476: Analyzing 2020's Biggest Hits

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Resa, j J zacher Reason. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacheres and the editor in chief at Fandle and at number fire dot com in this episode four hundred and seventy six of the Late Round podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. As always, thanks for tuning in. Last week, I walked through my biggest misses of the fantasy football season, not because I wanted sympathy, but because it's important to look back and see what was right and wrong about your process in a given year. The thing is, sometimes when you're wrong, your process was objectively fine, and sometimes when you were right, your process was subjectively wrong. Sometimes you just get lucky. That happened to me this year. Some of the things I got right I got right because of good process, but some of the things were also just pretty lucky. I'll talk through that today to close up the twenty twenty fantasy football season. Hopefully by listening, we'll all be able to refine our process together. Now, before we get into the things that went my way this year, did you know that sports Betting is live in Michigan to celebrate Fandal's giving you the chance to get an even bigger win when you bet the Lakers versus Pistons this Thursday. For every three hundred and thirteen fans who bet on the Pistons to cover Fandal will move the line one point in their favor. There's no limit to how good this line can get. Fandal won't stop until fans stop betting. Best of all, you can bet today and Fandal will cover your bet at whatever the line lands at by tip off. Must be twenty one years or older, and President in Michigan must wager and designated crowdfunding market max wager fifty dollars payout at minus one ten. Gambling problems called one hundred and two seven zero seven to one one seven for confidential help. One thing I'm really pleased about is how I handled the quarterback position this year. I was into the idea that the quarterback market had gotten really efficient because of the rushing ability of the top eight or so quarterbacks by ADP. I won't reread the conclusion of the article that I wrote on this before the season started. Instead, you can just go back and listen to episode four hundred and seventy two, where I talked about the importance of rushing at the quarterback position. That'll show the receipts. But I feel good about it because it obviously goes against what people would expect with the late round quarterback draft philosophy. It's never been a game of chicken. It's a game of value. Your goal with drafting a quarterback late isn't just to be the last team to draft a quarterback. It's just that historically you've been able to get really good value late, and it seemed clear entering the twenty twenty season that things were shifting. The traditional rushing quarterbacks all of a sudden had really high passing ceilings, and there weren't a ton of quarterbacks late who had that true dual thread ability. Two of the late round quarterbacks that I did like for the record Joe Burrow and Ryan Tannehill, and then I also liked throwing darts at Cam Newton when he signed in New England. Those weren't terrible picks, but there was a reason that Josh allen And was my highest rostered quarterback across my leagues this year. It's because it was looking clear from a projections and an outlook standpoint that it was going to be a tough year for late round quarterbacks. The market dictated it, the type of quarterbacks who were being drafted early dictated it. And even though some people started calling me middle round QB, I'm definitely happy with the way that the quarterback landscape was evaluated preseason. James Robinson is a good example of good process but also getting very lucky. I can generally tell what I got right by number one, looking at which players are on my own rosters, but number two listening to you guys. You guys will often thank me for targeting specific players and talking them up on this podcast, and one of those players this year was James Robinson. So let's talk about Robinson. There was an episode of this show that I did back in May where I talked him up as an underrated player because his numbers in college were absolutely nuts, regardless of the school that he went to, and he had the right build to be in every down back in the NFL. The problem was that at the time he was an undrafted player, buried behind Leonard Fournett on the depth chart. But when Fournette was let go, it was clearly time to pounce. This is where prospecting and knowing these players can be really, really beneficial. A lot of lower tiered players, a lot of undrafted guys, they won't become relevant, but by knowing their profiles and what they're all about, when the opportunity arises, you have a better idea of what you're getting versus your league mates. And knowing the type of prospect James Robinson was led me to recommending him early on when everyone was adding Divine a zigbo who after the four NET release was a good ad. I was reminding people to not forget about James Robinson. I said as much in the fifteen Transactions episode before Week one, saying that I actually preferred James Robinson and that