761: Mailbag 5/5/23

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j Jae zacher Reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zacher Eeson in this episode seven hundred and sixty one of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, go buy the Late Round Prospect Guide. That's it. That's my promotion of the guide for today's show. Go buy it on Lateround dot com. Crush your rookie drafts. Let's answer some mailback questions. The first question this week is from Twitter. It's from at Mike zero eight zero three. It says what impact will Sharbonay's draft have on Seattle's backfield, particularly Kenneth Walker. One of the top topics this week in Fantasy Circles has been the Zach Sharbonay pick and what it all means for Kenneth Walker. I talked about the pick itself on Monday's episode, giving reason as the why the Seahawks made that pick. I really think it comes down to two things, the first being that Kenneth Walker had the worst success rate among one hundred plus attempt running backs last season, and his rate of gaining positive yardage per rush was also worse in the league. He was a home run hitting running back, so they paired him with Sharbonay, who was good at picking up tough yards without that same type of big playability. But there's also pass catching, which I think is just as important. Kenneth Walker was not a good pass catcher in college. You guys got sick of me bringing that up last year. His five point four percent best season reception share was really really low, and his yards per route running college never exceeded point seven to seven in a single season. Sharbonnay's, meanwhile, was never below that mark, and during the two players' final seasons, Sharbonnay had basically triple the yards per route run compared to Walker, and then all the while Sharbonney had more than double Walker's best season reception share. And this is all coming after a season where Walker didn't do that much as a pass catcher. He ranked low in PFF's receiving great among running backs. He was one of the worst in the league per route run, and he averaged about a seven and a half percent target share per game when he took over that backfield. That's nothing special. I think it would be silly for anyone to defend Kenneth Walker, the receiver, the pass catcher defending Walker the rusher. That makes a lot more sense. He can be electric with the ball in his hands. He was the best pure runner in last year's class. But the Sharbonay pick hurts him. Not because that early down work is just gonna vanish, but because the receiving ceiling is now going to be tougher to achieve. I think there's at least some chance, some chance that Sharbonay becomes a favorite for that coaching staff if he ends up hitting, if he ends up being a good player. But I want to be clear here. Just because I'm explaining why the Seahawks may have made the sharbona pick, it doesn't mean I think he's gonna outperform Kenneth Walker in fantasy football. I still think that Kenneth Walker is the favorite there. My point is more so there are a lot of people out there who seem to think that this is not that big of a deal. That it's a deal, but it's not a big one. That's where I disagree. Before that pick, Walker had hoped to be in every down back. Now I've had him as a cell all off season, but I still recognized that it could go in that direction. With the Sharbonay investment, those odds have dropped considerably. He's gonna need sharbon Ay to bus as a player in order to maintain that value or get hurt. My early projection see Walker as more of a low end RB two with upside. That's for twenty twenty three. That's off of a fifty two percent rush share in that offense and about a five percent target share. Maybe you feel more optimistic than those numbers, but I think the numbers are logical when you figure the player that they just drafted in the investment they made to get him. And yeah, it's the Seahawks. They love their running backs and they value the position more than the rest of the league. But it's not like Sharbona himself is a bad running back. He was projected to go in round two, maybe early round three. And I will say this, the backfield's a little bit different in best ball leagues, where you won't have to worry about how things will go down each week. But I did want to at least get this out there because it was easy to take what I said on Monday and think that I just like Sharboney more Kenneth Walker is still projected to be the better fantasy asset, but I do think I'll be lower than consensus on Walker, but that hasn't really changed. I'd been lower on Walker than the consensus, and I do think that Sharbona is at least somewhat of a threat, somewhat of a threat to be the one a in that offense down the line. He's a good running back who does things that Walker doesn't do, and that in turn limits Walker's ceiling. The next question is from Patreon. It's from Garrett. It says, HEYJJ, with rookie drafts gearing up and with there being a general expectation that there will be no true consensus rankings with this year's class, one of the fantasy football strategies that isn't talked about much among analysts is utilizing game theory within