909: Mailbag 9/13/24

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Mal podcast with your host JJ Zacherretha, jj Zacher, what's up everyone. It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode nine nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. Before we get into the questions this week, I want to send another reminder about a new Underdog Fantasy offer. If you sign up on Underdog Fantasy with promo code Late Round and then you make a deposit, you'll get a deposit bonus and a link. Underdog will email you a link to my rest of season rankings. Underdog is the best and easiest place to play fantasy sports. There's a lot to play, there's a lot to do on their platform, so check it out Underdog Fantasy dot com and make sure you use promo code late Round when you sign up. The first mailbag question this week is from Patreon. It's from Jacob. It says, how do you go about buying the players that you make on your fifteen transactions episode? Meaning how do you come up with trades to get the players you mention as buys. I feel like it's necessary to talk about trading at least once on this show per year. This is that one time people go about trading and fantasy football the wrong way to think about players that they want to target instead of thinking about taking advantage of the teams in their league. Like, yeah, I do the Fifty Transactions episode. I give buy and sell recommendations because it's hopefully good information to have. Maybe you have one of those players on your team, and then you know not to panic if they're a by. Maybe you have one of those players who are sells and you can sell high. You can try to trade them away. But when it comes to targeting players, yes, I'll see what's going on with a team in my league who has a certain player who I call out as a buy, But I don't always make a trade offer with that team because the number one thing to focus on when making a trade in fantasy football is team needs. That's it. Like earlier this week, I said, go buy a Mari Cooper. Okay, great, your team needs wide receiver help. Go ahead, get a Mari Cooper. You go, and you look at the team that has a Mari Cooper and you realize that they need wide receiver help too. If you're unable to give that team what it needs, it's going to be difficult getting a deal done. It's going to be hard getting a Mari Cooper off of their team. What works better is when that team has a lot of good wide receivers and maybe they lack at running back, but maybe you have a ton of running backs, or maybe that team just needs some depth, so you can do a two for one deal, so you can create trades around that, around needs. So when I say that you need to take advantage of teams in your league, I mean you need to focus on their needs, and you also need to take advantage when they're vulnerable after week one. In my more active leagues, I'll look at the bottom of the league's standings and try to trade with those teams because people panic way too much after week one, and I know that those league managers they're way more vulnerable and they're ready to make a move versus a team that's in first place. I tweeted about this earlier in the week. But I also think that people need to stop the same position for same position trades like b Jean Robinson for Breeze Hall. Why why are we making that trade? The result of that trade is that there's going to be a clear loser one of those two running backs will win out, they'll outscore the other one, and maybe you're cool with that. That's fine. But when players are in the same tier like that, we know there's plenty of variance, and we know that fantasy football is about probabilities, not certainties. It's just silly to me to have so much conviction with one player or another and that example. Now, sometimes you will sometimes a deal like that, it can be done, but most of the time you're just swapping coin flips. To me, trades are about making both teams better when the deal is struck. Yes, be a loser when it's all said and done, but both teams can absolutely win when different positions are involved and when you're filling needs for both rosters. Look, I could go on and on and on about this topic because in my opinion, it's one of the most misunderstood topics in this game. People need to think more creatively about their deals. That could be giving away more players on your bench in order to improve your starting lineup, or it's actually just giving their trade partners what those teams need. There's a lot to trading that's just not discussed enough. This asks question is also from Patreon. It's from James. It says, hey, JJ, is it already time to give up on Blake Korum? In a ten man league, available backs include Alexander Madison, Julil McLoughlin, and Chuba Hubbard. So I'm using this as an opportunity to just talk about moving on from players. I got other questions, like one from Clark on Patreon this week where it said something along the lines of when do you move on from late round dart throws? There's no magical number to focus on here, Like I really wish I could sit back and say after week three, if there's no production, you can move on. That's, unfortunately, just not how this works. Every player circumstance is unique, and also every lineup is unique. I think that last part is really important to get across. James is asking a question here about Blake koram well. Based on the evidence that we have after week one, Korum currently looks like a handcuff. He