712: Mailbag 11/18/22

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachera, JJ Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zachar Eeson in this episode seven hundred and twelve of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. The week eleven, NFL Sunday Million is officially live on fanduels. Showcase your NFL knowledge and construct your best nine player roster while staying under the salary cap. Then follow along using Fandel's live scoring feature to compete for your share of one point three million dollars in cash prizes, including a cold two hundred fifty thousand dollars first place prize, and it's all for just five dollars. Sunday's approaching quickly, so head to fandel and submit your lineups today. Eligibility restrictions apply. Go to fandel dot com or download the FanDuel app for more details. The first question this week is from Patreon, and it's from Garrett. It says, with Hollywood Brown being designated to return from IR this week, where do you stand on the outlook of the DeAndre High Hopkins, Hollywood Brown, Rondel Moore trio. Hollywood was good before he got hurt, but that was before Hopkins was playing. How much do you think his volume change is coming back in light of hopkins return and the rise of Rondel More. So I got a ton of questions about Hollywood Brown this week, so let's dig into this. And I want to look at this from an analytical and projection standpoint, because that's what I do. When a team lacks alternatives in an offense, and when that team has a good pass catcher, that pass catcher is unable to capture a really high target share. We've seen that play out historically. When an elite player has no other good players in his offense, he's able to see some serious volume. And generally speaking, I want volume over efficiency. In fantasy football, you want both, but you want volume first. And I bring that up because there are arguments about this kind of thing all the time that when a player enters the picture, people ask what happens the existing players who were already there. So in this case, you've got DeAndre Hopkins and Rondel Moore already playing for Arizona, but now you're adding a really good wide receiver in Hollywood Brown. I don't think this is a good thing. For Hopkins and more. Projections generally won't show that. Yes, Arizona's offense should be better with Brown, but chances are marquees Brown is going to dig into the target chairs of both DeAndre Hopkins and Rondel Moore, and again, we want volume. It's honestly hard for that to not be the case. Hopkins is averaging a thirty three percent target share per game since his return. Rondel Moore has hit a thirty percent target share in each of his last two games. You don't often see two players from the same team capture half the team's targets, let alone over sixty percent of them. Now, I know most of you listening don't do projections. You shouldn't be expected to, but most projection systems work around target share and not total targets because target shair can be reactive to whatever volume numbers you're projecting at a team level for that week or for that season. A good general rule of thumb, like just generally speaking, is that elite players will see at least a twenty five percent target share in their offense. I'm talking like the best wide receivers in the game. They usually see an even higher number. But that's at least a baseline. Very good wide receivers they can hit that twenty to twenty five percent range. Solid ones they're in the high teens, and in sort of more replacement level wide outs, they're in that ten to fifteen percent target share range. So when you project someone like Hollywood Brown, he's likely not someone in this type of environment. With a really good wide receiver in DeAndre Hopkins and a pretty good one in Rondell Moore, he's likely not going to consistently be above that twenty five percent target share mark. I mean, even before Hopkins entered the picture so earlier this season, Brown was hovering the twenty six percent range. Brown is someone who's likely going to fall into that twenty to twenty five percent range, Rondell More hypothetically a little bit below that, and maybe Hopkins maintains a twenty five percent share. But here's the thing the Cardinals are really lacking outside of those three. They just lost Zach Ertz, who is running the most routes at tight end across the entire league. Ertz was at almost a twenty percent target chair in the offense. What that means is that the standard buckets that we place these wide receivers in when we're projecting, And let me be clear here, there's more to projecting target share than just saying, yeah, this guy's pretty good, this guy's okay, and so on. You're looking at team tendencies and how that player has historically performed. But I'm approaching this at a high level so you can see how this might shake out. I would anticipate all of those numbers that I just cited to get a little bit of a bump because of how mediocre the depth is in Arizona. There's a real chance the three wide receivers, assuming Hollywood Brown is healthy, that they can end up capturing like seventy percent of the team's targets in some games. Even more, what that means is that I would push Hopkins and Rondel Moore down with Hollywood returning, but they can still be viable. All three of them can be. I'd prefer Hopkins then Hollywood, then Rondell Moore. It's not a good thing for Hopkins and more, but thankfully for them, this offense does not have a whole lot of juice elsewhere. They just really need