779: Mailbag 7/14/23

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha j Jake zacher reson. What's up everyone. It's JJ zacher Esen in this episode seven and seventy nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to pick up the Late Round Draft Guide. It's got a ton of strategy related research in it. I talk about my fantasy football philosophy. I give out players to target and avoid and more. It's updated each week too, so you can update to your email inbox every week with up to date rankings and players to target and avoid. You can get it right now for twenty four to ninety nine by going to Lateround dot com. The first question this week is from at crass Cross on Twitter. It says, I'm surprised by Matthew Stafford and Gino Smith's early ranks. Is it likely they are both undervalued? Stafford is one year removed from a forty touchdown season and Gino was the QB five last year and now has more weapons. If given the option of either as a higher ceiling QB two, who would you choose? So I want to answer this in two parts. The first part is to say, yes, I do think you could consider both of these players undervalued. Gino especially is undervalued. He's got three receivers being drafted relatively early, which signals that that offense is going to be good this year. That's what I talked about on episode seven hundred and seventy five. Gino's actually one of the quarterbacks to target in my draft guide. Here's a little snippet from his blurb in that late Round draft guide. It says, over the last twelve seasons, there have been twenty one quarterbacks who were drafted after pick one hundred who had multiple wide receivers ranking the top thirty at the position by ADP. Of those twenty one, fifteen ended up exceeding ADP expectation. I think Smith is a very good bet to outperform expectation. I do think we have to be realistic about ceiling given he doesn't run like the other higher end quarterbacks, but he's not taking a zero in the rushing column either. And that brings me to Matthew Stafford. I think Stafford is also a good bet to exceed ADP expectation. But this is sort of part two of what I was talking about. That's not always enough. With Gino, you can at least see a path to having a crazy outlier season in the touchdown column given his weapons, and like I said, there is some rushing there. There is a rushing component with Gino Smith. He averaged two and a half points per game on the ground last year, and he was top ten in the league in quarterback rushing yards. And he had two and a half points per game with his legs while finding the end zone once on the ground. What if he scores three times four times with Stafford, You're not gonna get that. Stafford's been above two fantasy points per game via rushing just twice during his entire career. And you mentioned his forty touchdown season. That season actually shows us that his ceiling probably is not very high. He had arguably the best season of his career that year, and it was likely a better season than what he's gonna have this year in twenty twenty three. He threw forty one touchdowns in twenty twenty one, Despite that, he still finished eleventh in points per game. He didn't even score twenty points per game because he was averaging point two toy five points per contest via rushing that's not gonna cut it in today's fantasy football. So Gino to me has the better floor ceiling combo. I would much rather have Gino Smith than Matthew Stafford, and he gets drafted higher, he should get drafted higher. But there's at least a reason that Stafford goes as late as he does. There's a lot up in the air with him just in general number one, but there's no rushing component to his game at all. Can he exceed expectation? Of course I think that he will. I think he's a fine super flex pick. I don't think he's a bad best ball pick either. But is he can s going to get you QB one production in your standard season long leagues. I'm not going to count on that at all. This last question is the first question that I've gotten on this show from Threads, which, by the way, you can follow me on threads at late round QB. And this question is from Marvin. It says, if you can only use one metric to evaluate wide receivers, which one would you choose? So I asked Marvin who is referring to NFL players or prospects here? And he said NFL players we'll roll with that. My answer here is probably target share. Volume drives the game. Targets are earned, and target share is predictive. It's such a simple metric, but it's also very telling. Now. I think yards per route run is an interesting one to throw out here too, but without any context, yards per route run is not nearly as valuable. A guy could have a great yards per route run rate while running only ten routes. That's not valuable. It doesn't matter. He needs to be a high volume wide receiver while still having a good yards per route run rate. It really comes down to volume. You always want to analyze volume. Target chare is an influence by the ups and