their rankings. That's to say, if you rank a player as your seventh best prospect, but you know that the majority of the market will not view them that way, would you actually take them at seven or would you try to play it differently based on what you know about the market because you know that you can extract more value. In general, how would you actually play your rookie rankings. So rookie drafts are different than a normal season long draft or a dynasty startup draft. There's a lot more variants involved because we've never seen these guys play before in the NFL. In those other drafts, we generally know the type of players that we're drafting, so they're easier to predict, and that means less variance all the while. There's another layer of variants this year with rookie drafts, and that's EIGHTP variants. There's definitely a whole lot of volatility in rookie drafts. When you get into the second round, at least in like super flex leagues, it'd be mid to late first round. In single quarterback leagues. You can study rookie draft boards and see that the first round is pretty straightforward through about Zay Flowers, and then the second is generally all over the place from one draft board to the next. You're gonna still get an average of all those boards though, that's your average draft position. But that average draft position is more than likely not gonna be as obvious or locked in as what we've seen in the past. In the past, a lot of times you generally knew what you would be looking at in the middle of round two this year, you really have no idea. In super flex leagues because there's so much volatility, it makes it harder to do what you're saying in this question, and that's to play the ADP game to extract value. Volatility means that ADP itself is volatile. It's not just that your rankings disagree with ADP. It's that ADP is all over the place. So when you're given draft, things are gonna be all over the place. But this really depends on your overall approach to these drafts. I would say that if there's one guy that you absolutely don't want to miss out on in the second round, just drafting. Don't try to extract value, because, like we're both saying here, there's variance, so you may or may not have a shot to get that player later. In the past, in other drafts, you might have been able to play that game a little bit easier. Like if you really like Marvin Mims and you absolutely want him and only him, and you have the two two in a super flex league, just get Mims. He usually goes later, but if that's your focus, just get your guy. Now, if your consideration set is a little bit wider than that, if you have multiple players that you like and you can play the odds that way, that's a little bit different. Like if you're into Mims, Jaden Reed, and Jalen Hyatt, let's say, and you have the two O two, then yeah, you can trade back and cross your fingers that one of them falls because your probability in getting one of them increases a whole lot because you have three guys to choose from instead of one. But if there's one player you really want to target, just get your guy. You don't get many shots in your rookie draft. There's too much variance involved with prospecting to strictly try to extract value, in my opinion. The next question is from at the Wizard forty nine. It says, I'm it's very interested in the Josh Downs versus Jaden Reid prospect model versus your rankings. So something that I've noticed more this year is people questioning my rankings versus my prospect model's rankings. And that means that I haven't done a good job communicating in the Late Round Prospect Guide. I have a cheat sheet for what my prospect model is saying and how it ranks my players. It's completely objective based on the model. I then have my own personal ranking sheet that has more subjectivity built into it. I inject my own personal thoughts into those rankings, and those are the rankings that I follow during drafts. They're all guided by the model. I say this all the time, but prospect models, to me, aren't there to make all of your decisions for you. They're a guide. If there's a player who has a far better prospect score than another, then I'm going to almost always side with the player with a far better prospect score. But this year, there are a lot of wide receivers who are sort of clustered together in that eighty second to eighty six percentile range. Marvin Min's, Jaden Reed, Josh Downs, Jalen Hyatt, Jonathan Mingo. Those are the wide receivers, and so in the guide, I essentially went with what I saw because I watched these guys too their opportunity, they're fit with their new team, and then I ranked them accordingly. And remember some players still have very scary analytical profiles, even if it looks fine in the model. Jalen Hyatt is a perfect example of that. He looks good for where he got drafted, and I think he's a fine draft pick in rookie drafts, but he still has a scary analytical profile. I don't let landing Spot dictate my rankings a ton, because landing spot changes. But when you've got players clustered in prospect score, you can use landing Spot to help navigate how to rank them. And that's what I did with Josh