734: Analyzing 2022's Biggest Misses

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Speaker 1: This is the Lady Podcast with your host JJ zacheras J J. Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zach er Eeson in this episode seven hundred and thirty four of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. I've missed you, guys. It feels good to be back now. During the regular season, I get questions all the time from people that are along the lines of are you ready to admit that you were wrong about player X? To me, taking l's in the middle of the season doesn't do any good. And the same goes for any wins that I might have. Who's that helping? At the end of the day, I'm trying to get some content out each week to help you guys win. If it's week eleven and I sit and dwell on things that I got right and wrong during the summer, it's kind of meaningless, right, aren't you more concerned about who to pick up off the waiver wire? So I do this series of episodes. Each year. I do an episode that recaps the things that I predicted incorrectly across the previous season, and I follow that up with a show on the things that I got right. Being a fantasy football analyst means you're going to get a lot of things wrong, but there's no reason to just ignore that. You don't get better at anything by ignoring mistakes. And sometimes when you dig into the mistakes that you made, you realize that they weren't mistakes at all. Sometimes your process was just fine. So today, as I do each year, I'll be talking through some of the big things that I got wrong this season. I'll talk about what those things were and whether or not there was bad process involved in making the decisions that I made, because in the end, process is what matters most. 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Now that's fandle dot Com Slash League, Slash NBA Dash, Maine Dash, Marquee Dash one. When you think about me in this podcast and Big Misses in twenty twenty two, you probably would start with Elijah Moore. Everything that I work with data wise pointed to Elijah Moore being a great player entering the twenty twenty two season. He had a great Fantasy points per game rate as a rookie. He had a good yards per route run rate. He was above the ninety fifth percentile on my prospect model entering the NFL, which is a really good score. Everything was there. The Jets drafted Garrett Wilson, but I don't think Garrett Wilson can really be blamed for Elijah moore struggles. There's more to this. During Moore's rookie year, he had a one point seventy five yards per route run rate. That was about a sixty fifth percentile yards per route run among all rookie wide receivers since twenty eleven with fifty or more targets, Which, sure that doesn't sound amazing, but you have to keep in mind that the sample there is filled with some really good rookies. We're only looking at rookie wide receivers with fifty or more targets, meaning they were likely pretty good to begin with. You're not seeing that volume if you're horrible, and Moore was in the sixty fifth percent island yards per route run among that group. Now here's something that's pretty crazy. Of our sample of rookie wide receivers with fifty or more targets, about seventy three percent of them had fifty or more targets during their second season. The reason that number isn't higher is because the twenty twenty two class hasn't played their second year yet. So we have this new sample of wide receivers. They're players since twenty who saw fifty or more targets as a rookie and then fifty or more targets as a second year player. Now, keep in mind, Elijah Moore had a yards per route run rate of one point seventy five as a rookie. As a second year player, that number dropped a point nine, so we essentially saw it get cut in half. In our sample of rookie wide receivers who had fifty targets in each of their first two seasons in the league, Moore's drop in yards per route run was by far the highest. We're talking over eighty wide receivers in this sample, and Elijah Moore effectively saw the biggest efficiency drop from one season to the next, and it really wasn't close. His drop in yards per route run was nearly thirty three percent worse than the player who was second worse, which was Doug Baldwin. Baldwin's really the only player close to Moore who ended up having a good NFL career too, next to Baldwin or players like Jalen Reger, Chris Gibvens, and Keelan Cole. So what does this all mean? Well, I'll say this first, if Elijah Moore didn't look good in my prospect model and then follow it up with a really effect rookie season. I wouldn't have been as high on him, but I was high in all the middle round second year wide receivers. That's something I talked about a lot last offseason. Those types of wide receivers tend to break out at an extremely high rate, and they did this year. Aman Ross Saint Brown and Devonte Smith were studs. Rashad Bateman got hurt, and Elijah Moore he wasn't a stud. Process wise, I'm not sure I would do anything dramatically different. This is a probability driven game, and thinking this way allowed me to land Devonte Smith and aman Ross Saint Brown in a lot of leagues. And you might remember me talking about those players being by candidates after last year's draft because their prices fell with their teams drafting or trading for good wide receivers. People didn't want Devonte Smith because they had aj Brown. People didn't want aman Ross Saint Brown because they had Jamison Williams. Elijah Moore just happened to go in the opposite direction. Maybe some of it was his off the field stuff and his frustration with the team, and maybe some of it was the fact that Garrett Wilson is just a superior player. But the bottom line is that this was a miss. Sometimes players aren't as good as we originally think, but that doesn't mean the process was wrong. I'll continue to throw darts at that kind of profile all day