898: Mailbag 8/16/24

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zacheratha j J zacher reson what's up everyone. It's JJ zacharyesin in this episode eight hundred and ninety eight of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. Before get into the mailbag questions this week, I wanted to send a reminder that if you're planning on buying the Late Round Draft Guide to help you out with your drafts this year, make sure you're taking advantage of my Underdog offer because it can quite literally save you money. Instead of buying that guide, new Underdog users can sign up on Underdog Fantasy dot com with promo code Late Round and get the guide sent to them for absolutely free. Just go and sign up, use promo code late Round, make a deposit, and Underdog will email you a link to the guide. It's that easy. Of course, you can still buy the guide over on Lateround dot com and you'll get everything you need to wrap your head around the fantasy football landscape this year. But I have to bring up that offer because you can get a discount on the guide by doing it, so you get to play some best ball and you also get the Late Round Draft Guide, so check that all out Underdog Fantasy dot Com sign up, make a deposit and use promo code Late Round. The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Justin and says, why is Javonte Williams being ignored by the fantasy community. He seems like a strong late round target at cost another year removed from a knee injury. Could be a workhorse back. He catches and has the raw talent, albeit on a likely subpar offense. However, Bresee Hall did just find last year in a bad offense no plus, maybe Sean Payton surprises. Just seems like a flyer being overlooked. The first thing I want to touch on here is the bad offense thing. There's definitely a connection between offensive environs in success at the running back position in fantasy football, especially when a team is very bad offensively. I wrote about this in my draft guide. Since twenty fourteen, just one percent of running backs and offenses that scored fewer than thirty touchdowns end up as true breakouts. That means that they outscore their average draft position expectation by six or more PPR points per game. That number is ten times greater when looking at running backs and offenses that had forty or more touchdowns. Just because Breecee Hall did okay in a bad offense doesn't mean that any running back can be okay in a bad offense. Breece Hall is just special. We also have evidence suggesting that we don't typically see monster seasons from running backs on teams with rookie quarterbacks, so that's bad news for the Denver backs as well. With all that being said, I've been on the record multiple times talking about Jalil McLaughlin as a great value, and while I don't think that Williams is as good of a value, I do think that he's a pretty good I've gotten him plenty in drafts. One of the reasons for that is what I've said all off season about Sean Payton's offenses. He loves the target running backs. His teams own eight of the top seventeen running back target share seasons since twenty eleven. He wasn't even coaching every year during that stretch. They were top in the league in running back target share last year, and both Javonte Williams and Julia McLoughlin can take advantage of that. This year, McLoughlin is more of a player who can just beat ADP, like he's a great value bet. Williams is the guy who has a shot to really beat ADP. The downside is that last year wasn't just due to injury, and he really has taken a step back as a player because he was worst on the team than almost any imaginable metric, gaining positive yards, gaining ten or more yards yards per Kerry success rate, and so on. But yeah, Fantasy pros rankers have Williams behind guys like Brian Robinson DeAndre Swift. I disagree with that. I would take Williams over Zamir White too. The only thing that I'll say is that I like to throw darts at some of those ambiguous backfields in that same range, like Cincinnati or Tennessee. So oftentimes I'm gonna get a Tony Pollard or a Taj Spears or a Chase Brown over someone like Javonte Williams. But yeah, overall, I think he's fine to draft this year. The SAS question is also from Patreon. It's from al. It says, who is your lowest ranked running back that you would feel comfortable drafting as a hero slash anchor running back. So I get this question all the time. I figured i'd finally answer it. I think we need to recognize that labeling a team as zero RB or hero RB it's honestly meaningless. It doesn't matter what your individual team is or how we're labeling it. The reason we talk about zero RB and hero RB, and the reason analysts like myself are labeling these strategies, it's so we have a quick way of refor them. There's not a point in the draft where you necessarily say this is a zero RB build or this is a hero RB build. It also just doesn't really matter. Labeling your team isn't really relevant. It's just a way for fantasy analysts to describe what a certain strategy is. The idea behind zero RB and hero RB, that's what's important, Hero RB being the fact that there's typically a big gap from RB ones to RB two's and RB three's, so there's no point in reaching for a lot of those RB two types and drafts with zero RB. It plays into the fragility of the position and how running backs get hurt, and anytime there's an injury, it's benefiting your zero RB team. Now I've seen content on Twitter on TikTok where they draft someone like Rashad White and round four and they say this is a zero RB team, But someone else can walk away and say, no, that's actually a hero RB team because you didn't get your RB two until round nine. You see what I mean. It may seem like I'm getting into semantics here, but I think it's really really important. What a team gets labeled as doesn't really matter. Understanding why a team is going with a certain approach, that's what's important now. I generally consider hero RB builds as builds where you get a running back