478: How Rookies Appreciate in Value

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Speaker 1: This is the Label podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J zacher reson What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharesen, the editor in chief at fandlin at number fire dot com in this episode four hundred and seventy eight of the Late Round podcast. Many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. I'll sometimes get feedback from people who ask me to do more shows around Dynasty formats, and I think it's valid feedback. I just can't necessarily focus a huge chunk of my energy to Dynasty on this podcast because the audience is largely a Redraft one and Redraft also has a larger audience in general. But when the season comes to a close and when things slow down, I'm able to fire off some Dynasty related episodes, and this is one of them. Before I go on, I know a lot of you don't play Dynasty formats. That's totally cool and fine. I understand this episode won't totally hit for you, but if you're not a Dyna player all the way back in twenty eighteen, I did an episode with the great Ryan mcdal of Dynasty League Football where we covered the basics of Dynasty Fantasy Football. That's episode one hundred and eleven. Ryan's an awesome analysts. I play in a lot of leagues with him, and I can tell you, guys, he's one of the best out there at the game. But I play in a good number of Dynasty leagues now and I have been for a handful of years, and like Redraft, my strategy is constantly evolving, and I would say that it's evolved a lot more in the Dynasty front than the redraft once since I started playing. One thing that's very obvious in Dynasty is at the market is incredibly important to understand, more so than your regular redraft league. I stress understanding the market all the time on the show, but there's even more to it when we're talking Dynasty, because you're not just looking at the market and saying this is where this player is getting drafted. You're looking at the market and you're saying this is where the player is getting drafted, and then this is where this player is going to be drafted in the future. You have to understand appreciation. You've got to grasp how players are, how positions change in value over time. Some Dynasty players, they're amazing at this to the point where it doesn't even matter if they're hitting on players at a higher rate than their competition. They just know when to buy and sell. I won't pretend that I'm that dynasty player. I'm admittedly a better redraft player than a dynasty one, but I approach both formats in a similar way through math and logic. The thing is, when looking at how players appreciate in value, it's not just a game about how good those players necessarily are. It's not just based on whether a player is good or not. Like of course, good players will gain value and bad ones will lose value over time. There's a little bit more to it, though, and I want to touch on that a little bit on today's show. I want to show you guys, through data, how rookies appreciate in value in dynasty formats. I really approach this topic with the question of what happens to rookies when looking at their value in startup drafts from year one to year two, Because if they almost always gain value, then why would you not just punt for a season and get that value for your team from one year to the next. And anecdotally, it does seem like that generally happens, but I wanted the data to speak, not just my random experience. Now before I dig into this data. Not sure if you heard, but there's a big game happening this weekend, and fandle is making sure that you have a chance to celebrate with one of the biggest NFL daily fantasy contests of the year. The NFL Big Game Bowl is live on fandle and for just four dollars and forty four cents, you have a chance to compete for your share of the three point five to five million dollar prize pool, including a whopping one million dollar first place prize. For more details with at fandle dot com or download the fandle app today. Eligibility restrictions apply. So, like I said, I was curious to see what happens to a rookie startup average draft position his startup ADP after his rookie season, to compare how a rookie's value changed from before year one to before year two. To help me out, I utilize Dynasty League Football dot COM's average Draft Position data. You guys should all check out DLF because it's a great resource and the people running it are also great people. I went through their ADP, which dates back to twenty fourteen. To me, looking at ADP at least gives us some idea of value, right, It's how people are valuing these players when they're drafting them. I then realized that I wanted to make what I was doing a little bit more consumable for you guys, So I had to cross reference the startup ADP data with rookie Draft ADP that I've compiled from my Fantasy League dot Com. So we've got Dynasty League Football startup ADP and we've got my Fantasy League dot Com Rookie Draft ADP. Our rookie sample is in the my Fantasy League ADP, and I'm seeing how those rookies changed in startup ADP from year one to year two. Since we're looking at data from twenty