876: Mailbag 4/19/24

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Speaker 1: This is the lad podcast with your host jj Zachertha jj Zachers, what's up everyone, It's jj zacher eeson in this episode eight and seventy six of the Late Round Fantasy football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. It's been a minute since the last Mailbag episode, so I'm excited to get to this one. Before get into the questions, though, I'm sending you another reminder to check out what's going on over at Underdog. They've got Best Ball drafts going on constantly and you can enter them anytime you want. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Best Ball leagues, you draft a team and then you're done. There's no team maintenance. Your lineup gets optimized each week during the season based on player performance. There's a lot of strategy involved with Best Ball and I have content that I'm planning for this summer to help you and me get better as Best Ball players. So make sure you're signed up on Underdog now for when that content drops. You can head to Underdog Fantasy dot com or download the Underdog app, and when you sign up, make sure you use promo code Late Round that'll give you a deposit match up to one hundred dollars. That's promo code late Round. The first question this week is from my friend Hutchinson Brown or at Hutchinson b underscore ff on Twitter. It says, any thoughts on Georgia running back Kendall Milton. I think he's an interesting later round prospect. So I obviously have covered every relevant prospect in the Prospect Guide, at least at running back and wide receiver, but I definitely haven't been able to get to every player on this podcast. Kendall Milton, that's one that I haven't talked about at all. So I thought, not only could I talk about this question on the show and hopefully give you an answer, but by giving you that answer, I can talk through my prospecting process a bit. The things I'm looking for in a running back prospect is a combination of size or weight, good speed, and a strong age adjusted production profile. I also just don't want my prospects to be old in general. Now, Milton's just a little over twenty two, so that's fine, and he's definitely got size because he's two hundred and twenty five pounds, but his production profile is really really lacking, and that's a huge red flag. Now, I know he played at Georgia and he competed with pro caliber backs, and we've seen Georgia running backs in the past not have these robust production profiles. But even when you account for that, even when you account for teammate competition and the fact that Georgia might not use belcal backs, that still doesn't excuse his production profile. People will look at his senior season and they'll say not bad. One hundred and twenty one rush attempts, seven hundred and ninety rushing yards, and fourteen scores on the ground. Well, from all the research that I've done, yards and more importantly, yards within the context of a player's offense, that's more important than touchdowns. On top of that, receiving that's unbelievably important at the running acquisition, and Milton had a total of twelve receptions in college. His top season in pro rated reception share was under two percent. Now, let me give you some context as to how low that number is. Consider this, and this is something that was in a newsletter that I sent out earlier this week. You can subscribe to those newsletters for absolutely free by just going to late Round dot com. But consider this, since twenty eleven, fifty two running backs in my model's database have hit fourteen or more PPR points per game in one of their first three years in the league. So fifty two running backs have given us like RB two type numbers. The lowest best season reception share among that group came from Jordan Howard, who was at five point nine percent. Again, Kendall Milton is below two percent. Not only that, but because Milton didn't have that much of a receiving profile, his total yards per team play rate is really really low, and that's what drives breakout score in the running back model. His breakout score is actually zero, and only five running backs from group of fifty two we're able to produce an RB two season without a breakout score. Like anything in fantasy football, I look at prospecting through the lens of probability, and I think probability says that it's very unlikely that we'll need to be concerned about Milton as a fantasy asset. Could he be an early down guy in the NFL, maybe come in as a handcuff, sure, but I think a lot of backs are capable of doing that. We need more of a ceiling from these guys, so to me, there are better darts to throw at the end of your rookie drafts. This sess questions also from twitters from at real Internet me. It says, do you believe there are trends that will translate to redraft in ADP of ongoing Bestball drafts like underdog or is the format too specific slash the type of people grinding drafts in April too different to find reasonable predictors of what we may see come August. In home leagues, I think there are always takeaways from almost any format as long as you're playing the same general type of game. Underdog Bestball drafts are inherently going to skew a little bit more wide receiver heavy. They're gonna probably value rookies a little bit differently than your home league will. But I still think there are plenty of things that you can use for your home league draft. Underdog ADP is pretty sharp, so you can use that to your advantage in spotting some values, and I think you can always just look within each position instead of across positions for some insights. That's something I'm really going to focus on this year with the draft guide. I haven't started working on it yet, but when I do, I'm going to look within the position more as opposed to a cross positions. I've done a lot of analysis based on rounds like middle round, running max, the running back dead zone, that kind of stuff, but I want to focus more on what happens within the position from one positional slot to the next. I've done that a little bit through the years, but I want that to be the focus. That way, you can easily transfer the knowledge from that draft guide from one game type to the next, whether you're