813: Mailbag 10/6/23

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Speaker 1: This is the Lady Podcast with your host JJ Zachera Jake zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode eight hundred and thirteen of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting this week spicy mail Bag episode, I just want to remind you to check out the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon. The patreon is run by Yours Truly and I offer up rest of season rankings and tiers, weekly rankings and tiers, livestream q and as a great discord community, and more. You can check it all out on lateround dot com. Now let's get to these questions. The first question this week is from patreon. It's from Jacob. It says, what can we expect from CJ. Stroud and his past catchers rest of season? Thinking about your research done this offseason on rookie quarterbacks, their past catchers, and their production, it doesn't seem favorable that this pace is maintained. Does this make Nico Collins in Tank Dell possible sells for this season? So one of the things I brought up for years on this show is how rookie quarterbacks are almost always not a good thing for pass catchers and their ceiling. Since twenty eleven, among thirty seven relevant rookie quarterbacks, so quarterbacks who played the majority of their team snaps of the position, only three of them gave us a top twelve wide receiver in points per game. And really that's top fifteen wide receiver. Those quarterbacks were Christian Ponder, Justin Herbert, and Andrew Luck. You guys might remember me talking about this over the offseason. Keenan Allen was Justin Herbert's wide out. That season, Allen finished with a twenty seven percent target chair per game rate, and he caught one hundred passes. Andrew Luck had Reggie Wayne. Reggie Wayne that season had one hundred and ninety five targets on a thirty two percent target chair per game. Christian Ponder's wide receiver who got there was Percy Harvin. But Harvin's production his ceiling largely came from what he did on the ground. He ran the ball fifty one times that year for three hundred and forty two yards and two touchdowns. So, in ni sence, compared to history, what's happening with someone like Nico Collins. It's something that we really haven't seen before. If this maintains, because Nico's target share per game rate, it's good, but it's not elite. It's twenty two point seven percent. But as it stands today, he's the wide receiver seven in PPR points per game. From the perspective of will he maintain that high of a rank from here on out, I think the answer is probably not. According to PFF's expected Fantasy points model, only devon Ah, chan Raheem Mostert, Christian McCaffrey, and Brandon Ayuk have outperformed their points per game expectation at a higher rate than Nico Collins. I would anticipate all of those players, for one reason or another, to slow down their pace at some point this season. But I think this is also a classic case of assuming regression equals sell. Regression doesn't always I mean that you just sell players. The market often will bakeon that regression. I mean right now, I'm higher than the market when I'm looking at my rest of season rankings versus Fantasy Pros rest of season rankings, I'm higher when it comes to a Chan Ayuk and Nico Collins. That's despite being a nerd who focuses a lot of attention on regression as it relates to some of the ADP trends that I talked about prior to the season. I actually got a mailbag question about Nico over the summer, so I talked through that Collins wasn't a middle round wide receiver selection, so the whole rookie quarterback thing didn't really apply to him in terms of exceeding ADP expectation. It applies to players draft in the single digit rounds. Now, I wasn't shouting from the rooftops to draft Nico Collins. I'm not sitting here trying to get credit for nailing that pick. I said that he was a fine selection, and I was drafting him this year where the market had him. I'm just pointing out that all the stuff about wide receivers not performing all versus ADP expectation, it was for middle round wide receivers. Honestly, like a Michael Pittman type. Pittman is the real threat to that research compared to Nico Collins, because Collins didn't have that high of an ADP overall. Though, I think that you have to still react to what's happening in the current season instead of being anchored to a probability driven trend. We're now getting a lot of evidence that CJ. Stroud is the truth. And I also think that Houston's one of the best coach teams in the league right now. New evidence should adjust our priors. That's why I don't think that Collins in Dell are cells. Though I do think we're bound to see some week to week variants that we haven't seen just yet with Nico Collins. But even still, I think the market is sort of baking that in so right now in the moment in Redraft, I do not think that Nico Collins is a cell. This as questions from Fields of Hope on Patreon, it says, hey, JJ, love the Pods so far this season