long because the reward, as we saw with Saint Brown and DeVante Smith, can be huge. I had sort of a love hate relationship with Josh Jacobs this year. I definitely wasn't drafting him much as his redraft ADP, which according to my Fantasy League was forty eighth overall, so he was squarely a dead zone running back. Now Best Ball was a little bit different of a story because his cost kept falling, But in the fourth round I was out and Jacobs ended up being the absolute best value at running back this year. Now I look at expected fantasy points based on average draft position, which is essentially telling us how many fantasy points we'd expect a player to score at a certain ADP. Jacobs at his ADP would have been expected to score about eleven point six points per game. That's based on data over the last eleven years, but he scored seven point seven more points than that, and that difference ended up being the most at running back this year, So good job, JJ, good effort. Now, the reason I have some love for this was because back on a ten Trends episode earlier in the season, I had noted that Jacobs was starting to see a bell cow workload, that the receiving work started coming his way, and that he was a bye as a result. So hopefully people were able to take advantage of a by low moment in season. I feel good about how I reacted to Josh Jacobs out of season not so much. I bought into what Beat writers were saying out of Vegas that this was going to be a committee backfield that, combined with him being in the dead zone, made him a fade. We also had a pretty decent sample of him not being quite the bell cow back that we wanted him to be when he was drafted. And while I think that kind of reporting can be really helpful, I didn't put enough emphasis on talent within this situation. I like Zamir White as a prospect, but his profile was not totally complete. There were plenty of question marks, and the other guys in that backfield weren't special. Whereas we knew that Jacobs had the capitol and the talent to be this guy. That was the mistake and it's something I'm going to try to avoid moving forward. And for the record, I've seen a lot of people say the dead Zone wasn't a thing this year because Josh Jacobs was really good and Travis Etn was good, and Breece Hall would have been a smash too. And while those guys did do well, Etn still technically played slightly below expectation this year because of how he started the season. Etn and Breece Hall were also two players that I picked out in my Beating the running Back dead Zone episode last summer. The running Back dead Zone is not full proof. Not every single running back in the dead Zone does poorly, but according to the ADP data that I work with, you still had players like JK. Dobbins, Ezekiel Elliott, AJ Dillon, Elijah Mitchell, cam Akers, and David Montgomery in the dead Zone. None of those players exceeded ADP expectation. The dead Zone is a probability driven thing, and it was still alive and well in twenty twenty two. Josh Jacobs he beat it, and I was wrong to think that he wouldn't It's wild to even think about this, but I thought that Chase Edmonds was a good value entering the season, and after his Week one performance, I even doubled down on it. I said that he was a by candidate because in Week one he was seeing the usage that I thought he was gonna see this year. He saw two thirds of the team's running back rushes in a thirteen percent target share, and then things just sort of crashed. The very next week, those numbers were more than cut in half, and the rest is history. Now, I never thought Chase Edmonds was a bad player. He had plenty of redeeming qualities as a receiving back. I think the issue with Edmonds here was being quick to double down on a small sample. Sometimes that works out, but I try to do that when we're talking about truly great talents like you heard me do that a lot this year with rookie wide receivers, in particular, when it comes to a veteran running back who never truly capitalized on opportunity in the past, I should have been more careful. I still think Michael Pittman is a really good wide receiver, and his fantasy season really came down to situation. In my opinion, Pittman was someone that I was high on as a breakout or someone who had a chance to be elevated to elite status. That breakout didn't happen, but not everything was horrible for him. He saw one hundred and forty one targets in a target share per game rate of twenty six percent. That's not only really high, but it was better than what he saw in twenty twenty one. But the way that offense operated was absolutely pathetic. There was a chance that Matt Ryan would elevate things, and all he did was turn Michael Pittman into a high floor, low ceiling option. Pittman's average depth of target this year dropped by two and a half yards year over year. In twenty twenty one, almost twenty one percent of his targets came fifteen or more yards down the field. In twenty twenty two, that number was under eight percent. It's going to be nearly impossible to be fantasy relevant with that low of an intermediate and deep ball rate. And what's interesting thing is that Pittman actually played relatively well for this situation. Since twenty eleven, we've seen thirty six wide receivers hit fifty targets and have a deep ball rate under nine percent. Remember Pittman was under eight percent. Pittman's PPR points per game was second best on that list. His yards per team pass attempt was third best on the list. So all things considered, there was still some good that came from Pittman this year. We just have to hope that there's a tangible quarterback upgrade for this team next year. I'm still a believer in the talent, but I downplayed the situation for sure entering the season when Pittman was such a high draft pick. That's the thing. If he was a fourth or fifth rounder, it would have made more sense to not care about the situation, but