426: Mailbag 10/9/20

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J. Zacher reson. What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at Fandel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode four hundred and twenty six of the Late Round podcast and the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast Network. Oh right, thanks for tuning in. As I mentioned on yesterday's show, we've got another FanDuel Podcast Network Listener League contest this week. Just five dollars to enter. There's two thousand dollars in prizes, and you can enter up to three lineups. Best of all, it's rake free, so you should definitely join. To do so, just go to fandel dot com slash League slash Listener League. Eligibility restrictions apply. Now let's get to this week's questions. This first question says huge fan of the podcast. Thanks, They've been a major key in becoming a better Fantasy man hashtag process Squad. Is Robbie Anderson a cell high candidate or might he maintain his current role for the season. I wish that I could definitively tell you that, yes, Robbie Anderson is someone that you should be trading away right now, But all of the numbers indicate that he's here to stay. And for the record, him being here to stay doesn't mean DJ Moore isn't. We're only talking about Robbie Anderson here, But look at the facts. He's seen at least twenty one percent of Carolina's targets in every single game. He's one of eight wide receivers in all of football who have played all four games so far this year and have had at least a twenty percent target share in each one of those games. And with that volume, he's seeing a decent number of air yards too. He ranks in the top twenty five in air yards. Now, do I think Anderson's going to finish the season in the top ten at the position? No, I don't, but his usage right now could easily get him in that wide receiver two area. Basically, I don't think this is some fluke. I mostly said the same thing last year. I was just more focused on DJ Moore, who ended up having a poor Week four production wise, But Anderson's looking like a very good asset moving forward. This last question is from at fish Wind based on his play last year, what impact can we expect Kyle Allen to have on the Washington football team's pass catchers, namely Terry McLaurin and Logan Thomas. Yeah, I got this question a lot. A lot of you are interested in specifically what's gonna happen with Logan Thomas. But I mean, I'm sort of looking at this like I looked at the Mitch Trubisky and Nick Foles thing, Like, you can't feel amazing about Kyle Allen when he was backing up Dwayne Haskins to begin with, similar to Nick Foles. How can you feel good about Foles when he lost the job to Trubisky at the start of the year. Now, with that being said, I'm hoping we get a little bit more of an aggressive passer in Allen than what we saw with Haskins. Haskins has been throwing it deep on just fourteen point four percent of his throws this year. Those are fifteen plus air yard throws. Allen's rate was closer to nineteen percent last year. It's a totally different scenario here with Washington, But I think that's what we're really hoping for. We're hoping for more d gaff That's how we'd unlock Thomas and McLaurin more. The thing is, though Terry McLaurin all things considered, has not been bad. The dude is a stud. He still has two top ten performances this year in fantasy football, So I think this is more about Logan Thomas, and to me, it can't get much worse for Thomas given his peripherals. I think the change should help him, but similar to the Bear situation, just temper expectations. Overall, this has questions from at FDM, NFL. Jacobs and Sanders are warhorses and talented, but Raiders are missing their starting wide receivers and defenses hone in on him. Same for Sanders. Jacobs has a nagging hip and has been ineffective. Sanders has no offensive line. Tough schedules for both, sell them or deal with them sucking until they maybe don't see. To me, the situations for Jacobs and Sanders are a little bit different. I prefer Miles Sanders because he's being utilized more in the passing game over the last three weeks. The three weeks that Sanders has played, He's averaged a target share per game of seventeen percent. He's yet to fall below fifteen percent. Josh Jacobs hasn't hit that number since Week one. Jacobs hasn't ranked higher than RB twenty four in PPR formats since that Week one game against Carolina, whereas Sanders has been the RB ten, the RB twenty, and the RB thirty two. I think you can make the argument for either guy, but I actually think Sanders is in a much better situation to produce week in and week out. Now, with that being said, I would not be selling either of them right now. The Raiders will start to see their schedule open up a bit, and after the Steelers and Ravens the next two weeks, Philly's in a decent enough spot rest of season two. So don't let the immediate impact the future so much, because even in tough matchups, players can produce This as question is from at Bobby Jordan three, why have I not dropped JKD. Dobbins in Redraft? I was also wondering why have I not dropped Dobbins in Redraft? I mean, look, we knew this was a very real possibility that Dobbins would be sharing a backfield with at least mark Ingram for Baltimore, and that the Ravens were a run heavy team, so the receiving ceiling for him might not be very high. He's tough to play unless you're desperate, like I talked about on the Matchup show this week, but he's also essentially a handcuff right now. If something weren't happen to mark Ingram, you're going to get a boost with Dobbins. And the nice part is that it's only week four. Who knows how things evolve as the season goes on. Now, if you need to drop him in a shallower league, I get it, but I think he's very much still rosterable. Maybe my expectations were just lower than others for the twenty twenty season, but he's not really performing so far below expectation. In my eyes, He's always been a longer term play. Now. This next one is sort of related to the Dobbins questions from at Champs Texas. Can you remember a more underperforming group of rookie running backs in recent memory? Cech isn't up to ADP, Jonathan Taylor is drifting in the wrong direction, akers Dobbins, Gibson, and Robinson seem to be the outliers. Again, this is all related to both your expectation and what you think is about to happen. And I also think there's not a lot of context for some of this, Like Clyde Edwards. Hilaire is the RB twelve right now with one touchdown he scored once despite his usage and the fact that he's in a Patrick Mahomes led offense that's not going to continue. And given the way that people have talked about Cech this week, I sort of wish I would have featured him on the fifteen Transactions episode because he's a very, very obvious by candidate right now. I don't even really think that he's not living up to expectation. Jonathan Taylor I talked