913: Mailbag 9/20/24

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host, JJ Zacherath JJ Zacherweth. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode nine and thirteen of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. Underdog is the best and easiest place to play fantasy sports, and right now, if you sign up with promo code Late Round, like I've been saying, you get three things. You get a deposit bonus, you get a free pick, and you get a copy of my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are emailed to you after you sign up and they're updated every Tuesday. All you have to do is head to Underdog Fantasy dot com and use promo code late Round when you sign up. Once you make a deposit, you'll get those three things. Again, that's promo code Late Round. Now let's get to these questions. The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Matt. It says, hi, JJ, why is tank Dell ranked so high in your rest of season rankings? So I got a lot of questions about tank Dell this week, and because of that, because so many people are questioning him, and because of other reasons that I'm going to talk about right now. He's kind of an obvious by candidate. So far this season, Tank Dell has run a route on eighty six percent of Houston's dropbacks, Stefan Diggs eighty seven percent, Nico Collins eighty eight percent. People have this idea in their head that Tank Dell is Houston's wide receiver three, which I guess is technically true from a real life perspective. It is true he's played like twenty fewer snaps across two games than Nico Collins and Stefan Diggs, but that doesn't matter that much from a fantasy football perspective because we're not playing in points per cornerback blocked leagues. We're getting points for receiving, and Dell is still running routes at a similar rate as Nico Collins and Stefan Diggs in a small sample size. We're gonna see some wild fluctuations in production. Nico Collins is an alf who's almost definitely gonna lead that team in target share, but Dell currently has a seventeen percent target share, Collins is at twenty eight percent. I don't think that's necessarily going to remain as large of a gap throughout the entire season. We didn't see nearly that kind of gap last year when Dell was a rookie. Now, players develop, and maybe Dell's not one hundred percent after his injury last year, but this is a high powered offense and Dell is running a lot of routes within that offense, and he's still seeing targets down the field. According to Sports Info Solutions, Dell's thirteenth among relevant wideouts and intended air yards per target. His average up of target is still the highest on the Texans. The NFL is filled with terrible offenses right now, I'll gladly take on a second year wide receiver who's getting a lot of run and one of the better ones one of the few good offenses in the league. That's why Dell is still ranked pretty high my rest of the season rankings. This last question is also from Patreon. It's from David. It says, I'm sure you'll get a lot of questions about the Miami wide receivers, your stance on them, and is there any chance we can get something out of a trade with name value. Look, regarding that last question, in situations like these, valuations are going to be all over the place. So the only thing I can say is test the market. But I'm definitely concerned about the Miami pass catchers. Tyreek Hill has been in Miami since twenty twenty two. During that twenty twenty two season, two a miss four games. He also missed a playoff game that Skyler Thompson started in. But in those four games, Tyreek Hill averaged fifteen point seven PPR points per game. That's not that bad, but one of those games saw him with nearly thirty PPR points. He had fifteen targets, and that game had Teddy Bridgewater throwing the ball because he came in for Thompson, who hurt his thumb. Now, Waddle had a good game that week too, but Wattle splits are even more concerning. He averaged ten point two PPR points per game in that four game split. Now, I'm not saying that those four games are everything and all of a sudden, Jalen Waddle is gonna be like a wide receiver five, or that Tyreek Hill is going to average exactly fifteen point seven PPR points per game. My point is more so the fact that quarterback play matters. We should be concerned about Miami pass catchers seeing a dip in production. Thompson has now started three games when you include that playoff lost to the Bills. He's thrown the ball eighty nine times in those starts. Again, one of those starts he got hurt. His yards per attempt rate on those eighty nine attempts is five point two. Bryce Young's rookie season yards per attempt five point five to his career yards per attempt is seven point seven, and it's been eight point nine and eight point three the last two years with Tyreek Hill. I mean, statistically, it's hard to see this as anything but a huge downgrade. The hope that you have to have for these pass catchers is that Miami just hits a lot of negative game scripts, which would increase their volume. We saw that in the playoffs against the Bills. Thompson had forty five pass attempts. The problem he only completed eighteen of them. So my stance is that I'm incredibly nervous about both Tyreek Hill and Jalen Waddle. This last question from Patreon, it's from Jesse. It says another player I'm concerned about is Terry McLaurin. I was very optimistic about his connection with Jayden and Daniels, but his lack of production is scaring me. I'd hate to get to Week four and see Terry as a bench play. So I want to kick this out by reading a great tweet that came from my friend Rich Reebar at Lord Reeves. This week. It said thirty seven point nine percent of Washington wide receiver targets have come behind the line of scrimmage, the highest rate in the league. The league average is eleven point three percent. That's pretty freaking wild. Washington has targeted their wide receivers at a fifty four percent rate this year. That's about six percentage points lower than the average. Now, McLaurin himself has about a twenty three percent target share, which is fine, but it's in an offense that's likely to be a little