in your home league or you're in a Best Ball league. So there's still a lot that you can take away from Best Ball Drafts right now. Where players are drafted within their position is probably the top thing. If Bjon Robinson is the RB two and Best Ball Drafts, you can probably expect Robinson to be about the RB two in your home league two. And by knowing that type of information and how players sort of fluctuate within their positions, you can then be better prepared for your home league drafts. The occeess querestions from at cook fri five H on Twitter. Cook Fresh says, what's the deal with Tyrone Tracy? Undervalued? Look depending on where you're looking, you might see a lot of tyrone Tracy hype. There's a lot of it out there, and I'm kind of shocked, if I'm being honest. It's not that I think that it's stupid or anything. It's just that when I wrote up his profile in the Prospect Guide over a month ago, I didn't expect there to be a Tyrone Tracy hive. That's why I'm surprised. But I'll say this. In that Prospect Guide, one of Tracy's top comps is Tony Pollard, which is funny because Pollard, like Tracy, ended up going from wide receiver to running back in college. Pollard was more of a pass catcher. He didn't have the twenty twenty three that Tracy had where Tracy carried the ball one hundred and thirteen times, but size wise, journey wise, it's not that far off. The biggest difference and I think this is the biggest red flag for Tracy analytically, aside from draft capital, but it's age. Pollard entered the league at twenty two years old. Tracy's gonna be almost twenty four and a half. My man played four seasons in Iowa and then two more seasons at Purdue. He's been playing college ball since twenty eighteen. Tony Pollard was still at Memphis that season. Now, Tracy should be or could be, a dynamic pass catcher, which is something that we're always looking for in our fantasy running backs. I just don't think he's gonna command some really big workload on the ground. So sure, he can hang out on your bench in dynasty. Maybe a team finds a way to use him in a high volume capacity, but I think he'll end up being more of a random PPR fill in than anything else. He's probably a little bit undervalued because a lot of people don't even know who he is. But I wouldn't be spending anything more than like a fourth round rookie pick on Tracy more than likely. Let's see how the draft unfolds before I cement that comment. This next question from Patreon. It's from Christopher. It says, Hi, JJ, love the show and always appreciate your great content. Thanks. What do you think are realistic expectations for Tank Dell and Nico Collins next season? After the Stefan Digs trade, everyone is down on Diggs, but it feels like he could still sneak his way into the top fifteen wide receivers if volume is there in a good offense. If that happens, it's hard to imagine that Tank Dell or Nico Collins could do much better than a wide receiver two. Yeah. I mean, chances are all three of these guys won't be wide receiver twos together. But I will say we have seen something like that happen before. I looked at every team since twenty eleven, and there were four teams over this timeframe who had three wide receivers, So three wide receiver teammates who scored fourteen or more PPR points per game during that same season, and that's a minimum of eight games played per wide receiver. Those teams were the twenty thirteen Denver Broncos, the twenty eighteen Rams, the twenty twenty Buccaneers, and the twenty twenty Carolina Panthers. Now let's give all that some context. That Broncos team was historically good, like the best offense ever arguably the Rams team in twenty eighteen. That team had Cooper Cup, Robert Woods, and Brandon Cooks. Cooper Cup only played eight games, so I'm not sure we'd see that team sustain that production among the wide receivers. The twenty twenty Buccaneers had Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, and Antonio Brown, and those wide receivers missed a lot of games. So when wide receivers missed games, as long as they hit that eight game baseline, they can raise their PPR points per game output because the other wide receivers aren't playing. And then the Panthers in twenty twenty, that's probably the weirdest one of this group. That team saw all three wideouts score between fourteen and fourteen point two PPR points per game. That was with DJ Moore, Curtis Samuel and Robbie Anderson. So what does that tell you? It tells you that in order for these three Houston wide receivers to all thrive, they've got to either be in one of the best offenses ever, which we shouldn't project. One of them will need to get hurt, maybe two of them, but still play about eight games, or they just will need to hit a minimum threshold of like fourteen PPR points per game be usable, but maybe not give you an elite season like all three of these players could hypothetically get you fourteen PPR points per game while playing all seventeen games. That's very possible. But what that would mean is we're probably not going to see an elite season from one of these wide receivers if that were to happen. Now, I have Digs barely projected for the most targets on that team, but all three wideouts are within eleven targets of one another. Nico Collins has some regression coming on the efficiency front, but I do still have him as the most efficient of the three, while Diggs ends up catching more passes. But what I think this move for Diggs really does is give the Texans an insane amount of flexibility. You can move all three of these guys all over the formation if you want, and don't forget many including myself, saw Tank Dell as mostly a slot guy as he entered the NFL, but he played fewer than thirty percent of his snaps from the slot last year. Now I think that number does probably rise a little bit this season because you're gonna want all three of these wideouts on the field in eleven personnel. They're gonna run a lot of eleven personnel because look at these weapons. Last year, you kind of had an abundance of slot receivers in Houston or guys who are most comfortable there, Digs can at least go to the outside. Now, with that being said, I actually think that Diggs ends up playing a good bit in the slot in Houston next year, which