967: Analyzing 2024's Biggest Misses

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacheris j J Zacher Reason, what's up everyone? It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode nine hundred and sixty seven of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. I say it every year, but this is always a tough episode to do. I'm human, just like you, and being human, I don't want to be wrong about things. I think some people can handle being wrong better than others. But no one wakes up in the morning and says, man, I can't wait to screw up today. That's kind of what I'm doing here in front of thousands of people. But this is important. You need to evaluate both your rights and wrongs if you want to get better at something, and I think that's especially true with the things you get wrong. So on today's show, I'm gonna talk through a handful of things that I did incorrectly during the twenty twenty four season, and instead of just saying, hey, JJ, you're an idiot, I'll say that while also seeing if it was a process thing that was wrong or if it was just the result. Now, before we get into those things, I want to remind you to check out Underdog. Underdog's the easiest and best place to play fantasy sports, and with the conference championships happening this weekend, there are plenty of contests to choose from to get in on the action, you can always throw some pickup selections out there too. Check it all out at Underdog Fantasy dot com and if you're new to the site or new to the app, sign up with promo code late Round that'll get you a nice deposit offer. Also, make sure you head to lateround dot com and pre order the Prospect Guide. It's currently available for fourteen ninety nine and that price will jump to nineteen ninety nine when the Guide launches in March. The Prospect Guide includes a write up of what goes into the ZAP model, profiles of every running back and wide receiver who will be at the NFL, combine results of the tight end ZAP model, a write up of the year two model, and profiles for relevant running backs and wider receivers in that year two model. Last year's guide was one hundred and forty pages long. Just to give you an idea of the information that you'll get in it, that's all at late round dot com. Just click guides at the top. All right, now, let's look at how stupid I was during the twenty twenty four season. One of the easier places to start today's show is with Kyler Murray. I talked about Murray being a miss during a mailbag episode a little while back, but we have to bring it up today because Kyler was easily my biggest miss at quarterback. Now, it's kind of interesting, is that according to what Kyler was expected to score this year at his ADP, he actually wasn't that gigantic of a miss. He was the qbaight according to Fantasy Data's ADP, and him going seventy fourth overall meant that he would have been expected to score eighteen standard Fantasy points per game. That's based on what we've seen historically or since twenty fourteen, which is when that ADP goes back to. He scored seventeen and a half points per game, so he only played half a point per game under expectation. Players like CJ. Stroud, Patrick Mahomes, Anthony Richardson. They were way worse picks. But that's still a pretty bad l when you consider I went around saving he was a top value at quarterback this year. So what happened well? In my opinion, there were two main things. The first is that I had some faulty analysis. One of the things that I brought up time and time again with Kyler was that he had a good rushing floor, to the point where players historically with Kyler's rushing floor had almost always given us a solid fantasy season. This is straight from the Late Round Draft guide. I wrote, quote, Murray got by last year with rushing, even off a major injury. He scored five point three points per game on the ground. He's now reached four point nine points per contest via rushing in all five seasons in the league, and four of his five years were over the five point zero mark. Since twenty eleven, we've had thirty five quarterbacks hit three hundred pass attempts in the season while running to a five points per game mark. Of those thirty five, each of them scored at least seventeen point seven points per game, thirty one of them hit eighteen points per contest, and twenty of them got to twenty points. So you may be wondering why is that faulty analysis? Well, using five as the baseline for Murray probably wasn't very fair. Murray got to five point one this year, five point one points per game via rushing, but that data should have included guys who were just under the five mark, not only players who were over it. Now, even with that being said, Kyler still finishes the worst quarterback since twenty eleven to hit three hundred pass attempts and have five points per game via the rush. Like he had a bad season outside of that one thing. And that's where the second mistake lies. I made a bad assumption. In twenty twenty three, Kyler was coming off that ACL injury. That season, he had a three point seven percent touchdown rate with some relatively bad weapons around him in a new offense. The assumption was that he'd improve pretty dramatically as a pastor in twenty twenty four, he'd be getting Marvin Harrison junior, he'd be healthier, he'd be another year in this offensive system, and that assumption was wrong. Murray had a slightly better touchdown rate in twenty twenty four, but it was still belout four percent. His interception rate increased, his average up to target was nearly the same, and while his yards per attempt did get better, it just wasn't enough to give us more than just a floor. I