didn't get any work. I think that could very easily change in the coming weeks. But the information we have right now, we'd probably lean more in the handcuff direction for Korum than the direction of he's got some value to be a flex play, but then there's the upside with a Kyron Williams injury. Most running backs in your bench sort of fit a category of purely being a handcuff like Braylan Allen on the Jets, are being more of a flex producer like Julia McLoughlin. Chances are McLoughlin's not going to be some massive, bell cow running back who's gonna finish as an RB one in any format. And that's coming from someone who touted McLoughlin all off season, but that was known when I was touting him. Justice Hill is another one, like, what are the odds that he's in every down back? Even if Derrick Henry goes down, he would definitely see a value bump, but he probably wouldn't be in RB one. Blake koram Zach Charbonay, those guys are not in the same camp. They're getting less work, or hypothetically they're getting less work, but they could see a ton of work if there are injuries to the guys listed ahead of them on the depth chart. What that means that you have to decide which running back arc type works best for your individual team. If you went zero RB and you're struggling for some early season points from the position, then you might lean towards Justice Hill over Blake Koram. But there are leagues where a player like Korum is definitely more attractive. And when it comes to just totally giving up on these players, you guys have to be more patient than feeling this way after one week. A lot of these guys are rookies. Remember what I always say, rookies tend to really overperform during the second half of the season. We do this every single year. You have to be patient with these younger players, even guys in more ambiguous backfields like a Chase Brown. I got a lot of Chase Brown questions this week. Yes, the usage was really disappointing, but we can't just assume that that usage is going to be the same way all season long, especially with how atrocious the Bengals offense looked. You have to be patient. Patience often wins Fantasy championships. Now, speaking of ambiguous backfields, I got this one from at just drew it on Twitter this week. That says only one week, but early on, I think I drafted the wrong backs and ambiguous backfields. I went after spears and Brown when the lead backs might be Pollard in Moss, how should I adjust? Should I hold both, try to trade for one of Pollard or Moss. So, yeah, this is gonna happen with ambiguous backfields. Sometimes you get the right guy, sometimes you get the wrong guy. I think we have to keep a couple of things in mind here, though. First we don't know for sure how these backfields are gonna actually shake out. Second part of the allure with ambiguous backfields is the fact that even the one B in that backfield, they can sometimes be usable. And then they also have the contingent upside if the one A in that backfield gets hurt. Nailing the player in one of these backfields is never going to be easy. Like we'll have our favorites from a cost perspective, but as I said all offseason, if you're playing in a decent number of leagues, even just like three or four of them, it's not smart to just pile all of your exposure to one side of that backfield. Like I like Taj Spears at cost more than Tony Pollard at cost, but I have plenty of Tony Pollard on my rosters because it could go either way and the research, it clearly shows that those are the backfields to target. Now. I know not everyone's playing in more than one or two leagues. In those cases, yeah, you might lose out on that pick. You might have picked the wrong running back. But at the very least, like I said, that one b player can still be useful. Taja Spears's usage in Week one was not atrocious. He's definitely their receiving back, and the Bengals offense, like I said, they could absolutely change things up because their performance was so bad. Now, the idea of trading for an entire backfield, please do not do that. Remember ambiguous backfields. These backs who were middle round picks with teammates who we are also drafted near them. They're the best kind of running backs to select in that range. But the most likely outcome for an ambiguous backfield is that that backfield is split up. So by capturing both players, all you're doing is giving yourself a headache every single week. Players will end up emerging, And right now, Pollard and Moss look like the early favorites without a doubt. But we're already hearing Brian Callahan talk about getting Taj Spears more involved in the Bengals offense. Like I said, for a third time, they weren't good in Week one. This isn't saying that I would prefer Chase over Moss or Spears over Pollard. But now is not the time to just say how weak one went down. That's how it's going to be all season long, especially when you consider that injuries are going to happen. This has questions from twitters from at Aaron Short one to one eight eight. With your optimism on Jamison Williams, Should I be at all concerned with aman Ross Saint Brown possibly regressing maybe more than anticipated? Is he a potential cell candidate? Okay, So on the ten Trends episode, I talked about buying into Jamison Williams because at this moment, every site that I know that does rest of season rankings, they're just too low on Jamison Williams. I don't want to fully reiterate