346: Mailbag 2/7/20

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Speaker 1: This is the Label Podcast with your host JJ zacher Resa j J zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at FANDEL and at number fire dot com. And this is episode three hundred and forty six of the Late Round podcast many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. The NFL season might be over, but the XFL is officially back, and there's no better place to celebrate its return than on FANDEL. Enter the three hundred thousand dollars XFL Saturday Special for just nine dollars and take a shot at the one hundred thousand dollars first place prize. Just make your best six man lineup while staying under the one hundred dollars salary cap to give yourself a chance to take down FanDuel's inaugural XFL contest. For more details, visit fandle dot com or download the Fandel app today. Eligibility restrictions may apply, and if you need a little help with who to pick, I published a Week one primer a Number five earlier in the week, so check that out too. Now let's get to these questions. This first question is from at Nezi tweets eighty three. When building your process for fantasy do you make general rules to follow, laws that you never break, theories that you test. Guidelines help me make the best decisions. But to what degree should I build a process? Thanks? JJ? So having a process is really important. If I were to really boil it down to just a few things, I'd probably say my process is that I always target volume. I always try to target good offenses, and touchdowns regress. Those are the three big things to always remember in fantasy football. When you know those three things, when you know that volume is king, that players who perform well in fantasy are generally coming from good offenses, and that touchdowns always eventually regress, you're able to get a pretty structured process. It's why on this show I'm always talking about market share numbers and how offenses in general are performing, and then obviously players who are over and underperforming in the touchdown column, because those things are incredibly important. Nothing in fantasy football is black and white, but those are three things to always keep in mind when you're making decisions. This next question is an email. It says, hey, JJ, we have been hearing for years now, how great the rookie running backs are in the twenty twenty draft, and I noticed that there's going to have to be some current starting running backs that will be losing their starting role. What running backs would you advise selling in dynasty because you could see them losing their job to one of the elite rookie running backs. Thank you for making great fantasy content all year round. You're welcome. Thanks again, Brian. So one thing that we should keep in mind with a question like this is that selling players in dynasty isn't just solely about the probability of something happening to that player situation. For example, we can look at Ronald Jones in Tampa Bay and say, man, the Buccaneers might end up getting one of those elite running backs in this class, and that would make Ronald Jones irrelevant. But that doesn't actually mean that you should sell Rightnald Jones, because if everyone else feels the same way, then that means that Ronald Jones can actually be had at a discount. And considering the Buccaneers could realistically not get one of those elite running backs, then all of a sudden, if you bought Ronald Jones, you've got some upside in twenty twenty. We always think that we know more than we do. Every year, there are teams who we say will absolutely take a certain position early, and then they don't. You have to play that probability against what the market is saying and use that to your advantage. And look, I'm not trying to destroy this question because it's a very valid question. But where do we draw the line for something like this, like what do we consider a starting running back in today's NFL? If we're looking at only workhorse backs from twenty nineteen, I can't imagine any of them losing their jobs to a rookie running back because there just aren't many workhorse backs. If we go to the next tier of running backs, and I think that we can speculate a bit, I think one player to keep an eye on is James Connor. With Ben Roethlisberger coming back, the Steelers are absolutely in win now mode. They've got to go all in, and an elite running back pick is an all in pick, and Connor has had issues staying healthy and they don't really have a special player behind him on the depth chart. I don't think he's really a special player either. Now. I don't agree with that logic at all. The Steelers shouldn't invest in a running back. But I'm just speculating on what teams could end up doing and finding some surprising running backs who could lose work and I think Connor is one of them. And this is sort of a spoiler alert for next week Sell Candidate show. But watch what Detroit does. Carrie On Johnson has struggled to stay on the field, and that might be in the back of the front office's mind. And Carryon's running back rush share wasn't all that elite last year, even when he was playing. He averaged