884: Using Wide Receiver Prospect Scores In Season-Long Leagues

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacheris je Zacher Reason. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode eight hundred and eighty four of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. Last week you heard me talk about how you can use running back prospect scores and redraft leagues. You can listen back to that episode to hear the takeaways. On today's show, I'll be going through a similar process, but with wide receivers. I'll be looking at whether or not my prospect model this that model can help us make better decisions in season long leagues. We know it could be helpful in dynasty, but season long is a different beast. But spoiler alert, it can still help us out. Now, before we get into the study, I wanted to send a reminder to check out what's going on over at Underdog. Underdog has Best Ball drafts going on constantly and there are tons of contests to choose from all different price points. There's also their pick Them game that you can try out too. I've been doing the Becoming a Best Ball bro podcast to help us all learn and become better. Best ball players, So why not use that information to your advantage. Sign up on Underdog right now and make a deposit. When you do that, make sure to use promo code late Round for a deposit offer along with a free Late Round draft guide. That guide is available for pre order right now over on lateround dot com, but you'll get it for free when you sign up over on Underdog. It'll be emailed to you on July first when it officially launches. So head to Underdog Fantasy dot com or download the app. When you sign up and make a deposit, use promo code late Round for a deposit offer and a free draft guide. And that's all one word Late Round. Now. I know I talked about this last week, but I think it's important to quickly go over what the zapmodels all about. The wide receiver ZAT model looks at all wide outs were either drafted or at the NFL come since twenty eleven, so there are a lot of players in the database, but there are some productive NFL players who aren't in there. It's not common at all, but every once in a while we get an Adam Thielen. We get someone who is productive but they weren't drafted and they didn't go to the NFL combine. The ZAP model takes collegiate production inputs and uses draft capital to spit out a score that ranges from zero to one hundred. That score is helping me and us predict how well a player is going to perform during his first three years in the NFL because there are a lot of Day three picks and undrafted players in that model's database. Scores below fifty rarely produce good NFL players. Anything in the wide receiver ZAP model over ninety five usually captures the elite players. The ninety to ninety five range gives us some really good prospects who usually have a chance to be elite. Scores in the eighties are solid prospects, and then under eighty that's when things get a little shakier, just like the running back position. Now, there's also my year two model, which looks at a player's prospect score and it incorporates how he performed as a rookie in the NFL to spit out a year two score. That SCO is trying to forecast year two and year three performance. Because that model is using actual NFL inputs, it's more accurate than the prospect score. Therefore, anything in the ninety five to one hundred range that's still elite, anything in the ninety to ninety five range that's still really good, but scores below ninety year when we start to see more wide receiver two ceilings instead of wide receiver one ceilings. I bring all this up because for this study, I broke things up by prospect score, and I'll be referencing those scores throughout today's show. Okay, so, just like the running back episode from last week, the first thing that I did with these wide receivers was bucket them by average draft position that season. Long redraft ADP. I grouped up wide receiver since twenty fourteen using Fantasy Data's historical average draft position data. I looked at wide receiver ones or top twelve wide receivers by ADP. Then wide receiver twos or wideouts ranked thirteenth to twenty fourth. Wide receiver threes were the ones that were ranked in the twenty five to thirty six range, and then the wide receiver fours were in the thirty seven to forty eight range. So we're looking at top forty eight wide receivers here by ADP. The question I'm asking is, can we use ZAP model scores in year two scores to help us pinpoint players to target and avoid in our season long leagues to help us increase our probability of hitting on these wide receivers. When looking at our wide receiver ones by ADP, we had ninety one of them since twenty fourteen who played eight or more games in the season while also just having a prospect score. So those are ninety one wide receiver one seasons. Because some of those players did repeat being wide receiver ones by ADP from one year to the next, they're seasons, not players. That number was eighty six for the wide receiver twos, so eighty six wide receiver two since twenty fourteen had a prospect scorer while playing eight or more games in the season that were analyzing. It was then seventy three for wide receiver threes, and it was oddly ninety three the highest mark for the wide receiver fours. Those guys probably just stayed healthy. Remember we're looking at all wide receivers here, not just rookies, not just second year players. We're looking at all wide receivers. When look at the wide receiver ones by ADP, thirty three of the ninety one who had prospect scorers saw their scores in the ninety five to one hundred range, So thirty six percent of wide receiver ones by EIGHTYP since twenty fourteen were once elite prospects. According to the model, that