Late-Round Perspectives: Ben Gretch

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Speaker 1: Ben Gretch is a fantasy analyst who's done work at places like Rodovis and CBS Sports. He's known for his comprehensive work with Stealing signals. He's half of the Stealing Bananas podcast. He's a ship chaser, and he makes you think deeper about fantasy football. These are his late Round perspectives. I was thinking, man, how does it feel to be talking to it to an Omni thought leader right now?

00:00:33
Speaker 2: You know what's funny about that? I just updated it the other day. You are absolutely crushing it, but I'm trying to run you down. It's it's a battle between me and you and our in our fantasy league.

00:00:43
Speaker 1: It's It's hilarious, dude, the last. So, actually, you do want to explain to people what what omni is all about and stuff? Since you got you you mean you're obviously the one who introduced me to it.

00:00:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so it's a basically a mix between the futures market and fantasy sports. So we are drafting uh like teams instead of players across all the different sports and trying to predict champions winners of each sport. So the super Bowl champion, the NBA Finals champion, college football, college basketball, every sport basketball we have, you know, the the rotational sports like last year or this current year, we had the World Baseball Classic, we had the Women's World Cup. The ones that are not an annual, we you know, incorporate them the years that they run. NASCAR, I mean like just like every sport, golf, tennis, all of them. And then you won the league last year and then started this year insanely hot with like you won the what the because it's we draft in like February and you won the first few champions.

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Speaker 1: I did. I did it. It's so funny about it, dude, And I've I've like talked to friends about this because it's it's laughably like just so lucky. Right, But like last year, last year, I mean like I had a process for it, but it was definitely not like this was not the expectation last year in the league that ended up winning. I drafted the NBA champion and the NCAA Tournament champion, so both both college basketball and the NBA, and the same thing happened this year, the exact same thing. I'm like, I'm like I have I'm not even like the biggest NBA fan in the world. I love college basketball, but not to the standpoint of like what I'm doing with football or anything like that. And it's just it's hilarious the way that that just sort of like played itself out. But I had to throw that out there that you know, I am getting that w this year.

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Speaker 2: You're crushing. I'm looking at our draft right now. I had the one on one so like I took Novak Djokovic right, like he tends to dominate tennis, although you have Carlos Alcarez who's the up and coming guy, and they have they have one more tournament that the next January's Australian Open will be the fourth one that will count. And they're one two right now, so whoever does better there will win tennis. But you took the Nuggets in the fifth round, right, and you took Yukon Husky's in the seventeenth round and you couldn't champion smart.

00:02:54
Speaker 1: It's so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous, But you guys should definitely check it out Omni fantasy. You probably have sent links out and stuff on Twitter and.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: What, Yeah, I'm in a fantasy dot Com will be drafting again in January and February. It's a post football season thing, but if that sounds fun, you can you can join the substack. I'm in a fantasy dot substack dot com. You'll get notifications emails from there.

00:03:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. Cool, I'm really pumped to have you on. Man, you're one of the guests that people have talked about most to come on. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we definitely are not just player take driven, and I think that's partially why folks have said, hey, you and gret should have a conversation on perspectives and sort of talk about this stuff. You are, though, one of the higher level thinkers in fantasy football, and it's unfortunate that we don't really see a ton of like higher level strategy, that kind of stuff, that type of thinking, you know, within the fantasy space. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that player analysis is just easier. There's a lot of work that goes into not just thinking of like these abstract ideas within the fantasy football space and within football, but also coming up with those ideas and then researching those ideas and talking about those ideas. It's not an easy thing to do you know? But I do want to to ask you where do you think that comes from? Like what kinds of things maybe in your life, or the kinds of hobbies you have, or like the things that you read have sort of directed you into this spot where you know you're not just this player take machine. You're really looking at this from a different perspective.

00:04:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so funny because I always like break down the third ball on pods, but just by the scenes. I'm sure your listeners Melix. So you sent over some of these questions and I messaged you back and was like, I love these questions because they are what I think. They get at what I like to write about and talk about so well. And it's so cool when someone is asking you the things that you already are passionate about writing about I want to talk about and there's no one I'd rather talk about it within you. So when you said all that just now, it's like, I mean, it's it's so exciting. I'm really thrilled for this conversation. It's going to be a blast in terms of you know, well, first of all, that idea I'm a high level thinker is you know, I don't think of myself that way. I'll take the compliment. But in terms of where it comes from. For me, it has always been, you know, this passion for football since a young age, like I grew up really into it. I don't know why. This is the thing that just popped in my head, like right, this moment not something I prepared, but my parents sold their house like two years ago and we went through with some old stuff and my mom found this thing I did for it says in the corner, you know, age six, first grade and it's me writing up you know, the Vikings winning the Super Bowl over the Oilers and this whole story and it's got like Mike Merriweather's name in it and stuff like I'm a six year old Like what I was like, what is this? Like this is insane, Like half the words aren't even spelled correctly, but I know who Mike Merriweather. It's like it's just really ridiculous because that's the guy that was. He was the guy I used to always be when I was the Vikings and Techno Super Bowl, right, so you know, the love these this stuff as a kid, love the stats as a kid. I have an older brother and then two older step and then a step brother who's a year younger than me, And so we did a lot of you know, playing sports as kids, right. We played whiffleball, We played all sorts of football and basketball and stuff. We had a field goal kicking game we used to play where we set a field goal post in our backyard and then you know, a scoring system that would make it so that scores were like reflect NFL score, so the final score would be like twenty four to seventeen or something based on you know, you had these spots where you kicked from the deeper ones were worth a touchdown, the shorter ones were worth a field goal.

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Speaker 1: Stuff like that.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And anyway, when we would play all this stuff, we would keep a spiral notebook and have stats for the whole league and so like all of that stuff from a young age. And then as I got a little older, it was you know Madden and NCAA Football even more so the dynasty mode. Yes, and that's something we're good. I know.

00:06:48
Speaker 1: I was going to say, were you someone who would just kill out with your buddies and you guys would draft a team and Madden and just simulate and just manage the team as opposed to just straight up playing the games and stuff.

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Speaker 2: I did that. I definitely did that before We did a fantasy football season Ogdad one time, like in an off season. Yeah.

00:07:07
Speaker 1: Nice.

00:07:07
Speaker 2: I think it was just me and like one or two other buddies, but we like you know, drafted teams, simulated it and like tallied up scores because we started our league before it was online. I mean we did the newspapers a couple of years. Yeah, but the NCAA football game was a bigger one for me, and it was this dynasty mode. And you know, to your question about like why do I enjoy looking at the game this way? I think it really started from a lot of that stuff. People have used Madden Generation to talk about why, like a lot of observers are better at the timeout management and some of that kind of exceisent, like not the axis in those the clock management and the game situational management than even NFL coaches, Which sounds absurd, right because we know that NFL coaches have way more experience than us, except when it comes to stuff like that, they maybe don't because the people that are playing simulations over and over again are getting so much experience and they're like hacking and they're trying fourth down, go for it. They're calling timeouts way more than an NFL coach with all the other things in their job, is really only managing those game situations sixteen times a year, seventeen times a year now, right, they only have those a couple live reps for how they might want to manage their timeouts and stuff. It's not that crazy to think that somebody sitting on their couch actually knows that better than an NFL coach. And there are elements of this that of Madden NCAA football that I think can apply similarly. And I think that's really where my like love of the schemes and all that stuff probably came from playing these video games a little bit where it's like, you know, understanding different offenses. You know, you're doing the when I play the nca football, you're recruiting. And then the fun thing about it is like they graduate and you have a new players and you've got to figure out a different scheme, right, and like at a young age you realize, you know, the early days, it was the scrambling quarterbacks. You know, Mike Vick was like so good and Madden Eventually it becomes you know, harder to do that, and you got to figure out the route concepts and be able to actually you know, throw down field. And I remember, like the first time I had like a really fast receiver, I'd run him on a bunch of drag rounds, right, and then it's like you got to get him past the line of scrimmae where it's going to get knocked down and then hit him in space and then he runs with it. But you better have an accurate quarterback because if he's if it's off target, he's gonna get you know, he's gonna slow down to catch it. In the simulation, and like literally what we're seeing in this artificial simulation, you know, like helping me understand something that I think to this day. You look at like the ways that like the Dolphins are utilizing Tyreek Hill and getting him to space and how important it is to get him the ball on him and create yak after the catch. It's like I remember trying to do that in NCAA football, right, And so there's elements of it that I think I actually honestly still take and like you know, how to deploy certain personnel in those things. And I do think it's super super important to understanding the NFL because I think every team is a little bit different and the ways that they're trying to go about things and their schemes and the ways they're utilizing their players is different.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. I was actually having this conversation with some friends earlier today and and we're gonna get to some of this to some degree, you know, later in the show. But I think that people still underrate scheme and situation for individual talent and player aval right, Like you look at someone like Devon a Chan or for instance, right, Devon a Chan in Pittsburgh is not the same player as Devon a Chan in Miami, And it's okay to say that that's the case, and that we're we're looking at these multiple layers of how good these guys are going to actually perform and do, And so you bring up scheme and you looking at that stuff. I mean, I would argue that it's a bigger deal than player analysis a lot of times because not only not only is it a bigger deal because it's such an important piece to how well a player performs, but player analysis is everywhere, right, player analysis you can get information from literally you google anything and you can find player analysis and fantasy football. And you know, I've played in my home league and my dad's in it. This is like this twenty second year of my home league, right, and my dad's in it. He's, you know, in his seventies now, he doesn't know exactly what's going on in but he's picking up sleepers during our auction draft because he can literally, I mean he's reading my stuff because he's a great dad. But you know, like you can, he can just go online and find, oh, this list has these guys as sleepers, and therefore I'm going to draft those players. It's a lot harder to integrate the stuff about scheme and the higher level stuff into your fantasy football strategy and approach than it is to say, oh, this guy's good, this guy isn't good. I think that's another really really important piece of this. And to your point, you do stealing signals. It's amazing. Everyone needs to check it out if they can. And again, you know, we'll talk about at the very end, you can you can let everyone know where to do that. I've read it and I've known that, you know, through the years, reading it and checking it out that you're obviously a data person, but you don't only look at things in a data driven way, which I think is very very important. But back in the day, like a decade ago, there were these back and forths on fantasy Twitter all the time about film versus stats. What's more important? You know, are you a film guy or are you a stats guy? What's your take on that whole thing now today in twenty twenty three, and how that sort of collides and works together in fantasy analysis.

