736: Analyzing 2022's Biggest Hits

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zafter Retha y Shake zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyesen in this episode seven and thirty six of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Last week, I talked through the things that I got wrong during the twenty twenty two season and whether or not bad process was involved when making the wrong decisions that I made. Today, I'm doing the opposite, which is looking at the things that I got right. I always do this episode after the episode and the things that I got wrong. That way people know that this exercise isn't just me trying to give myself a giant pat on the back. Last week was sort of a way to see if there are any glaring gaps in my process, but this week it's sort of a way to see if there are things that I should be enhancing more now before getting the things that I got right. 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One of the things I talked a lot about last offseason was how important investing in rookie wide receivers was. That not only do rookie wide receivers and redraft pan out at a really good rate, but those rates are even better when you focus on the second half of the season, aka the time of year that matters most In fantasy football because it often takes time for rookies to get going. Episode six hundred and forty seven covers that all in detail. So I was into rookie wide receivers this year, not only at the draft with Drake London and Chris Alave or Johan Dotson late, but also as the season went on. I was aggressive when talking about Garrett Wilson and getting Christian Watson off the waiver wire. Now, Drake London didn't have a fantastic fantasy season because that offense was so obnoxious, but he still technically outperformed his ADP expectation by about point three ppero points per game. Now, for anyone who wasn't around and didn't hear last week's episode, here's what I mean by ADP expectation. Every player is drafted at some position. On average, that draft position, that ADP has some sort of points per game expectation based on what's happened over the last ten years in the league. So at Drake London's ADP, which I pulled from my fantasy league, he would have been expected to score were ten point twenty five points per game. He ended up scoring a little over ten and a half points per game. But this is also about just the general strategy of going hard with rookie wide receivers. Not all of them are gonna work out, but you'll win out more often than not. Garrett Wilson exceeded ADP expectation by almost four points per game. A Lave was close behind at three and a half. Christian Watson was at three point three, Johan Dotson two point three, Wandel Robinson was even doing really well before he got hurt. The guys who didn't really pan out were Treylon Burks, Romeo Dobbs, Jamison Williams, and Sky Moore. Burks and Dobbs dealt with injury, Jamison Williams obviously dealt with injury two. Sky Moore just ended up being a bust here in year one. So either injuries happened or you knew what you were getting into with a guy like Jamison Williams. With his twenty twenty two data, since twenty eleven, eighty percent of rookie wide receivers with a top one hundred ADP who ended up playing eight or more games exceeded ADPI expectation. Remember these are the best of the best players. They're guys who get drafted in Round one of the actual NFL draft, and they're likely in decent situations entering their rookie season, but eighty freaking percent of them were better than ADP expectation, And when you expand that to the top one twenty, you get one of the best hit rates in terms of guys exceeding expectation by three or more points too. So I'm happy with the way that I approached rookie wide receivers this year and in season on the fifteen transaction shows. I'm glad that I was aggressive and spending up and getting those players once they showed any signs of a breakout. It's really important to be aggressive like that, and that's something I'll continue to do in the future. I'm pretty pleased with how I handled the Eagles passing attack this year. In the late Round Draft Guide, within the team level regression section, I wrote about how the Eagles were likely to throw more this year and have more passing touchdowns, and that was just based off of regression. It wasn't based off of the fact that they traded for aj Brown. They ended up being more pass heavy this year, and they ended up throwing more passing touchdowns. Surprisingly, though their ratio of touchdowns how they scored them didn't change dramatically year over year, So from a results standpoint, it was a huge win, but process wise it wasn't totally totally correct. But I was in on Jalen Hurts as a value, as I talked about on last week's show, and while he got injured in the Fantasy playoffs that sucked, he ended up being the best quarterback value by expected ADP this year. He outscored his average draft position by seven point eight points per game since twenty eleven. That was the seventh best among quarterbacks with eight or more games played, and it was the best among quarterbacks who were drafted in the top eight at their