345: Buy Candidates

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Speaker 1: This is the Lab Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha, j J zacher Resa, what's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at fandel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode three hundred and forty five of the Late Round podcast and the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. Now that the Super bowls over, which congrats to all of you Chiefs fans out there, by the way, But now the Super Bowl is done more officially in the off season, and for all you Dynasty nerds out there, that means it's peak time to start making moves, and that means it's peak time for me to give you some advice on the moves that you should be making. On today's show, I'm gonna run through a handful of players that you should look to buy in dynasty leagues right now. Next week i'm gonna go over players to sell before doing that. Though, even though football is over, Number five is still doing analysis for the other major sports that are still playing. If you want to take a look at Number five Premium, which helps you with daily fantasy and sports betting, use per Code Champion and get your first month of any premium package for just nine to ninety nine. That's a cost savings of forty dollars. Just had to number five dot com slash premium for more details. I'm gonna kick things off at quarterback and I'll talk about someone who I think is sort of an obvious buy this offseason, and that's Baker Mayfield. After so much promise during his rookie year, Baker, with better weapons and a new coaching staff, he was pretty bad. In twenty nineteen. He was the QB twenty in total points, and that was even worse on a points per game basis. But since this is an episode about buying players, let me at least explain some of the reasons to not overstate what happened this past year with Baker Mayfield. First off, he faced a tough schedule, a really tough one. His schedule adjusted fantasy numbers aren't very strong, but according to number Fire's expected points model, he had the second toughest pass defense schedule in the league this year. There's also some regression that should hit Mayfield. Based on his passing yardage total, he should have had about two more touchdowns than he actually had this year. That's just me looking at how many yards it took for a quarterback to throw a touchdown over the last nine years or since twenty eleven. Yards correlate to touchdowns, so it's an easy way to spot regression. Baker's number wasn't on like Philip Rivers or Jared Goff's level, because they really really underperformed in the touchdown column, but it's at least something to grab hold of and say that he underperformed this year. Mathematically. You could even see that with his four point one percent touchdown rate, which is just the number of touchdowns divided by the number of attempts that a quarterback throws, that was below the league average from twenty nineteen, which was four point four percent. Maybe Baker's just an average quarterback. Even if that's the case, there's some positive regression coming. But he was also a really good prospect, one of the best statistically that we've seen, and we saw him look a lot better fantasy wise during his rookie year. So I'm buying the fact that regression will hit, that the schedule should get a little bit easier, and that maybe with a new coaching staff, Baker becomes a more efficient passer. He's certainly got the weapons to do it. A lower key buy that I like is someone that I mentioned on last week's Mailbag Show, and that's Matthew Stafford. Making fun of Matthew Stafford's age has kind of been a thing in Fantasy Circle since he entered the league. But it's nuts that Stafford's still only going to be thirty two years old next year. He should have at least a few more years in the league, even if it's not all in Detroit, but at least in twenty twenty, given his contract situation, he'll be in Detroit, and that's a good thing. I do think his injury has seemed to really overshadow what he accomplished this year, because Stafford was really really good. On a points per game basis, only Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson, and Dak Prescott was better than Matthew Stafford. Stafford's yards per attempt was eight point six, which was by far the highest number of his career. At least a portion of this can be related to a shift and offensive coordinator to Darryl Bevell. Like I said on the Mailback Show last week, Stafford threw a deep at the highest rate of his career in twenty nineteen, and he had his second highest completion percentage on those types of throws, and I don't think that the market has really caught up to this. According to Dynasty League Football's January startup average Draft position data, Stafford's listened at QB nineteen. I understand the ranking and why he's listed there, but you can make the argument and I basically just made it, but you can make the argument that he's got more short term upside than players ahead of him, like Kirk Cousins, Drew Brees, and Jimmy Garoppolo. I'm very much a fan of just going through the aged veterans at quarterback in Dynasty because you can generally get them for a really cheap price tag in single quarterback leagues, and that's the logic with Stafford. He has top ten upside very easily next season given what he did in twenty nineteen, and you can feel pretty good about the weapons that he has around him in the short term as well. He's a nice veteran to target. Buying running backs is generally a tough thing to do in Dynasty. There are