about earlier this week, but it's not like you paid a top two round pick form. Is he underperforming now that he's in this role, Sure yes, But is he underperforming compared to ADP Not really, as has been hurt JK. Dobbins I just mentioned, But again, Dobbins wasn't some top five round pick. And then you have Gibson who's starting to play really well and James Robinson who's an RB one. I don't think this has been an underperforming class, especially especially when you provide proper context. We're in a season where teams had zero preseason and rookies got their first NFL action in Week one of the regular season. If you're a believer that they're off to a slow start, which I would not agree with, But if you're a believer of that, you could easily point back to this just being a pandemic season, that this was expected. But then on top of that, guys, we knew this was a thing. I talked about it all offseason. You want to target ambiguous backfields for breakout running backs, and so many of these backs were placed in ambiguous backfields. We've played four games. The expectation can't be that they're gonna be at peak performance right now, that they're gonna be workhorses. That's not a reasonable expectation for four weeks. That didn't happen for Miles Sanders last year, that didn't happen for Nick Chubb in twenty eighteen. You've got to be patient. Some of these guys are going to bust, but be patient. And by Clyde Edwards Hilaire. This nice question is from at Joey Jackson eighty five. Is there any good correlation to target wide receivers or tight ends a year after a notoriously run heavy season, like with Seattle and Green Bay. So instead of looking at this in such a detailed manner, instead of saying I'm going to specifically target pass catchers from these teams because they were run heavy last year, I think we can just go back to an off season episode that it did. On team level regression, what we find year over years that teams that were really run heavy or really pass heavy, they tend to regress a bit to the mean the following season. And what we also find is that neutral script pass rates, so how a team functions when games are close, that's more predictive for next season overall pass rate than overall pass rates are in the current season. Let me put that a different way. Look at what a team did in a neutral script last year, Now look at how their pass rate looks overall this year. That neutral script pass rate from last year was more predictive of what's happening this year than overall pass rate from last year. This is pretty intuitive. When teams are really good, they tend to run more because they run out clock, they're leading, they're running the ball. Then the opposite is true too, but with personnel changing, coaches changing year over year, that's hard to maintain, especially with a small sample size of sixteen games in a regular season in the NFL. It's tough to be really good in this league year overyear. So what's more revealing about a team is how they function in neutral game scripts. The examples of the Packers and the Seahawks aren't necessarily ideal here though, because the Seahawks just changed their philosophy and Green Bay is just more efficient. The Packers are not some ultra pass heavy team right now, but the idea that teams regress to the mean and pass rate is very, very real, and that's gonna then trickle down to pass catchers on those teams. This, as QURS is from at brad Olan. Is Miles Gaskin really the back to own in Miami or is Matt Brida going to take over? I would absolutely still want Gaskin. Even this past week, Gaskins scored more points, He saw one more target, he had seven more carries. He played sixty five percent of the team snaps. Brito was at twenty four percent. It was a slight dip from the week before, sure, but Gaskin is still the guy that you want in that offense given current usage, and it's not even close. The next question is from AT's Honest Underscore EV. Discuss your thoughts on trades or moves based on your team record. To be more specific, what types of players or moves you target based on your situation. One example that comes to mind is when a team is struggling, they often move their best player to improve their overall r. Yeah. I mean, if your team is struggling and it doesn't look good, you've got to be open to trading absolutely everyone. And then on the flip side, if your team's looking really good, try to take advantage of the vulnerable bad teams. Bad teams right now, guys, they're gonna be willing to do a lot in order to turn their fortunes around unless they've just gotten totally and objectively unlucky. But they're going to be more willing to make a trade because they likely need to make a trade. So everyone should be open to trading anyone all the time, even good teams should. But if your team is bad, you should be even more open to dealing your studs. And if your team is bad, you should also be more willing to buy into variants. That's sort of what I talked about with Joe Mixon earlier this week. The last question this week is from at Greg turl eighty eight. When looking at rankings, should one always start the player ranked higher or is there more ambiguity to rankings? Look, there's tons of ambito with rankings, especially if you're looking at rankings that are being posted for accuracy top to bottom. And here's what I mean by that. There are a couple of ways of doing rankings. I think you can lump in season long rankings here too, rather than just weak to weak ones. But if you make projections and then just generate rankings based on those projections, which is totally fine. But if you're gonna do that, what you're going to find is that there are going to be clusters. There are going to be a whole lot of players with a fantasy projection range that's just one or two points off from one another. When we look at rankings, though, we're seeing where a guy is ranked and not his projection. So realistically, each week, the wide receiver like twenty six to the wide receiver fifty, they may only be a couple of points off from one another. So that's going to tell you something different than a ranking that's more subjective, because with more subjective rankings you often give a high variance or more of those sort of gut field dart throw plays. You give them a higher ranking since their projection might not look very good. Now, rankings are fine, but I don't love them for this reason. There's a feel component of fantasy football that rankings don't always capture, and you should be looking at things like your opponent's projection, your projection, and what you think you need for your individual lineup. So the answer is no, you shouldn't always just go with the player who's ranked higher. There's a lot more to fantasy football than just that. 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 as always, don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, enjoy your weekend, stay safe, and good luck in Week five.