and all the extra perks of being a Patreon member. Thanks. I don't understand why Kyen Williams is not a top ten running back in your rest of season rankings. Still, he's a top five running back right now and he just had a monster week. Yet again, the system that he's in and having Sean McVeigh creates an atmosphere where he isn't facing stacked boxes as often is the addition of Cooper Cup gonna even help more with this. Teams are not focusing on stopping Kyron as much compared to Puka and now Cup coming in. It seems like, so I've got Kyrien Williams is my RB sixteen rest of season, which is actually two spots higher than Fantasy Pros expert consensus rankings, So I technically like Kyron Williams more than the market. My question back to something like this, though, who should Kien Williams be ahead of? I actually have him ahead of Ramandre Stephenson, who's very oddly ranked as RB eight over on Fantasy Pros. But are you gonna take Kyron Williams over someone like Alvin Kamara, Devon a Chan, DeAndre Swift, Aaron Jones? To me, all of those players are more appealing now. The usage for Kyron has been fantastic and the production is matched too. Since camp Makers left, La, Williams has averaged a ninety one percent running back rush are per game rate. His target share per game is sixteen point three percent. Those are seriously elite numbers, and his red zone usage, according to fantasylife dot Com that's been really good too, So what's not to like, well, I don't think that pace is gonna maintain on a lot of levels. Like I said, without camp makers in that lineup, Kyron Williams running back rush air is at ninety one percent since twenty eleven. The highest running back rush share per game rate that we've seen has come from Derreck Henry. It was in twenty twenty one, during that eight game season that he played, he saw eighty four percent of Tennessee's running back rushes. Now we can sit back and say, well, who else is going to take touches out of that backfield? And like I said on last week's Late Round Perspectives episode with Ray Garvin, I agree that backfield. I wish I liked another running back. I wish I liked Ronnie Rivers and Zack Evans as players, But that doesn't mean that a player like Rivers or player like Zack Evans eventually can't still see some work. And Williams has largely just been a volume play. He's been great in fantasy, but according to Next Gen Stats, of the thirty four running backs with thirty or more carries this season, Kien Williams is twenty eighth and rushing yards overexpected per carry, he's barely above average and success rate. He's twenty fifth in PFF's rushing grade. He's really ordinary in yards after contact per attempt. He's really not performing at that high of a level as a running back talent. He's just seeing a lot of volume and there's value to that. That's why I still have him ranked as a very solid RB two, and because I'm not that big of a believer in his backups, it's probably why I have him ranked ahead of consensus. I'm also concerned though, with how LA is scoring their touchdowns. Among all running backs, Kien Williams is currently eighteenth and rushing yards. The reason he's been so valuable in fantasy football across this really small sample is because of touchdowns. Among the top twenty running backs in fantasy, Kien Williams is fourth and percentage of fantasy points that came from touchdowns, David Montgomery is first, then it's Raheem Mostert, and then Devon a Chan. The difference between those players and Kien Williams is that Montgomery isn't being ranked as high as Kien Williams is, and David Montgomery also has contingent upside if Jamiir Gibbs gets hurt with the Miami running bax A chan is being ranked as high. Yes, but we're also talking about an offense with the most touchdowns in the league and a coaching staff with a really good history of using running backs in an efficient way. The Rams offense overall has been pretty average, and speaking of that Rams offense, how they've scored their touchdowns that matters here too. Across the league, only the Ravens and forty nine Ers have seen a higher percentage of their touchdowns come via the ground, and that makes sense. Those two teams ranking that high, that makes plenty of sense. The Ravens have Lamar Jackson, the forty nine Ers have Christian McCaffrey, and they're always in a positive game script. The Rams right now have seen the biggest difference in expected touchdown ratio, or how they should score their touchdowns based on pass rate versus actual touchdown ratio. They should throw for more touchdowns moving forward. So let's recap. Kyan Williams is probably not going to totally maintain this workload. If he does, it's gonna be historic. And I don't like betting on an outlier when the player is not special. And judging by his performance this year, and judging by everything we know about Kien Williams, he's a fine enough player, but he's not special. A Devon ah Chan type, he has a much greater likelihood of being special. And then on top of all that, there's some