bit more inefficient through the air. They've got a rookie quarterback. We're gonna need a higher target chare for McLaurin to be really good in fantasy football, but a twenty three percent target chair could definitely be worse. Mclaurin's also in the top fifteen in air yard share among all wide receivers across the league. He's been a wide out on that team who's actually getting down the field. His catchuple targets rate. According to PFF, it's also not been that bad. Now, the problem is McLaurin just isn't connecting on any of his down the field targets. According to Sports Info Solutions, McLaurin has seen four targets this year that have traveled ten or more air yards. There were one hundred and tended air yards on those throws. He caught one of those passes for twelve yards. Now, it's not Amari Cooper levels of bad. Cooper has seen seven of those targets and he's caught zero of them. But it's still a huge reason that we're seeing little production out of Terry McLaurin, and some of that should regress. But mclaurin's a dot so far. This year's average up the tar is down three full yards year overyear. That just goes back to Rich's tweet. The Commanders need to push the ball down the field more, which we have to hope happens as Jaden Daniels develops. So I'm concerned. But this is why we typically don't see huge monster seasons from wide receivers with rookie quarterbacks because coaches are understandably not gonna let them loose. It takes time for those quarterbacks to develop. I could see McLaurin being more of a second half of the season player than a first half of the season. One. This s quson is from Twitter. It says how worried should we be about Dalton Kincaid rest of season? So I'm gonna answer an even larger question about tight ends here in a minute, but I'll start with Kincaid first. My concern with Dalton Kincaid is twofold number one. His average up to target right now is minus point six. That's according to PFF, and that's an absolute joke. You could see the Bills trying to get him involved more in Week two. That's great, but the game script just got totally out of hand. Buffalo didn't need to throw the ball anymore like a legit. Concern that I have about the pass catchers in Buffalo right now is that the Bills are just seeing game scripts that are really favoring the run. So far this season, Buffalo has the twenty seventh ranked overall pass rate. Now, fortunately, they've been more pass heavy and neutral scripts. Their pass rate over expected is eighteenth in the league. That's not that bad. But Joe Brady did this last year. He's doing it again this year. He's not afraid to run the football. The hope would be that Buffalo's defense doesn't play all that well for fantasy purposes. Obviously Buffalo fans want them to play well, but they've been pretty good through two games. Now. I don't think this is all gonna continue through the end of the season. Kincaid is gonna get more down the field targets, but it is a concern. If Kinkaid has a low average up to target, and if that's combined with a non elite target share, like a target share below twenty percent, and that's in an offense that might be more run heavy than pass heavy, he absolutely will not live up to expectation. Like even if you remove the first two games, his raw participation hasn't been that bad, but we need to see a change here in week three to his usage or else I'm gonna be very panicked because at least right now you can say Week one was just tough for him, and then Week two's game script got out of hand. But if we get a Week three game where Buffalo's game script is totally normal. They throw a normal number of pass attempts, and Kinkaid is still being used this way, he's seeing his targets behind the line of scrimmage than anyone with kincaid could be in trouble. Now. The last one this week's kind of a long answer, but I think it's very, very interesting. It's from at Adam nine to five six nine three eight two seven zero zero five on Twitter. It says, coming into the season, everyone was touting that this is the most balanced the top ten tight ends have been. How does the expectation meet up with reality and how are you projecting slash expecting this to change as the season progresses. Okay, so let's talk tight end. I thought drafting tight ends in like round four, round five this year, I thought it made sense because historically we'd almost always seen a tight end, even ones not named Rob Gronkowski or Travis Kelce. We'd almost always seen some cluster of tight ends give us an advantage in fantasy football, and those tight ends often came from the top of your drafts. This year, we were getting a discount on those players, and to me, it was easy to take on that kind of opportunity cost. A second round opportunity cost that's kind of rough a fourth round one, a fifth round one, maybe even a sixth round one. That's a totally different story. The kind of hit rates at wide receiver and running back in those ranges are totally different. The problem so far is that every tight end basically sucks. But I have some thoughts on this. First, I think part of the problem, just the narrative here, is that people were assuming that every tight end that was drafted early was gonna pan out. That was never gonna have I talked about that a lot during the summer. It was always about probability and seeing if you were able to find the guy. The twenty twenty four season, though, has gotten off to a really really rough start for tight ends, at least compared to other seasons over the last decade. If you look at all top ten tight ends by EIGHTYP since twenty fourteen, and you remove the tight ends who failed to play at least one game over their first two games from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three, the average PPR points per game from those top ten tight ends by ADP has been around eleven point nine. In other words, a top ten tight end after two weeks has usually provided around eleven point nine PPR points per game. This year, with a lot of guys removed because David and Joku and Evan Ingram and Jake Ferguson have been hurt, this year's average is eight point one, significantly lower than eleven point nine. Now, that