position. So he was drafted high. He had fairly high expectations and he far exceeded those expectations, and that all came down to his team regressing and the fact that he still had opportunity to get better as a passer, which he did all the while. I thought Dallas Goddard had a decent profile even for a middle round tight end, and that was thanks to his extreme efficiency. But more importantly, I like Davonte Smith. Over the summer, I talked about the possibility that Smith could just end up seeing more volume than AJ Brown in that offense. Now I didn't project that, but I talked about how that was in his range of outcomes. He was a ninety eight percentile year two model player. That's very, very good, and Smith had one of the most underrated seasons in fantasy football. His target year per game rate was just two percentage points lower than AJ Brown's, and he scored about fifteen PPR points per game. He actually ended up being the best value a wide receiver when factoring in ADP, and he joins a list of second year middle round wide receivers who have balled out. That was a subset of player that I talked about targeting this year, and while Elijah Moore did not pan out, Davonte Smith absolutely did. You want those second year wide receivers just like you want the rookie wide receivers. The market hasn't properly valued them. Historic that's something to continue on in future seasons. My favorite hit of the twenty twenty two season is probably Tony Pollard because he sort of embodies my process in the way that I see things. I openly talked about this in the preseason, but I was never a Tony Pollard guy in fantasy football until this year. I saw the talent, I knew it was there, but I was never rostering Pollard in redraft because the Cowboys usage of Pollard was never there and that was always reflected in the market. Ezekiel Elliott before this past season had always had first or second round average draft positions. He was a top ten draft pick in five of six seasons before this twenty twenty two season, but then in twenty twenty two he was a middle third round pick, right where the running back dead zone tends to begin. According to the data that I've worked with, the market generally knows what it's doing. It's not perfect, but you should always at least understand what the market is doing because historically, when you had a running back that was being draft around the dead zone and his RB two teammate was a middle round pick, that running backs teammate, the RB two hit at a very very high rate. Not only that, but according to my projections, Tony Pollard was being drafted at his projection. He went at RB thirty three this year according to my Fantasy league, that was essentially lower than what his projection was for me. And that's important because we knew that Tony Pollard's ceiling came in the form of an Ezekiel Elliott injury, which is exactly what happened. We saw Pollard take off and Pollard ended up being the second best value at running back this year versus ADP. He scored six point one more points per game than what he was expected to score. This is a big win for the process. You had a pass catching RB two who had a teammate RB one who was being drafted in the dead zone. The market was telling us that Tony Pollard was super talented and arguably more talented than his RB one teammate, because despite Zeke being projected for a big workload, Pollard was still a middle round pick, and because Zeke was being drafted in the dead zone, you knew that he wasn't some elite talent. So this all worked out big time. Let me read you the top quarterbacks who outperformed ADP most this year. I already mentioned Jalen Hurts, who ranks first. Then it's Patrick Mahomes, then Justin Fields, then Joe Burrow, then Josh Allen, and then Daniel Jones. That's the top six. That means the two best late round quarterbacks this season were Justin Fields and Daniel Jones, and they were two players I highlighted in the Late Round Draft Guy this summer. This is something I end up talking about every offseason. But quarterback rushing. You can say it's overblown or it doesn't matter, but I would argue strongly against that claim. The top five quarterbacks in fantasy points per game via the rush this season were Justin Fields, Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, and Daniel Jones. As you just heard, four of those five quarterbacks were also the best values in fantasy football this season at the position. Even Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow were top nine quarterbacks this year in points per game via rushing. When there's a late round quarterback with rushing upside, you have to target him. There's a lot about this in last year's Draft Guide, and there will be a lot of data about it in this year's guide. What also got me on Daniel Jones was team level regression. The Giants were bound to be better offensively this season for a ton of reasons, one of them being that teams who perform as poorly as the Giants have performed in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, they usually bounce back, and with the help of Brian Dable, they absolutely did. Now, Danny Dimes wasn't necessarily a league winning player, but