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Speaker 2: Well, I mean, first of all, back in the day, I you know, I came in a little later than you and some others, But to the extent that I was a part of those debates, I was firmly teamed data and I would say I still am, and like not to like come at anyone, but I do think it's fair to point out that some people have strengths and weaknesses in other areas. I think a lot of the traditional film people don't necessarily do a great job of applying their analysis. I think they have good film takes, and they understand the game and a lot of the ways that I was just talking about taking stuff from video game like, they understand a lot of these ex'es and those things. But like one of the things I love about you, you're often talking about how like we're just nerds, Like we're playing like we're playing a board game. We're playing some nerdy thing that has a fake scoring system. Just because you can analyze football is not going to make you miss necessarily be able to apply it on the data side and on the number side and how these things come together. You have to have a mix of both. But I do. Over the years, I started very data heavy, and over the years I have shifted more. And you know, in the last question, I was talking all about my childhood, but you asked, like why I think it's so important to look at the bigger picture stuff, And I mean, the NFL is this living, evolving thing, right, And so we have, you know, a couple of examples. I wrote down pass rate over time. Right, we've seen like a huge shift in past. Right, we have the scheme changes based on rules changes and things like that. A decade ago, shotgun was just becoming like more and more popular. Like it's just in the time that I've been a fantasy writer, where I know early in my career I was writing about how shotgun was picking up and three wide receiver sets. Now we're in this current too high shell era trying to take away the explosives on defense and how that impacts what the offenses are able to do. And so you have and timeframes and things that are impacting the ways that the offenses can scheme and what they want to do, but also how they're able to do it, and then what players benefit and those types of things and all of that is so important in addition to the player you know, profiles and a lot of those elements, and like some of your great models that you have built for like young players, for rookies and year two players, those types of things are very important on the player level as well. But we do have to understand the context of how does they put into the scheme and how where's the NFL go right, and so there's a lot of elements there that are really interesting. I do think there's a huge advantage to watching the games when you are a data person who understands it and you're not like, I don't think that means you're a film guy, but I do think if you understand fantasy the nerd game, you know, understand data and then you're watching the games for yourself, like you're understanding how that data is being compiled in a way that you're going to be able to apply it and have a real edge that people on both sides of this film versus data thing don't necessarily bridge that. App The data people, I think are too focused on the box score. Sometimes the film people I don't think can apply down to the statistical level what that means for fantasy. They're like, I really like this guy in film. Draft him on your fantasy league. But they don't understand the market. They don't understand the dynamics around you know, and so you see and and the reality of football as well. And we obviously talk about this a ton in our stuff, but it's small samples all the way down right. It's an evolving sport and even multi year things it creates, you know, segmented small samples because there's changes in offenses and things. So what is so rare is a consistently dominant player over a long career. And we all like to think about this in Dynasty, like this guy is you know, Jamar Chase is going to be a great receiver for the next decade. Well, I mean a lot of things have to have to happen there, right, I mean, and he is tied to Joe Burrow, it probably can happen, but that's rare, right, Like what Travis Kelsey and Mahomes have done of the last five years, that doesn't happen as much as we want to believe it does. There's a lot of high level producers that then don't do anything for you know, another several years for whatever reason.

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Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, Yeah. I think the other thing too, with the data versus film stuff, is that I think that what you're sort of getting at too, is that if you have like a baseline of understanding football, Like like I I'm not gonna sit here and analyze film the way that Kurt Warner does. Right, It's just it would be ridiculously stupid for me to think that I can do that. It's no different than any other I mean, like I'm I'm probably within the fantasy football space like a fiftieth percentile film watcher, if you will, right, Like, there's nothing there's nothing like overly special about the way that But I am watching everything every game, every single week, all the time because I want to sound competent when I'm talking about this stuff, and I think it is helpful. But at the same time, if you understand the basic concepts of what's going on on a football field, and you understand the trends at a high level and where things are moving, it'll help you discover data. Then while you're searching for data, and while you're researching to then come up with new and different ideas to then help you with game theory and help you with strategy. I think a great example of this is what you did over the off season that I then sort of piled on with the RPO stuff, where you researched what happens to pass catchers when they're when they're on these RPO heavy teams, and then I was like, wow, this is really interesting. We did a podcast with CBS on it a little bit and I was like afterwards, I'm like, I got to research this a little bit more. And there was a little bit of signal in there that heavy RPO teams tend to focus their target share on one guy. And it makes sense logically if you understand what goes down with an RPO and that whenever they are at whenever they do end up throwing it, they're doing it in a very quick it's a very fast decision making process, and so they're not able to just go read after read after read like they're just chilling in the pocket. It's a much different situation. And so as a result, when you can combine this narrative in this story with the data and just understanding football at a baseline, you know, it's nothing like, it's nothing crazy. It's just that if you can understand that and then you have the understanding and resources to dive into the data, it can be really really helpful.

00:18:00
Speaker 2: I mean completely. I mean, I think that's to your point about when you're watching it, it helps you find data like that I write this stealing signal you mention. We're gonna talk about this a little later. But it's a game by game recap every week, and so much of it is from watching the games, Like I'm making notes during the games. Look up this player's aera yards, look up this this is a trend that I saw in this game, Like I kind of have an idea of what the stats are before I even look at the box score, because I'm I'm thinking through these things as exactly as you just described. And that's where like some of the RBO stuff came as well as I mean, if you're watching the game and trying to think about what they're actually doing, what their scheme is, what their coaches are trying to do in the game plan, what it's their goal, what's the defense trying to take away, it's going to help you understand what the actual box score is telling you a lot more and whether or not, as I like to do in my in my column, whether it's signal or noise, right, Like, that's that's what I end up kind of trying to boil it down to, and and some of the stuff. It's it's important because it is data, it is statistics, but you can kind of pretty comfortably be like that's sort of noisy, like that happened for a very contextual reason within that game, right, and then you can kind of see it in real time.

00:19:06
Speaker 1: Let's talk about stealing signals for a second, because to me, when you sort of go out in this venture and you're creating this new piece of content and you're digging as deep as you are, I mean, I don't have a single piece of content that does nearly digs as nearly as deep as what stealing signals does. For instance, right, Like, you're going so in depth game by game, what's been helpful most for you with that column? You know, because I think, like, like, if I go to fifteen transactions, for instance, the thing that's really helpful for me is that I'm forcing myself to really look at the market and look at the way people are viewing players, and it helps me as a fantasy manager then make It's not like I'm just recommending things that I'm not using myself. Right, It's very important for people to understand that I'm not just like blowing smoke and just saying, hey, go do I'm doing the exact same thing, right, And so for you while you're analyzing this stuff, what's been really helpful with stealing signals for you as a fantasy manager?