sample, to be fair, doesn't include Brock Bowers. I stopped at top ten via Fantasy Data's ADP and Bowers was tight end eleven. But this is actually something that we saw last year too. Doing this exact same method showed the top ten tight ends under eight PPR points per game after week two last season. Now, last year was a bad year for top tight ends, but a lot of those guys did bounce back to some degree. What I think is more interesting, though, is when you take another step back, the NFL has seen really bad offensive production to start the year. We're sitting here saying that tight ends suck, but literally every position sucks. Let me put it to you this way. I'm gonna get the last eleven seasons with his ADP data, So we'll look back to twenty fourteen. Since twenty fourteen, so out of eleven seasons, across the first two weeks, quarterbacks have scored the tenth fewest Fantasy points. Only twenty seventeen was worse. Running back scoring ranks eighth, wide receiver scoring ranks tenth, and then tight end scoring ranks dead last in eleventh. So while these top tight ends have not performed well, it's really that no tight end is performing well. I mean, aside from a couple of them. Now, I was interested in digging into this a little bit more so I looked at three main production buckets and this data is all on Twitter, by the way, at late Round QB I made a thread on it. But the first bucket was tight end target share. Are tight ends being targeted less than they were the previous ten seasons? And the answer to that is kind of, but not substantially. Tight ends have seen a target share of nineteen point eight percent so far this year. That average through two weeks from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three has been twenty point two percent. So technically, yes, the target share is lower, but not by much at all. It's basically been average. The good news is that since twenty fourteen, every single season aside from twenty fourteen saw tight end target share increase when looking at week three through the end of the year, so we should expect an increase in tight end target share moving forward. The second chunk that I wanted to look at was percentage of wide receiver and tight end PPR points. In other words, I was taking all of the receiving PPR points in the lead get tight end and wide receiver and seeing if maybe some of these points were going to wide outs instead of tight ends. In short, they kind of are. Twenty two and a half percent of the tight end wide receiver PPR points have gone to tight end so far this year. That's the lowest that we've seen since twenty fourteen, but it's only point three percent off of last year's rate. And what's interesting is what happens to this number. We're looking at week three to week eighteen. It regresses the seasons where that number was really really high in week one and week two, where tight ends were seeing a larger proportion of tight end and wide receiver PPR points in those seasons. We saw a decline during weeks three to week seventeen or week eighteen, depending on the year, But then in seasons where that number was lower, like in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, we saw giant jumps. I'm talking like jumps of like four percentage points. So here's what that means. As we get more into the season, expect tight ends to score a higher percentage of the receiving fantasy points across the league. So with those two things, we're concluding that number one, tight end should see a higher target share moving forward, and then number two, they should see a higher proportion of the receiving fantasy points moving forward as well. That's great news. The last thing I looked at was touchdown share, the percentage of touchdowns that were going to tight ends through the air from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three. The lowest mark that we saw through the first two weeks was in twenty eighteen, seventeen point nine percent of receiving touchdowns went to tight ends, and if you look at the raw numbers, the lowest number of tight end touchdowns in weeks one and two was sixteen sixteen raw tight end touchdowns. This year, the tight end touchdown share is eleven point eight percent. That's more than six percentage points lower than any other season and tight ends have eight touchdowns eight that's half of the lowest numbers since twenty fourteen. We know that touchdowns regress and we've seen that happen through the years. For example, there were three seasons where after two weeks, tight end touchdown shares were above thirty percent. Those were in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and twenty twenty. When looking at week three to the end of the season, for those three seasons, the drop and tight end touchdown shares were by nine point two percentage points, seven point three percentage points, and eight point one percentage points. Meanwhile, every other season saw an increase in tight end touchdown share when comparing weeks one and two to week three through the end of the season, which is literal regression. This is what I mean by regression. In small samples, touchdowns tend to regress to the mean, and I would expect that to happen once again this year. So what that means is that within the context of this season where offenses have been really bad, tight ends are slightly underperforming. Their target share is a little bit lower, their percentage of receiving points is slightly lower as well. But that can very easily normalize with regression, especially once they start scoring a higher percentage of the league's passing touchdowns. We can't guarantee a bounce back because every player and every season is unique, and maybe there's something going on here that's just different about twenty twenty four than what we realize right now. But it's pretty reassuring to know that at a high level when looking at trends, this season hasn't been nearly as abnormal as you might think. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I greatly appreciate it. I've got a Late Round Perspectives episode dropping later this morning. Hope you give that a listen. Otherwise, good luck in week three. I'll talk to you next week.