765: Mailbag 5/19/23

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachera J J. Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zachariesen in this episode seven hundred and sixty five of the Late Round Fantasy Football Podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Hey, thanks for tuning in. We I'm gonna check out the Late Round Prospect Guide and the Late Round Draft Guide over on lateround dot com. The Prospect Guide will help you out with your rookie drafts and just getting to know this year's rookie class, whereas the Draft Guide is in pre order mode. I won't bore you with more information that you probably already know. You can just learn more about both of those guides over on lateround dot com. Now let's get to these mail by questions. The first question is from at the Real P. It says, what's your take on Christian Watson? He has the skill set to be elite? But what does them bringing in Jaden Reed mean? How are we feeling about this year and long term? Well, then bringing in Jayden Reid had a lot to do with need. They had a need for Reed, if you will. The Packers wide receiver depth chart before the draft was absolutely horrendous. I mean it's still loaded with uncertainty, but they at least have three promising young wide receivers. Now, Reed and Christian Watson are not the same type of receiver, my guess is that Reid ends up playing the slot a lot to start. It's an easier transition from college to the pros for a wide receiver. But also, Romeo Dobbs ran just twenty two percent of his routes from the slot last year. Christian Watson was at thirty one percent. Reid didn't play that much slot during his final two seasons at Michigan State, but he did during his first two seasons in college, so Reid can fit in well. Right away. From that perspective, the Packers really didn't have anything outside of Watson and Dobbs. Now to Christian Watson, he had some analytical marks last year that were really really good among all rookie wide receivers since twenty eleven. With fifty or more targets, Watson's yards per route run rate was seventh best. His targets per route run rate was in the top twenty, so you may be thinking that he's on his way to being elite. Players with those marks generally have had great NFL careers, and I think Watson will have a good career. The hesitation is that he's still not the best route runner in the world. My buddy Matt Harmon from reception perception, he charted Christian Watson's routes last year and Watson still comes out as a below average route runner. He was a pretty raw prospect entering the league with insane athleticism, and that athleticism showed up. We saw that last year. But the question is how consistent will he be because of his route running. You need that consistency to truly hit a ceiling in fantasy football. The year two model has Watson in a group of Johan Dotson, George Pickens, and trey Lon Burks, and that year two model is trying to predict how well he's going to do in year two and year three. The tier that he's in is a tier that often hits and does well, but it's not one that often gets to a really high ceiling. Let me just give you the numbers. Players in the ninety fifth to one hundred percent tile in the year two model have given us an eighteen plus PPR point per game season in either year two or year three at more than a fifty percent rate, which is crazy. That's a high end wide receiver one season and year two or year three. So these are the elite of the elite players, the Garrett Wilsons, the Chris a Laves. The next tier, which is where Christian Watson's at, that drops to about nine percent, which is still way better than any other tier, but it's not nearly as good as the elite tier, and their rate of getting sixteen plus PPR points goes from seventy percent to twenty three percent. The fact is, in fantasy football, we don't have a ton of elite wide receivers who are giving us bonkers production year in and year out. Justin Jefferson does not happen very often, and that's okay. Players can still be very valuable when they're capable of spiked weeks, like Christian Watson is, even if that player isn't able to do that week in and week out. So Watson overall is someone I see having a pretty good outlook moving forward. Even with this Jayden Reid pick, I think there's a chance that Reid ends up being the target hog and then offense in twenty twenty four. That's in his range of outcomes. We have to recognize that. But Watson is likely to be someone who's going to always be super efficient with his touches. I just don't know if he's going to see those touches consistently enough to be an elite asset in fantasy football. A very good one, yes, an elite one. I'm not so sure. This one is an email and it says Hi JJ, longtime listener, first time caller. Your point about cam Akers on Tuesday's podcast raised a question for me. You noted Aker's success towards the end of the season as a means for projecting him this season. What I think may have been missed is that he did that without Stafford and Cup. Will you have the same opportunity and volume with both of them back? Hopefully? But I'm always wary of end of season production, given that those circumstances are often different for losing teams. What do you think? Thanks for all the great info. So more than one person asked me about Acres this week, and it had to do with his exact same premise, So let's talk about it. I want to be clear that I'm not projecting cam Akers solely based off of what he did at the end of last year. The reason I brought up the end of last year's stuff is to just show people that Acres is capable of