00:19:58
Speaker 2: Well, And it's it's so funny because a big part of it for me, and what I always tell the readers is it's just me sort of going through an analytical process gain by game. How I would break it down, but I write it up and obviously it's gotten bigger and deeper over the years. I've been doing this since I think the twenty seventeen season was the first year I did it. So it's added a lot of layers. The first couple of years was just like you know, some notes, and now it's like I go way too long sometimes, as you alluded to. But it is what it is, right, But I approach it like this stream of consciousness. I'm thinking out loud, these are the things I'm considering. And then here's where I think is signal annoyance right at the end. But in terms of you know, going to that depth every week, in terms of what is the most beneficial for me, I really do think it's this idea of like how different the context is for the different organizations, for the different schemes and understanding not just like we were just talking about the whole league is this living evolving entity. I think each offense, each team, each scheme within a season can be thought of as this living evolving And when we talk about like a lot of like draft strategies like zero or be a big idea of it is like projections, for example, are pretty fragile for a full season because they're kind of more focused on Week one in the early part of the year, and things happen throughout the year, and the fl seasons are chaos injuries happen, and I just like to think about it again, as it is this evolving thing where teams are trying to figure out what works and what they can continuously do successfully, and then other teams aren't gonna then try to take away because a lot of times they do some successfully for a few weeks and then a defense can figure out a way to stop that, and then they have to have pivots off of that. One of the fascinating things about fantasy to this point is sometimes it's something that defense don't want to take away. So like Adam Feeling, this is how I describe Adam Feeling. He just sits down three yards down field and Bryce Young, like the Panthers are okay with it because the other receivers aren't winning and they want their rookie quarterback to have somewhere to go with the ball. They don't mind him having this like basically a tight end outlet, and the defenses don't care because they're like, yeah, I mean, if you're gonna throw to your thirty four zer old receiver three yards downfield, like, we're gonna take that bet. Sometimes he's getting some yak. A lot of the times he's not. It's like it's I mean his last game he had he averaged like like four yards perception or something like that.

00:22:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like the Panthers a dot, it's like five and a half this year, So like, yeah, I mean it's just all driven by Adam Thielen.

00:22:18
Speaker 2: But it works well for our game even though it's not because I mean the Panthers are okay with it as part of their offense because a lot of the other stuff isn't functional. It's not like they're gonna try to replace I think a good team would try to replace that over time. They would try to push the ball down field. They don't have the receivers to win downfield. The defenses are okay with it, So where's it gonna go? Like, it's gonna keep happening, and that's part of their evolution as an offense. It's not a positive evolution, like that's not a good team. But what it means is a lot of targets for Adam Feeling. Unfortunately for someone like me who doesn't draft a lot of guys like.

00:22:48
Speaker 1: Adam Feeling exactly exactly. Yeah, Yeah, I mean it's it's it's a it's a very interesting thought that like inside of a season, there's like these micro seasons almost for a lot of these teams, and I think the feeling things are really good example, where like you can go into a season as an analyst as a player and think a certain thing about an offense in the way that it's going to go down. And I think what stealing signals is really impactful and helpful for is understanding that delta and that change from where we were at the start of the season, whereas a lot of people just kind of have take lock and player lock, where you know, like I didn't draft a lot of Adam Adam Thielen this year. You know, I the trends that I look at all that kind of stuff. I'm usually going after young rookie, unproven guys in the late rounds and such, and you know, every once in a while, like age isn't that big of a factor from like an ADP trends standpoint in the late rounds, but when you attach them to a rookie quarterback, I'm like, no, I mean, I'm not going to go hard after Adam Thielen this season. And then we see what we're seeing and it might not make sense from a real football perspective, but it can make sense from a fantasy football perspective. It's similar to how some teams don't really care if they're like that bad against the run defensively because because at the end of the day, it's like the Chargers did that for a little while. Where I mean, the Chargers defense just sucks in general. But you know where if you're giving up chunk plays on the ground, or if you're if you're allowing four and a half yard instead of four yards per carry, the difference there really isn't that significant. You'd rather be better against the pass than against the run in today's NFL. So in fantasy right against the Chargers defense or against whatever defense that's bad at stopping the run, there's obviously an impact, but from a real football perspective it might not see, you know, there might not be as big of an adulta. They're in an impact there.

00:24:26
Speaker 2: Right, and it's like what are they trying to do? Why are they allowing that? And then we need to be able to apply it to the opposing offense. Well, if they're committing all the resources to stopping the pass and the opposing offenses are running at a high rate, as a result and efficiently, right, but also the run rates higher. Maybe we're not going to be playing their receivers that week because we know that, you know, especially if it's a team that has a tendency to fall into that and be run heavy whenbe it's the Lions, right with their great offense. I mean, this isn't a great example because they just played a massive shootout last week. You were talking about the Chargers of a few years ago.

00:24:58
Speaker 1: Obviously, yeah, yeah, but last week we tell them about like a fourth and five just running the ball against LS, right, that's true, inane, insane, And this is this gets back.

00:25:07
Speaker 2: To this concept of tacit knowledge I've written out before. And if you do go to my Stealing Signals sub stack, it's the pinned article up there, and it's like, you know, the subtitles like a pitch for why you should subscribe to Stealing Signals or what I'm trying to do. But this concept of tacit knowledge, I originally stole it from Jonathan Bales, but he's quoting from an article from a man named Cedric Chin. He wrote this article called why tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice. I recommend looking it up and reading the whole thing. It's fantastic, But this is a passage from it. That is something you do in your work, and it's going to resonate with you. It's something that I do in my work, but it's People with expertise in any sufficiently complicated domain will always explain their expertise with things like, well, do X, except when you see why, then do Z because A. And if you see B, then do P. But if you see A and C but not B, then do Q because reason D. And then there are weird situations where you do Z but then see thing C emerge and then you should switch to Q. And the whole point is like, we can't actually really explain some of these things, like the whole Adam feeling conversation we just had, is because like several elements are in play, including the rookie quarterback and including all these things, right, and then it just fits and it comes together and you're like, I mean, I can't really fight this trend. It is a real trend and it's going to probably stick as a result of several of these PQ and X things that are all present in this situation, and it is something that like that type of context is necessary. There's so many people that want to be able to find the magic spell for fantasy and like, what thing is going to help me pick out the winners every year? And for me? And this gets back to your question about the stats in film thing, watching the game, studying the game from a number's perspective, immersing yourself in all of it is the way that you're going to be the most successful. I know not everyone has the time for that, but that's what you and I are doing, and that's what we're here for. I really do think it does marginally improve the takes to be doing all the those things because football is a complicate. A lot of people love I mean, I love this about your Twitter. I've told you this. People love to come at you, and you do an awesome job of the back and forth. But one of the things I've seen you highlight before is when people come at you and say, you're a fantasy football analyst, don't take yourself so seriously. And it's hilarious that I'm quoting something that says a sufficiently complicated domain. We're not rocket science sciens, right, Like, Yeah, we don't take ourselves that seriously. But it is a highly competitive industry. There's a lot of people doing analysis. It is complicated. It's a schematic, tactical sport, right, that's what we're talking about earlier. This isn't baseball where it's one on one. It isn't you know, pitch your hitter. This isn't basketball where it's you know, there's still five players moving around, but it's only five on each shide. But football is more complicated. There are individual plays, there are individual schemes that offenses and defense are gonna liign positively or you know, they're not going to align well for the defense in some cases. And it's just this offense is going to crush this defense because of scheme reasons. It's all very like I said, tactical and nuanced. It is complicated. Even though you know we are nerds playing dungeons and dragons like, it's still complicated, right.