only maybe like ten to twelve running backs, so you can feel confident we'll give you workhorse numbers for more than one season, and that might even be an optimistic view. So on this show each year, I rarely have a ton of running back picks, but one younger player who I think is slightly undervalued right now when looking at startup ADP is Devin Singletary. Entering last year's draft, I wasn't the biggest fan of Singletary given his size. We don't have a large sample of players at his size really succeeding at the NFL level, especially when you combine it with his four to sixty six speed. Fortunately, that speed isn't a death sentence, and the forty is really about hitting that four to seven threshold. But the combination of it all made Singletary a risky prospect despite good college production. The way I viewed Singletary changed a bit when he was drafted, given that draft capital is really important for running backs for fantasy purposes. And then I watched him play at the NFL level and he was really good. So my opinion flipped, which is what cannon should happen when you're presented with new information. Singletary was banged up during the early parts of the twenty nineteen season, but even on a points per game basis, he finishes a higher end RB three. He wasn't anything special from a fantasy standpoint. He was fine with some random spiked weeks, but a big part of Singletary's lack of fantasy production was touchdown related. He scored just twice despite having seven hundred and seventy five yards on the ground. Using the yards to touchdowns conversion since twenty eleven, running backs have typically scored well over five touchdowns with that type of yardage total. When you factor in his receiving, Singletary underperformed in the touchdown column. Based on his yards by over two. You might be saying, well, yeah, he didn't see goal line work and the Bills have Josh Allen to steal rushing touchdowns from him. This is true. Singletary only had two goal line rushes last year, and Josh Allen had nine rushing touchdowns after scoring eight the previous year. But this is also sort of the point. You can get Singletary at a mid RB two price right now when that's not even that far off from where he ranked during his rookie year, and that was on a team that didn't feature him as the goal line back, that saw rushing touchdowns go to their quarterback, and that ranked twenty fourth in the NFL, and total offensive touchdowns scored. All of those things can he easily bounced in Singletary's favor as early as next season. He could see more goal line work, Josh Allen's rushing touchdown number could regress, and the Bills, if they add more weapons, can be a lot more effective offensively. And all the while, you've got a running back who's going to be twenty three in November and who will almost definitely be the starter in Buffalo for the next three years. So to me, Singletary is someone who's probably properly priced because of the running back landscape in general, but of the younger players in that range, he's my favorite to target. Now. When you look at the running back position in Dynasty, it's really really top heavy. Like I said earlier, there's only like a dozen or so backs, so you really feel confident about and maybe twenty of them who are locked in for a nice workload next season and beyond maybe. So when you dig deep at the position, you're really just trying to tell yourself a story about a path to relevancy. If you look at Dynasty League Football dot COM's ADP data, any running back pass like RB thirty needs a story. He needs something to break in his favor for him to take off. Now, I was actually planning on talking about Damian Williams here, and I think Williams is still sort of a Galaxy Brain type of buy right now. But he did what he did in the playoffs, and his price is probably gonna change as a result. It wouldn't be a bad idea to at least see how easy it would be to get him this offseason, because there's still a chance that Williams ends up as the RB one in Kansas City next year. We said the same thing this year. I get it, but it did come to fruition eventually, so I don't think it's a bad idea to try to buy him. He's one of the lower tiered running backs that you could potentially target. But the one that I want to bring up today is Justice Hill. Now, admittedly this sort of goes against what I talked about on last week's show, since I preached that good fantasy assets we're generally productive as rookies and that's still true. You can't just easily find productive rookie running backs who are priced low. That's why you need a story, and the story with Justice Hill is that he's got an aging running back in front of him on the depth chart. He was a fairly productive running back at the college level. He plays in one of the most explosive of offenses in the league, and he has one of the best young quarterbacks in the league. And he's a freak athlete. The expectation for Hill probably shouldn't be that he's going to be a workhorse. You're not necessarily buying Hill to be a top ten running back. But Gus Edwards is a free agent right now. In twenty nineteen, Edwards handled thirty four percent of Baltimore's running back rushes and he saw one hundred and thirty three carries. There's a world where he doesn't get re signed and Baltimore features more of a one to two punch with Mark Ingram and Justice Hill, and despite limited playing time, Hill still had about a three and a half percent target share in that Baltimore offense. He's gonna need a much higher percentage there on a run heavy team to be relevant, but The point is that