being relevant in fantasy football. Last season. Akers started to see an uptick and snapshare at week thirteen that coincides directly with when he started scoring fantasy points. When players are on the field more, they touched the ball more, and they score more fantasy points. From Week thirteen onward, Acres hit a seventy percent snapshare in five of six games, and during that timeframe, the Rams were a pretty run heavy team. They had a pass rate below fifty percent. We should not expect that to happen with Matthew Stafford under center and with Cooper cupback. Stafford played through Week nine last year, missed a game, and then he played week eleven. Let's just focus on weeks one through nine to keep this simple. During that timeframe, the Rams had almost a sixty three percent pass rate. They were a dramatically different team than what we saw down the stretch. But even still, even with that difference in pass rate, the team's running backs were seeing just three fewer rush attempts per game. The entire backfield. They went from about seventeen and a half to twenty and a half rushes with and without Stafford. And then you look at the team's running back target share per game and it did rise by about three percentage points without Stafford. Three percentage points isn't huge, but it's at least something. And the Rams basically since losing Todd Gurley, they haven't targeted their running backs that much through the air, but we're talking about a thirteen percent target share versus a ten percent one And since the team was more pass heavy with Stafford, the running backs actually averaged more targets per game than they did without him, despite the lower target share. Basically, it's hard for me to say that Stafford and Cup being back is a bad thing for cam Akers upgrades over what the team had before. There's more upside in that offense when they're not trotting out Baker Mayfield and when they have one of the best wide receivers in the game active. What acres protection comes down to is how you think they're going to split that backfield. It's not necessarily about Matthew Stafford and Cooper Cup. If you think Zach Evans is a threat then you probably won't be drafting cam Akers that much. But if you think that he showed something down the stretch, and if you think the Rams can build off of that, then you might want to consider cam Akers. And to me, he showed up at the end of last year, he performed well, and he was always a good prospect, a good player. The Rams don't have a lot of competition for him this year, and even if that offense takes on a slightly new form with Stafford back, that's not automatically a bad thing. The volume will be comparable if he's able to maintain his backfield share. The next question is from at Bulldozer John. It says, when you roster one of the best uncertain backfield eg. Khalil Herbert, what do you think about trading for all of the backs? And said backfield versus more running back diversity on your roster. It seems like at least one of them fits this criteria for me each offseason. So this is something that I've answered before in the podcast, but it's worth repeating. Do not go into your draft with the intent to capture an entire backfield, especially when that backfield is Chicago's. And this is not a best ball take for the record, but the idea of ambiguous backfields is that players ADPs drop in season long drafts due to them not having high projected volume. They're splitting a back to it with someone else, so their price drops. But oftentimes those are the types of running backs who end up emerging and becoming huge values in fantasy football. I have tons of episodes through the years on the topic. So people then come to me and say, well, JJ, then why not just draft every single running back from a particular backfield. That way you can get the one who emerges the huge value in fantasy football. And the very simple answer to that is not all these running backs end up emerging. These ambiguous backfields often stay ambiguous, so you can't really do this, And I say especially Chicago's backfield, because that means you're gonna draft three running backs from the same team just hoping that one emerges. And then you also have to hope that that one player is effective in fantasy football, that his environment is even good enough for him to be a difference maker. And I'm not sure Chicago even has that kind of environment, given what Justin Field is going to do with his legs players will emerge from these ambiguous backfields. They do every single year, But capturing the backfield is a bad idea in season long leagues. You're making the assumption that a player is going to emerge from the single backfield that you targeted. More often than not, the backfield stays ambiguous. So instead you should target players in these specific backfields who fit certain criteria that'll increase your chances of hitting on players who end up emerging. And there is data that can help you out with this. I cover it all in the draft guide. The nice question is from Tom and it says, Hey, JJ, do you prefer Jamison Williams or George Pickens. I'm curious as to what you think of Matt Harmon's skepticism to Pickens, So shout out Matt Harmon for a couple of nods on today's episode. But yeah, I've talked about both of these guys at length on this podcast during the offseason. With Jamison Williams, he was a better prospect in my model and in my rankings versus Pickens last year. But my hesitation with Williams right now isn't really the suspension or anything, but it's how rare it is for a wide receiver to miss his entire rookie season