talk about that a lot each year, but mobile quarterbacks are more about floor than ceiling. A run heavy quarterback will hit a ceiling when his passing numbers are also good when he's a unicorn player like Lamar Jackson or Josh Allen. That didn't happen for Kyler, despite having multiple seasons with a way better touchdown rate than he had this year. If I'm being totally honest here, though, guys, I'm not sure I'd changed this process up dramatically. I think the storytelling definitely does need fixed. The stat about five points per game via rushing that needed broader parameters. But Kyler Murray had two top five finishes in his career, and one of those finishes came during a year where he didn't have some outlier season in rushing touchdowns. Meanwhile, he was a year healthier from his knee injury, and his weapons were improved. The problem with Murray was that there wasn't any progression. Everything basically stayed status quo, and at quarterback you can't have that in fantasy because once you get past the first few elite guys, everyone kind of becomes the same. There's not a huge edge. You need your quarterback to become that kind of elite player, So process wise, I'm not gonna beat myself up over this one too badly. This is the kind of profile that you generally want to target. Would have been nicer if you got him in like the double digit rounds, of course, but the bottom line is that things didn't look nearly as good in Arizona as I expected. That's just a team and personnel evaluation thing, and that's gonna happen in fantasy football. One place where I am regretting my process is with a fifteen transactions item that I had part way through the season, and that was the by Deebo Samuel. Not to be fair, I had Deebo as a dynasty cell at the start of last offseason, so I didn't get everything wrong with Deebo last year. But there was a point in time during the regular season. It was week eleven where I had him listed as a bye and if you go back you listen to that episode, or you read the blurb from the newsletter, which is free by the way, lateround dot com, it's pretty bad. If you recall Brandon and Ayuk had gotten down with his knee injury and Deebo had pneumonia. I really just made a totally lazy assumption that things would just turn around for Debo because we had this small sample of how good he was per route run without Brandon Ayuk, Like that was the extent of it. It wasn't like he was seeing amazing volume at the time of the transaction. Even on the week where I called him a bye, he was coming off a game with just an eighteen percent target chair, nothing special. Deebo had one good game from men through the end of the season, he was a total bust, and it was a really bad process called by me. Instead of looking at how he was performing in the current season, I made a lot of excuses and I focused on a small sample size split for a Deebo Samuel that wasn't as banged up, probably both physically and mentally, because that's what he was in twenty twenty four. So that was an l When any of you think about my season and what went wrong for me as an analyst, Kyler Murray's probably going to be one of your first thoughts. But if it's not Kyler Murray, it's probably gonna be Jalen Waddle. I know, guys, I know he was terrible this year, like beyond bad. He averages ten PPR points per game after averaging fifteen point four, fifteen point three, and fourteen point two across the first three years of his career. Now, I said this before on the show, but I'm not walking away from this season with the attitude that Jalen Waddle is all, all of a sudden bad at football. Across his first three years in the league, he saw yards per route run rates of one point seventy five, which is really solid for a rookie, two point five to nine and two point sixty three those are legitimately like borderline elite numbers. This year that yards per route run number one point five to three, his targets per route run was basically cut by like forty percent year over year. Now, I think there are a few reasons for the down year. One of them is health. Wattle wasn't fully healthy this season, and as we know, tuatungue Baia Looa wasn't either, and games where Waddle played his normal number of snaps with Tua under center. Wattle was far from great, but he did average almost thirteen PPR points per game, and games where Tuo was out or where Wattle was injured early he averages five point seven PPR points per game. The Dolphins just operated differently on offense too. I think this could be the result of to his head injury. Maybe it was them trying to maximize the offensive line's effectiveness. Regardless, tuas averaged at the target took a huge hit this year. It fell to six point one. For context, it was eight point two last year. It was ten point one the year before that. I'm not sure anyone on earth was projecting a six point one a dot for two a tongue of ioloa. Tua threw it deep according to PFF, at roughly half the rate compared to his previous two seasons. That's why Devon a Chan and John hus Smith dominated looks in their offense. And for the record, those are also two guys who are on my targets list this year. Now. Was the low a dot due to the concussions, not wanting to be hit in that bad offensive line play at times? Or was it because the Dolphins wanted to just get Devon a Chan and John who Smith the ball a lot? My guess is the answer is somewhere in the middle. But what I definitely know is that it hurt Jalen Wattle. And one of the reasons I'm not blaming this solely on a talent issue for Wattle is because the exact same thing happened with Tye Hill. This isn't a Wattle only thing. And while people will point to Hill's wrist