what's already been said, so I'll just leave it at that. Let's say you're like me, and you say to yourself, Jamison Williams is undervalued. He's gonna maybe not maintain what he did in Week one, but he's gonna have a pretty significant role in this line's offense. Okay, if that happens, what would happen to the other players in that offense? Amen Ross, Saint Brown might take a slight hit, same with Sam Laporta. I say slight though, because number one Williams is not going to maintain his target chair that he saw in Week one, but number two Williams can capture a twenty percent target chair in this offense while Laporta and Saint Brown still eat. Just think of it this way. Last year, Detroit wide receivers saw fifty eight percent target shair in that offense. The year before that it was sixty two percent. Those are pretty normal rates. Last season we were seeing about a twenty percent target chair in Detroit's offense going to wide receivers not named Domen and Ross, Saint Brown, and Jamison Williams. Williams per game rate was about ten percent. And this is just quick math. So in order for Saint Brown and Laporta just kind of maintain their roles, Williams could see an uptick while the secondary players in the Lions they would get bumped down. And I think that's what's gonna happen. In Week one. Williams ran around on ninety four percent of Detroit's dropbacks. Then it was Khalif Raymond at seventy two percent. No other wide receiver aside from Amaras Saint Brown was above thirteen percent. The targets are now just looking to be distributed in a more funneled way. Just based off of Week one. Last year, Williams ran around on fifty six percent of Detroit's dropbacks. Again, it was ninety four percent in Week one. So to me, Amaras Saint Brown his target share year over year. It might drop by one or two percentage points, maybe three. It could have a small impact. Maybe I don't think that's a lock because, like I said, the distribution of targets in the Lions offense could just be more narrow. We also need to think about this in terms of range of outcomes and in terms of what the market might think. Like Jamison Williams season, it could still go south. We don't need to be locked into some take these absolutely arrived. We don't know yet. We're just looking at Week one, seeing his awesome peripherals, looking at him as a player, as a prospect, and we're saying, man, if it finally clicked for Jamison Williams, then he could be a massive value right now if the take was that he's absolutely arrived, that he's here, that we're gonna see Jamison Williams be the player we thought he might be coming out of Alabama. If that were the case, he'd be ranked more in wide receiver two range. There's still an outcome here where nothing changes year over year. So sometimes if the market is reacting too much of that Week one game, you can then go in the opposite direction and you could say, go get Amenros Saint Brown. I'm saying that Saint Brown is still fine. Laporta was a regression candidate anyway, But I like buying into Williams right now because based off of the stuff that I've seen, people aren't reacting enough to him in Week one. If it's wrong, so be it. You're only paying a wide receiver for price tag that's really not significant for a player who we all thought was once very good and who then showed up in Week one. That's why he's a wide receiver three in my rankings right now. The next question is from the Wasted Picks. It says I am concerned about the usage of Chris A. Lava. I don't see how a legitimate number one receiver gets two for fourteen in any game, regardless of game script, especially when the team puts up forty plus points. Either we are all wrong and a Lave is bad, or it will never happen with Allen as coach or car at quarterback. If the expectation is that Chris A Lave is like Justin Jefferson, or if that's your definition of a legit number one receiver, then yes, I agree, a Lave will almost definitely not make a Justin Jefferson like impact and fantasy football. But how many guys are truly going to make that impact. You can probably count them on one hand going to have down games statistically, And everyone keeps referencing this forty plus point thing. The Saints completed nineteen passes in that game against Carolina. Yes, Chris A Lave, he could have been more involved in that offense. I just said that he had a down game. But Derek Carr threw for two hundred yards. Fifty nine of those yards came on one single play. The defense just put them in awesome positions and they weren't really asked to do that much through the air. Game script does matter. It's at least part of the equation here. As I said on the ten Trends episode, I'm continuing to be more optimistic than most about this Saints offense because of their use of motion in Week one and their use of play action. A Lave was one of the best wideouts in football last year when put in motion, the Saints offense was just horrific. And I mean that schematically. The idea of either we are all wrong and a Lave is bad, that's insane to me. He's been in the league for two years now. He's finished as a top twenty five wide receiver in PPR points per game in both of those seasons, and an absolutely ridiculously bad offensive scheme. His yards per route run in those two seasons two point zero seven and two point four to two. Here's a list of all the wide receivers since twenty eleven who ran at least three hundred routes in year one and