regression coming in how the Rams score their touchdowns. That's why even as a top five running back right now, it's hard to rank him that high. It's hard to rank him as even a top ten guy because you have to keep in mind that other players like Saquon Barkley or Dereck Henry or b John Robinson or Aaron Jones or Josh Jacobs, those guys ranked behind Kyron Williams in points per game. But it has been a really small sample. We can't just assume that those players, those really talented running backs, are gonna keep going down the path that they're going down right now. This last question is from Twitter. It's from at G Markert. It says it's looking to me like late round QB is back, and maybe it was premature to bail on this strategy when looking at the emergence of undrafted quarterbacks like Jordan loves c j Stroud, Josh Dobbs, and even a rich who went very later undrafted in many leagues thoughts. Yeah, guys, no one should have bailed on the strategy. I did an episode this offseason on the rise of the early round quarterback, and quite literally, on that show, I talked about how we were gonna see regression compared to twenty twenty two. That twenty twenty two was a whole lot like twenty eleven. Twenty eleven to twenty twelve. That was the year that I ended up writing the Late Round Quarterback Ebook because everyone started drafting quarterbacks way too early. It was the same deal this year. The difference is that there was a little bit more stickiness with early round quarterbacks here in twenty twenty three because of the rushing factor, and I think we're still seeing that. Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, they're all top six quarterbacks. Patrick Mahomes is the top ten to one. There is stickiness still with those high end quarterbacks. It's just that the QB two types thus far have closed the gap more. But that's exactly what I talked about on that episode, because last year it wasn't just that Jalen Hurts and Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes dominated, which they did, It was that they dominated and the rest of the position also sucked. So when you get a little bit of regression with Mahomes, Allen and Hurts, and you get the rest of the position not sucking as much, you get this you get a much closer quarterback market where players aren't dominating the way they did last year. You can go back and listen to that episode that I did earlier in the off season. It's episode seven hundred and seventy two. My take on getting early round quarterbacks this year was to do it if they either fell in drafts because everyone becomes a value at some point, or to do it in smaller formats, smaller leagues where your lineup needs to be super optimal. But I do think we're bound to see a player like Patrick Mahomes bounce back, as I talked about on the fifteen Transaction show. I think Alan and Hurtz still have a great opportunity to be a lead at the position. It's just that we have more options outside of that tier this year, making the late round quarterback strategy much more viable. No one should have bailed on the strategy. The math was right in front of us. It's just that this is not the same as it was in twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen, when the position literally didn't matter at all. It didn't matter when you drafted your quarterback. You could have easily just streamed the position back then. Right now, we're still not there. This asks questions from Patreon. It's from Will. It says drafted Cup and was fortunate enough to get Puka on waivers. How would you personally navigate this situation with Cup's return coming soon? So this was easily the top question of the week, so I've got to talk about it. Though I did talk about it after Week one when Puka had his big breakout, and my thoughts really haven't changed. Cooper Cup and Puka Nakua can coexist in this offense. They can both be good in fantasy football. Puka and Akua has run just thirty one percent of his routes from the slot this year. Like I said back after Week one, he's not just playing the Cooper Cup role. Cup in twenty twenty two had a fifty six percent slot rate. It was sixty six percent and twenty twenty one. Niakua hasn't been some slot wide out who's taken advantage of advantageous matchups. He's been a very legit wide receiver who's played all over the formation. Now, a lot of the questions that I got regarding Puka this week were about selling him because Cooper Cup's coming back, are hopefully coming back, and like, I get the idea around that, but everyone playing fantasy football knows that Cooper Cup could be coming back. We're not actually able to sell Pooka Nakua for Stefan Diggs, a player that he's outperformed thus far. We can't get Devonte Adams for Nakua. The idea of selling is fine in theory, because yeah, with Cooper Cup, if he is playing, Nikua's numbers are going to take someone of a hit. A healthy Cooper Cup is more than likely going to lead that team in target share. But Nakua, given how they've used him, he can still be in that twenty to twenty