is why I do think that we could project him to catch the most in that offense. He's gonna see easier receptions because Tank Dell was really good on the outside last year. His yards per route run was a lot better on the perimeter than the slot last season, and that's thanks to his explosion. But Diggs hit a thirty five percent slot rate last year that was his highest since his second year in the league, and it's not uncommon to see older wide receivers start to move inward a little bit more So, I think Houston wanted Digs just for versatility purposes. It gives them a lot of flexibility at the line of scrimmage in eleven personnel. And then I also think that this is a standard situation where projections can give us an idea of the most likely outcome, But we know that injuries are inevitable, and when injuries hit one of those players, it'll really help the other wide outs on that team from a fantasy perspective. So just because these guys won't be projected as wide receiver ones doesn't mean that they Number one won't have spiked weeks where they are wide receiver ones, or number two can't get to that status based on the ebbs and flows of a football seat, based on injuries happening to their teammates. But yeah, on the projections front, I think they can all be top thirty, maybe top twenty five wide receivers, but it'll be difficult for one of them to really stand out and be a wide receiver one week in and week out. As long as they're all healthy, I don't think we're looking at a situation where only one guy emerges while the other two give us sort of wide receiver three numbers. I think Houston sees this as all three of those guys having the ability to take over games if a matchup calls for it. The last question this week is kind of a two fer. The first ones from at the Dave from work. It says, not sure if this is a mailbag question exactly, but can you talk me off a ledge with this year's wide receiver class, Everyone says how great it is, and maybe the top three guys are enough to make it great, but it seems every other wide receiver in the class has major question marks in their game. Is it actually that good? To be clear, I'm finishing your pod with Matt Harmon now and listen and regularly to others in the field, like Matt Waldman in particular. Maybe Draft capital clears things up, but four to twelve ish in this class feels like anyone's guests now. I also got one from at paste Dog that says, hi, JJ love the show and the Draft Guide. Thanks. Everybody is saying that this year's wide receiver class is very deep, but when they dive in after the top three, every prospect has tons of question marks, So maybe it's not that deep after all. Now, look, I've talked about this a little bit in the past. On a Mailbag episode. It was the Mailbag from early March. Someone asked me how this wide receiver class stacks up to other classes in the past, and I talked about a study that I did in a newsletter. In that study, I looked at wide receivers drafted in the first two rounds of drafts, and I found the breakout scores for those wide receivers in each class, breakout score being one of the production metrics that the ZAP model uses. Now what I just said that might not make a lot of sense, so let me just explain it really fast. At that time, early March, NFL mock draft database had fifteen wide receivers from this draft class projected to go in round one and round two. The median breakout score of those fifteen wide receivers was actually lower than any other class since twenty eleven, So in some you could argue that this class was a little bit overvalued. Breakout score correlates to NFL success and fantasy success, So the fact that we have poorer profiles getting drafted early, yeah, maybe the class is a little bit overrated. Here's the thing, though, the sheer number of wide receivers getting drafted so early that matters too, which is not what I was talking about with that study. Like, saying a class is good or bad is different than saying if it's overrated or underrated, or saying the class is deeper shallow. Same thing. I do think the wide receiver class is a little bit overvalued, but that might not matter for fantasy purposes. Because at the end of the day, draft capital is an input. It's sort of the film evaluation piece of the prospect model, and if the draft capital is there, the overall scores for these players will look better. And the prospect score itself, that's what matters most, not breakout score, prospect score, the ZAP model score, that's what matters most for all of these players. Let me just show you what I mean here. The wide receiver ZAP model. My prospect model gives scores to players from zero to one hundred. Anything over ninety five at wide receiver is really really good. Anything over ninety is very good, and anything over eighty is something that we definitely can work with. This year's class is a real shot to have five players over the ninety five mark. There's definitely gonna be three, but there's a chance for five, and that would tie a high since twenty eleven. And right now as it stands with projected draft capital, we've got twelve wide receivers in this class with scores above eighty. If that holds, then that would be the second highest mark since twenty eleven. I think that that's the lens that we need to be looking at this through because a player's actual score is more meaningful than that player's production profile against his draft capital. And I actually think that there are players below that eighty mark wide receivers in this class, below eighty who have really intriguing profiles. So I'd say that this is definitely a deep class. It's not a flawless class because that won't ever exist, but we're bound to get a lot of fantasy success from this year's wide receiver class. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you 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. You know, for it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Don't forget to check out the Prospect guide over on Lateround dot com. You will get an updated version of that guide Saturday night after the draft is over, so make sure you have the guide now to get the pre draft version. Otherwise, thanks for listening. Everyone greatly appreciate it as always, have a great weekend.