887: The Pocket Passer Trap

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacherathas J J. Zacher Reason. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode eight hundred and eighty seven of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. Almost exactly a year ago, I published an episode of the podcast called the Rise of the Early Round Quarterback. Years and years ago, when I first started in the fantasy football industry, quarterbacks reading selected really early in drafts, but based on supply and demand and predictability, it didn't make much sense. A late round quarterback approach was much more approachable, so I wrote about it. I published the Late Round Quarterback Ebook in twenty twelve, and I've been brain vobbiting fantasy takes ever since. We've been through a journey over the years. In that twenty fourteen to twenty fifteen timeframe, drafting a quarterback early was legitimately worthless. When looking at top eighteen quarterbacks by ADP and twenty fifteen, for example, the correlation between where those quarterbacks were drafted and the number of fantasy points per game that they actually scored was zero. QB twos were getting You just as many points as QB once we were terrible at predicting performance. That all changed in twenty twenty and the reason it changed, in my eyes is because of Lamar Jackson. Look, I've missed on a lot of things in fantasy football through the years. That's part of this gig. But the single take that I'm most proud of relates to this topic. After Jackson's monster MVP season in twenty nineteen, I wrote an article on whether or not he broke the late round quarterback strategy. Yes, he was a late round quarterback himself that year, but it was obvious that people were catching on. They were realizing the importance of mobility at the position in fantasy football. So I wrote about it, and at the end of that article, I wrote the following. You know, the truth is the question about the late round quarterback strategy and fantasy football this year shouldn't really revolve around Lamar Jackson. It shouldn't be about whether or not you're willing to take Jackson the top twenty five or the top thirty. Instead, our focus should be on the fact that the fantasy football world has gotten smarter. Historically, fantasy managers didn't put a premium on quarterback rushing production. They ignored what's been dubbed the Konami code of fantasy football. We don't see that anymore. The consensus top seven quarterbacks this year are all players who bring that extra juice with their legs. So no, Lamar Jackson isn't what could break the idea of drafting quarterbacks late in fantasy football. You are as the fantasy football world gets sharper, the late round quarterback strategy may slowly morph into the middle round quarterback strategy. Now I bring this up every once in a while on the show because it's such a good example of why average draft position analysis is so important. You can be ahead of the game when you spot these macro trends. Not everything needs to be player analysis focused. We've definitely seen a change the position since that timeframe. When looking at the correlation between preseason expectation and postseason result over the last four seasons, it's night and day compared to what we saw in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen. That's because the best quarterbacks in fantasy football are now running the ball and passing the ball well. You see before when front of the show, Rich Reebar wrote about the Konami code and fantasy football. The cheat code, that is quarterback rushing quarterbacks didn't have this unicornability of being great rushers and passers. We saw these one off spike seasons. But in today's game, it's Lamar Jackson, it's Josh Allen, it's Jalen Hurts. These guys are posting good rushing numbers and good passing numbers, and when you get that combination, it becomes much easier to predict which quarterbacks are going to be good entering a given season. Now. I go through a lot of this in this year's Late Round Draft Guide, but something else that I talk about that's related to this is what I call the pocket passer trap, and that's what we're going to dig into today. Before going forward, I want to send another reminder about a very special offer. Right now. The Late Round Draft Guide is available for pre order. It's the thing that I put the most work into each and every year. That guide is available right now over on lateround dot com for nineteen ninety nine. It's going to go up to twenty four to ninety nine on July first when it launches, but you can get it for absolutely free. All you need to do is head to Underdog Fantasy dot com or download the Underdog app, and if you're a new user, go sign up on Underdog, use promo code Late Round, and then make a deposit. That promo code will allow you to not only get a deposit offer, but you also get a free late Round draft guide. The guide will be emailed to your inbox on July first when it launches. So again Underdog Fantasy dot Com or download the Underdog app, sign up with promo code Late Round, and make a deposit. You can do best ball drafts all while getting a free late Round draft guide. It doesn't get much better than that. So here's where we're at with the quarterback landscape. Elite quarterbacks have separated themselves, not really from the standpoint that they're giving your fantasy teams a bigger points per game edge, but they're more predictable. The players who are giving you that edge the ones separating themselves from the rest of the position. They're the guys who were drafting early because rushing numbers are a lot more predictive than passing ones, and the market is putting the right premium on rushing quarterbacks. But not every earlier middle round quarterback is mobile. Some of them are pocket passers, and that presents a problem that's not talked about nearly enough. When a more immobile quarterback has a big season, he's doing so because he has a big season through the air, right, and if he's scoring a lot of fantasy points, that he's likely throwing for a lot of touchdowns. On a weekly basis. Since twenty eleven, the r squared between fantasy points per game and passing yards has been about forty two