fourteen onward, that means that there were six rookie drafts worth of data within our sample. Where we've got next season data, So twenty fourteen through twenty nineteen, with twelve players picked per round in a twelve team league, that means that we've got seventy two first round picks and seventy two second round picks in our sample. Because six years times twelve players per round equals seventy two total picks. Now, hypothetically we should have seventy two third round picks and seventy two fourth round picks as well. That's not the case, though, since I'm using rookie draft data and I'm cross referencing it to the startup data to understand how value changes. Not all third and fourth round rookies actually had an average draft position in startup drafts. According to the number, sixty three third rounders had startup value and then forty one fourth rounders had startup value. I then stopped at the fourth round because our sample would just be getting smaller and smaller as we move down rookie drafts. I'm also going to focus heavily on the higher end players for today's show, So let me recap what's going on here. It's important to wrap your head around the methodology. We've got six years of rookie draft ADP data that we're looking at, and we're looking at just the first four rounds of rookie drafts. Says, not all of those rookie picks have startup ADPs to cross reference. It's not a data set that's simply six years times twelve picks per round times four rounds. It's not two hundred and eighty eight total rookies that we're analyzing. It's a little bit less than that, at two hundred and four forty eight. These two hundred and forty eight rookies are our sample that we're working with. What we're trying to figure out is how did these rookies change in value from one year to the next. I'm gonna start by looking at straight up round drafted. As you'd guess, round one rookies and rookie drafts have a higher hit rate than round two rookies, meaning Round one players tend to end up being better than round two ones because they're better players, and we're not totally totally horrendous at evaluating. If you look at our sample of first round players, we've got seventy two of them. Since every rookie that was drafted in round one also had startup ADP. Of those seventy two rookies, about fifty two percent of them saw their startup ADP get better from year one to year two. As of right now, that fifty two percent number that really shouldn't mean anything to you. Because we're not comparing it to anything. Is fifty two percent good or bad? We don't know. We have no idea. Meanwhile, in round two, a solid fifty four to fifty five percent of Round two rookies have seen their startup ADP rise from year one to year two. By the way, keep in mind that some Round one rookie draft players they have high startup ADPs to begin with, so sometimes it's really hard to increase that value. But that doesn't totally matter just yet, because we're looking at this in a binary did this player gain value? Way when you get to round three, things aren't as strong. Forty percent of our round three samples saw their value increase year over year, whereas forty two percent in round four saw their value increase. So at a high level, this tells us at a random first or second round rookie pick, they're likely to see an increase in value year over year, an increase in startup ADP. That's not that big of a surprise. We all value first and second round rookie picks a lot more than third and fourth rounders, and this, along with a whole lot of other data, plays into that fact that we care a lot more about first and second round rookie picks. Now, we can say that fifty four percent of round two rookies see an increase in value from year one to year two. But is that because of wide receivers in round two, or is it because of running backs in round two? Or does it not really matter? Help answer this, let's focus on running backs and wide receivers drafted in rounds one to two in rookie drafts. It's pretty clear that after you get out of round two, things start to drop off, and we're most concerned about the higher end players. Anyway, whenever we draft of all first round rookie draft players in our sample, thirty three were running backs and thirty one were wide receivers. Of those running backs, about forty eight percent of them saw an increase in startup ADP from their first to second seasons, whereas about fifty five percent of wide receivers saw on increase. I think this is actually kind of meaningful. It does appear that wide receivers are at least a little bit of a safer bet and round one of rookie drafts than running backs are when you're looking at the rate that they increase in value. Year over year in round two that's flipped. Round two, wide receivers see an increase in year over year startup ADP just forty four percent of the time. That's fifty six percent for running backs. This actually plays into something that I found a few years back when analyzing the value of rookie picks. I did a study on that, and to be honest, I don't believe in what I said back then that's gonna happen. Sometimes I do studies, and I realized that there was more to those studies than I was aware of when