772: The Rise of the Early-Round Quarterback

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacher rethas j Jae zacher reson what's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Eson in this episode seven hundred and seventy two of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. At the end of the twenty eleven football season, there was talk all over the internet about the importance of quarterbacks and fantasy football. That season had seen some really good performances from the position. Aaron Rodgers scored over twenty six points per game with forty five touchdown passes. Drew Brees had over twenty four points per contest and forty six touchdown throws. Cam Newton was a beast, Tom Brady was great. Matthew Stafford had a good year. If you had one of those five quarterbacks, you probably had a good fantasy season. Those five quarterbacks shifted the fantasy football market entirely. You had analysts putting articles together at the end of the year stating that in twenty twelve you needed to get an elite quarterback and the only way to do that would be to spend up, and that irritated me. It was one season there was tons of data and logic that showed that drafting quarterbacks late was almost always the move, not early, so I did something about it. At the end of that twenty eleven season. I started writing the Late Round Quarterback Ebook. It launched in June of twenty twelve, and that's what got me going down this path of being a fantasy football analyst. I hadn't done a thing in this space before that ebook, but thanks to the market reacting so aggressively to the twenty eleven season at quarterback, I was able to capitalize and start my career as a fantasy analyst. The year after those five quarterbacks separated themselves. In fantasy football, we did indeed see a shift in average draft position. The three highest ADPs at the quarterback position since twenty eleven came during that twenty twelve season. According to my Fantasy League data, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees were all top nine overall picks. They were all first rounders, and then Cam Newton and Matthew Stafford were second rounders. But after most of those quarterbacks scored over twenty two fantasy points per game in twenty eleven, none of them ended up scoring twenty two points per game in twenty twelve, none of them lived up to expectation when you compare where they were drafted and how many points we'd expect them to score at that adp. From that moment forward, people became believers in the late round quarterback strategy, and for years and years in the twenty tens, the strategy was full proof. There were seasons in there where you could have literally just ignored the position during your draft and it wouldn't matter. It just didn't matter if you didn't get a good quarterback in August. But after years of late round quarterbacking being the obvious go to strategy, we're seeing the market shift, and it's been shifting not just over the last year, but over the last few years. Back when Lamar Jackson had his MVP season and when he broke fantasy football, it was clear that the masses were starting to understand the importance of rushing in fantasy football. Jackson was a great passer that year, but his rushing numbers were out of control two and that combination made him a unicorn. When something that amazing happens in fantasy everyone notices. Everyone realized that season how important rushing was at the quarterback position. It forced me to write an article called did Lamar Jackson Break the late round Quarterback Strategy? Now, Jackson himself that year was a late round quarterback, but because of his performance, the thought was that people would begin prioritizing the right things and that Jackson himself and players like Jackson would finally be properly valued in fantasy football. The article was written in May of twenty twenty, and it was an article where I started to detach myself from the very thing that allowed me to live out this dream of being a fantasy analyst. I began to detach myself from the late round quarterback strategy. At the conclusion of the article, I wrote the following, You know, the truth is the question about the late round quarterback strategy in fantasy football this year shouldn't really revolve around Lamar Jackson. It shouldn't be about whether or not you're willing to take Jackson in the top twenty five or the top thirty. Instead, our focus should be on the fact that the fantasy football world has gotten smarter in the past. The season like Ryan Tannehill's twenty nineteen would have almost assuredly catapulted his cost the following year into the top ten at the quarterback position. Yet today the following year he's being drafted as a mid range QB two. Historically, fantasy managers didn't put a premium on quarterback rushing production. They ignored what's been dubbed the Konami code of fantasy football. We don't see that anymore. The consensus top seven quarterbacks this year are all players who bring that extra juice with their legs. So no, Lamar Jackson isn't what could break the idea of drafting quarterbacks late in fantasy football, you are As the fantasy football world gets sharper, the late round quarterback strategy may slowly morph into the middle round quarterback strategy. There's this thing in math called the coefficient of determination, or what we refer to as R squared. It's the