00:28:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, look, I don't take myself too seriously, but I take my job seriously, you know, Like I I know that it's that the subject matter and all that is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. From like a worldview perspective, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a law I'm not doing things that are necessarily directly impacting the world. I know that I give people an outlet and all that kind of stuff, and I'm very grateful for that, right, but I do take being right, for instance, seriously. I see a lot of fantasy analysts that they don't care about their results at the end of the season. I literally do podcasts on what I got right and what I got wrong because I want to be better the following season. I think that's very very important to at least like get across is that we're doing stupid things. I mean, like this is dumb, right, like very like like what it is is very dumb, But it's an important piece to American culture. It's an important piece to people's lives as an outlet, it's a good hobby, and people want to win at the end of the day. And I don't want to be a fantasy analyst that people listen to and they start yelling at on Reddit and start talking junk on and stuff. And to your point about you know, the the excerpt that you read. The other thing that I've really become to real or come to realize over the last few years is you know I've gotten I'd say, like the number one feedback that I've gotten as a fantasy analyst is that I'm not I don't have enough l I don't want to say not enough hot takes, but I'm not like strong enough in the takes that I have. If you will, you know, I'll say, buy this player, sell this player. But then there's always this gray area. Right. But to me an analyst, an expert, and someone who understands what's going on in such a complicated game where we're trying to predict what humans are gonna do on a football field, you have to use words like probably to describe what's going on. You know, like it's okay to say that it doesn't mean that you're gonna get things wrong more than you're gonna get things right. The opposite is true when you understand that variants and you understand that things aren't gonna be clean. Like like you and I playing a ton leagues together, you've seen me make dumb trades, like we've we've both made stupid moves throughout our fantasy playing career. But the idea here is that we're making way more good moves than bad moves throughout a season, throughout multiple seasons in Dynasty, and it's okay whenever you get things wrong, because it's going to happen, and saying, you know, probably this is probably gonna happen. Uh, this is the way this backfield will probably be split moving forward. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's a human thing, and it's it's it's the important, Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's a humbling thing to say, right, you like, like I'm not sitting here just saying like this is exactly how it's gonna go because I know, no, I don't. I don't know. I'm not in these locker rooms. I don't know exactly how it's gonna play out, right, And.

00:30:42
Speaker 2: That gets back to the things I was just saying about what's complicated. The other huge thing is all of these teams are guarding everything, like I mean, like look at the whole Michigan side ceiling scandal right, like it's their playbooks are guarded. Teams pick up players that were recently cut from a different team just to get the inside on that future apparent because if they have them next on the schedule, they'll go sign someone who's recently cut because he's been in practices for that team, and they just bring him in sometimes for a week literally, like sign him for a week, pay him one game check to get him to help them, you know. And the point is that the offenses, the defenses, the schemes are all very closely guarded secrets. You and I are not in the locker rooms, like you just said, we don't know what they're doing. We're we're making assumptions. And then the other important thing you said is you know, over time, yes, we're gonna we're gonna be trying to make more right moves than wrong moves. And typically I am in leagues with you, You're very good at this, and I think I'm pretty decent at too. We're usually gonna come out that way. But when we don't. The other really important thing you said is then we self reflect. Right at the end of the season, you're looking at your takes. Why did I miss so much? Like what I had a tough season in twenty twenty two, when my toughest in like five years. It was a a lot of the players I was heavily on got hurt, Like things didn't go necessarily great on some of the key teams had a lot of cow pits last year. A lot of things just didn't go the way that I necessarily wanted them to. Still want a couple leaks, you know, still had some successes because, like you know, the way that you structure things are going to work out. But I spend a lot of time this offseason trying to understand why what is changing and again back to the macro stuff, why I was scoring down? Why did that impact things? Because I often don't draft a lot of running backs, take a lot of receivers. A lot of those receivers didn't have the seasons I wanted them to, and some of that had to do with the whole macro stuff. Spend a lot of time analyzing those things to figure it out. And I think I'm feeling, you know that some of its variance. I'm having a better year in twenty twenty three, and I think that's because I'm, you know, seeing the fruits of some of that. And it is important. Like you said, though, I think it is so key the intentional self reflection and willingness to be like, yeah, this was a bad take, and not a lot of people in our industry do it man, especially like it's a tough thing for up and commerce. I had a really hard time doing it when I was when I was new in the industry. You want to be an expert. You want people to recognize that your takes are right and they're good, and you want you you take your victory lapse on everything you say that it's correct. And I totally understand that urge. And I get that the people that I the the young analysts that I have the most respect for, are the ones that I see thinking critically about things that got wrong and why they got them wrong, and trying to grow and trying to learn and those things. And I mean, it doesn't mean you have to, like you know, beat yourself up publicly all the time either, like some people take that far as well. But it's so important to think critically because you're not going to get everything right. But this is a really competitive industry where there is pressure to be right about everything, and so it's hard to toe that line. Certainly, I totally agree.

00:33:34
Speaker 1: I understand why analysts are out there victory lapping and celebrating their wins and maybe they're quiet with their losses. I get it. I mean, it's a very instinctual thing to do within a pretty competitive space. I also think that you can apply the same thing though, to just being a player. You know, any listener who's not an analyst, which is going to be the majority of people. If you're playing in a lot of leagues and you had a really really good season, understand that there are things that go on, like in the Fantasy playoffs, where tons and tons of variants exist. Right Like if you won three games in the Fantasy playoffs and you had to you know, you're not didn't didn't have a buy or anything like that, like a lot went your way in order to win that championship. Don't just look at the result and say, oh, I was good this year because I won two out of my nine leagues or something other three out of my nine leagues or what have you. You know, understand what went down, whether you got lucky or not, and and and see if it's a process that can be you know, duplicated and replicated in some way, you know. I I think though, the greater piece to this is that instead of you know, you can be excited about hits, of course, but you know, there's no reason for me to you know, it's really easy for me and you at this point. This is our jobs, is what we do, This is you know where we're a part of this community, if you will. It's very easy for me to sit back and be like, yeah, I mean like I got Christian Watson wrong this year, Like it's not panning out. I'm gonna reflect at the end of the season and see exactly why it didn't pan out. Uh, but it's it's not panning out. I mean, he's like borderline droppable in a lot of leagues at this point, whereas I got Rashad White right, you know, like things went my way with Rashad White and so but like there's no reason for me to go on social media and say, look at the look at how well Rashad White's doing, because someone could just respond and say you told me to drave Bejon Robinson in the first round, you know, like like like this is just the way that And it's easy for me now though, where I'm like, Okay, I've been doing this for years and years, and I have this backbone and people trust me, and I'm very confident in the process that I have to not really fret you know, getting things wrong and just be open about it and such. But you know, what I'm basically trying to get to here is that if you are just playing the game yourself, don't look at those individual player takes and don't look at those individual drafts that you had, draft picks that you had and say, oh, I just got this right because I'm good, Like understand what led you to that point in getting that right. And maybe it's just I listened to the right fantasy analysts. That's fine. Like if you if you're trying to to find the right mesh for you and your brain and the way that you are, great, that's totally fine. But the thing that I hate more than anything. I even said this like halfway through the season with Rashad White, it's like, don't have my me JJ as an analyst. I shouldn't live and die by one player in your mind as an analyst, Like that's insane. Like if I led you to White and then you kept you, you held him through the tough times, and you want to be thankful because you read my draft guid or like Sam Laporta or something like that, Like I get it, you're excited, but I really truly don't want people to only think like Isaiah Pacheco last year, right, I was into him. My prospect guy liked him, my prospect model liked him. I don't want to live and die by one player, because it's gonna go south the next time that you do it. I know how this works.

00:36:41
Speaker 2: You know I did the same thing with it, Like I got a lot of positive feedback for aj Brown for a couple of years. I've been really high on him since my fie year, and he's basically always beat his expectation. And I and I Stefan Diggs the first year he went to Buffalo was another one that pops in my head when you were saying that. And in both cases, I remember the year after, I was like, I'm not going to act like I have some magical cure to predict this mid round receiver that's going to be, you know, a first round value. It's it's you. I don't think I can do that again next time. I just was playing a probability, like you were saying a minute ago, there's there's some there's some upside here. Really like this guy. A lot of reasons to be in on him at this cost, and the and the ceiling hit like Diggs first season in Buffalo is a great example where I was arguing, look, Minnesota never really gave him the full role. They were using him in a low eight out role than a high eight out role. And then there's a chance that he's the legit number one. They were trying to acquire Antonio Brown. They didn't get him, They go get Digs, They trade a bunch of you know, capital to get him, and he ends up being that in the first year. But in addition to him getting targets at all depths for the first time, Josh Allen has a breakthrough, the past rate explodes. It's like, I mean, I had no idea that it was going to hit to that left exact right.

00:37:50
Speaker 1: I mean, that's crazy exactly. And that's the way that I feel about basically all of my hits. Lamar Jackson his MVP season really really into Lamar. He had an unbelieve or passing touchdown rate. Like, I'm not predicting that kind of insanity to happen. And so what I'm saying, I don't want people to think in a results oriented way when it comes to the fantasy analysis that they're consuming I think it's more important to look at analysts who are showing their work and what led to getting to that point, you know. I think that's what's the biggest key with everything that we're doing, you know, within fantasy analysis. One question I have to ask every analyst that that pops on this show, what do you And we kind of alluded to this a little bit, you know, we're talking about it a little bit right now, but what do you think fantasy managers consistently get wrong as they're playing.