was the highest rate of any of these ADP groups, which makes sense because good prospects generally lead to better fantasy assets, which lead to better average draft positions. That's how I split things up with every ADP grouping. I looked at a section of them who had prospect scores in the ninety five to one hundred range, then the ninety to ninety five range, the eighty to ninety range, the seventy to eighty range, and then I had a group of all the guys who had prospect scores below seventy. Now I could go group by group and tell you how these players worked out, but that wouldn't be very concise and very helpful, so instead, I'll give you some takeaways. The first takeaway is that among higher end wide receivers, it doesn't look like prospect score really matters, which is honestly kind of a relief. We saw that wasn't the case with running backs. But during this timeframe of twenty fourteen until now, there were a total of thirty eight wide receivers who were drafted in the top twenty four at their position who had prospect scores below eighty. Those players exceeded average draft position expectation at a rate that was nearly identical to the players who had prospect scores above eighty. Now, when I say exceeded average draft position expectation, I'm referring to the idea that at every spot in ADP, a player is expected to score some number of Fantasy points per game. A wide receiver drafted fiftieth overall historically has an expectation to score twelve to thirteen PPR points per game. When a player at that ADP ends up scoring more than that, than he exceeded expectation, and then the opposite is true too. So these wide receiver ones and wide receiver twos exceeded ADP expectation at a similar rate throughout all the buckets of prospect scores, and if you look at their rate of exceeding expectation by three or more PPR points per game, something I call moderate breakout. The players with poorer prospect scores actually perform a little bit better. Now, something to keep in mind here is that when we're looking at ADP expectation, higher end wide receiver ones are going to need to perform really, really well in order to match expectation. And within this group of top twenty four wide receivers, most of the low prospect score players are more in the wide receiver two bucket, which means they can hypethetically give us like a low end wide receiver one season and be a moderate breakout. The wide receiver ones by ADP can't really do that. So instead of looking at things against ADP expectation, let's just look at raw points scored. Let's look at the rate that these guys are scoring fourteen or sixteen or more PPR points per game. Well, it's no surprise that wide receiver ones by ADP score fourteen or more PPR points per game at a pretty nice rate. Of the players in our sample with prospect scores, seventy four of the ninety one ended up hitting that fourteen mark, and there was absolutely no correlation between prospect score and get into that number. The exact same thing can be said for wide receiver ones who reach sixteen or more PPR points per game, which is usually a wide receiver one season. With our wide receiver twos, it's generally the same story. In fact, historically we've seen that wide receiver twos who had elite prospect scores have actually been slightly worse bets than wide receiver twos with bad prospect scores. I think this is telling us that the market is just properly accounting for this stuff, and that's okay. I don't need to sit in front of this microphone and only give you data that makes you gasp, that makes you just totally think of the game differently. Sometimes this is the result. Sometimes things just don't matter, and in this case, prospect scores don't really seem to matter, and they're probably a handful of reasons as to why, but that's not the important part right now. The important part is that in some you don't need to be worried about wide receiver ones and wide receiver twos who entered the league with poor prospect scores. With the wide receiver threes and the wide receiver fours, the takeaway is slightly different when looking at this grouping of wide receivers there's a clear difference in how these wide outs perform versus expectation based on their prospect scores. For example, we have one hundred and eighteen wide receiver seasons where the wide out was drafted between wide receiver twenty five and wide receiver forty eight while having a prospect score above eighty. Among those one hundred and eighteen wide receivers, sixty nine exceeded ADP expectation. That's a rate of fifty eight point four percent, which is well above what we'd expect to see. Meanwhile, there were forty eight wide receivers who were drafted in that wide receiver three wide receiver four range who had prospect scores below eighty, and of those forty eight, only eighteen exceeded ADP expectation. That's a horrible rate of thirty seven and a half percent. So where we're at is that wide receiver threes and wide receiver fours by ADP when they have low prospect scores, they tend to not live up to expectation at that hive or rate at all. They're also worse at becoming moderate breakouts. Players in the wide receiver three and wide receiver four range who had prospect scores above eighty. They provide moderate breakouts at a rate that's ten percentage points higher than wide receiver threes and wide receiver fours with prospect scores below eighty. And if you're looking for the league winning players, the guys who score sixteen or more PPR points per game a wide receiver one season. If you're looking for a wide receiver one season. Among wide receivers drafted as wide receiver threes or wide receiver fours, you want wide outs with better prospect scores. About seven point six percent of the wide receiver threes and wide receiver fours