Kyler Murray to get healthy. This last question is from at Nickel, plated one to eight seven. It says, can we expect a similar time share between Montgomery and Ebner as we got with Monty and Khalil Herbert? So I also got a lot of David Montgomery questions this week, And in short, no, I don't think we'll see Ebner just take on the Khalil Herbert role. Talented players see the field, remember that, and Khalil Herbert is a good running back. We don't know if Treston Ebner is capable of that yet. We don't know if he's good. I think he's a good explosive change of pace guy. But Herbert was more than just that. Herbert was also playing a role that I don't think Ebner would really play. We've seen Ebner take on a pass catching role at times this year, whereas Herbert hadn't seen a target in his last three games. So I think Ebner is an interesting stash in deeper leagues, yes, but I'm looking at Montgomery as a very solid rbat right now. This last questions from Patreon. It's from Jeff. He says, can you explain your conceptualization of rational coaching? I hear you say it, but I also hear other analysts say it as well. To me, it seems to be kind of a catch all to justify when coaches don't play players we think are the best. But I struggle to believe that coaches aren't trying to win like I think they are making the decisions that they think give them the best chance of winning. Isn't that rational? Yeah, this is totally fair. It's a very rational take in question, if you will, my stance on rational coaching, it's at the extremes when it's beyond just your own opinions on a player. What I mean by that is if there's a player who just literally everyone knows is better than the guy playing ahead of him, and they're playing times aren't reflected to show that, then I think that you can sit back and say that the coach is not being rational, or like, when we know what a player is all about and a coach just clearly misuses him, we can sit here and say coaches know more about their teams and they know more about football than we do, and that's true, we shouldn't deny that. I always hate when I criticize a coach and someone responds with, well, he's better at it than you are. Yeah, one hundred percent, he is. He's an NFL head coach. Of course he is. I'm a thirty something year old dude just hanging out in his parents' basement talking fantasy football. Of course, these coaches know more about football than I do. But they're not flawless human beings. They're going to do dumb things, just like you do, and just like I do. At our jobs. We all do dumb things. Coaches do dumb things. They do irrational things. If they didn't do irrational things, then we'd see the same thing week in and week out. But they fix things, they correct things. We would have seen Rex Burkhead in a pass catching role all season long for the Texans if they didn't correct anything they were wrong to start the year that was not rational. Damian Pierce is clearly the better running back. We could have seen Rondell Moore continue to play strictly the perimeter when DeAndre Hopkins returned. But those things don't continue because coaches look at them and they say, wait a second, why am I not just using Damian Piers every down? Or they'll say something like why is ron Dell Moore in the slot on just six percent of his snaps this week. There are instances where coaches are objectively not rational, because no one is flawless. There are times where I think the idea of rational coaching goes way too far. Yes, if that's what you're also thinking, I would say that's right, especially with running back workloads like with Dallas. Yes, I want Tony Pollard to see all of the touches in the Dallas backfield. But Ezekiel Elliott is a different kind of back who does different things than Tony Pollard does. It's not totally irrational to have Pollard not be a bell cow when he's playing with Ezekiel Elliott. What we can say, though, is that Tony Pollard at least deserves more touches than what he was seeing earlier this season. We can meet in the middle, so hopefully that helps. I think with the idea of rational coaching, it's sort of this intersection of very obvious situations where they did something dumb and understanding that these coaches are not flawless. It's okay to be critical. It's okay to say that they didn't do everything right. Coaches in front offices do stupid stuff all the time. It doesn't mean that you're better than them if you criticize them. It just means that you can point out what that dumb thing is in that one very specific situation. But these guys are smart people. They know the game better than any of us, But that doesn't mean that they're always right. This last question is from at Jacob deal Underscore film. It says, what's Kadarius Tony's true ceiling? Could he be the next Tyreek Hill or is that too far of a comparison. Look, I like Kadarius Tony entering the season. There were a lot of underlying metrics pointing to Tony being the right kind of risk rewards selection where he went in fantasy drafts, But I'm trying to be as reasonable as possible here with him in Kansas City. From the start, it was obvious that this was probably the best fit imaginable for his skill set. The Chiefs will find ways to get him in space to work as magic because when and he has the ball in his hands, he is incredible, and I do think that he should be rostered everywhere. Like I said in the fifteen Transaction show, he's scoring Fantasy points at a higher rate per target than any wide out in football right now. It's a small sample, but