00:38:38
Speaker 2: I think the biggest one that I would emphasize as a concept that I've heard best described by the phrase misapplying the aggregate in the specific. So we do a lot of analysis in fantasy where we do a lot of like cohorts and you know, group things, and a lot of that stuff is really important. I think there's a lot of intelligent ways to be looking at like ranges of outcomes through like comp groups and things like that. Right, But we were just talking a lot about how the different schemes are unique and there is context and one of the things that I see as an issue with the misapplying the aggre. I mean, there's a lot of ways I think this is done poorly. One is arbitrary cutoffs. Right. You'll see like the fifty or more of this stat and twenty five percent or more of this stat, and the player they're putting into that group is right at fifty and right at twenty five. Yes, and then the whole comp group is significantly better than that. And so it's not really a range of outcomes, it's just everything that's better than the mark that that person's at. That's I mean, you're now missing. You're creating a comp group. That's that's not not working. There's a lot of analysis when we look at the league level, though, where there are these examples, and this is I think a way that the aggregate is used intelligently in the specific But people like you, I've heard a lot of analysts talk about this when we look at like maybe like team level data a lot of time, like for a particular stat, it might only be really relevant for like the top three teams and the bottom three teams, and then we have this other twenty six teams and we're like, yeah, there's kind of a lot of variance in here, but there is signal you know, at the tails, right, Like I mean, the one that comes to my mind as I say that has passed right over expected this year, we have the Chiefs way up there, and we have Washington like way up there with them in Cincinnati, and then like you get down a few more teams and they're like, okay, if you're at plus three percent or minus three percent or relative to expect it, that's all kind of in a wash. And then get way down to the bottom of the Falcons are at bottom of the league. Yeah, that's relevant, Like that's that's a tail outcome that I mean, so we're you know, but then what happens I think with the cohorts and stuff, and often I see to get back to this aggregant and the specific thing. Christian Watson's a good one. I don't know if you necessarily did this with your Christian Watson in case, I saw this reference to a lot his yards per route and run two plus and it put him in a cohort of a lot of receivers that yeah, it was like a lot of really great receivers.

00:40:56
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, And.

00:40:59
Speaker 2: For me, so I wasn't is on Christian Watson. So this is maybe a bad example because we just got done saying that it's not about one player, no, it's yeah. I was certainly not trying to be like, this is a guy I faded and JJ said was right, and I'm going on this podcast, bro, this is.

00:41:14
Speaker 1: This is why lay round perspectives exists. Let's hear it.

00:41:16
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, the yards per route run is a stat that I always I love to break down into the two component parts targets perut'ru on yards per target. And I wrote about this a lot. And it's not like I even said to fate Christian Watson. I still ranked him pretty high. I just most of my readers know that I was not really on drafting him a lot. He was the year Tube profile that you want to be after for a lot of reasons. Right, he had the draft capital very efficient in your one. We know that efficiency leads to more volume from young players, so and so, like, I spent a lot of time talking about Christian Watson about why I wasn't as in on him as I should have been. And I got that question a lot because it fit a lot of the other players that I've been in on, and a big reason was it goes back to the contextual like watching the games and things like that. Where I felt like he was a tail outcome two point zer yards per out run guy for that cohort right in the sense that he didn't really fit with aj Brown or some of these other rookie And the reason was he had, first of all, didn't run a ton of routes right. And I'm sure you've talked a lot about the sample size as it relates to him. He had Aaron Rodgers and then doesn't have Aaron Rodgers this year. So the yards per target side of it, the efficiency side, you could expect to potentially come down. The targets per route run side was really strong. And that's the one that I spent a lot of time on targets prout run and I got a lot of questions about and I was basically saying I thought his targets prout run were inflated. And I didn't really have a good reason for arguing that other than like it felt like they were trying to funnel him volume last year. And there was even a game where they tried to throw to him a couple of times near the goal line, and then the interviewed Aaron Rodgers after the game, they were like, two scores up, Yeah, they didn't score, that kicked a field goal, and they interviewed, yeah, and so it didn't matter. The interviewed Aaron Rodger after the game, and he makes a little comment like if he wants to win the Rookie the Year, he's gonna have to make plays like that, and it's like, wait, you're like actually very aware of what the stats are. You're trying to get in touchdowns. He went to him twice in a row. He dropped the TV and so the argue and then another stat that I saw this off season that I used to try to make this point. Bill Barnwell shared a stat at one point that was like percentage of yards for wide receivers that were accumulated while win probability was seventy five percent or higher or something. And so similar to that situation where like, once they got into these like end of game situations, it seemed like they were trying to pad Chrishna Watson's stats every week. It felt like and I and that was part of me writing still and signals every week being like, yeah, I mean, he had another great stat line, but like a lot of this production the game wasn't even like they didn't need it. To help them win. It was like they were trying to just get him the ball. It was interesting, but that's what they That's what it felt like to me. And I had a hard time explaining it. But the point was that he then winds up in this cohort of yards per out and run and the tart and so the tarks part run, the yards were target both of them for me, were maybe a little bit you know, room for them to regress more so than being predictive of like success in a way that when I watched AJ Brown's rookie year, I was like, this guy's you know, a gam he can go out and just win, right like. And there's it's a very nuanced belief, but it is one of those things where like again I was getting back to that point where there's there's context and and I felt like Watson was a tail outcome that didn't belong in this cohort for whatever reason. And I mean, again, hard to tacit, knowledge thing, hard to explain. It's just a b C. Were all president, and so I didn't love it.

00:44:27
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I mean, but here's the thing. If you because I did that cohort, you know that that grouping and talked about it and my stance on Watson in particular. And I know that we're using this as an example, and this this is I think that going through this example is just helpful to sort of understand what we're talking about. But like my stance with Watson was purely a redraft stance. My Dynasty stance was, this is a very very volatile asset, right, And a lot of it was because of that, Like the same thing happened with me with Gabe Davis last year, you know, not not this path in twenty twenty two. I was it on Gabe, Yeah, right, So I wasn't that into him in redraft last year. But it was also this notion that people really can't wrap their heads around the idea of buying into a player, a young, up and coming player, more in redraft than in Dynasty because they assume that a younger player is going to naturally be more valuable in Dynasty than in redraft, but the cost is totally different, right, Like Christian Watson to me, part of the reason why and I talked about this a lot of my show. Part of the reason I didn't mind drafting Christian Watson and Drake London is because things got so flat in fantasy drafts, you know, at wide receiver around that time, where you could really make up for a miss by just pounding wide receiver in round five, six, seven, eight, et cetera, if you were getting them in a round four or five. And so it was easier to sort of swallow that variance with those guys, and obviously hasn't really panned out for them. But I think that's one piece of it too. But this leads me to what I really want to discover this offseason and research this offseason, is that I think there's a lot of signal. I know there's some because I researched it a little bit at the end of this summer. I think there's gonna be a lot of signal with what my prospect scoreres say and how that relates to not dynasty but redraft. And you look at the grouping that Christian Watson was in of these guys who dominated their rookie season in yards per route run. Every other wide receiver that was part of that group was an elite, elite prospect entering the league. Yeah, and Christian Watson was not that. He was not that Yeah, And so and so I think that all these like these these tertiary things that you're sort of thinking of and putting together right now, which are all very very valid, I think that you might be able to dumb it down and saying he just isn't as good as these other guys, you know, like like he's just not as talented and was never in that same grouping, which is why he was a second round pick who probably should have been a third round pick if not for his athleticism, you know, like and the go ahead.

00:46:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think the whole reason I was going through his production was such a fine tooth comb during the season and all this is all in garbage time and Aaron Rodgers is getting the balls because I didn't like him as a prospect for since you said, right, and so I was like, no, but this breakout isn't real. I wasn't wrong about him in Dynasty, like he's not actually good. This is all fake, right, like right, and it is. So that definitely was part of it for me as well. Where and to your point, I think that's exactly that's exactly right about that cohort. I mean, that's probably why he was a tail outcome. For like, you can't just look at him from a two point zero yards per route run. There's other important context, right, Like that is a good signal part of it, but there's other context and for him to your point, I mean, the prospect profile is still very relevant. And what's so funny about this we're saying on this what could still happen is he could he's had an injury plague first half, he could go on to dominate the second Halfic we want to be a really good NFL player, right, yeah, yeah, like we should.

00:47:39
Speaker 1: We We're open to that kind of thing. But like I have the year two model, and Christian Watson was not part of there were three wide receivers who were part of the elite group, which was Chris Olaive, Garrett Wilson, and Drake London. And I still stand by Drake London being a phenomenal player. And I think that like situationally, it definitely didn't really you know, obviously was part of the range of outcomes. We knew this was probable, but I was willing to buy into what if everyone's wrong, because he could have easily then been a wide receiver one in fantasy. Your opinion. So I don't really hate on that as much as that process as much as the Christian Watson one because of the lack of backbone from a prospect profile standpoint, because this year two model score was was in the same grouping as Treylon, Johan Dotson, George Pickens, all of those guys.