he was often a late second rounder, though I will say I'm not sure I would have ever predicted such bizarre usage. Now, speaking of situation, let's talk about Seattle. Because I was not very high on dk Metcalf or Tyler Lockett entering the year, and the obvious reason as the why I was pretty straightforward. It's Geno Smith. I love Geno Smith the person, but I had no idea he had this in him. Now, Metcalf wasn't as good in twenty twenty two, as he'd been with Russell Wilson. Let's get that out of the way. He scored just six times, when he had touched on totals of twelve and ten during his two previous seasons. His target chair per game rate was pretty in line with what he'd seen with Wilson, but he did see a slightly lower yards per route run rate. One of the things I wrote about in the Late Round Draft Guy this past summer was how Seattle was almost definitely going to run more plays per game this year than they did last year. I should have listened to my own advice with that, because they did run over five more plays per game, and then on top of that, they had a pass rate of fifty seven percent it was fifty four percent the year prior. What that meant was more targets for Metcalf and Lockett. Metcalf had a similar target share, but his target total jump by twelve and because Gino Smith ended up being so much more accurate than we all thought, Metcalf had a better catch rate. He ended the season with a career high ninety. So his PPR points per game did drop, but it didn't drop to the point where he'd become irrelevant, and it was sort of similar with Tyler Lockett. Lockett actually had pretty similar numbers across the board as he saw the previous season. It was as if Russell Wilson never left Seattle. Now, I've done studies on middle round wide receivers and those studies show that quarterback play by ADP doesn't matter. It matters much more for tight ends. We knew Metcalf and Lockett were good players, so in hindsight, it made plenty of sense to load up on them regardless of their situation. Because unlike Michael Pittman, a player like DK Metcalf wasn't getting drafted in the early rounds, the opportunity cost wasn't nearly as significant. He was an early fifth round pick. He outscored his expected points per game by point four points per contest, and with Tyler Lockett, Lockett out scored it by four point four points per game. So the moral of the story is this, trust team regression on the play's run front, and don't worry so much about situation. With players drafted outside the early rounds, it made sense to worry more for a player like Pittman, But when the opportunity cost is lower, and you know the players are talented, you should be able to brush it off more easily. Now. Of course Gino Smith playing out of his mind versus expectation helped with all of this, but we need to be more open minded in the preseason to those types of things happening. It's easy to be overly confident in how you think a team season is going to go down. I was in on Alan Robinson too, and WHOA that was wrong. My logic for Robinson was that twenty twenty one was just a weird year for him, whether talking injury or COVID. He was literally a year removed from a one hundred reception season and he'd done all that with poor quarterback play. Now, the Rams offense this year was bad in general, and the offensive line was a big reason for that. He didn't get to do what the Rams wanted him to do. His average at the target in twenty twenty two is the lowest of his career. He saw a fifteen plus air yard target at just a thirteen and a half percent rate. That was by far, by far the lowest rate of his career. He'd typically been in the twenty five to thirty percent range, so all that compounded, yes, But I do think it's also important to be a little bit more hesitant about players like him who are coming off objectively horrible seasons. I mean, in twenty twenty one, Robinson had a yards per route run rate of one point one to three. He somehow was even worse in twenty twenty two. But when you combine that with a wide receiver age curve, in hindsight, it made sense to see Robinson is overvalued even with this improved situation. So hand me that L for Alan Robinson. I wasn't into Josh Allen at his ADP because I preferred the Jalen Hurts tier more so. Missing out on Josh Allen's season. Yeah, it's a loss. It was a bad call, but I did that at the cost of drafting a player who was just as good and he was cheaper and Jalen Hurts I just like that tier more so. It was an L, but it also wasn't totally an L. At the same time, instead of focusing today on Alan, I want to look at someone who I definitely got wrong, which was Joe Burrow. It sounds weird to say that I wasn't high on Burrow because obviously Burrow's a monster. But one of the things I wrote about and talked about with Burrow entering last year was his high touchdown rate. In twenty twenty one, it was six and a half percent. Usually touchdown rates that high regress, and his did. He was at five point eight percent this year. Now, in twenty twenty one, Burrow also had a lot of unsustainable touchdowns. Sixteen of his touchdowns were on fifteen plus air yard throws. That was the second highest mark that we'd seen from any quarterback since twenty eleven. The Bengals were bound to be more pass heavy in twenty twenty two than they were in twenty twenty one. Yes, But my thinking and my projection showed this too, was that the potential dip and touchdown rate and big play touchdowns would sort of combat the rise and pass rate. And since he had nineteen points six points per game in twenty twenty one, my thought was that with people being very very high on him after his Super Bowl run, if the match that scored as ADP, he wouldn't necessarily be a league winning quarterback. He did better than that, though Burrow exceeded his twenty twenty one numbers by a little over two points per game. The crazy part is, though, is that the things I