year two who had yards per route run rates in both seasons above two, and keep in mind, Alave has been well over that mark. Here's that list. Jamar Chase, Justin, Jefferson, AJ Brown, Juju Smith, Schuster, Michael Thomas Odell, Beckham, Mike Evans, Julio Jones, and AJ Green. That's like All Pro player after All Pro player, and then Juju Smith Schuster. But Juju's nothing like Chris Olave is a receiver. He's a totally different archtype. Chris Olave is a good player, he's a great player. He's a talented player. And while he's not part of the top three elite wide receivers in the game, I would be shocked if we're looking back on this season and I'm not talking about Week two or Week three and overreacting over bad stat lines early in the season or in small sample sizes. I would be shocked at the end of the year if Chris Olave had a bad season. The last question this week, it's not football related, but people ask for these questions sometimes in the show, so I'm gonna answer this one because I'm pretty passionate about it. It's from Michael on Patreon and it says, hey, JJ love the show. Thanks. Non fantasy question here. Your graphics in the off season and draft guides are awesome, even the podcast feed images and the website layout. Do you have someone that does graphic design for you or are you super talented at that too? Keep up the awesome work. So one of my sincere passions since I was like eleven years old, has been designed. I taught myself graphic design when I was in middle school. That then led to me learning some front end development. Like when I was in high school, people were doing their high school jobs. They were working at like McDonald's and stuff, and I was building websites for people, usually just small businesses where I'd get like five hundred bucks, but that was a lot of money when you were a junior in high school. When I graduated high school, I was like fifty to fifty on what I wanted to study. I almost went to the University of Cincinnati to study graphic design, but I decided to get my degree in marketing because I felt like if I wanted to be a designer, I could figure it out on my own. Anyway. All that's to say that design and branding has always been incredibly top of mind for me. I did internships in college where I did a lot of design work. Now fast forward out of school, when I graduated from Pitt and I went into the advertising world. I knew front end development. I knew graphic design, and I had a degree in marketing, so I was bringing all of those worlds together. Now. I didn't get a lot out of my two jobs out of school, which led me to writing the Late Round Quarterback Ebook and that turned into the career that I have now. But when I was at one of those two agencies that I worked for, I worked with someone who became a friend. It was a marketing agency and it was a really cool spot with a really awesome owner. I worked with great people. We had a ping pong table I brought in my sega. We would play NHL ninety four almost every single day together, and we would always talk about just our general dream jobs. He wanted to do his own thing. He wanted his own design shop. I wanted to be a fantasy football analyst. We were twenty three years old at the time. Fast forward thirteen years. I'm sitting here right now in front of a microphone, living my dream. And he's got an awesome branding studio that he now owns with his wife, and he's been my backbone with all things designed. I went like a decade without doing much at all with graphic and web design. I started all this fantasy football stuff. I worked at Number Fire and FanDuel. I wasn't asked to do that kind of work. But when I went out on my own a few years ago and I started Late Round fantasy football, part of the allure for me in doing that was that I'd get to do some of that creative work again. And I'm not good enough these days to create the designs that you see in the guides. EA. My buddy does that, but I love having the assets that he's created and being able to use them for smaller things like anything you see on the website. I created and coded that website. I do the YouTube thumbnails stuff like that, but it's all built from the design and branding foundation that my friend built for me. And shout out to Rich Ryan as well, who co hosted Becoming a Best Ball bro with me. He does all the video work that you see out there on social media platforms. But my buddy's branding studio it's called Edelmaid. Like I said, it's a smaller shop. He and his wife own it. If you need anything done, absolutely hit them up. They do amazing work, of course, but they're also amazing people. It's edelmad dot com. E D E l mad dot com. That's my story, though design matters a lot to me. I brought that up a bit last week when I talked to Jason Moore on Late Round Perspectives. I wish I had more time for it, but at least you have a little bit more background on why things look the way that they do, and you saying that about the guides and about the brand. It means more to me than you could even imagine, because, like I said, it's been a passion of mine for the majority of my life. That's it for today's show, though, thanks Olivy for listening. If you yet 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 to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. There's a Late Round Perspective's episode dropping later this morning. Go check that out. Otherwise, everyone, good luck in week two. I'll talk to you next week.