry glzh. Is Austin Eckler a first rounder next year regardless of any other running backs the Chargers might sign. Again, I haven't done rankings or anything for next season, but I think my go to answer here is no. For a lot of reasons, actually, But first off, I think that you should be worried about them signing other running backs. I know Eckler was more than usable when Melvin Gordon returned last year, but when Gordon was out, Eckler averaged almost twenty seven PPR points per game. That was sixteen point eight with Melvin Gordon. And this is a question about what's sustainable and what's not sustainable to Eckler overachieved in the touchdown column last year, and he averaged just a little over six attempts per game when Melvin Gordon returned to action. Without Gordon, that rush attempt per game number was fourteen. So if another running back is in the mix, especially if that running back was an early round draft pick, then Eckler's going to have a lot less upside. It absolutely matters if they get someone else. And we're also not totally sure what the quarterback change is going to do to Austin Eckler. Either. He's still a great fantasy asset in PPR formats, and he should be used as a receiver quite a bit, especially if Hunter Henry isn't re signed. But the only way that Eckler is a first rounder next year is if they don't do anything substantial at running back this offseason, which at this time, and it could end up being wrong, but at this time I don't think that's very likely. This next question is an email from Mike. He says been listening to a few other analytics folks talk about receiving yards, market share, and age adjusted production. Would a weighted average of a prospect's entire market share data be a more predictive stat than an individual year. Does your model care about a final season or when they broke out with a twenty percent market share? So I can only speak to what I've found to correlate to successful fantasy assets in the NFL. Here, I've looked at a bunch of different stuff, and we have to remember that we're often limited in what we can do because college football data isn't as detailed as NFL data. But my model cares about both things. Final season numbers matter most when looking at running backs and wide receivers. That's what I've found at least, and with running backs, I don't care a whole lot about age, but with wide receivers I do. I care about their age, and I care about when they broke out and if they broke out. It's helped my model be more predictive. So I guess I'm answering the question when I say that I'm looking at all of the above. I care about whether or not a wide receiver broke out and when, but I'm also weighing final season production the most. This is the next question is from at Adam Underscore perky. Hey JJ, glad you're putting out all the off season content. Thanks. How do your projection models work for dynasty leagues or do they work at all? If not, is there anything in the works that applies more to dynasty leagues? Hashtag play more dynasty. So I do two main things with projections. I build actual stat lines and project how players are going to perform in a single season, and then I have the prospect models. My prospect models are basically based on dynasty. They look at attributes that successful running backs and receivers in the NFL shared in college, and then they find those attributes and players from the incoming class. So the prospect model is absolutely a dynasty focus thing. My projections are more redraft focused because it's kind of difficult to have accurate projections for more than one season given how much changes in the NFL. I mean, if we're being honest, it's hard to have accurate projections in a single season because of how much things change. But you can't really sit back and say something like this player will score five hundred and sixty seven Fantasy points over the next three years with any sort of confidence. So I hope that makes things a little bit clearer. A lot of the stuff that I talk about on this show in the off season is dynasty focus, so I'm already part of hashtag playmore Dynasty. This last question says, hey, JJ, happy super Bowl Week. Happy super Bowl Week to you as well. I understand it's early in the fantasy off season, but is there any particular team offense you expect to bounce back or have a big year next year compared to this year. I'm looking forward to what the Bengals have to offer next season. Thanks as always, Mike. Yeah, I agree on the Bengals. I actually got a separate question this week about Joe Mixon, and I think that he's someone who's got a ton of upside heading into next season. He low key end of the season really really strong. From Week eight onward, he was the RB nine in Fantasy. During the first seven weeks of the season, he was RB thirty five. The team had trouble everywhere, especially on the line, so you have to think that things only get better. But for questions like this in general, I usually just look at teams who struggled at the quarterback position, and as long as that's changing, I can feel optimistic about the offense bouncing back like an obvious one is Pittsburgh or Carolina. But then you can look at a team like Jacksonville and they have a lot of positive touchdown regression coming too. And then there's also Detroit. Matthew Stafford was bawling out under Daryl Bevell before he got hurt. He threw it fifteen or more air yards on over twenty six percent of his throws. His previous career high was under twenty one percent, and then all the while he was completing about forty nine percent of those tosses. That was the second highest completion percentage on deep balls of his career. If that can continue into twenty twenty, then that whole passing offense could really thrive. We just didn't get to see a full season of it in twenty nineteen. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've yet 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. And also, if you guys have any feedback for the show, how to make it better, or maybe even just a topic that you'd like to see me cover. Hit me up, shoot me an email at jjat number fire dot com. Thanks everyone, have a great weekend and enjoy the super Bowl.