00:48:21
Speaker 2: The massive hits.

00:48:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and so so like I knew that going so I that's that's a little teaser for like the the you know, the offseason and stuff, and for next year's draft guide is that I would almost guarantee you that there's gonna be a lot more of the prospect stuff that's integrating more within redraft because I think that's one of the big missing pieces. I have a lot of thinking to do just around that. In general. Let's move on to there. There's there's a player take I want to talk about here. Do you have anything you want to add about the Christian Watson No, I.

00:48:51
Speaker 2: Mean, I think that's a great example of what we were just talking about. And you're not reacting just to Christian Watson. You're reacting to a set of outcomes, right, we were talking about like we don't want to just change our whole process for one play. Sure do want to self analyze, and it's just such a great example of what we were perfect.

00:49:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's a perfect example. It's a perfect example. So let's move on to one player that I've talked about a good bit on this show. You know, I was in on him this season. He has not panned out, and he's really getting a lot of hate right now in the fantasy space. That's Tony Pollard. So my stance right now is that I still think Tony Pollard is a buy in fantasy football. And I want to hear you just be totally honest. I don't need people to come on this show and just agree with me, but tell me how idiotic I am, because I know that a lot of people are gonna have listened to me and they're like, oh, you're just doubling down on a bad take. I don't care what again, I don't care how I felt about these guys in August and September. I'm saying right now, where the market is at with Tony Pollard and the sentiment around Tony Pollard, I am much more on the buy side than the cell side. Could it continue to go south? Could they use Rico doubtlemore. Yeah, of course, but I still think that the way people are, Like I've seen people say they're gonna bench him this week in Fantasy they're playing. They're ten and a half point favorites against Carolina. I mean, I can't imagine that you have, you know, two or three more better options than Tony Pollard. Just just tell me how stupid I am for sticking with him right now from the perspective that the market shifted. Obviously, I don't think he's the same player that he was in August, you know, entering the season. But you know, am I wrong for still thinking that he's a by candidate.

00:50:26
Speaker 2: No, he's obviously still a by candidate. You're not wrong at all. I mean, there's there's there's there are concerns that have cropped up. But like I actually wrote about him pretty extensively recently as well, And I mean my thing was he was so similar in hindsight, I guess as a bet to Austin Eckler the year he broke out, where Austin Eckler was a twenty six year old who had never been the full time lead back and was a little older than we'd like to see. But and then the other key part of it was, well, now that he's going to be the clear lead back, is he going to get the goal line work? And that was the big question about Austin Eckler. And he goes on. Up to that point, he had fourteen and eleven twenty five career touchdowns. He had twenty tds that season as a twenty six year so four years, twenty five TVs over four years. Age twenty six season he goes in, he puts up twenty, and then age twenty seven season he puts up eighteen and you know he still he has five this year. He's been hurt a little bit, but he's scoring, you know, at a decent clip this year as well. Led the league in touchdowns the last two years going into that twenty twenty one season. I don't think you could have found anyone that would have been concerned about his efficiency because he was always an efficient player. He gets enough receiving work, All of that stuff is fine. It was just will he get the touchdowns? And then he got them and he became a league winner for two seasons. Tony Pollard gets the receiving Wait, no, now this year he doesn't for some reason, very efficient player. Nobody would have told you coming into this year that he's inefficient, that he's anything other than an explosive efficient player, And for some reason, he's no longer able to be efficient. And I've seen so many people reference the injury. Isn't it that simple? I referenced the injury early in the off season. Was a little concerned until I did a little research and had people talking to me about it, and all of the Twitter doctors and the people that do this type of research seemed to be pretty much agreement that, like, this is like an eight week injury and he's got seven months to heal, He's going to be fine, right, And so unless like something went wrong with the surgery, or unless it's somehow you know, impacted his off season workout. You know, like we don't necessarily know every detail about every player. Sometimes I think about that, like we joke about the best shape of your life thing, But like there probably is something to some players being a little more motivated some off seasons, eating better, working out better. There's certainly years of my life where I exactly healthier and years that I've been less healthy, Right, And that's just going to be part of it, and so maybe he's not in the best shape of his life. You know, who knows, but we wouldn't have any idea about that. But the reality is the goal line work is there. I mean, Rico Daddle's doing well, but the goal line work is there. He's still a big part of their passing name could be should be. A lot of their games in the first half of the season, this is a big part of it for me, have been massive blowouts They've They've played like an absurd amount. I mean I wrote about this recently, but like four or five of their games have been like three score games at halftime, you know, and like early blowouts because the defensive TVs and stuff. Week one was one against the Giants, they got blown out by the Niners. Similarly, I don't think it was quite as big of a blowu at halftime in that game. But they've blown out multiple other teams. They are not all coming into my head. The Rams recently was one. Anyway, when you're playing a lot of games where in the second half you're not even in competitive I mean, there's maybe an argument for like he's not trying to create as many big plays. Maybe he's just like covering up the ball and doing what he's supposed to do in those things. It's tricky obviously, Like I don't I'm not trying to make too many excuses for him, but the volume is there. And even in the sense of, like I think running back efficiency is not discussed enough, like it is important. But even in the sense of him being an inefficient back, if he can just get back like the old way that we've always talked about it for, you know, ten plus years in fantasy. And I'm not trying to say this is like outdated or anything. My Ceiling Videos co host Shawn SIEGELSLLL does it all the time. He's one of my absolute favorite analysts the whole industry. But the idea of expected points and points over expected, the old idea of just like, yeah, he's been way below expectation in terms of, you know, what his actual role is, we probably should expect that to regress somewhat. I mean, even if he's not adding points, even if he's not efficient, he should be somewhere in the middle, you know, close to right. It's it's so I I think that's he's a bye on those terms, But it is it is a really like complicated one. And there are a couple concerning names that, like, you know, the comps start to come out. I saw somebody reference Davis Maddock, reference Ben Tate on on Twitter the other day. One name that came to me was like Tevin Coleman or a couple names Kareem Hunt. These are guys that were efficient younger and then about twenty six they lost their efficiency.

00:54:50
Speaker 1: Lamar Miller was another one.

00:54:51
Speaker 2: Lamar Miller not and all of them not only prospects like round two to round four prospects. They weren't like you know, round one guys, and they were good early, but maybe they they just aged a little earlier than you would expect them to. But then you go back to Eckler as the other side of it, where like, you know, this guy's continued to be explosive and ficial. It's not like you know, I don't know. I still think he's a by the other thing I will say about Dallas a trend right now. The last three games they've been plus eight percent or more pass right over expected. They only had one game where they even positive plus better than plus zero. In the whole pre buy segment of their season since the buy, they've come out throwing a ton, but that might actually help open up.

00:55:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they'll probably be better offensively because we know the passing is just more effective than running is. But here, here's the thing you mentioned the he might not regress the full way, but maybe a little bit. That's the thing is that like his expected touchdowns right now, according to PFFS expected Fantasy points model and expected touchdown model is nine right, so he should be He was expected to score nine touch which means he's played seven touchdowns below expectation. Even if he were to score six touchdowns instead of nine right, which is only two thirds of the way there, he would be a low end RB one and PPR Right now on a points per game basis, the narrative shifts completely. And I got to give a shout out to my buddy Rich Riebar, our buddy Rich Riebar who you know. He he sent a text about this where it was this comparison between two players, okay, and I didn't take the exact data that he shared in this text message. I looked at up myself and just kind of picked out other other data points. But there's a player A and A, player B running back A running back B. Player A yards per carry three point nine, player B yards per carry three point nine. Player A expected points added per rush minus point one three, player B minus point one nine. So player B a little bit worse and expected points per rush, but they both suck. Player A success rate thirty five point six percent, player B thirty eight point five percent. So player B had a worse expected points added per rush, but a better success rate, so he's gaining positive points for his team at a more consistent rate. And then percentage of carries that are ten or more yards eight point eight percent for player A, seven point four percent for player B, So player A a little bit more explosive. Player A ben, you're ready for this player A, well, i'll say this player B is Tony Pollard. Okay, okay, Player A is Travis Etn. Like it is like the narrative around these two guys is totally different. Where you have ETN his expected points per game this year is fifteen point three, Tony Pollard's is seventeen point one. It's just that ETN is playing three point one points over that expectation and Tony Poller is playing four point five points under that expectation, now, I would one hundred percent take Travis Etn over Tony Pollard rest of season. That's not what I'm arguing or talking about here at all. What I am saying is is that you can take advantage to overall sentiment and feeling about these players big time in the market. I think right now, you look at the rest of season schedule really favorable. I mean even this week, I wouldn't be shocked if he has a decent outing. I really do think that at the end of the day, a lot of this is just small sample variance and touchdown related, like I I and it might not come to fruition this year. That's the thing, Like it might just be a bad year for Tony Pollard, right It just he might not really regress as much as we are hoping or expecting or anything like that. But I just do think that people are taking this way way too far right now.