still we're doing a whole lot of projecting. Though. If we're thinking that he could be Tyreek Hill, He's yet to even hit a fifty percent snapshare in their offense, and that was in a game last week without me Cole Hardman and with Juju Smith Schuster leaving with a concussion. You're hoping that Tony just keeps going up and up in this offense from a snapshare standpoint, and your guess is as good as mine as the whether or not that happens. I think it's logical to assume that there's a chance that it does. Because he's been quite good per target, they should probably throw him on the field more. There's also some injuries in that offense, but the Chiefs might sit there and they might say, you know what, we like him in more of this part time role. I know that's a crappy answer for a fantasy analyst to give you, but it's a true answer. What we need to care about is what's actionable here, and what's actionable is sta him wherever you can, because his talent profile is there. If I'm being more realistic about what his projected sealing is it's probably like a volatile wide receiver two. Projection wise, it's more like a wide receiver three or four. And I don't say that to me that I'm down on him. I'm just being realistic given trajectory and usage and what else is on that roster. So my advice is to keep stashing him and be pleasantly surprised if he really really hits the athletic profile the talent that's at least there, and that's the majority of the battle. The last question is from at Fantasy Brains one. Would you prefer Cole Comet or Tyler Higbee rest of season? Tyler Higbye. My process will never get me on Cole Comet long term with the way that things currently are going like. He was a streamer on Living the Stream last week, my other podcast, But what Comet's doing is just not sustainable. I talked about this on the fifteen Transaction show. The Bears are averaging just twenty team targets per game. Cametch just happened to see a thirty nine and a twenty two percent target chair over his last two and both of those games were plus matchups for tight ends. Tyler Higbey doesn't have Cooper Cup in the short term, maybe even the long term, maybe even rest of the season, and he's coming off a game with a twenty two percent target chair and what should be a pass friendlier offense. Now, of course we need Matthew Stafford to get back and be healthy, but Higgby is going to give you more projectable output moving forward. Comet does have a fine enough matchup again this week. I wouldn't be that surprised if he posts a decent fantasy performance, but down the stretch rest of season, give me Higbee in the volume. The last question this week is from at go Vike's zero nine one zero. I'm a big data and spreadsheet nerd like yourself. That's a compliment without giving away any trade secrets. How do you manage and track all the data you do? The information on the trend show is always so interesting and diverse, really curious what your process is a big thing is that I ask questions each week. I'm going through that week's worth of data and I'm saying, Okay, this happened, this player, saw this backfield share, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm always trying to take that a step further by asking questions. Okay, James Connor had a huge snapshare this past week, what was the reason for that. I know that people in the analytics space like to joke about not watching games, but you're able to ask those questions a lot more easily when you watch the games. I'm watching games all day on Sunday, and then I watch in the early parts of the following week, so I can at least sit on this show and talk about this stuff confidently. But I can discover things and ask the right questions because I saw things unfold with my own eyes. I don't think a fantasy analyst can do their job well enough if they're only looking at spreadsheets. I think numbers are extremely important to fantasy football. Clearly, fantasy football is a game about numbers. But on the discovery side, your life becomes a hundred times easier when you actually saw what went down, because you can then ask the right questions. And for anyone who's into data and once a more streamlined process to discover trends and come up with ideas, build databases have data that you can access very very easily and look back on, so you can quickly check on the questions that you're asking. Don't rely solely on a website to pull a query for you. Each time that you have a question, have that data stored somewhere so you can easily answer things. I've built mine up for the last decade. I'm continuously trying to make it better. It's a competitive advantage for me because I've spent a lot of time building that thing up, so now moving forward, it not only helps me give unique insights, but it saves me a ton of time. And I've also just been doing this stuff for a long time too. Anytime you get a lot of reps with something, you get better at it. I know what to look for more now than I did ten years ago, even two years ago. So to sum this up, ask questions and watch the games to help with that. Have a strong foundational database so that you can be more efficient and just get reps. That's what's helped me the most. That's it for today's show, so thanks all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found in ever to follow me on Twitter at lateroundqb Urner check out lateround dot com, join the Patreon, subscribe to the free newsletter, all that good stuff. Otherwise, enjoy your weekend, good luck, and week eleven. I'll talk to you next week.