percent. That's sixty two percent when looking at passing touchdowns of fantasy points scored, meaning passing touchdowns correlate a lot stronger to fantasy output than yardage does on a weekly basis, which makes sense because one passing touchdown equals one hundred passing yards. In most leagues, touchdowns can be kind of random, though, like not totally random, but kind of random. If a team decides to run in at the goal line, then that quarterback won't benefit from that team's touchdown. But if they get stuffed and they run a play action pass in the very next play for a score, all of a sudden, that quarterback has four fantasy points. That one yard touchdown is technically worth more than one hundred yards passing because you're getting points for that one yard as well. That leads to variants with pocket passing quarterbacks. Touchdown rate is the easiest metric to go to with this kind of thing. Touchdown rate is just touchdowns divided by attempts. The league average since twenty eleven has been four point four percent, and since twenty eleven, we've had sixty seven quarterback seasons where the quarterback had twenty or more fantasy points per game. Of those sixty seven, twenty seven did it while failing to hit fifty rush attempts, so they were super immobile quarterbacks. They weren't running the ball that much. And of those twenty seven, their average touchdown rates were six point four percent. That's two percentage points higher than the league average. Getting to that number is not easy. Being in the six point four percent touchdown rate range, that's no easy task. In fact, only seven quarterbacks over the last thirteen years have gotten to that touchdown rate more than once in a season with three hundred and more pass attempts. Those quarterbacks are basically all Hall of Fame quarterbacks. So what does that alone tell us. Well, it tells us that if you're gonna draft a pocket passer with a higher end pick in fantasy, you're gonna need variants on your side at least a little bit. You'll at least need it on your side a lot more than you would with a mobile quarterback, because those mobile quarterbacks are scoring points with their legs too. Let me break this down even further. I looked at ADP data via fantasydata dot Com since twenty fourteen. I then split quarterbacks into buckets. You've got the QB one to the QB three by ADP, the QB four to the QB six, and so on, and I only included quarterbacks who then went on to play eight or more games in the season. I then took those quarterback groupings and I wanted to see how well they scored in points per game. So the QB one to the QB three bucket. We've had twenty seven of them since twenty fourteen play eight or more games in the season, and of those twenty seven, over ninety six percent of them, so twenty six of the twenty seven scored sixteen or more points per game. This is standard points, so four points per touchdown. Pass one point per two twenty five yards, seventy percent of them scored eighteen or more points, fifty two percent of them scored twenty or more points. You get the idea. When you chart this out with all quarterbacks, and that table will be in the late round draft guide. When you lay it all out, clear tiers start to form. The QB one to the QB six. They've got great hit rates, at least since twenty fourteen. That's not that big of a surprise, though, because we've become so much better at projecting quarterback output in recent years. The QB seven to the QB nine range, honestly, it's not been that much different than the QB thirteen to the QB fifteen range. So if you're looking to take a quarterback in that range, that QB seven to QB nine range, you might want to consider just waiting a little bit more to extract value. More on that in a second, though, and then after QB fifteen it's kind of an s show. There really aren't many season long hits, and season long is the key word here, looking across the entire season, but there aren't that many hits from quarterbacks that go that late you'll get the CJ. Strouds and the brock Parties and the Jordan Loves. But even those guys weren't scoring twenty or more points per game. They weren't massive, massive league winners. Now this data is looking at all quarterbacks since twenty fourteen who were drafted in these different positional buckets. What's really interesting is what happens when you separate these players into mobile and immobile quarterbacks. Because if we know that quarterback mobility is important, and we know that's a huge driver for quarterback predictability, then it would make sense that these mobile quarterbacks are the reason that the QB won to the QB six range by ADP has been so successful through the years, and that's generally the case. I took that table and I split it up a little bit differently. I took all the QB one to QB six is by ADP and I threw them together. Then I took all the QB seven to QB fIF teams and I threw them together. Remember that QB seven to QB nine range not any different results wise through the years than the QB thirteen to the QB fifteen range. So having them all together in a group made sense. So we have two groups here. One has all quarterbacks drafted between QB one and QB six by ADP, the other QB seven to QB fifteen. We'll call these groups the elite quarterbacks and then the good quarterbacks that'll keep things easier to follow. I then took those two groupings and I split them up one more time. I split them up by players who ran the ball four more times per game and players who didn't run the ball four more times per game. And that's where the data really started to come together. First off, top six quarterbacks who run the ball at least a moderate amount have been really easy bets in fantasy football. Now, obviously there's an opportunity cost involved in drafting those players. It's not a necessity to get one of them. But percent of them in the elite range have ended up scoring twenty two or more points per game. Fifty six percent of them have hit twenty one points per game. And there's twenty five quarterbacks in our sample here. Now, of course that group includes Josh Allen basically each year, but that's also the point. These guys are so consistently good for your rosters. It's not what