Edwards played more than double the number of snaps, but Hill had about double the number of targets, So the potential loss of Edwards could get Hill on the field more, which could increase both his attempt and target share. Basically, what I'm saying here is Justice Hill won't necessarily just play a Gus Edwards type role. In fact, he probably won't because they're not the same type of back. So the upside with Hill is a he's potentially an injury away from being the RB one in one of the best situations for a running back in fantasy football. The downside is that he never really gets going. The Ravens keep Gus Edwards around and we just see a little bit more volume for him in year two and moving forward. But you can get Hill for a pretty cheap price, and that makes the upside piece worthwhile. And for the record, there have been some backs who have succeeded after rookie seasons, like Justice Hill just had a good career. Art comp or a positive comp might be someone like Tevin Coleman, except Coleman was just a superior prospect. I find wide receiver analysis in Dynasty the most intriguing because when you hit on one of them, that player can give you production for a really long period of time. Now, having anchors at running back is important, and you're still gaining the same type of edge that you are in redraft if you have someone like Christian McCaffrey. But because there's a lot more depth at wide receiver, you can go in a lot of different directions with how you want to build the position. I've got four wide receiver buys for you today. In the first one, one is Michael Gallup. According to DLF's January eightyp data, Gallups listened at wide receiver twenty seven. He's behind Tyler Boyd and Adam Thielen when I would take Michael Gallup over both of those guys. Let me give you a little side by side comparison here. Player A a wide receiver. He played all sixteen games in twenty nineteen. On a per game basis, he averaged four point nine receptions, seventy four point three receiving yards, and half a touchdown per game. That was good for fifteen point four PPR points per game. Player A. That player will be twenty six years old in June. Player B is going to be twenty four next month, and in twenty nineteen, he averaged four point seven receptions per game, so point two receptions fewer than player A. He averaged seventy nine receiving yards per game, which was five more than player A, and he scored about point four touchdowns per game, which was really close to Player a's point five rate. While player A average fifteen point four PPR points per game, player B average fifteen point two. Based on this information alone, who would you rather have in your Dynasty roster? Nearly identical per game production, but one dude is two years younger, you'd likely go with player B. Player B is Michael Gallup. Player A is Amari Cooper. Michael Gallup, like I said, was the wide receiver twenty seven and January startup ADP. Amari Cooper was wide receiver ten. Yes, I get it context his need don't tilt too hard after hearing all of that. Cooper wasn't completely healthy all season long. So it's not the fairest comparison in the world, but I do think it speaks to how undervalued Michael Gallup is right now. He's in a much more pass friendly offense than he was during his rookie year, and he's got a really good young quarterback throwing him passes, and Amari Cooper might not even be a cowboy next year. That would make Michael Gallup the number one in this offense. I genuinely don't understand why someone would want Adam Thielen or Tyler Boyd over Michael Gallup. And you can make the same argument for a lot of guys ahead of him, like Tyler Lockett. I mean, think of it this way. Adam Thielen hit Michael Gallup's year two points per game mark just once in his career, same with Tyler Boyd. Lockett has never done it, and all of those guys are substantially older than Michael Gallup. So if the person with Gallup in your league is truly valuing him like a mid range or a high end wide receiver three, which is where his ADP is, I would be trying to get him. Curtis Samuel was sort of an obvious by candidate. A lot of people, including myself to a degree, we were into him entering the twenty nineteen season. It was gonna be his breakout year, but that didn't exactly happen. And I do think that quarterback play was a pretty big reason for it, because Samuel had strong peripherals. In twenty nineteen, he saw almost eighteen percent of Carolinas targets and he had an absurd number of air yards. According to airyards dot Com Curtis, Samuel was ninth in the NFL at wide receiver in air yards, but he ranked fifty first in receiving yards. That has positive regression written all over it. Things went poorly for Samuel on deep balls this year. We saw seventy nine wide receivers with fifty or more targets in twenty nineteen, and Samuel ranked eighteenth in percentage of targets scene that traveled fifteen or more air yards. About thirty five percent of his targets went fifteen or more yards through the air now among this same group. Among those seventy nine wide receivers, Samuel was second worst in catch rate on those throws, ahead of only DaShan Hamilton, and he was forty ninth in receiving yards on those throws. Some may say that this is a bad sign for Samuel because maybe he's just not very good, but targets are a talent statistic. If he's being targeted, that means he's probably open, and if you want to place blame on some of those numbers, wouldn't it make more sense to blame the backup quarterback as opposed to the guy who entered the league as a much better prospect. With