downs of how an offense operates one week to the next, because game script and game flow can dictate that. Now you can look at row targets too. That's just as helpful. But I'm sort of approaching this from the perspective of what I'd want to see one week to the next, as opposed to looking back on an entire season worth of data. The sas questions from at mister Underscore MAC fourteen, it says, hey, JJ loving the draft guide. Thanks. According to Fantasy pros ADP Josh Jacobs is going off the board as the RB eight, which is also where you have him ranked. Through his first four seasons, he has point per game finishes amongst running backs who have played a minimum of eight games of thirteenth, tenth, fifteenth, and fourth. I know you have him in a tier with Hall, Henry, and Stevenson, But am I crazy if I like all of them and Jamier Gibbs before Josh Jacobs. Now, look, I love Gibbs this year. He's one of my favorite targets in fantasy football. But I do think it's probably a little unfair to weigh Josh jacobs first three seasons the exact same way as last year. The Raiders had a brand new coaching staff last year, and what happened. Jacobs became a true bell cow back. He saw the workload that we've been waiting for. Had he done exactly what he did year one to year three, yeah he'd be way overrated right now. But things changed. The crazy thing with Jacobs right now is that his projection actually looks a lot better than his rank and where he goes by ADP. The reason I'm not higher on him in that RB eight range is just because I'm a little bit concerned about the workload from last year. Players usually don't see the backfield show that he saw in back to back seasons, and there's some injury risks there too. But I actually have been drafting Jacob's a good bit in Best Ball Draft because he sometimes slips to the third round. He often slips to the third round. So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily weigh those first three seasons the same way as last year. He was utilized in a totally different way in twenty twenty two, and that came when the team switched coaching staffs. That's a good sign. The subs questions from at GMN Pride for says, JJ absolutely loved the draft guide. It is incredibly thorough and I am so glad I bought it. Thank you so much. What is your opinion on Alexander Madison. He's very polarizing in the fantasy community this year. If you were to guarantee that Alexander Madison's workload this year would be what he saw without Dalvin Coke over the last handful of years, I'd be gobbling up Madison as much as possible right now, even as a dead zone back. He averaged a running back rush here of eighty two percent and a target share per game of thirteen percent. In games without Dalvin Cook over the last three years, he averaged over twenty PPERO points per game in those contests. But here's the downside. My buddy Rich Reebar of Sharp Football Analysis, he tweeted about this just a handful of days ago. He's at Lord Reeves on Twitter. Rich noted that in those six games without Dalvin Cook, Madison faced the Lions in three of them, so we had a very soft matchup. The fact of the matter is, if you look at Madison's advanced numbers as a runner, He's not impressive at all. He's a very ordinary running back, and his yards per route run since entering the league has been pretty average. Last year was really bad. So where I land on Madison This is really tough. This is a very tough evaluation. But where I land on him is that he does look like a pretty traditional dead zone back. I think it's fine to get exposure in Best Ball. I've gotten exposure to Madison in Best Ball myself. But when you're drafting players simply because of projected volume and not necessarily talent, that can get you into trouble. And that's my fear with Alexander Madison that he's mostly an average running back and there are other capable running backs on that roster, at least intriguing ones. Now I still have him as a lower end RB two, so I'm mostly at market with him, but given the way that I build my teams, he's not someone I'm aggressively targeting, especially in regular season long leaguess. The last question this week is an email says, how do you make sense of the Atlanta offense? Pitts, London, and Bijon are all being drafted as top fantasy options, but the Arthur Smith offense was incredibly frustrating for fantasy last year because it was run first, there was a split backfield, slow pace of play, et cetera. You highlight a few of these players in your draft guide, so I'm curious if you think there will be a shift in offensive philosophy or whether the talent will succeed in spite of it best Travis So sort of related to this. One of the things that annoys me with fantasy analysis is this idea that if you like one player in an offense, that means you have to not like another player in that offense. Let me just give you an example. I like Drake London this year. You may hear that and you might think, well, if he likes Drake London, then he