Justin Fields kind of was. And I'm really glad that I was in on that breakout, at least the fantasy breakout. Now. I talked about this a little bit last week, but the running back dead zone was alive and well in twenty twenty two, despite what you see on social media. In last summer's Late Round Draft Guide, I published a chart that showed different points per game thresholds hit by different running backs by ADP. It broke things up by front half of round one, running backs, back half of round one, running backs, front half of round two, back half of round two, and so on, and it showed how frequently those types of running backs hit certain points per game thresholds. There was a distinct drop off and how well the running back ended up producing in the middle of round three and backs in round seven didn't really produce significantly different from a ceiling perspective than backs from that middle of round three through round six, aka the running back dead zone. Now, part of the dead zone idea is the fact that wide receivers also have better hit rates in that area of the draft. So not only are these running backs replaceable with slightly later round picks, but wide receivers are pretty good in there too. Now today, I'm strictly going to focus on how mediocre the running backs were in the running back dead zone this past year. I could do an entire episode if I focus on the wide receivers there too, And for the record, they weren't nearly as bad as people think, but we'll talk about that some other time. The running backs and the dead zone this year were not good. I've seen a lot of people talk about how the running backs and the dead zone this year were good. They weren't good. If we look at the middle of round three through round six and twelve team leagues, you had some hits like Josh Jacob Sure, Breise Hall ended up working out when he was healthy. Damian Pierce was good, but no other running back out of the twelve from that group exceeded ADP expectation by more than a point. That includes Travis Etn who fell below expectation by point two points per game because of the way he started his season. Now, Antonio Gibson was fine, but he wasn't league winning. JK. Dobbins didn't do anything significant. Clyde Edwards A Laire ended up being a bust. Ezekiel Elliott wasn't great. AJ Dillon was a huge bust. David Montgomery, Elijah Mitchell, and Camp Akers generally didn't work out either. I know Akers had his great playoff run, but that didn't make him a good draft selection. Now, the dead zone fluctuates depending on where you get your ADP. I totally understand that this is a general concept. The individual players who are part of the dead zone can change depending on the analysis. This is more about the idea than anything else. I've said this many many times in the past, but the dead zone exists because it's a place in the market where fantasy managers are desperate. They don't have a running back from the early rounds. They realize that the true bell cows are gone, they panic, and then they reach that drives up inferior running back prices. But the way to beat the dead zone, as episode six hundred and forty three talks about, is through youth and past catching upside. Arguably the four best picks from the dead zone this year where Josh Jacobs, Damian Pierce, Breise Hall, and Travis Etn. Three of those four players were playing in their first NFL season because remember Etn was hurt as a rookie, and for what it's worth, I understand that Damian Pierce went a lot later in some drafts. This is just the ADP that I'm working off of. If you recall, he really surged towards the end of draft season, but the market priced those rookies there not because of talent, it was because of ambiguity. That's something that you should really buy into in the future. Rookies in that area of the draft are totally fine. It's the veterans that you should be worried about. Now. Josh Jacobs ended up working like I said last week, but the odds were still against you in the dead zone this year. I wrote Saquon Barkley up as a player to target in the draft guide, and this one's pretty simple. When you can get a projected belcal in the second round of fantasy drafts who's only going that low because of past injury, go for it. I know his ADP spike towards the end of draft season, but Barkley was an obvious value this year to me and my research. At least, not only was the volume projectable, but like I talked about earlier, the Giants were huge regression candidates. They were almost definitely gonna be far better offensively just given natural regression. And unlike other early round running backs you might have been choosing from, you didn't have to do a whole lot of projecting. With Barkley. We'd seen the ceiling with him. He may not have hit that ceiling in a few years, but we at least knew that it was there. Combine that with a new coaching staff, he made a lot of sense as a selection. So I'll just keep this one simple. The lesson learned here is that when you have a talented player who has a workload that's projected to be insane and without much competition, and when that player has a proven track record aside from injury, you should probably draft that