about fifty eight percent of Detroit's running back rushes when active last year, which would have ranked well outside the top fifteen at the position across the league. Had he maintained that the whole season, had he not gotten hurt. Now, I understand he wasn't one hundred percent, but it's not exactly giving me a lot of confidence that they want to use him as a true workhorse. There are more obvious spots where someone could walk into a starting role and really hurt The other running backs were there, like Atlanta or Houston or Tampa Bay, but Detroit and Pittsburgh are my two dark horses. That's probably the type of answer that you guys wanted to hear from this question. Pittsburgh's a little bit iffy because they only have a second rounder of their early round picks, so they might have to make a trade to get it done. But it wouldn't shock me if that's a direction that they go in, even though I completely completely disagree with it. This has questions from at b ball club. You talked about how targets are a skill statistic this week. What do we make of Cooper cup splits prior to the bye week and after the bye week when looking at him going forward? So the Rams had a bye in Week nine, which splits up the season perfectly, eight games, a bye week, and then another eight games. But up through that bye, Cup was averaging almost twenty one PPR points per game and his per game target share averaged twenty eight point three percent. Absolutely insane. That target shair dropped a sixteen percent per game over the second half of the season and Cup averaged fewer than thirteen PPR points per game, So what the hell happened? Well? According to sharpfootballstats dot Com, the Rams changed up their offense after the bye. During the first eight weeks of the season, they were running eleven personnel groupings on seventy one percent of their offensive plays. That was one of the higher marks in the league. That means three wide receivers were on the field at the same time on seventy one percent of their offensive plays. From weeks nine through sixteen, that dropped to just forty five percent. They became one of the heaviest twelve personnel teams in the league during the second half of the season. That helps explain why Tyler Higbee went off the way that he did and Cooper Cup was hurt. As a result, his snapchare dropped by about ten percent. Now, whether this is something that's going to continue, I'm not totally sure. Brandon Cooks was hurt in week eight, so that coincides directly with this information. But it was also a move that helped the run game out and that's why I could be here to stay more than we'd like. So if you don't have Cup, I wouldn't be looking to buy him right now. I don't think using the first half of the season and extrapolating that and even part the season before, I don't know if that's a logical thing to do. Since there are things that actually did change, meaningful things that changed, I don't think selling him is necessary. It's just tough to confidently invest right now. This asks questions an email and says, hey, JJ love the pod. Is there an approach that you have to pulling off two for one type trades to reduce your roster size? My Dynasty team has seven picks in twenty twenty, and if I have to cut seven players, I will have some difficult decisions. Pulling off trades like this are historically next to impossible in my league. Any insight, thanks, Brian. This is likely not going to be different than any other approach I would make with trades. You've got to give the person that you're trading with what their team needs, rather than forcing players onto that team. Don't offer Patrick Mahomes that the manager already has Lamar Jackson, offer up pieces that they actually need. But you can also go for two for two deals instead of two for one deals, and when you do it sort of mask the deal with a player that you're likely going to drop anyway. Get a player on the other person's team who isn't valuable at all, but it makes the other league manager sit back and say, huh, maybe I'm not valuing these guys the right way. Maybe this is a fair deal. Instead of me giving up the clear cut best player in the deal, you just have to make sure that the best player in that trade is going to your team. Still, this asks questions. An email says, HIJJ, you thoroughly stumped me this past week with your thanks for tuning in the long pause got me. You're welcome for that. Over the last couple of years, I've noticed there are some talented wide receiver prospects that come from big Power five schools who like to run the ball, i e. Terry McLaurin at Ohio State and mikol Hardman at Georgia. It can be frustrated to see these guys fail to produce at the level you'd think they could in college, then turn into solid NFL fantasy assets. So my question is what do you make of talented skill players from these big Power five schools that go underutilized in college but turn into solid fantasy players in the NFL. Is there a way to spot those prospects? Is this simply too anecdotal in nature? Or am I on to something here. Thanks for great content and thanks for tuning into my email. Mike. Well, first off, I think it's important to remember that college