I put the studies together. But one of the things that was evident and that I still believe in, was that Round two rookie draft running backs they're kind of awesome. They had to higher than normal hit rate compared to other positions in that round, and we're seeing that with this data as well. I always try to find some sort of logic and form some narrative as to why something like this would be the case, and I think it's that we're enamored with immediate opportunity at running back, which drives up the cost for rookies who were in immediate positions to get touches A perfect example of this is the absolute worst pick over the last six years of rookie drafts when considering cost and when considering how that player then saw his startup value change year one to year two, and that's samaj p Rin. P Urn wasn't a special prospect and he wasn't even a Day one or Day two pick, but he landed in Washington where there was an open backfield, or so we thought. Meanwhile, according to my Fantasy league's rookie draft, adp p Rand was selected right around Kareem Hunt and before Alvin Kamara. Both of those running backs had higher draft capital than samaj p Rin did draft capital alone, or where those players were selected in the actual NFL draft, That should have told us that something was up. Running Backs who were drafted Day two of the NFL drafts, so backs who were drafted in rounds two and three. If you can get one of them in the second round of your rookie draft, you should jump on it. And oftentimes the players who emerge as the awesome values in that area of rookie drafts are the ones who don't seem to have a path to immediate production because someone's in their way, like David Johnson or Jeremy Hill or Marlon Mack or even Damian Harris, and then, of course this year we saw that with Antonio Gibson. The point I'm trying to drive home here is that round two rookie running backs, generally speaking, they appreciate and value better than round two wide receivers do, at least when looking at it in this binary fashion, and then round one wide receivers do so better than Round one running backs. Now, this doesn't necessarily tell the whole story of what I'm trying to solve here. Thus far, I've only compared rookies to other rookies. We can see that first round rookie draft wide receivers appreciate and value better than running backs do from year one to year two, and that's helpful when looking at how we might want to build through a rookie draft. But what we really should be concerned about is how rookies change in value versus non rookies. And this is where things start to get really interesting. As I said earlier, not every rookie draft pick has startup ADP, and not every rookie with startup ADP obviously had a high ADP. If we're going to compare how player value changes between rookies and non rookies, we need to compare them within the same parameters. This is kind of arbitrary, but let's look at this by looking at rookies who were draft in the top two hundred and startup drafts since twenty fourteen, and then compare that to the non rookies who are drafted in the top two hundred. Now, keep in mind the top two hundred is pretty deep in startup drafts. Since twenty fourteen, we've had two hundred and three rookies drafted in the top two hundred who were also taken in rookie drafts. These players range from the first round to the fourth round of rookie drafts. They were all over the place. We have a wide variety here. Of those two hundred and three, the median change in year over year startup ADP was about minus five, which tells us that a typical change in ADP for those players was the fall in ADP. They decrease their ADP. That's not necessarily shocking considering lower end players don't hit at a very high rate, and every year we've got surprise players entering the top two hundred, and then we've got a brand new rookie class that pushes players down. Now, of the two hundred and three rookies, ninety seven of them saw an increase in ADP year over year, meaning about forty eight percent of top two hundred rookies have increased their year over year value in startup ADP over the last six years. Now, let's look at the non rookies. Of the non rookies, the median fallen ADP over this timeframe has been a little bit over nine, so they've fallen about nine spots in a ADP year over year. That's more than the rookies. And while forty eight percent of the top two hundred rookies have seen their value increase year over year, forty one percent of non rookies have seen their value increase. That alone gives us a good understanding that these rookies are providing an increase in value at a higher rate than their counterparts. What's even more interesting is what happens with the top one hundred. Typically, top one hundred rookies are selected in the first round of rookie drafts over the last six years, where we have next season data about eighty four percent of rookies drafted the top one hundred of startup drafts had first round rookie draft ADPs. So let's look at these high end players. How different is the market value of a rookie in the top one hundred versus a non rookie. Well, I should first say that of all the rookies with top one hundred startup ADPs, every single