Downs. My model likes Downs. I think he's got Tyler Lockett and his range of outcomes, but I'm not in love with him going to a team with a mobile rookie quarterback. He would have been better off in a spot with a pocket passer who can pepper him in the slot. And the reason I like read More is because there are a lot of positives of his profile. There are a lot of negatives too. Don't get me wrong. He's an older prospect, He's not an early declare. He saw his final season production dip. I mean, there are things that we can say about Reed that are not good, but this is the problem in approaching it that way. With this year's draft class, we can say the exact same thing with any of these wide receivers. Josh Downs is small and he might only be a slot guy at the next level. Jalen Hyatt had semi fraudulent numbers. Is going to be asked to play the perimeter more than likely, but he played eighty seven percent of his snaps from the slot and his only productive season in college. Marvin Mims never had elite production and played in a weaker conference. What if Marvin Mims is just another kJ handler. Jonathan Mingo's production profile is nothing special. We've got this cluster of players who all have WARTZ, and like I just said, we have to be real with ourselves when we're approaching things in fantasy football. There's variance. There's a ton of variance with these rookies. So to me, it's a go with what you feel most comfortable doing thing. Do you like Josh Downs more than Jaden Reid? That's totally reasonable. Would you rather go with Marvin Mims Jonathan Mingo? That works too. I understand that people want me to have strong convictions. It's my job to rank these guys and help tell you who to pick, and I do. I think all of the first round wide receivers are in a better spot than the other wide receivers in this class, the guys that I just mentioned. I'd rather have Dalton Kincaid and a couple of running backs over these wide receivers. But I tier players for a reason. They're players who are generally interchangeable in rank, and when there's a clear drop off, when I can say I'll definitely take this guy over the next, that's when a new tier is formed. This is also where their profiles come into play too. You can choose your own adventure by reading up and seeing what you like and what you want. That's why I break down all of these players in the guide. A player like Josh Downs probably has a higher floor than Jonathan Mingo as a player, Kingo probably has more of a ceiling given where he lines up his size in his landing spot. But this is how I embrace variants and not walk away from every single rookie draft with the exact same players. And I understand that some of you are only in one rookie draft, but you can still embrace variants if you're in a lot of leagues, even just two or three of them. By not diversifying, you're saying that there's no variance in this, but there's a ton of variants, so embrace it. This ask questions an email from Adam and it says I've got DeAndre Swift on my dynasty roster and was hoping that he would go to a good landing spot after the Lions took Jamiir Gibbs. He then went to Philadelphia. It seems like his dynasty stock is on the rise. Do you agree? What is Swift's outlook as an Eagle? I think his stock is on the rise versus how low it was after that Jamiir Gibbs pick, for sure, but I also think that people may be overrating this landing spot in Philadelphia. I think Swift is better than what we saw from him last year in Detroit. They barely used him on the ground, but he had a target share per game rate of fifteen percent and he's been efficient. The problem is that I've done research on how mobile quarterbacks impact their personnel and fantasy football, and it's generally not a plus thing, especially as it pertains the running back target share. The Eagles rank dead last and running back target share last year. They've got three extremely good weapons in their passing game that are gonna command a high target share. It's not gonna be easy for Swift to get a fifteen percent target share in this offense. A ten percent share that's definitely doable. Eleven percent maybe, but fifteen percent is asking for a lot. And if he's getting a ten percent target share, that's just not a special number. We're gonna need him to see more work on the ground. When before last year he was around the forty five percent fifty percent running back rush share per game mark in that Detroit backfield, and that's running back rush share. That's what's key. Now he has Jalen Hurts to compete with on a total rush share standpoint, Miles Sanders last year had a seventy one percent running back rush are per game rate that equated to a total rush share of forty seven point six percent. Because Jalen Hurts is a factor, so he doesn't look as good as you might think in my initial projections. For that reason, he's more like an RB three. You can boost him up a little bit from that because there is some upside, of course, but I've seen people have him as like a rock solid RB two. I just don't see how you can have him ranked that high. And let's not ignore the fact that the Lions openly and abruptly replace DeAndre Swift. That's not