early, let's say, the first couple of rounds, and then you punt the position until like round seven, eight or nine. That's in a regular twelve team home league. You've got this giant gap between running back picks, and if I'm going that direction, if I were to answer your question more directly and less annoyingly, I think you probably could consider someone like Kyra Williams or Derrick Henry as the lowest RB one that we'd consider in a hero RB build. But honestly, like I could consider Isaiah Pacheco one of those running backs too. That's what I'm saying, I don't think that this is a really clear cut answer. I don't think it really matters either. What matters is really wrapping your head around why here ERB and zero RB are strategies that you can implement, and understanding that there are some leagues where it's more beneficial to go with those strategies. This question is from not on Patreon and it says, from a mentality perspective, how are you able to get yourself away from takelock? Your most impressive quality as a fantasy analyst is your ability to be agile and react to new information, even if it conflix with what you previously believed or outright contradicts a take that you've been sharing. I'd love to know how you build that mental flexibility and adaptability. So, first off, I appreciate the compliment, thanks for that, But to give you an answer, I think it's as simple as just asking questions. A good example of that is with Kenneth Walker. At the start of the off season and into July, my thought process was that the Seahawks backfield might be split between Walker and Sharbonnay, pretty similarly to how we saw at the end of last year, and since we have years and years of data showing that Kenneth Walker isn't some high volume receiver. Then that meant that he might be a little bit overvalued and Sharboney undervalued, especially since Sharbonay has the contingent injury upside. Now Walker's also had that, but he wasn't being drafted late like Zach Sharboney. Now, as time has moved forward, we've learned that this coaching staff seems to like Walker quite a bit and they want to use him more in a pass catching role. Okay, let's take that at face value and ask the question what does that look like? Well, we know that Walker probably won't all of a sudden become like a fifteen percent target share running back because number one, he's never been that and that would be a huge jump. Number Two, the Seahawks have a lot of good receiving talent. This is where projections can really help. There's only a one hundred percent target share to go around. It'll be difficult for him to dig into that overall target share. Pie, But is it unreasonable to think that his eight percent target share could be ten percent, maybe eleven. I don't think that's unreasonable. It would likely reflect more of a higher end outcome, but there are coaching signs pointing to that higher end outcome actually hitting. And I'm a believer that coach speak items they're gonna be more important for running backs than wide receivers because coaches are making decisions about running backs directly. Wide receivers, they're gonna be on the field pretty frequently, but they have to actually get open and get targeted in order to see production running backs. They just need their names called. You hope the most talented running back is going to win and see the most volume. But if the Falcons coaches take a step back and they say, hey, we want Tyler Aljeer to see half of the team's running back rushes this year, then that's what's gonna happen. It's a choice. So I sort of go piece by piece and I try to think about things rationally through a series of questions, and then I get to a conclusion of, hey, I was a little bit too low on Kenneth Walker. When we react to things, we don't have to go so far in one direction, which is how I think a lot of people generally think. Like there are people who will definitely believe that Kenneth Walker is gonna catch sixty passes this year. I would be absolutely shocked if that happens. But I can still use the evidence provided to make a grounded conclusion about that player, and that grounded conclusion could still lead to me being higher or lower on a player versus the market. And I don't really care about being wrong, especially being wrong in July. I'd much rather correct things. Hope my correction is more thoughtful and correct and actually help you guys win at fantasy football. Having takelock that simply means that you don't care about being right, because we're gonna be wrong about this stuff all the time. When we get new information, we got to use that information. If I meet someone and I think that they're five foot eleven, but they tell me that they just came from the doctor and the doctor measured them and they're actually six foot one, then I'm going to think that they're closer to six foot one than five to eleven. New information leads us to forecasting better and better forecasts lead to more fantasy football championships. It's as simple as that. This has question from Chris on Patreon. It says, is the order you rank players the order you would draft them on average or does ADP factor in especially for dead zone backs. Curious if you would draft David Montgomery, who is on your avoid list, over Brooks, who profiles as a better selection in the dead zone and is a target. So I've actually heard this a couple of times from people over the last few weeks. I want to address it. I have a rankings and tiers list that anyone can access via Patreon or through the Late Round Draft Guide. That rankings and tiers list is there to show you how I generally draft in a single quarterback league with two running backs, three wide receivers, a flex and the tight end half PPR. You heard the other day that I think that David Montgomery is a general avoid at his cost because on some platforms like Yahoo, he's the RB sixteen. Now, obviously the Jamir Gibbs injury that's now helping the case for David Montgomery, but Gibbs seems like he's gonna be okay