one of them there were seventy nine of them, but each one of them had some sort of ADP the following year. Because of non rookie players retiring or performing poorly, we actually saw six percent of that sample have no real eighty P the following year. So there's a difference right there. But here's the thing that probably matters most of all. If you look at the seventy nine rookies who had their ADP and the top one hundred of startup drafts, fifty three percent of them saw their ADP rise from year one to year two. That's up from forty eight percent when you include rookies who had startup ADPs in the one hundred to two hundred range. Among the non rookies in the top one hundred, only thirty percent of them saw their ADP rise from year one to year two. That's down from forty one percent when you include the one hundred to two hundred range. And if you look at the rookies who had top one hundred startup ADPs and you compare those ADPs from year one to year two, the median change in ADP among those players is about five, meaning typically a rookie who has a startup ADP in the top one hundred, he's typically increasing that ADP by about five The following year, that number was minus five when you include the top two hundred players. And then if you look at top one hundred players who aren't rookies, their median changes a decrease of sixteen spots. Now, to be fair, you might be thinking that the non rookies are in a slightly worse position than rookies are. For a study like this, maybe it's going to be easier for the rookies to gain an ADP only because it's very hard for players to stay high in rankings year after year after year. If Christian McCaffrey is the one oh one one year, that means he has to maintain that the next year, and that's difficult to do, and you're not gonna see rookies with that high of an ADP. But if you look at the players ranked fiftieth through one hundredth, you get a very similar result. Exactly fifty rookies have had startup ADPs between fifty and one hundred over the last six years. Of those players, fifty six percent of them had an eightyp increase the following season. And then if you look at non rookies, the rate of increase among players ranked fiftieth to one hundredth is still very low at thirty one percent. Now you might be wondering why this is happening, and honestly, the answer is that people age and dynasty managers don't want older players on their roster. A new rookie class comes in each year as well, and those rookie classes have added about thirteen players into the top one hundred per class. That's why these numbers aren't significantly higher. So let's take a step back now and think about what all of this means. I want to wrap this up and make it super actionable. When looking at how rookies appreciate within the context of rookie drafts and positions, it seems like the advantage is there for high end wide receivers, which makes sense. We generally have higher expectations for running backs in year one than we do wide receivers, so a running backs value is more likely to be inflated when he's drafted. This doesn't mean that you should avoid first round running backs in your rookie draft. If you need immediate production, higher end running backs are a better bet than wide receivers. If you're rebuilding, though, then your goal is to increase your team's overall value from one year to the next. You don't care as much about immediate production, and as a result, you should probably be looking at wide receivers in that first round versus run All the while, it's just generally not a good idea to put too much stock in the immediate opportunity of running backs. This is a learning from before, but it needs to be reiterated with this data. But the bigger takeaway is one that I think a lot of people understood, but maybe not to this level of detail. The data that was presented today really plays into the productive struggle strategy and startup drafts, gobbling up rookie pick after rookie pick or rookie after rookie. Doing that in a startup will almost undoubtedly increase your team's overall value from one year to the next, unless you're working with an objectively terrible rookie class. And of course there's more to it than just that. I looked at this from the perspective of rookies versus non rookies, But you could take this a step further and break down the non rookie group to look at second year players, third year players, and so on. But my big question today was about rookies, and what the data shows is pretty glaring. It's pretty obvious if you're not looking at production because you don't necessarily need to win right away in your dynasty league, and if you're looking to obtain value in relation to the market, you should be heavily targeting rookies and startup drafts because they definitely appreciate and value from one year to the next at a much higher rate than veterans do. And that rate is probably higher than you even realized. That's going to do it for today's show, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and I forget to follow me on Twitter at late round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I hope you enjoyed it. I'll be back in your ears on Friday with the Weekly mail Bag Show.