a positive vindicator of him being as talented as we think. We shouldn't have all the confidence in the world when teams openly and quickly get rid of players, that's not a good sign. We can't sell it that way. Now. My opinion can certainly change, but I just have a feeling that someone in my draft is typically gonna like Swift more than I do, and I liked him at the beginning of the offseason. I think the best ball is probably a little bit different because of his big playability. I who just don't know how predictable that production is going to be. The sess question is from at some Dad five. It says, we've heard a lot this offseason about how great this tight end class is, but also what a bad investment tight ends are as rookie picks. How would your rookie rankings change in leagues that require starting two tight ends? So I did that episode a handful of weeks ago on investing in rookie tight ends, showing that they appreciate and value at a worse rate than running Max and wide receivers. The problem for this season in particular is all the variant stuff that I've been talking about on today's show, with their not being locked in situations and players who were obvious second round picks. It makes taking a Dalton Kincaid in the late first or a Sam Laporta in the early second a lot easier. So I do think that this year, now that we're post draft, it will look a little bit different for tight ends. And regarding your question about how rookie rankings change in leagues requiring two tight ends, well, those tight ends become a lot more valuable. You're increasing the demand of the position. You're then lowering the baseline player at the position you need more of them, so you're all of a sudden drafting those guys closer to where first round wide receivers are getting drafted. But that also assumes that you're still starting two running backs and two or three wide receivers. I think people get that wrong a whole lot. They see that they're starting more than one tight end, which is a big deal, But if you're starting three times the number of running backs or three times the number of wide receivers, it's all relative so in that case, it's not as significant of a bump. The last question this week is another email says, hey, JJ, love the pod and the guide. Thank you with a twenty twenty three NFL draft in our rearview. What are your entirely two early thoughts on which twenty twenty three rookie running backs will be looking over their shoulder and possibly quote aljeared this time next year the way guys like Pollard or Shot White and others are sweating it out this year. For example, Taj Spears and Chase Brown come to mind for me thanks at DFF Underscore. As Jonathan O two on Twitter, I think Spears and Brown are two very good candidates for this, and I'll just be straight up, Spears scares me flat out. I never saw a workhorse profile for NFL purposes when I was prospecting him, and my model reflected that he's undersized and he got by on efficiency in college, not volume. Now I think that he can be a good committee back in the NFL, A really good one like pairing him with Derek Henry in the short term makes plenty of sense. But Pro Football Doc sent a tweet out about Spears the other day and it's not a good one. It's about his knee, and the tweet said that he expects him to have a short NFL career, so that just plays into the idea that he won't carry a huge workload. So if Henry is gone next year, and let's say that Spears is good in a complimentary role, I would not expect Spears to survive the draft or free agency. Chase Brown's interesting because Joe Mixon could be gone sooner rather than later, and I like Brown the prospect. He's one of my favorite dart throws from Day three. But yeah, it's a Day three pick on a team very likely to be competing in twenty twenty four. The chance that they don't add a back to that backfield if they do lose Joe Mixon, it seems slim unless Brown just really really shows up, like Isaiah Pacheco. Zach Evans is another one. I don't think Evans is a workhorse in the NFL, and he doesn't have a great receiving profile. He's a fine dart throw in rookie drafts. Whatever, He's going late enough, it doesn't really matter. No one in that range has a good profile. But if we assume that Cam Akers is gone next year, which is very possible, then Evans would also be in one of these situations. And I'm not gonna be overly optimistic about a Day three guy. It just doesn't make any sense to You can play the odds and you can still draft these guys, but to think that they're gonna be starters in twenty twenty four, that's kind of foolish. So those would be my three spears for sure. I think he's the most obvious one, and then from day three, Chase Brown and Zach Evans. Like I said, but it doesn't mean that these guys are bad investments. We saw a player like Al Jiers still appreciate in value. That can definitely happen with Brown or Evans, but any Day three running back is not very stable. That's it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've 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. Greatly appreciate all the support during draft season. Enjoy your weekend and I will talk to you next week.