with prospect scores above eighty scored sixteen or more PPR points per game in a season. That number is about half with the alternative group. I don't think these numbers are as glaring as what we saw with running backs. Some of the running back numbers were actually pretty crazy, But I do think this tells us that if you're in the middle rounds of your draft, typically where wide receiver threes and wide receiver fours get drafted, you want to probably air in the side of good prospects versus bad ones. Now, fortunately, there don't appear to be many glaring instances of this this year. Now, I wanted to see how these scores perform for rookies and second year players too. The problem is, specifically with rookie wide receivers, we just don't get a lot of them drafted highly in redraft, or we haven't through the years. Just as an example, according to this ADP data, which I know that some ADP sources may have been sharper with a player like Jamar Chase or something like that as a rookie, I get that, But according to this data, we've only had one rookie wide receiver with a top twenty four wide receiver ADP since twenty fourteen. That was a Mari Cooper. Cooper simply met expectation that year, like actually exactly matched expectation. But working off of one data point isn't all that helpful. I don't think a Mari Cooper's performance is really that telling of how Marvin Harrison Junior is going to perform against expectation this year. According to the data, we've also only had five rookie wide receivers get drafted in the wide receiver three range. Again, this can differ from one source to the next. But we're not usually getting earlier around to middle round rookie wide receivers. We've had twenty wide receiver fours, though, so there's at least some of a sample there. Now. I've done episodes on the value of rookie wide receivers and redraft leagues in the past. The TLDR is that they're typically very very good draft selections. Not only do they outperform expectation at a better rate than most other career groupings, but they perform better during the second half of the season compared to the first. They peak at the right time for our fantasy football teams, and this data says the same thing. Of the twenty six rookie wideouts who had top forty eight wide receiver ADP since twenty fourteen, fifteen of them exceeded ADP expectation and eight of them did so by three or more PPR points per game. That's a thirty one percent rate. That's higher than most other groups you're gonna find. The problem I ran into with this analysis is that none of the players had prospect scores below eighty in this group. Because if a rookie wide receiver is going to be draft in the top forty eight and re draft leagues top forty eight of the position. He's probably entering the league as a pretty good player, so there's not a ton of TA take away there. However, I did decide to look beyond wide receiver forty eight. I went to wide receiver seventy two just for fun, so I'm looking at wide receiver fives and wide receiver sixes as well. That's where we started getting some signal With this larger sample. There were thirty eight rookie wide receivers drafted in this range. Of those thirty eight, twelve had prospect scores above ninety. The remaining twenty six were below ninety. The players who were above ninety exceeded expectation at a rate of sixty seven percent. The remaining players, the remaining rookie wide receivers in that wide receiver five wide receiver six range who had prospect scores below ninety, their rate of exceeding ADP expectation was only thirty five percent. When looking at moderate breakouts or players who exceeded expectation by three or more points, it's the same story. Half of the late round wide receivers with good prospect scores were moderate BREAKO. That's crazy. That was only eight percent among the other group. To put this all another way, if you're staring at a late round rookie wide receiver, if that player has a good to elite prospect score, you should be taking that wide receiver. Now, we once again don't have wide receivers in this year's group that clearly fit this criteria because there aren't any prospect scorers above ninety in that range. That's according to Underdogs ADP wide receivers going in the wide receiver five wide receiver six range. But there are plenty who are in the eighties. A lot of those guys drafted in the second round of the NFL Draft last month. They ended up being in the eighties from a prospect score standpoint. Don't write those players off now. I think the market has slowly caught onto the fact that rookie wide receivers are good bets and fantasy football. We have seen a general trend of them getting drafted a little bit earlier through the years. But if one of them slips, you should be gobbling that player up. And usually that player is going to slip because of situation, So draft the talent and not the situation. And just for the record, I'm putting arbitrary thresholds around these prospect scores for these studies, so that's easier for everyone to follow. If a player has a score of eighty nine point five, we shouldn't look at him the same way as someone with a score of sixty. We can be loose with how we approach this stuff. We should be loose. That's why some of the rookies from this year's class are pretty attractive in that range. Now, lastly, I wanted to look at second year players, and I wanted to use the year two model to help with this. When looking at earlier round second year wide receivers, we haven't really had any with bad year two score since twenty fourteen, meaning the second year wide receivers that were drafting early in the top twenty four they're coming with year two scores above ninety. Fortunately, they're not that bad at exceeding expectation. Mostly for whatever reason, wide receiver