00:58:23
Speaker 2: A hundred percent. And I think the Etn comp is a great example of why he should be a bye because the point of that and what you're driving home is like it's not like Etn's been like massively efficient. I mean, he has eight touchdowns, like you just talked about how Poldily has too what if he had six, if he had eight, he would we would literally be thinking he was. I mean, it's the exact same.

00:58:43
Speaker 1: It's the exact same. If if Tony Pollard had eight touchdowns right now or seven touchdowns right now, we would be not even having this conversation. We wouldn't be talking about it whatsoever, even if he was super innofitent. I mean, there's so many running backs that are inefficient that no one cares about. I mean, I know that, Like there's been conversations about about like Joe Mixon for the last like eight years. It feels like at this point with him being like not that effective as a runner, but he's he's more of the exception in the rule. I mean, like we see seasons all the time where guys are just not nearly as effective, but if they can find the end zone and they can get a little bit lucky there and maybe they see inflated target chairs or something like, all of a sudden, no one cares about how good the actual player is. The only reason people care about how bad Tony Pollard has been is because he hasn't been able to find the end zone.

00:59:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think part of it as well is it's because he doesn't find the end zone and he doesn't look like he did last year in terms.

00:59:35
Speaker 1: Yeahs not totally.

00:59:36
Speaker 2: Explosiveness the efficients. Yeah, and so like even the mixing point, because I just wanted to hit on that real quick. People have made that comp and I do think he's playing a lot like I wrote this recently, he's playing a lot like twenty twenty two Joe Mixon. The difference is mixing has had that issue for years, Like you said it was, he's been an inefficient player for years. That might just be who he is. Tony Pollard has not been this guy and at the other point until these like eight games, So it's a little bit different. It goes back to, you know, sort of like the Christian Watson thing, where that's it's a little there's a slight different in the in the past profile. If we look take a little bit of a longer view on this player, a little bit of a difference. I mean, I don't think he's mixing. I mean I actually do think like most likely he has a couple of long touchdowns the rest of the way he has in every year of his career. It's weird that he hasn't done it so far. You were saying it's small sample. I completely agree. I think you know, Etn's had a couple of long touchdowns, like he's gonna have a couple like ETN has had. His profile is probably gonna look. I mean, you said you would obviously take et had more, which we kind of have to say because otherwise people are gonna be right. But I was, I was sitting here thinking like I'd probably ranked up pretty close, honestly, Like they're not.

01:00:39
Speaker 1: That different, right, Yeah, I mean, like the there's it's one of those things where you just kind of have to like keep things rolling the way they've been rolling, you know, with like a guy like ETN and stuff, and like they're clearly cool with feeding him, and I do think that they obviously need more balance, whereas Dallas is going in this other direction. And you know, pass ray does matter from the standpoint of like how teams score touchdowns, Like that's the that's one of the big reasons why would care about pass rate in Dallas's pass rate a little bit? But yeah, man, I mean, like it's not that dramatic of a difference between those two guys, and right now you could get Pollard plus probably another pretty elite player for Travis Etn like straight up right right, And so that's why I'm like, play the mart.

01:01:16
Speaker 2: Let me make trade. I would probably take the second elite player and go make that train.

01:01:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean right, And very rarely am I doing Am I doing two for ones like that? So we're we're we're pushing the time a little bit here. But I do have a couple questions I really want to ask you. We talked earlier about sort of scheme and how that impacts the way that you view fantasy football, and I think one of the things that we've seen this year, at least with two very obvious examples, is smaller running backs sort of being more viable and fantasy of Devon Chen crushing it. Hopefully he's back this weekend, and then Keith Mitchell plays tonight, and so we're recording this on Thursday. I say this every week, if you know, we don't have to give up a player, take on Keaton Mitchell here, because something's gonna happen tonight, and then people are gonna listen to the next day and people are gonna cau us morons and all this kind of stuff, and I don't want to deal with that, right, this is more of a high level discussion. Do you think that there is a real shift here with these smaller running backs being more viable or do you think that this is a small sample, we haven't seen enough of it, and more than likely the trend that we've seen historically, which is bigger running backs are generally better in fantasy, is what we're going to end up seeing.

01:02:22
Speaker 2: I think it's a little bit of both, right. I think some of the scheme stuff we talked about has actually shifted the math a little bit. We're talking about the cover two shells and more dbs on the field is a big part of it, right, There's always a nickel corner on the field than some of those things, so you have these lighter defenses. One of the big trends though, is like teams are not as efficient as they were last year running the ball. Suddenly this year the defenses seem to have gotten better on that side of it, where in twenty twenty two, you know, the explosive pass rate was down, but it was one of the most efficient rushing seasons of all time. The yards Percerrie was the most efficient of all time twenty twenty three. We've seen that fall back down a little bit, and I think, like, you know, I don't know the exes and o's well enough, but I know some of it has to do with the quality of interior defensive linemen and some of the things that they're able to do with with lighter fronts still being able to plug up some of these holes. Having said all of that, like there's still lighter defenses you're still going to see. I think the creative offenses are based around the outside zone running and so like Mike McDaniel, he wanted a chan four speed right, the ability to get him on the edge and explode the Keith Mitchell big plays we've seen so far, you know, big plays on the edge all out of the time. That's also been traditionally the case for lighter back you know, when Chris Johnson was hitting and Jamal Charles was hitting, that's what it looked like. And so there is still an element of like, you've got to be able to stand up to a lot of hits to play the running back position. I think coaches are going to stoff a bias towards weight at the goal line, which is really important for running back roles. I think lighter receivers is a is a like a stronger trend because it's based on the rule change rule changes of defensive holding an illegal contact and these guys are allowed to move free a lot more. And so then once you're allowed to move free as receivers, you don't need the physicality to break through hand fighting as much. And then the fact that you're actually faster the other element to the light side of it, right Like, cause two hundred and thirty pound receivers, there's not a whole lot of aj Browns out there, right, Like there's they can't also be super super fast. So now suddenly what wins is speed speed gills, right Like you can get tyreek on short motion and get them open on every single play. Like that's the most dominant thing in the game right now at receiver. That's harder at running back to think about from a scheme perspective, and because like at receiver, you're not taking as many like you still have to be able to take a lot of hits at running back, right So for me, I think there's a little bit of it. I think we can certainly buy into some of the running backs, but I don't think I'm like buying it as like a clear shift, oh you know, like the way I do think there's more signal at receiver.

01:04:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I would definitely agree with that. I also think two things. Number One, if if a running back is going to be smaller, which look, I've I did a study on this over the offseason. You guys can look at late round dot com. The newsletter archives. There's there's a newsletter I sent out that was a study about running back weight and see that the data is very clear that running backs. And I didn't just say, oh, every runn back under two hundred hundred pounds is bad. It's more so I bucketed players. You can see that the drop off really generally occurs around like two ten ish, And I say generally like, it's not like I faded Jamir Gibbs. I like Jamior Gibbs after he got drafted twelfth overall, and I still, you know, dug into that a little bit more so, so look at that to get like very concrete at least data you know, on the subject. But my stance honestly is that number one, you need elite speed to make up and compensate for, you know, the smaller weight, like like we see with both Keaton Mitchell and Devon a Chan. That's the first thing. The second thing is, I think everything you said is totally right with the way the defenses are playing right now and the kind of personnel that's on the field. But I think the other piece of this is that I think that smaller backs might have been fine throughout history. It's just that coaches haven't chosen to put them on the field, you know, like the end of the end of the day. It's really just that that bias of I think that we need this bruiser. If I have a smaller back, he has to be in more of a satellite back role. And then you look at a player like, you know, Austin Eckler's smaller ish, you know, Raheem Moster is a smaller ish back from a weight perspective, and realistically they're generally fine. I know that, you know, Moster has been able to stay healthy throughout his career, but you know, there, I do think that there is still a bias there with the way that these coaches are just generally using these guys. If we see a trend work more and more coaches. You know, I think that that forward thinking coaches, like a like a Mike McDaniel coaches. Yeah, yeah, Like they're the ones who and and look even like Harbaugh has at least uh, you know, embraced a lot of the progressive movements within football in the NFL.