we had in twenty thirteen and twenty fourteen where there would be this turnover every single season. Now, since twenty fourteen, this elite group had thirty two quarterbacks get drafted who were under four rush attempts per game. They were more of the pocket passer types. Of those players, six point three percent scored twenty two or more points per game, Fewer than nineteen percent hit twenty one points per game. That's a massive difference compared to the Elite mobile quarterbacks. And when you compare those numbers to the good quarterback group, the guys who get drafted much later, it's p pretty interesting. The Elite pocket passers had a pretty good hit rate of getting to twenty or more points per game. It was forty point six percent, but then that dropped to eighteen point eight percent at twenty one points per game. That's what I just referenced. So they weren't bad at getting to twenty points per game, but they were pretty brutal at getting into twenty one or twenty two points per game. Twenty points per game is still really good. You'll probably find a quarterback in the top five of the position with that kind of score, but twenty one twenty two. That's an elite season. That's what we're really really striving for. The good pocket passers hit twenty or more points at a fifteen percent rate. That's significantly lower than the elite counterparts. They were at forty percent, but their rate of getting to twenty one points per game was only seven percentage points lower, and they've actually been a little bit better at getting to twenty two points per game. To put this all another way, because I know it's probably hard to follow top six quarterbacks by ADP who are pocket passers. They're better than the pocket passers that you can get late, but if you're looking at a true ceiling, the league winning ceiling, there's really not that big of a difference. Now, this led me to thinking more about game theory too. When we're talking QB one to QB six, our elite quarterback group, those guys are gonna be drafted by like round five, even earlier in more casual leagues, the QB thirteen QB fourteen, they're gonna go in the double digit rounds. I remember doing one of the first episodes of Late Round Perspectives last year and talking to Sean Siegel about this, But I think going with a two headed quarterback approach does make sense in scenarios like this, and math backs it up. Say you're in a draft and you decide to get a pocket passer who's getting drafted. Early history tells us that you have a forty percent chance that he scores twenty or more points per game, which is solid. His rate of getting to twenty one to twenty two points per game isn't as good, but forty percent is solid. But let's say that you didn't want to take on that opportunity cost and you waited instead. Rather than getting one pocket passing quarterback and that high end QB two range, what if you got two, you're giving yourself better odds of getting a quarterback who could score twenty or more points per game. In fact, and this is just based on what we've seen historically. Obviously we need to be a little bit looser with our parameters and how we think about all of this. It's just the idea here that matters. But like I said, elite pocket passers by ADP, they scored twenty or more points per game at a forty percent rate, and the QB thirteen to QB fifteen range. If you were to draft two of them, based on what we've seen since twenty fourteen, you'd have a thirty two percent chance to get to twenty or more points per game. That's not that far off from these early round pocket passers, and from a cost perspective, using two double digit round picks versus one fourth or fifth rounder might be more appealing for your particular league. Meanwhile, when you draft two of these high end QB two pocket passers, your rate of getting to twenty one twenty two points per game it's significantly higher than an early round pocket passer. You're increasing your odds dramatically of having a player who could be a league winning quarterback, who could have an outlier season and touchdown rate. And this is all because touchdowns bring a lot of variants. Those early round quarterbacks are better quarterbacks, and better quarterbacks will have better touchdown rates generally speaking. But that doesn't mean that there's zero variants here. There's a ton of variants. Now, don't get me wrong, this is just one approach. This is one strategy. It shouldn't be the strategy. To me. The strategy is to find a mobile quarterback anywhere throughout your draft. If you look at the mobile quarterbacks who've been drafted in that QB seven to QB fifteen range through the years, they've outplayed the pocket passers who've been drafted in the QB one a QB six range. In other words, a late round mobile quarterback is better than an early round pocket passing quarterback. Now, obviously we have the benefit of hindsight here. We're grouping players by whether or not they ran the ball four more times in a season. But rushing is more predictive at quarterback than passing is. If you look at the current quarterback landscape, you can pinpoint which ones are rushers and which ones aren't. Josh Allen rusher, Jalen Hurts rusher, Lamar Jackson rusher. C J. Stroud not a rusher, Dak Prescott not a rusher, Jordan Love not a rusher, and you can use that to your advantage. It's not that a player like c. J. Stroud or Dak Prescott or Jordan Love are worse than a pocket passer they use draft later like Tua or brock Purty. Is that there's a cost to acquire those players that's much greater if you're in a league environment with deeper benches, or you're in a league where you really don't want to take on that cop to a higher end quarterback, then you can go with that two headed monster as long as you're still focused on getting a mobile quarterback, because at the end of the day, throughout your draft, those mobile quarterbacks are still winning championships. 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 podcast can be found. You know, to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening. Everyone got to becoming a Best ball bro episode dropping tomorrow and then it's a mailbag week, so I'll talk to you on Friday with that one. Take care,