injury, I'm not sure that would be fully to blame for his career low like by far a career low, and yards per route run Tyreek Hill's yards per route run wasn't even that much better than Jalen Wattles. In the end, the Dolphins offense went for being a good bet to one that really really struggled at times. They averaged five point one yards per play, more than a full yard lower than their previous two seasons. They averaged exactly two offensive touchdowns per game. Over their two seasons prior to that, that number was three point four and two point five. So I don't know. I think it was pretty difficult to predict a Chan and John new Smith taking up the target chair that they took up. And that's me admitting that as someone who targeted both of those guys. I also don't think the Tua injury was totally predictable and that turned into the offense basically having thirteen hundred fewer yards year over year. Maybe I'm blind to something here, and I'm sure someone will hit me up saying but Jalen gets hurt every single year. But I think the Wattle stuff was okay enough process this past year. He had never had bad peripherals, he was on a top half offense, he had contingent upside. The Dolphins were also favorable passing, touchdown regression candidates. I mean, things were kind of lined up for Jalen Wattle. I'd love to hear if others think that there was some obvious sign that Wattle would only hit a sixteen percent target chair per game rate this year or a lower yards per out run significantly lower. In hindsight, we can see it, but entering the season, it's kind of hard for me to envision this one being super predictable. I took a chance and I put myself out there with David Montgomery as a player to avoid this year. Some of you may not even be aware of that. I was about three to five running back spots lower than the market with David Montgomery, and this one. This is one where I can absolutely criticize the process. This is also one of those predictions that just looks so so stupid in hindsight. Honestly, I'm kind of embarrassed. But here's what the logic was. Number One, we rarely had seen RB twos by ADP with RB one teammates. In other words, running backs ranked thirteenth to twenty fourth by ADP having teammates ranked in the top twelve. When we did, though in our limited sample, three of the four underperformed ADP expectation by one and a half points per game. The only player who exceeded expectation was mark Ingram, who did it by half a point per game. Number Two Montgomery wasn't used as a pass catcher in twenty twenty three. I was actually in on Montgomery and Gibbs during gibbs rookie season two years ago or two seasons ago, but Montgomery had a five percent target chair that year, which is really really low. Number Three. When Montgomery got hurt in twenty twenty three, Jamiir Gibbs took on a larger role in that backfield, obviously, but when Montgomery returned, Gibbs still out attempted Montgomery at the goal line, and Montgomery saw his backfield share numbers. When he returned. He went from averaging over twenty PPR points per game to thirteen point six within that split. Number four, the Lions were a regression candidate entering the season. Teams with well over three touchdowns per game like the Lions had in twenty twenty three almost never repeat that performance. It almost always gets worse. We're talking well over ninety percent of the time. Well, the Lions slapped me across the face and called me an idiot because they scored four touchdowns per game. Not only that, David Montgomery went healthy this past season saw on an eighty percent increase and target share per game. At times this year, the Lions were just using gibbson Montgomery interchangeably, and that I think was my biggest mistake. You know, all the Lions regression stuff. It's not like I was projecting them to just be an average offense. I still had them as one of the best ones in the league in my projections. I didn't project four touchdowns per game, but they were still pretty high. But them being as good as they were that obviously helped Montgomery take things to the next level this year. What really my mistake was it was making the assumption that Detroit would lean on Gibbs Moore after the split that they saw during the second half of twenty twenty three, but they didn't. In fact, Montgomery had better peripherals this year in twenty twenty four than he did before his injury last year. Sometimes in fantasy football it's easy to over complicate things, and I did that here. I don't think the individual points that were made were totally flawed, but I do think that sometimes I need to take a step back and just say, good talent, good offense, good player to target. It's sometimes that simple. A lot of running backs in the top twenty top twenty four did well this year. I talked about that earlier this week. Now I was gonna talk about Josh Jacobs today, but by the end of August I didn't really have him as a strong avoid. You can check out his blurb in the draft guide about that. Because a lot of things went his way in August and set him up really well for a monster year. The Packers then ended up going way more run heavy than I expected. But I really cooled off and avoiding Jacobs as things broke in August. I talked about that on becoming a best ball bro too, But yeah, I was still not high enough on him. That was an L. I just don't want to talk about him today because I think a bigger L was with Kien Williams. He was on my voids list this year and that didn't really go as planned. Now I have to first say that the whole story about him playing special teams had absolutely nothing to do with me being lower on Williams versus the