five percent target share range. If Cooper Cup is back, he can play that Robert Woods role. That's been a consistent thought even before the season started. And obviously there's a chance that Cooper Cup isn't nearly as healthy as we think. We have no idea what he's gonna look like if and when he returns. So if you have both, I think that both can be fine. And I don't think Nakua is a sell because the market is automatically thinking that he's doomed if Cooper Cup comes back. I don't think that's going to be the case. The last question this week is from Twitter's from at Defiant Vitreous. It says, why do NFL teams draft offensive players high in the first round and then play worst talent ahead of them? Case in point Gibbs sharbonet Kincaid, the coaching staff really loves Mont's three point eight yards per carry? Is Sharbonay's five point zero yards per carrey not enough to get on the field? Why even draft Dalton Kincaid at all? Well, First off, I think using yards per carry to justify talent is the wrong thing to do. It's one of the worst metrics for running backs, especially within a small sample size. It doesn't capture the type of defensive front that he's facing, and within a small sample like this, it's gonna be skewed by big runs. I wrote about Montgomery versus Gibbs in a late Round Fantasy football newsletter last week, and I reference that on Tuesday show. You can find that newsletter right up on Lateround dot com. It's in the newsletter archive, and make sure you're subscribed to that newsletter because it's absolutely free. But a lot of the backlash from last week's Packers Lions game surrounded this idea that Gibbs was better than Montgomery because his yards per carry rate was better. He had forty yards on eight carries for a yards per carry of five. Montgomery had a yards per carry of just three point eight. Guys, we've got to give this stuff more context. I talked about this very thing in that newsletter, so I'm just gonna read that section of the newsletter I wrote. You can look at yards per carry all you want, but that's a statistic that's skewed dramatically in small sample sizes. It can also be influenced by situation. Montgomery faced stacked boxes where there are eight or more defenders in the box on thirty one percent of his rushes last night. Only twenty two percent of his runs were against light boxes. Meanwhile, Gibbs, who wasn't seeing as much first down work. Saw a light box on five of his eight attempts. That's sixty two and a half percent. He didn't have a single rush against a stacked box. Even still, Montgomery had an identical success rate and he was able to break off bigger runs. Sure, his touch too was higher, and maybe Gibbs could have hit decent totals with more work, But why would Detroit fix something that's not broken. So I don't know how you just walk away from last week's game against the Packers and confidently say that Jamir Gibbs was the better running back in that game. David Montgomery was great. He was really strong when you give his numbers some context. And I'm not saying that coaches are always right. Sean Payton's usage of Marvin Mims this year has been egregiously stupid, egregiously bad. It makes absolutely zero sense to trot him out as little as they're trotting him out. But not all carries are equal at running back, and we're still working under very small sample sizes. Zach Sharbonay has seen twenty one carries this year. His per rush efficiency it might look better than Kenneth Walker's, but he's not seeing the same type of touches as Walker is. Dalton kin Kaid may not be lighting it up on the stat sheet, but we saw a turn from him in week four, and Buffalo's offense has morphed literally because of Kincaid. They went from being last in the NFL in their use of twelve personnel last year to now being second. And look at the Bills offense. They're currently second in total touchdowns. Josh Allen's EPA per dropback is point three to one this year. According to Number five's model, his success rate is fifty five percent. Last year, his EPA per dropback was thirty three percent worse. His success rate was four percentage points lower. You can't say that Dalton Kincaid has made zero impact. The entire offense has shifted. They're using two tight end sets a whole lot more, and in turn, Josh Allen has become more efficient. I think it's very easy to sit on our couches and criticize usage, but it's important to still be as objective as we can with our criticisms. And it's really important even the stuff that I just talked about, the stuff that favors my side of the argument, here. It's really important to recognize that we're talking about rookies right now, and we've only played four games. We gotta let things breathe a little bit. That's gonna do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribe 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 forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. You got a Late Round Perspectives episode later today. I hope you enjoy that. I also hope you enjoy your weekend. Take care,