production isn't really about raw numbers, it's about market share. That way, you can make better comparisons across teams since teams are run so drastically different offensively. So even though those players were on run heavy teams, if they were seeing a large proportion of their team's receptions or receiving yards, it wouldn't matter. Now. I went on Twitter this week and I tweeted about how I'm going to start talking about percentiles on this show when I'm referencing my prospect model. So I'm going to do that right now. I want things to be more consumable with this model, because you guys have a lot of good questions about it. So I've got every wide receiver who is either invited to the combine and or drafted in my wide receiver database. In two thousand and six, Terry McLaurin ranks in the seventy fifth percentile of all wide receivers, and Mikol Hardman ranks almost in the seventieth percentile. I wouldn't call that all that bad. What propped them up a little bit is where they were drafted, because draft capital is part of this model. But they were both super athletic, and they both had teammates drafted with them. I've got a teammate score that I implement that doesn't weigh super heavily into the model, but it at least counts for something. Generally speaking, good players find a way to see high market share numbers. AJ Brown was better than DK Metcalf in my model because AJ Brown was better than DK Metcalf in college. But it's important to at least recognize when pro teammates are there and they're active on the same team. And Mikol Hardman had Ridley Ridley and Terry Godwin McLaurin watched Paris Campbell go fifty ninth overall, So I do want to say I don't think they were terrible prospects. I actually ranked Hardman pretty high in my rankings post draft because of his landing spot. Now, I did a bad job ranking last year because the wide receiver class was pretty flat and I let landing spot dictate too much of the position. But I liked Hardman a lot, and part of it was because I didn't think that his overall prospect profile was as putrid as some made it out to be. But the thing is, you're gonna win more than you're going to lose when you look at this from a probability standpoint. Sure, McLaurin and Hardman both were not productive in college. Even when you look at market share, they were well below average. But we can play this game all day long. There are good wide receivers in the NFL who weren't productive in college, But the good wide receivers in fantasy football in the NFL, the majority of them were productive. To your question about spotting who those players are, who those unproductive players are who then go on to do well in the NFL. Anecdotally, it probably has something to do with their athleticism, but I do think that it also has something to do with those players doing something really really well. Like Hunter, Renfro sucked as a prospect. He has the body of an accountant and he didn't even have good college production. The chance that Renfro is a top twelve wide receiver year in and year out in fantasy football probably pretty slim. But he can be pretty usable because he's good in the slot and he's shifty, he actually had good agility numbers. He's good at that one thing. So if you're looking at al who, maybe a lot of people are on but you just can't see it from a production standpoint, see if that player wins at a really specific thing, and then go from there. But overall, you're still gonna win in the long run by having some sort of process with how you're evaluating these guys instead of singling out individual players who bucked a trend. Now, this last question is from at Eric Blair, and it's a real football question, not a fantasy one. It's kind of interesting. It says, let's say a quarterback needy team has multiple first round picks via trades, et cetera. Would it be crazy for them to draft two quarterbacks and let them battle in camp, hopefully finding a start worthy quarterback and a good backup, or perhaps trading one once you know one of them is good. So I've seen this talked about before, and I might have even answered this question on the Late Round podcast before. I do think that there are good arguments on both sides. My thing with this is I think that's just easier said than done. Like in theory. Yeah, This makes sense, especially if you've got a high grade on both of those quarterbacks you're gonna draft. But what it might do to a player's mental state or in the locker room, that's gonna be tough to measure. And then if you go and trade the other quarterback that you don't want, don't you think that teams are gonna wonder why you're trading that player. You probably won't be able to get the return that you want for that guy. Now, it's a cool idea and it would be fun to see a team actually try to do it, but I think this is something that's just easier said than done. That's gonna do it. For today's show, thanks to all of you for listening. As always, if you've yet subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and wherever you're listening to the show, please do me a huge favor and leave a rating and review, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, enjoy your weekend.