market. That was a stupid and borderline annoying narrative. In the Draft Guy this year, I said, quote, we can project a good season for Kien Williams while also recognizing that he'll potentially be overdrafted in a lot of season long leagues this year. Well, he wasn't overdrafted. He ended up out performing ADP expectation by two point one ppier points per game, which is really impressive because it was an earlier round pick. Now, I had Williams at RB nine entering the year he was drafted at RB seven. One of the main reasons I had Kyen on a player to avoid list was because I was more into Derrek Henry. The market at Henry below Kyron, but I had him above him. So I'm at least happy with that result in that thinking at least that happened. But man, I have to say, with Kien Williams, I didn't think we were gonna see him get the same kind of volume year over year, not with a Blake Korm pick. And I know what you're thinking. Kien Williams is Sean mcvay's guy. Totally understand. Even talked about that preseason. I actually wrote quote, they like Kyen Williams a lot, They want him to be featured, but they just don't want him to be featured like he was last season, and that brings down his ceiling just enough for me to pass on him more often than not. The Rams had seen him not stay healthy in twenty twenty three. They then go out and they spend a Day two pick on a running back who kind of profiled similarly to Kyrien Williams, and then they just didn't use him. Ky's it's all. His running back rush share per game rate rise by almost seven percentage points in twenty twenty four versus twenty twenty three he had three hundred and sixteen carries. His target share did drop, though it was twelve point three percent per game in twenty twenty three, it was under eight percent in twenty twenty four. But I think this is a good reminder, more than anything else, that running back value will often come down to a coaching decision. I talk about that all the time. I think Kyron Williams is good, but he definitely wasn't as strong per rush this year as he was last year in twenty twenty four versus twenty twenty three. He definitely didn't provide as many explosive plays per rush. So I don't think I'm that upset about this process, especially with the coorum addition playing a factor. But I do think some coaches are just gonna have their guys at the end of the day. And even though I did weigh that, I didn't weigh it enough. I've always been an analyst who preaches to either spend up or not spend it all at tight end, and I changed my philosophy a little bit this year because this year tight end average draft position was totally different historically, even when you remove Rob Gronkowski and Travis Kelcey from the data, we would almost always see a tight end emerge as elite in fantasy football, and those guys who gave us truly elite seasons were typically being drafted earlier. It didn't mean that they were the best values, but it did mean that they gave us the best chance at that elite player. In twenty twenty four, rather than having a first and usually second round tight end and a typical non tight end premium league, we had a cluster of tight ends who were taken in that round three, round four range through round six, round seven. It was much more linear, and my thought process was that the main reason for those ADPs was just uncertainty by the market. We didn't know which tight ends would emerge. But in my eyes, some of those guys would hit, and technically some of them did. By some, I really just mean Trey McBride and George Kittle, they outperformed ADP expectation by four to five PPR points per game. Those are really strong hits. But Travis Kelcey, Sam Laporta, Mark Andrews, Dalton, Kincaid, Kyle Pitts, Evan Ingram, they all underperformed. Now, to be totally fair, I don't know if this is as clear of an l compared to the other items on today's list, because I did point out that Dalton Kincaid and Kyle Pitts had some red flags entering the year in the draft guide. I wasn't high or low on Evan Ingram. I talked about Sam Laporta's regression in the draft Guide. I had Kelsey, Andrews, and Trey McBride as targets. Two of those three bad picks, especially Kelsey, but McBride was a W so that's bad but not horrendous. But I think in hindsight, I thought we'd see more than just Trey McBride and George Kittle emerge from the earlier round to mid round tight end group, and then later it was obviously Brock Bowers and then to a lesser extent, David and Joku. But it was a down year at tight end when I thought this could have been a spot where we could really gain some value, which went against a lot of what I've preached through the years. And in addition to this was the Mark Andrews dilemma. I just managed Andrews wrong all year long. I had him as a drop in shallower leagues. When he was getting such poor usage to start the season and then he went on a heater and he scored eleven touchdowns across his final twelve games. I don't think I would have ever predicted that. And his usage was worse year over year, make no mistake about it. He had a fifteen percent target year per game rate this year. It was almost twenty two percent last year. His yards per route run fell by a little bit, but his role participation it dropped by over twelve percentage points year over year. He had an okay enough fantasy season, but it was strictly driven by touchdowns. And I won't ever make those kind of assumptions. Needless to say, though, I shouldn't have been as aggressive as I was with my advice with Mark Andrews. It was just unnecessary, even if it was related to shallower leagues. Now I'm bringing all this up about tight ends though, because I think