player, especially when things only improved with a situation. Now you might be wondering, but Jaj, couldn't you say the exact same thing about Naji Harris and you faded Harris this year. Correct, I absolutely did, but there was a pretty distinct difference between Saquon Barkley and Naji Harris entering the season. Harris had a rookie season that wasn't necessarily the most efficient in the world. Efficiency gets trumped by volume at the running back position, for sure, I'll be the first one to talk about that. But a huge worry that I had was that because Nase wasn't special at certain areas, the volume wouldn't automatically be there with changes in that Steeler's offense. Just as an example in the draft guide, and it says to have this guide as reference from my old takes. But in the draft guide, I talked about how Nase Harris had seen a ton of looks through the air behind the line of scrimmage as a rookie, and my worry was that without Ben Roethlisberger there, with a more mobile quarterback, whether that be Kenny Pickett or Mitch Trubisky, we might not see that again. And we didn't. Harris only had seventeen targets behind the line of scrimmage this year, according to Pro Football Focus. He was first in the NFL last year with forty three, so he went from first to twenty fourth at running back. Unsurprisingly, that led to a target share per game dip of about five percent. Now, on top of that, an argument I made against Nause was that running backs who had the volume that Naj had during his rookie season, they almost always see a decline in volume the next year. Harris not only saw significant dip in targets, but he saw drop and running back rush share of about thirteen percentage points per game. Now, that was partially due to the emergence of Jalen Warren, but it's also due to the Steelers just not running him into the ground the same way. He still had two hundred and seventy two carries, but that was down from his three hundred and seven as a rookie. Compared to Saquon, too, Harris was going a lot earlier, and to me, Harris was a floor play. He was likely going to get you something, which he did, but the ceiling didn't seem as evident as it was with someone like Saquon Barkley. The two had differing ADPs, but my rankings actually had Barkley ahead of Harris. And then, since I'm talking about the Steelers. Let's talk about Deontay Johnson. I love Johnson the player still, but I was not drafting him at his ADP this year. My logic for that was that people didn't seem to realize just how pass heavy the Steelers had been under Ben Roethlisberger before he retired. They were second in pass rate in both twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. With a quarterback change, they were bound to be more run heavy, and they were. They had a fifty three percent pass rate that was down from a sixty two percent pass rate the previous season. Johnson himself actually had a really similar target share per game rate year over year. It was almost identical. The issue is that it was on a team with fewer pass attempts, so his target total dropped by two targets per game year over year. I've also done research showing that pass catchers don't perform as well with rookie quarterbacks, and we saw that come to fruition this year too. I definitely didn't project zero touchdowns from Johnson. That's a number that's not sustainable, but it did project worse efficiency because of the quarterback situation. What the Johnson and Harris example, show is really just understanding how a quarterback change can impact skill position players, especially when the quarterback change is going from veteran to rookie. There was a lot of chatter out there in the preseason about how anything is better than Ben Roethlisberger, and while that might be true on a per attempt basis, like I said, volume Trump's efficiency, the volume numbers were what I was worried about with the quarterback change that ended up being right. So I'm happy with the way that I p the Steelers offense last season, and I think that that approach can really help people moving forward when these situations arise. Now, just like last week's episode, clearly there are more things that went my way than just this simple list. Like Deebo Samuel, he was a fade for me this year that ended up being a good call. I did a pretty good job at pinpointing late round tight end breakouts. I called a lot of the rookie running backs undervalued, and they came through. But like the things that I got wrong episode, hopefully you were able to hear some things on today's show and have a few aha moments, and now you can take those things and apply them to your drafts next year. That's it for today's show, though thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got 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 to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Remember to check out lateround dot com and purchase this year's Prospect Guide. It's available for pre order right now for eleven ninety nine. It'll launch on March thirteenth, and that's when it becomes fourteen ninety nine, so head to lateround dot com check it out. Otherwise, I'll talk to you later in the week with the weekly Mailbag show.