must not like Kyle Pitts, because there's no way this Atlanta offense can support both the those players. But that's not how I think about fantasy football, and I hope that you guys don't think about fantasy football that way. This is a game of probability. Me saying that I like Drake London doesn't guarantee Drake London is going to be good. You gotta humble yourself a little bit. We're gonna be wrong all the time with this game. I recognize that my evaluation can be wrong, and that maybe he doesn't see the type of target here that I think he's gonna see this year. Maybe he's not as good of a player as I think. Now. I would rather draft Drake London at his ADP than Kyle Pitts at his But I still think that Kyle Pitts is a fine pick at his ADP, and I can think that all while understanding that both of them may not be huge, huge values this year. That may not come to fruition because based on what we saw from this offense last year, that might not be easy. People hear this and they think that I'm like cheating as an analyst, that I'm not taking enough of a stand by saying draft Drake London, fade Kyle Pitts. But there are so many directions that this can go in. They could both meet expectation at their ADPs. London could outperform by a lot while Pitts just meets expectation, or maybe Pitts goes nuts and London just meets expectation. I don't think this has to be a scenario where it's one or the other. Now, I wouldn't draft both of those guys in the same team, but if you have multiple teams, it's fine to draft both of these players. I just will likely have more Drake London than Kyle Pitts. And the reason for all this is because of the things that you're mentioning in this question. The Atlanta offense, in my opinion, is a little bit misunderstood. Yes, they're probably gonna be a pretty run heavy team. They drafted b Jean Robinson, They've got Desmond Ritter under center. They won't be airing it out even with Drake London and Kyle Pitts. But the entire market is assuming that they're going to be an extremely run heavy team. I don't think that's a lock. Not to the extreme side. When Marcus Mariota was quarterback last year, two things happened. The Falcons ran the ball a lot, and Marcus Mariota sucked. He was horrible. He ranked below Matt Ryan in PFF passing grade last year. He had a minus point zero seven expected points at it per drop back grade that was a bottom tiered number in the league. His completion percentage over expectation was below average, he was bottom ten. And sack rate, I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Marcus Mariota was very, very bad last year. He seems like a great guy, but he didn't perform very well in a football field. And I always hate saying negative things about players because those players are way better at their job than I am at mine. But I'm just trying to do my job here. So is it not kind of rational to want to run the ball when your quarterback is playing so poorly? Arthur Smith last year, we can curse his name all we want, but they were efficient on the ground. You could argue that Arthur Smith, given his quarterback situation, was actually pretty rational. Now I'm not saying that Desmond Ridder is necessarily going to be so much better, but there's at least some hope. He's not as mobile as Marcus Mariota and that can naturally lead to more pass attempts. And we saw the Falcons pass rate rise by a few percentage points in neutral game scripts last year when they made the switch to Ritter. And remember Ritter was a rookie quarterback. He wasn't even a rookie first round quarterback, so that pass rate could increase as he gets more experience. And that was during a time last year, by the way, where they didn't have Kyle Pitts. So again, I'm not predicting that they're going to be this pass heavy team all of a sudden. I'm just saying that I would be surprised if their pass rate was as low as it was last year. And that's the assumption that a lot of people are making. Not only that, but they're an RPO heavy team. They were first in the league last year and percentage of pass attempts that came from RPOs as I talked about on episode seven hundred and seventy seven, that can funnel target it's to specific players. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Drake London and Kyle Pitts own half of Atlanta's targets this year, and if you add Bjon Robinson and he's got another thirteen to fifteen percent targets, you're on top of that. I don't think that's an irrational way to think about this because those three players are by far the best three players in that offense so right now, overall, because of the way the market is viewing this offense, I'm buying it. That's 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 know for it's follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening, everyone. Remember to check out the Late Round Draft guide over on Lateround dot com for everything you need for your redraft leagues this year. Enjoy your weekend. I'll talk to you next week.