essentially and then becomes something really significant fantasy football. We really just don't see it. We really haven't seen it in recent memory. The only example since twenty eleven is like Mike Williams, So there's a lot of hesitation for me there. I think Williams is mostly a hold, and in some cases because some people are really high on him, he's a cell now with George Pickens. I called him out as a cell earlier this offseason, but after reformatting my year two model, he started to look a little bit better. But to reiterate some of the things that I said about Christian Watson, I'm not sure we're gonna see this elite ceiling from George Pickens. That's always been my argument. That part has been consistent. His yards per route run across the entirety of his rookie season was not good. His target share wasn't special either, and there are questions about his route running. But I do think not enough people were looking at the Steelers' offensive splits during the second half of the season versus the first. They were arguably the worst offense in football during the front half of last year, from weeks one to eight, the Steelers ran thirty first in scoring rate per drive. They were thirty second when looking at touchdowns per drive. Scoring rate per drive includes touchdowns and field goals, and they were dead last in yards per drive. They were basically the worst offense in football. After their by in Week nine, things changed from Week ten to eighteen, which was largely with Kenny Pickett. Pittsburgh was seventh in the NFL in scoring rate per drive and they were third in yards per drive. Only the Chiefs and the Lions were better yards per drive. Now, the Steelers, facing easier schedule, Kenny Pickett got more work. There's a lot of reasons to why this happened, but George Pickens was all so better. Everyone will cite his poor yards per route run rate during his rookie season across the entire year, and it wasn't great, but it jumped up dramatically during the second half of the season, and it jumped up completely in line with Deontay Johnson's jump, because stats like that are still team dependent in some way. But like I said, I think the route running stuff that Harmon's pointed out about Pickens is very real. It's a reason that I don't see the ceiling, similar to Christian Watson, where I don't know if those guys are really going to be elite fantasy assets. But both of those players can still be perfectly fine for your fantasy roster. They can be wide receiver twos. Once again, not everyone can be a superstar. The last question this week is from Chris from Patreon and says what goes into your decision making when ranking Javonte Williams coming off an ACL tear. I have Brandon Ayuk and I'm stacked at wide receiver. He is next to Williams and your super flex rankings, but I'm unsure of a one for one trade of Ayuk for Williams due to uncertainty. It feels like he has the potential to keep slipping down the rankings if he recovers, like say JK. Dobbins last year. So I get a lot of questions about Javonte Williams each week because there's so much uncertainty with his situation. He's got a new coaching staff, He's coming off this really rough injury. It's not an easy situation to analyze when you're looking at my rankings or any set of rankings, and not all of you are late round Fantasy football patrons. But if you look at rankings and see that players are right next to each other, it doesn't mean that you should make a deal. No matter what. You should check the market first, look at ADP. According to Keep Trade Cut, Javante is higher than Ayuk when looking at Dynasty League Football, and there may startup ADP Javonte's two spots ahead. So I'm pretty in line with the market here. I might be a little bit low on Williams actually, But what this means is that, yeah, you could hypothetically flip Brandon Ayuk for Javonte Williams. It would make make plenty of sense just based on the market. Now, the concern here is obviously William's health, as you're pointing out, that's why you're asking this question in the first place. I would argue that that's sort of baked into his ADP a little bit, otherwise he'd be ranked higher. But it's definitely a concern. But here's the thing. I actually think that JK. Dobbins is a reason to be bullish on Gavonte Williams. I know that sounds odd, but hear me out. Dobbins is currently the RB fifteen according to DLF startup ABP. He's going in the top fifty as the forty ninth overall player. One year ago. So last May, before we saw JK. Dobbins run on one leg for half the season, he was the RB fourteen. He was thirty first overall. Dobbins basically did nothing last year. He did very little, and even though his value dropped a little bit, he didn't disappear because people buy into talent and they're excited about what he can do a year removed from that injury. Now, I think the difference Betweenbbins and Williams from an uncertainty perspective is that Williams hasn't really proven it yet and he's got this new coaching staff. But he also doesn't have the same cost that Dobbins had last year at this time. So I do think that there's still a chance that Williams maintains okaynough value year over year, even if he doesn't get going until the second half of twenty twenty three. That was going to do it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed, to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast. Make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't fret to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening. Everyone greatly appreciate it. Enjoy your weekend and I will talk to you next week