thought would happen sort of did happen. Like I said, his touchdown rate dropped. He also had half the number of big play touchdowns that he had in twenty twenty one, and the Bengals did pass more. What I didn't account for was better rushing numbers. That was really the difference. Burrow scored two more points per game on the ground this past year than he did in twenty twenty one, and his rush share in the Bengals offense was twice as high. And honestly, this could have been because of the ACL recovery. That was definitely something I overlooked when projecting Burrow in twenty twenty two. Otherwise, the projection really wasn't that far off, but it was wrong. I should have been higher on Burrow. I don't know if we'd consider Burrow league winning this year because according to ADP expectation and how he actually performed, he was the fourth best value a quarterback behind Jalen Hurts, Patrick Mahomes and Justin Fields. But he was definitely someone who you loved having on your roster now. The last guy I want to mention on today's episode TJ Hockinson. My argument against Hawkinson had to do with a few things. Number One, a lot of people were blaming Hawkinson's absence for Amen Ross Saint Brown's emergence during his rookie season, But that didn't make much sense to me because Hawkinson himself had never proven to be some elite tight end. He was good, but he had never done anything like Saint Brown did during the end of his rookie season. So I liked Saint Brown and that bumped down Hawkinson. Number two. Middle round tight ends generally are not providing huge breakout seasons. This is an ADP trend. And on top of that, middle round tight ends with bad quarterbacks by ADP very rarely were worthwhile in fantasy. Keep in mind, when we were drafting Hawkinson, he was playing for the Lions. According to my numbers, Hawkinson ended up out performing ADP by two and a half PPR points game this year, which is very good, but given the way people are talking about him right now, that's not nearly as high as you might expect. Now, it was still bad advice for me to say that he wasn't a good pick at ADP. For instance, I had mentioned that I like Dallas Goddard more than TJ. Hockinson, and Hackinson ended up scoring a little bit more points per game, and he was better versus expectation than Dallas Goddard was. So what happened, Well, what happened was that Hawkinson was traded straight up. That trade was everything for him. Now you can look at his splits in Detroit versus Minnesota and say, but JJ, he averaged twelve point two points per game in Detroit, that's still good. Well, he also had a forty point performance that's helping raise that average. Now that performance counts, it's part of what Hockinson did this season. But when you look at his other six games in Detroit this year, Hawkinson averaged seven point six PPR points per game. For some context, that's what Kyle Pitts averaged this year. Even in Minnesota. Hawkinson had that monster Week sixteen game that bowet his average up a little bit too. But in Minnesota he was seeing more volume. His target share per game rate rose by six percentage points if you remove the worthless Week eighteen, and that's typically what we see with better quarterback play and why the quarterback ADP trend exists with tight ends. I talked about this research in the offseason a lot, but tight ends with better quarterbacks by ADP tend to perform better, and Cousins was an upgrade by that metric. Had Hawkinson started the season with Cousins, he wouldn't have been the same type of player to avoid. But look, Hawkinson had an awesome season. He had a great wildcard playoff game. He's a really good player, and I definitely took an l with him this year, even if the things that happened with him weren't totally predictable. Now, I want you to know that I'm fully, fully aware that there were more things that I got wrong this year. I thought the players that I highlighted today though, were some of the more glaring misses. Hopefully you ended up learning as much as I did going back through them. Next week's going to be a little bit easier on me because and be looking at the things that went my way. But that's it for today's show. 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 in e fit to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Now, before I let you go, I want to let you all know that this year's Late Round Prospect Guide is now available for pre order over on lateround dot com. I'm really proud of last year's guide, I'm excited for this year's. In it, you're gonna get an in depth background about what goes into my prospect models, and then I profile every single running back in wide receiver that's going to be at the NFL combine. You'll get their pre draft percentile scores from the model, and then when the draft concludes, you'll get an updated version of the guide showing their post draft scores. And there's rankings littered throughout it too. But there's more. The Prospect Guide also includes a breakdown of my year two model, along with profiles for relevant running backs and wide receivers who are going to be entering the second year of their NFL career. That section is going to help you know what to do with someone like Damian Pierce or Treylan Burks or George Payckens. All of those players will be profiled for you, and I'll talk about what to do with them in Dynasty. If you pre order the guide before it's launch on March thirteenth, you can get it for eleven ninety nine. It's a pedethic. It's delivered to your email. Once the official guide launches on March thirteenth, the price will jump to fourteen ninety nine. So you can pre order it today right nowover on lateround dot com. And when the guide is ready with pre draft information, it's going to hit your inbox and that'll be on March thirteenth. Thanks for listening, everyone really appreciate it. I'll talk to you later in the week with the Weekly Mailbag Show.