I was at a high level just generally wrong about the position this year. There were some hits in there. I liked McBride, Like I said, I had John hus Smith as a late round dart throw, but that's not what this episode is about. And this episode isn't only about the individual player, missus. It's about how I approach things holistically and strategically. And I was off with tight End this year as a whole. And my lesson learned is that sometimes just not necessary to take such a strong stance on a position. I leaned too heavily into the high level trends and the ADP analysis. I didn't lean enough on the individual players that we were analyzing. There were a lot of other things that I got wrong, like players in the Broncos offense or my sneaky breakout offense being the Titans that looks so idiotic in hindsight. But the last thing that I want to get to on today's show is someone in something that I spoke to on becoming a Best Ball Bros. Recap, and that's Johonathan Brooks. I like drafting Jonathan Brooks this past year. In my opinion, he was the best running back prospect by far in the twenty twenty four draft class. He had a good overall profile and he had good draft capital to back it up. Now, obviously his big issue was the ACL, and unfortunately that's still a big issue because he's got another ACL injury. And I could sit here and I could say, oh, let's just forgive this take because Brooks ended up suffering a major injury once again. But it's not like Brooks had nothing going on with him before that injury took place. So let's talk about it. Like I said, I talked about this a bit on the Becoming a Best ball bro recap. You guys can listen to that for more info on how my season went. But generally speaking, in most fantasy formats, the final weeks of the season they're going to be the most important because that's the fantasy playoffs. So with Jonathan Brooks, the idea was that, yes, you'd be taking zeros to start the season, but eventually he would be back, and given the talent profile well, him being back could have resulted in really strong numbers and in a lot of home leagues and such. This year, Brooks did go kind of late, so the opportunity cost in taking that on wasn't that massive, especially if you had an IR spot. But I do think there should have been more of a focus on the short term the start of the season and sort of making a more informed decision once we received more information. Like every year, at the start of the season. I do an episode on early season schedule analysis. I talk about players who have good or bad schedules to start the year. It's been a really successful episode in the past because it's really important to draft players who get off to hot starts. You want your team to appreciate in value immediately. We knew that was not gonna happen with Jonathan Brooks, and we had some examples of similar situations in the past, like Jonathan Brooks's Todd Gurley comes to mind, But we didn't have this massive database of higher end prospects at running back coming off acl tears and then beeing when they returned to action as rookies. That lack of evidence didn't mean that we should have faded Brooks, but it meant that we should have been more open to other Panthers running backs in that offense, not necessarily on the same fantasy team. We didn't even know if Carolina was capable of providing good numbers at running back. You didn't have to handcuff Jonathan Brooks. But the Brooks injury should have at least made me higher than I was on Chewba Hubbard, because I like Chewba Hubbard as a talent. He was actually one of my buyes on last year's By Candidate's episode, which, by the way, that episode's coming in just a couple of weeks. But with Brooks, I kind of did something that I did with Kyrin Williams. I think it's good to look at team actions and to draw conclusions based on those actions. But I took that too far. I made too many assumptions. With Kyron. It was the idea that surely they drafted Blake Koram to at least make him a somewhat relevant piece in that offense. With Jonathan Brooks, surely the Panthers drafted him to use him for chunk of his rookie season, and maybe that was their plan. Maybe his recovery hit a snag. We don't know for sure. What I do know is that I should have considered the team situation a little bit more, a little bit better. Carolina was not going to be competitive this year. Chopa Hubbard had an expiring contract, but they didn't need to force things with Jonathan Brooks if he wasn't one hundred percent. And since I liked Hubbard as a player, I really should have leaned into him more than I actually did. It's not like it was an expensive thing to do, and I think that's a common theme for this season for me making assumptions about running back workloads. That's one of the toughest parts about this job, there's no doubt about it. But taking a step back, being a little looser with the parameters that I'm working with, maybe having a little bit more flexibility, that'll at least ensure that I'm not missing wildly on some of these players. It's just a lot easier said than done. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for If you yet subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are bus shooting for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't fit to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Remember you can pre order the Prospect Guide right now over on the site Lateround dot com. Go do that. Otherwise, have a great weekend, enjoy those conference championship games. I'll catch you on Tuesday with a little bit easier of an episode for me to do, which is where I go over the things that went right this year. Talk to you then,