01:06:52
Speaker 2: And so one of the names that comes to mind is is Kyroen Williams, who is lighter and isn't actually like an elite speed guy. It's that's a good point again, the yeah, that's a good one. But I think you might be onto something here where it might just be the coaches that are willing to try it, right, like he pays another young coach who was like, yeah, you like him.

01:07:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. My stance has never been that smaller backs are bad. My stance has been smaller backs are not great for fantasy football, which is a totally different thing because I think that small I actually aesthetically I prefer smaller running backs, like I I actually like play into that more in my own biases and the types of running backs that I enjoy watching, right Whereas uh, you know, like Dusbon is fun, He's awesome, right, Like I like, I like these kinds of backs. But if Dusbond were to see a big workload in Dallas's offense, I bet, I bet he wouldn't be that bad. I think that's just this bias that coaches have that you know, we can't use this guy because of X, Y and Z, because we think that you know, he's gonna get Maybe Ducebon is a terrible example, but you know, you get my point of like like this, these smaller guys can see a bigger work they did in college. Oftentimes a lot of these guys saw a lot of work in college. So I think that's it's.

01:08:00
Speaker 2: Certainly possible, but I think it is gray, gray area, and I do think it's worth, you know, as a counterpoint, like Kyron Williams got hurt, Devon ah Chan got hurt. True Mitchell missed a lot of the time this year after you know, a preseason injury, like these can they hold up to the elite size of NFL defenders, Like I don't know that we have. That's a small sample of a couple of names, but the ones that we're talking about of all miss time this year. So I mean there is there's that element.

01:08:24
Speaker 1: Too, and from a process standpoint, It's not like the research I did said fade Devon a Chan.

01:08:29
Speaker 2: He was.

01:08:30
Speaker 1: He's one of my highest roster players this year. Is a player to target in the draft. Guy, like this is you know, this is what we were talking about earlier, where we're looking at the probably but if you overlay things like scheme in situation, I would not have been on Devon a Chan in any other situation more than unless he went to like San Francisco and Christian McCaffrey wasn't there, right, So like like this is the That's the reason why I was in on a Chan. I think a Chan could work in other environments now that we've seen him in the NFL, but at least entering you know, the league and you know fantasy drafts and such. Obviously Miami was like the perfect spot form. But still, I mean, like you can still say, hey, running back weight matters, but yeah, I still like Devon a Chan. It's fine to say that. Yeah, right, all right, I got one more question I want to ask you. The season is not over yet, but what do you think that when the season's over, you're gonna look back. What's gonna be sort of the lesson that you learned based on the twenty twenty three season. I know that we try not to use one season to sort of overshadow and sort of change our processes completely. But is there something that you're gonna walk away from this year? Do you think? And obviously it's still week eleven, but is there something that you're gonna walk away from this season? And say, I think that I'm gonna change my approach a little bit and maybe implement this strategy in twenty twenty four.

01:09:46
Speaker 2: I don't know that it's a huge strategy thing, but the trend that I think is like the most glaring to me right now, and I did a little research on it for my ceiling Signals intro this week, and I do think it's going to be a big talking point for next time offseason is number one receivers. And it's particularly relevant for me because for a long time I've said, like not to think of it like number one and number two, because wide receivers are running out simultaneously. It's not like running back where there's you know, the playing time matters a lot. Like I've often said, like, think of it like two number ones. Jamar Jason t Higgins are two number ones. They both have these great, independently strong profiles. Take a longer view like we were talking about, and look at their prospect profiles coming up and their efficiency as young players. They're both great in their own right. It's great. But to the RPO stuff that we talked about a little bit this offseason and to what we've actually seen in the twenty twenty three data, I do think there's a lot to be learned about why teams there's actually data behind this. I did a big research for the for the introduction to steiling signals where I looked at the percentage of overall wide receiver and tight end scoring that has been accounted for by each team's top scoring players. So it's either wide receiver or tight end. You know, if the top scorer is Travis Kelce, then than is Travis Kelce over the last decade, twenty twenty three is a lot higher of a rate. I also, you know, hypothesized that maybe that's because over a full season, you know, some of these guys are getting hurt and stuff. So I only looked at the top twenty highest percentages, Like the teams that had the highest percentages of the most dominant number ones, and twenty twenty three was still the clear winner. And then I also only looked at the top ten. Twenty twenty three was still the clear winner. So each of these little like groupings, the idea was what percentage of the NFL is overall passing, You know, receiving points are going to the team's top, top option, and for the whole league for twenty twenty three, it's thirty three point five percent. Last year was twenty nine point eight. It was thirty the year prior twenty eight thirty point zero, twenty eight point three the year prior, So like high twenties and thirty percent, it's jumped like three and a half percentage points. The next highest year is way back in twenty fifteen, and I went back a whole decade because I I've we used to have like remember when Brandon Marshall had the forty percent cheaf for a whole season, used to have more number ones, Like this is something that people like you and I have been doing this for a long time. We knew that, like, yeah, the number one Tucker shares have fallen off over time as we've seen more three receiver sets and more spread offenses, and that's been the reason that we've explained it. But it's it's come back this year and even heavier than so that the second highest season in the last decade is twenty fifteen, the third highest is twenty fourteen, the two earliest seasons of the last decade, but those are still a full percentage point and two full percentage points lower than twenty twenty three. So it is a lot more concentrated. And we've seen it with the results in Fantasy at the top of drafts, where all of those early receivers are smashing, except the ones that got hurt, like Cup got benned up, but Jefferson went healthy. Chase obviously with you know, when Burrow's been healthier, he's been doing very very well. Tyreek is smashing. Aj Brown is smashing, Seeding Lamb is absolutely smashing. I'm in our Saint Brown is smashing the just go on and on. Garrett Wilson, despite losing Aaron Rodgers still doing so well. Yeah, that I think everybody's pretty confident that if Aaron Rodgers was there, he'd be probably smashing, right. I mean, DeVante Adams another situationally not great. Stefan Diggs smashing right like all of there's not a miss there. Like just a couple of years ago, we had a lot of misses in the first couple of rounds at receiver and it was Cooper Cup and Jamar chasing those guys that you know mid round receivers. He was going in the fourth, up in the fourth and chasing the fifth, and de Bo was in the eighth, and those guys were the stars that year at the receiver position. This year, you're not seeing the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh round receivers that are climbing the top of the receiver board. Is all of the guys we knew were elite number ones and they are dominating more than they ever have And I, you know, I, I don't know what. Like, there's a lot of research on first red targets. I've written a little bit about having some issues with the ways that those that data is compiled. But the whole concept of first red targets is interesting as it relates to the RPO stuff we were talking about. Because the offense is on RPOs are the line that they're run blocking. You get the ineligible downfield if the ball doesn't go to the first read so it has to go to the first read. I do think there's something to that. We're probably seeing more pos but I also think there's something too. You know, the cover two shelves and the ways the defense are doing and they're rolling into coverages. I've seen some interesting data that's shown that when when the defenses roll into single high, the number ones are dominating. And so it's against too high it's more split, but against single high, the offenses like counter punched to. The schematic thing is we're going to get the ball to our guy like he's in single coverage probably or something. I don't know all the x's and o's, but you know, Jamar Chase and Tyree Kill and all these guys are crushing single high looks, and so I need to learn more about it from people who actually know the x's and o's. But I do think going forward, something that I've done for a long time is say, you know, there's no number one on the Bengals. Jamar Chase and Tiggins are both number ones. I'm going to go away from that going forward, like that's that's not correct. The number ones dominate in certain situations and being the number one is really relevant I think to the way that the offenses are counter punching the too high and all that stuff. It's a a big trend in twenty twenty three that the fact that all these big name receivers are just absolutely smashing.

01:15:00
Speaker 1: That's awesome. That is awesome, awesome insight. All of this has been awesome, man. Thank you so much for hopping on and joining. Let everyone know where they can find you.

01:15:09
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me on. It's been an absolute blast chat with you. Stealing Signals is a substack you can find at bengretch dot substack dot com. It is a premium substack, but you can just join the free newsletter I send, Like my introductions to Stealing Signals every week are usually all in front of the paywall. A lot of just like higher level stuff if you enjoyed this kind of stuff, a lot of that's on the free side, like you don't even have to subscribe for that. And then stealing Bananas, the podcast ship chasing, the podcast stealing lines of betting project I do. Those are all the places to find me.

01:15:40
Speaker 1: Awesome man. I'm on Twitter at LATEROUNDQB. You can find all my work over on lateround dot com. Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel. Parts of this show, video wise will be on the YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash at lateroundf Otherwise, everyone, thank you for tuning in that moment to Prombert to the BA