everything changing in Carolina, I'm bullish on this offense in general, and Samuel's a cheap enough way at wide receiver thirty nine in startups to get a piece of it. It seems like people aren't giving Deontay Johnson enough love for what he did during his rookie season with arguably the worst quarterback situation in all of football. This year, Johnson put up six hundred and eighty receiving yards, five touchdowns, and he saw almost nineteen percent of Pittsburgh's targets. His target chair actually ranked sixteenth highest among all rookie wide receivers since twenty eleven, and to reiterate, targets are a skill statistic. Everything should get better for Pittsburgh moving forward. Not only could Johnson just develop as a player, but Pittsburgh is getting Ben Roethlisberger back. In the five years prior to twenty nineteen, the Steelers averaged forty four point six touchdowns per season. This past year, they scored twenty five times on offense, that tied the Jets for the lowest number in the league. Now, a lot of people may be on James Washington too, and I think that's fine. Washington's ADP is about five spots lower than Johnson's, but I prefer Johnson despite the fact that Washington was the superior prospect in my model. This is not a situation like a Dante Pettis and Deebo Samuel that I talked about a couple of weeks ago in the show. With Deebo, we didn't know what we were getting, and he was a better prospect coming out than Pettis was. With James Washington Deontay Johnson, we have an NFL sample for both players, and Deontay Johnson's rookie season with trash quarterback play was essentially as good as what we saw from James Washington during year two. I'm fine with buying both guys, but I do prefer Johnson by a decent margin. His season really seems to be undervalued. At his current wide receiver forty four price tag. You can usually buy non elite veteran wide receivers at a discount. Marvin Jones is wide receiver fifty one right now in startups, even though he was a top twenty wide receiver in points per game this past year. But Julian Edelman is another player who falls into that bucket. Edelman's coming off a one hundred reception season where he ranks as a top ten wide out in PPR scoring, but he's listened at wide receiver forty six because he's going to be thirty four years old in May. Is his age a problem? Yeah, it's a problem from the perspective that he could retire tomorrow, but he's past the traditional age when we see wide receiver production take a nose dive. Basically, it's pretty safe to say that Julian Edelman isn't your traditional wide receiver. Only Jerry Rice, Larry Fitzgerald, Reggie Wayne, and Derek Mason have had a one hundred reception season at thirty three years of age or older. Are sample size of a wide receiver being misproductive at this age is very small, So saying Julian Edelman is old that holds a lot less weight than saying something like t Y Hilton is getting older. The thing with Edelman that's kind of interesting right now too, is that Tom Brady's status is still kind of up in the air. If you're a believer like I am, that Brady's going to stay put in New England. But maybe the person in your league with Edelman is not a believer, then Edelman might be able to be bought at a discount. He's the perfect type of veteran to acquire, though he's already shown that he's an outlier, so age matters a little bit less. He's really really cheap production. The last player I want to talk about today is a tight end and it's Jace Sternberger. College production and how it translates matters a lot less at tight end than it does at wide receiver and running back, at least that's what I've found. But it's hard to ignore Sternberger's ninety second percentile dominator rating, which is courtesy ofplayerprofiler dot com. And then athleticism seems to matter a little bit more at tight end than the other positions, and he tested an above average athlete. But I'm really buying Jay Sternberger because of what the market is showing us right now. He's listened at tight end twenty four in that January startup data that's far behind players like Chris Herndon and Gerald Everett. It's kind of crazy when Sternberger is on a team that's really lacking pass catching options, they have good quarterback play, and it's a team where the starting tight end is thirty four years old and often looks like a dad runner. Jimmy Graham's not expected to be on the team next year. According to the Green Bay pres Gazette, Sternberger was a seventy fifth overall pick in twenty nineteen. Who do we think is going to step in and replace Jimmy Graham? You could honestly remove talent and remove any positive feelings that you have about Jase Sternberger, remove them, look solely at the opportunity in front of him. That opportunity alone shows a player who should be higher than a low end tight end two in fantasy football. You're really just playing the market here. Now, before I let you guys go, I want to say one thing. Your consideration set for players that you're buying should be large. There are lots and lots of players who are going to score fantasy points for you. These are just something I like most that I think are undervalued, but you should have an open mind and be cool with targeting a lot of different players. Selling players at the right time is always a more important exercise, and I'll be covering that next week. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. As you get subscribed to Late Round podcasts, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone. I'll be back in your ear later this week with the Mailbag Show.