for Week one, and regardless, Montgomery's ADP would only go up if Gibbs wasn't ready for week one. Meanwhile, I think Jonathan Brooks is a player to target for all the reasons I talked about on the players to Target episode, but I still have Montgomery ranked ahead of Jonathan Brooks. In a vacuum, I would take David Montgomery the players to target the players to avoid those are against cost. The rankings and tiers are not against cost, So you guys can use the rankings and tiers list to draft. The problem is you should always keep ADP in mind because you want to extract as much value as humanly possible during your draft. But those targets and avoids lists, those lists are there to just let you know what I'm seeing in the market. They're there to tell you that those are the players you can extract a lot of value out of. That's all. The last question this week is an email that says, hi JJ was listening to you hyping up Malik neighbors. Can you tell us how we can feel more comfortable drafting him and not expect twenty twenty three Drake London. They seem similar. Number one, both scored high in your model. Number two. Both have had mobile quarterbacks who struggle to hit their throws. Number three. Both likely to catch passes from two bad backup quarterbacks later in the season. Number four both going around round five. Thanks and keep up the awesome work, Ethan. So the two main things here are prospects scorer and quarterback play. You say they both scored high in my model. Yes, that's true, but Neighbors is a better prospect than Drake London. London actually saw a slight dip with my new would improve model that I worked on this offseason, but he was still great. Don't take that to mean that the model didn't like him. The models still like Drake London. Neighbors, meanwhile, is one of the best prospects the model has ever seen. So while London was a very good, basically elite prospect, Neighbors is elite elite like Jamar Chase levels of good. London wasn't quite there. Now. The second thing is that they both have mobile quarterbacks who struggled to hit their throws. That's what you were saying. Yeah, sure, that's not unfair, but I'm not sure Marcus Mariota, Desmond Ritter, and Taylor Heineke are the same as even Daniel Jones and Drew Locke. Or to put this another way, we know the result of what London was working with. We don't yet know the result of what Neighbors is going to be working with not totally, so there's at least more upside inherently with what Neighbors has to deal with. Now, I'm not selling Daniel Jones as good. I'm just saying we don't totally know yet because we're not wor working in hindsight, we're not working knowing what Daniel Jones is gonna do with Molik Neighbors. The number one thing this is missing though, is volume. Sheer volume in the player's offense. Drake London has been working under pretty horrific volume conditions. Over his two seasons in the league. The Falcons have seen the second fewest pass attempts in football, and for what it's worth, the Giants during this time have hit about fifty more pass attempts per season. Now, I also think fixating on one outcome is a bad way to do this. It's not the right way to determine if Molik Neighbors is a good pick or not, because you're only fixated on the bad outcome and you're saying that if it happened for this player, it's gonna happen for this other player. Well, I can look at my prospect model, and see that ZAP scores above ninety eight since twenty eleven, which is where the ZAP model dates back to wide outs with ZAP scores that high ninety eight or higher do really well as rookies. Five of the twelve who have played their rookie seasons, we're able to score fourteen pp puero points per game as rookies. The average PPR points per game was thirteen point nine. Neighbors ADP expectation in your home league outside of a best ball environment, Like if you look at where he goes in regular leagues, you're even referencing round five in this question, his expectation is well below that thirteen point nine mark. Now, you could say, but how many of those wide receivers, those rookie wide receivers with elite prospect scorers had bad passing attacks. And we do have a pretty clear example here in Mike Evans. Evans played fifteen games as a rookie, and he scored over sixteen PPR points per game. He caught passes from a combination of Mike Glennon and Josh McCown. Now, a lot of you heard Evan Silva talk about neighbors and talk about how high he was on Neighbors, and he's even higher on him than I am. I think there is still some risk here, without a doubt, But when we're talking about these home leagues or a league on Yahoo or something, the cost to acquire and take a chance on Neighbors is well worth it, especially when you consider the fact that rookies perform a lot better during the second half of the season versus the first, so you may end up peaking at the right time for our fantasy squads. Look, I get your concerns. I think having concern over Neighbors overall situation that's completely valid and rational. But unlike Drake London, we don't know all of these things to be factually true. We don't know that the passing attack is factually going to be that horrendous, or that they're going to see very few pass attempts. Neighbors himself also has less competition within his offense, arguably versus what Drake London had, and most importantly, above all, talent wins out. Malik Neighbors is a better prospect than Drake London was. That's why I don't think this is the same situation that's it for today's show, though. Thanks tol Ofy for listening. If you subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and Jell follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Make sure you subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel. That's YouTube dot com slash at LATEROUNDFF. We're posting videos there and I'm doing live drafts there all the time. Thanks for listening, everyone really appreciate it. Enjoy your weekend, crush your drafts. I'll talk to you next week.