wasn't against the grain take, and I'm proud of that take. Why wouldn't I be proud of that take? Robinson was probably the best value when you consider costs in all of fantasy football. But I'd be lying if I said that I expected this. No one expected this. No one expected James Robinson to do what he did. This is where playing probability can lead to big wins in fantasy football. It's not like I said, James Robinson is absolutely better than divine a zigbo I was just looking at the players in the situation, and I sided with Robinson, especially considering how people would bit on them on the waiver wire. If you have a process and you can win those smaller percentage bets more often than not, you set yourself up for better luck. You just can't expect that luck and fortune to turn into James Robinson's rookie season, Robinson had insane usage usage that no one projected no one. His eighty five percent running back rush share was the eleventh best since twenty eleven, and it was the best of any running back in the NFL this year. And the crazy part is he only played fourteen games. Had he played a full sixteen game season, he would have shattered the season high. James Robinson didn't just take the Leonard Fournette role. He took it on and then some, at least on the rushing side. That makes me nervous about him entering next season. It's going to be really hard for him to sustain that. But for twenty twenty, Robinson was an absolute monster. The process was right to get him, and it highlights the importance of not just knowing the really highly touted prospects, but there was some luck here too, a lot of luck. Sometimes that's the way that things go in fantasy football. Deontay Johnson was probably my favorite and most frequent mid round pick this year for a few reasons. People always ask me what statistics matter most when trying to project things each year, and the answer is always volume. You should care about how much volume a player sees because volume is a sign that player is good. It's not just a sign that he's gonna be good in fantasy football because volume drives the game. But things like targets, they're earned. You have to get open to see a target, and Deontay Johnson as a rookie, he was targeted a lot, at least from a target shair perspective. Among the twenty nineteen rookies, which was a strong class by the way, only DK Metcalf, Terry McLaurin, and AJ Brown had higher target shairs than Deontay Johnson. Among that class, Johnson, with terrible, terrible quarterback play, he led all of them in receptions. The Steelers had consistently been a pass heavy team with Ben Roethlisberger under center, so there was a decent chance entering twenty twenty. If you merged the idea that Johnson was highly targeted and he was going to be in this past friendly offense, there was a good chance that Johnson would see triple digit targets this year. He also fit the breakout wide receiver mold that I talked about in the preseason. He was a second year guy, so he was young, He was part of an ambiguous wide receiver group, and he wasn't coming from nowhere. Given what he did his rookie season, Deontay Johnson finished the year as the wide receiver twenty one in PPR points per game, but as we know, he left a lot of games early with injuries. Now, injuries happened, but the time of when those injuries happened for Deontay Johnson it wasn't exactly normal. So for what it's worth, if you remove those games, he was the wide receiver eleven in PPR points per game this year. I think the lesson with Johnson is to always look at volume first. He may not have been the best prospect analytically in the world, although I do think in hindsight there were some obvious things that the fantasy football world missed, But he may not have been this prospect that everyone wanted. He showed up his rookie year, though, and his situation called for him being drafted higher than he was always look at volume first. I mentioned this one on last week's show, But I like DK Metcalf and Tyler Lockett this year, and somehow didn't like Stefan Diggs, even though the logic for Metcalf and Lockett should have gotten me on digs. Again, I'm still tilting about that decision. But like I said on the show last week, I was interested in Lockett and Metcalf because obviously they're good, but they were being priced in a way that was reflective of the Seahawks offense being run heavy. If Seattle didn't indeed let Russ Cook or even an increase in their passing rate just a little bit, then the two wide outs were going to hit. It was a weird year for both of them, though. As the Seahawks offense changed and they became less effective, so did DK Metcalf and Tyler Lockett. But considering where they were drafted and where they finished, they were wins this season, more so Metcalf than Lockett. Given how Lockett scored points the point with bringing this up is to reiterate the things that I said last week. When good players have lower costs because of their environment, you're likely getting them at their floor. There's always a path to a ceiling than if that environment just makes small changes. I got Marquise Brown wrong this year. I thought he'd have a stronger season. But I want to highlight something about him that happened in my