ones who have had good year two scores they haven't worked out as well as wide receiver twos have. They're a little bit better at getting to fourteen and sixteen PPR points per game, but they're not better versus expectation. It's a small sample, but it's something to at least keep in mind. If you can find a wide receiver two, so someone ranked in at thirteen to twenty four range who had an elite year two score, those players have been absolute fire. We've only had seven of them since twenty fourteen, but four of the seven have been moderate breakouts. Again, it's a small sample size, but when expectations are just a little bit lower for these year two players, that's when you really want to pounce. This year, there's a chance of someone like Zay Flowers, depending on how his ADP looks in August, there's a chance that Zay Flowers fits this mold. Now, similar to the rookie wide receiver stuff, our sample sizes just aren't very big with our second year players, generally speaking, like the rookies, you want to just target second year wide receivers in your fantasy drafts overall. That's something that I've talked about for years on this show and in the draft guide. Now, to make samples a little bit larger, I did extend the groupings into wide receiver forty nine to wide receiver seventy two. Once again, and what I found was kind of interesting. Since twenty fourteen, we've never had a second year wide receiver with a year two model score above ninety five get drafted after the wide receiver three range. So all of the second year wide receiver fours, wide receiver fives, wide receiver sixes, all of them had year two scores below ninety five, and only six of them, six out of fifty, had scores above ninety. But of those six, what's nice to know is that four of them became moderate breakouts. So chances are if there's a player just casually sitting out there with a year two score that's not quite elite, but it's still pretty good, and he's in this range, that's someone who has a decent shot to be a big value this year. A player who fits that criteria is Jackson Smith and Jigba, just to give you some context, he didn't have an elite year two score, but it was still good because of his prospect profile. Now again we're looking at wide receivers who were wide receiver fours, fives, and sixes, and they were second year wide receivers, and a lot of the second year wide receivers in this range had a year two score. In the eighties, twenty five of the fifty did, and among those twenty five thirteen exceeded ADP expectation. Five were moderate breakouts. Those are rates that are a little bit better than what we'd see from another random wide receiver. What I think is most interesting here, though, is that later round wide receivers who were in year two and had a year two model score below eighty they've never been moderate breakouts, not since twenty fourteen, and we're talking about nineteen players here. Questionable second year wide receivers are generally not good bets in fantasy football. So where does that leave us? As usual? I just threw a a bunch of stuff your way. Is probably kind of difficult to comprehend. So here's the deal. Here are the main takeaways. Number One, when it comes to your early round picks, overall prospect score doesn't matter that much a wide receiver. The market properly accounts for it. The players being drafted early who weren't highly sown after when they entered the league, they deserve to be drafted early. Number two. If you're staring at a wide receiver three or a wide receiver four in your redraft League players who once had stronger prospect scorers tend to outperform the players who didn't. You don't need to totally fade the latter group, because when they hit, they do have a decent rate, but you should be aware that is generally a worse bet. They don't hit at as high of a rate. Number three rookie wide receivers. They're good targets still. That's been the case for a while. But if you're in the later rounds and you're staring at a rookie wide out the rookies with good prospect profiles, with good prospect scorers, they perform very, very very well. So this year, target some of the wide receivers who are drafted at the end of the first round of the NFL Draft and into the second round. Those players had decent enough prospect scores they're worth the dart Number four. When it comes to year two scorers and second year wide receivers, if there's a wide receiver two who had an elite year two score or one above ninety five, you should be interested. Zay Flowers might be that guy this year, even if he's a wide receiver three, his year two score being above ninety five makes him very attractive. But when you're looking at second year wide receivers ranked below wide receiver thirty six by ADP, year two score absolutely matters. When you're looking at middle to late round second year wide receivers, if their year two score is above ninety, their hit rates are awesome. And then all the while, we almost never see breakout seasons from second year wide receivers who are being drafted late who had a year two score low eighty. So this should give us all some hope for Jackson Smith and Jigba. Finally, something positive about JSN now. I think the wide receiver stuff is a little bit more nuanced than the running back stuff, but hopefully you're still able to think about this a little bit differently. It's just a piece to the puzzle, but we should take any edges in fantasy football that we can get. That's it for today's show, though, Thanks Alvy for listening. If you 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 don't fit to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll be back tomorrow with another episode of Becoming a Best Ball bro and then I'll have a mailbag episode for you on Friday. I'll talk to you then