fifteen Transactions article and podcast that I think is a good learning now. I got a lot of things wrong and a lot of things right with fifteen Transactions this year. I just think this example is a good one to remember for your own process moving forward. It wasn't my best fit teen transactions called by any means. It was just a good learning and that's what the show is all about. Back in week eleven, I had Hollywood as a bye. At that point in time, he was coming off a game where he scored three Fantasy points. He was averaging nine point seven PPR points per game. A lot of people were calling Hollywood Brown a drop. But it's in those moments where you can really capitalize In fantasy football. It's a small sample sized game. A lot can look funky with small samples. Up until that point, Brown was still thirty fourth in the league in target share and fifteenth in deep ball targets. Those are both things that we desperately strive for with our Fantasy football wide receivers. It was pretty clear that he wasn't going to be that bad moving forward. The peripherals were not nine point seven points per game bad, So the recommendation was to swap a bench player for Hollywood Brown, and from that point forward he regressed sort of. He had a goose egg the following week, but after that zero point outing, Brown on a touchdown scoring tear, scoring sixteen points per game. I'm not saying I expected that he outperformed a bit down the stretch. I just think it's important to go after objectively solid players when they're basically free. There's no reason not to. I thought Brown was a great example of the small sample size dynamic to this game, along with pouncing on good players when things look terrible for them. The last thing I want to touch on today is the running back dead zone, the RB two group. One of the things I talked a ton about this offseason surrounded the idea of avoiding the traditional RB twos the guys drafted in late round three, into round four, and then into round five. Why because it's traditionally been a terrible place to get starting running backs in fantasy football. I did a study on where league winning players come from in fantasy for running backs, and there was logic and reason behind this. But for running backs, I looked at top ten players at the position, and the studies spanned twenty eleven through twenty nineteen. Across that time frame, four point four percent of league winning running backs came from round four. Four point four percent of them also came from round five, so eight point eight percent in total. Meanwhile, six point seven percent of them came from round six and seven. All the while, your rate of hitting on a league winning running back, so the number of league winning running backs taken by round divided by the total number of running backs taken from that round. Your rate of hitting on a league winning running back was better historically in round six than in round four. Even in round seven to eight, where it was eight to nine percent, it wasn't far off from what you've seen historically from round four, which was about ten percent, and then round five shot back up at seventeen percent. But the real takeaway was that the first two and a half rounds are really where league winning running backs come from if you're drafting them early. The rate on hitting on one was above at least thirty five percent in each of those rounds. So why is this? Why do these running backs have such bad hit rates? To me, the answers supply and demand only so many true workhorse running backs each year in fantasy football, and they get gobbled up fast. Then once the end of round three hits, and once round four hits, team's panic. They went wide receiver heavy, so they need to reach for a running back, but the back they're generally reaching for kind of sucks. He's got an obvious problem to his overall profile. We saw that area of the draft fall flat for the most part once again this year. Leonard Fournette, James Connor, Le'Veon Belle, David Johnson, Melvin Gordon Rare he mostered, Devin Singletary, Todd Gurley, Cam Akers, mark Ingram. The late third through the fourth round was pretty bad for running backs once again. Jonathan Taylor did hit, but he was one of the few that I openly liked entering the season because of his ceiling. Now I did like James Connor two as the other one, so don't think that I'm only talking wins here. David Montgomery was fringe in that area. But even if you want to count David Montgomery, the point is that that area of the draft, specifically the fourth round range, it's death for running backs. That proved to be the case once again this year. Now, there are plenty of things that I got right this year that I didn't talk about today, maybe something that helped you, like being high on Calvin Ridley or loving Antonio Gibson. I just wanted to highlight some hits that were different from one another to really give you, guys, true takeaways from a show like this. Hopefully everything I talked about today helped, If not in true Late Round podcast fashion, at least you didn't waste a ton of time. That's gonna do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found. And no I forgot to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week.