proportion of the variation in the dependent variable that is predictable from the independent variable. It tells us to what extent the variance of one variable explains the variance of the second variable, and our squared of one or one hundred percent means there's perfect correlation. One variable explains everything about the other, and our square of zero percent means there's absolutely no correlation. Now, something I've done through the years is look at how well the fantasy football market does at predicting success at the quarterback position, and I use R squared to help determine that. Back in twenty fifteen, when you lined up average draft position versus postseason result, you'd find almost no correlation at quarterback, meaning we were absolutely terrible at figuring out how quarterbacks would end up performing in fantasy football. That was pretty similar to other seasons in the twenty tens as well, there wasn't much correlation between where we drafted these guys and how they finished. And when that's the case, what's the point in drafting one early. But since twenty nineteen, since Lamar Jackson's breakout season, those correlations have gotten so much stronger. The market has gotten smarter. Like I talked about in that article, the quarterbacks will be draft early, at least in the top ten or the top twelve. They've been the quarterbacks who have ended up performing really well. That means finding late round quarterbacks has become increasingly more difficult, and when you look at the data, that's definitely been the case. Let's just use late to mean any quarterback drafted after round seven of a twelve team league. After all, when I launched the Late Round Quarterback Ebook, that was the range that I considered late. That's when opportunity costs was significantly lowered. In twenty twenty two, zero quarterbacks drafted after round seven provided twenty or more points per game. Now, Justin was close, but he didn't get there because of how he started his season. For some comparison, in twenty nineteen, seventy one percent of quarterbacks who scored twenty or more points came from the late rounds. That number was fifty percent in twenty eighteen, and it was fifty percent in twenty seventeen. It was zero percent last year. Just twenty five percent of the quarterbacks last season who scored eighteen points per game, which isn't a super high bar, came from the late rounds. That was at least forty percent from twenty fifteen through twenty twenty. Now, some of that has to do with the fact that more quarterbacks are being drafted late during those seasons. In twenty nineteen, for example, five quarterbacks went in the first seven rounds of a twelve team league. In twenty twenty two, we had ten. But that's also kind of the point going into a draft. You can't assume that you can just wait and hit on a quarterback who's going to give you high end QB one production because the market dynamics have shifted. And that's especially true going into the twenty twenty three season. We know that the position has become more prediction and the reason for that is rushing, and I talk about that a lot in the Late Round Draft Guide. Fantasy managers are properly prioritizing the rushing component at quarterback. In turn, it's tougher to get valuable quarterbacks late and the more seasons where this happens, the more we fail to see late round quarterbacks emerge, the higher the elite quarterbacks will get drafted the following season. And that's exactly what's going on in twenty twenty three. Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, and Josh Allen are all roughly second round picks this year. The last time we saw a surge like this in early round quarterbacking it was in twenty twelve, and it's no surprise that last season saw similarly absurd numbers from quarterbacks as that twenty eleven season saw if you look at how top three and top six quarterbacks performed in points per game versus the rest of their position, last season gave us the biggest gap that we've seen since. Oh wait, there it is again since twenty eleven. The top three quarterbacks average in points per game last year versus the next three quarterbacks was four point three points better. So you're comparing the QB one to the QB three versus the QB four to the QB six. That's the highest that we've seen since beyond twenty eleven. The third highest rate with that group was in twenty eleven. Then, when you look at the QB four to the QB six and how many points per game they scored last year, that group was two point four points per game better than the QB seven to QB nine. That was second best that we've seen since twenty eleven to the year twenty eleven. What I'm essentially saying here is the advantage that the elite quarterbacks gave you last season was the biggest that we've seen since that amazing twenty eleven season, the season that got my career started. In twenty twelve, what happened quarterbacks started getting drafted incredibly early, and what's happening in twenty twenty three, quarterbacks are being pushed up draft boards to places we haven't seen in almost a decade. If history repeats itself, then that means that drafting Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, or Patrick maho Homes in round two this year will end up being a very bad idea. When the market is reactive to a previous season, you usually want to go in the opposite direction strategically. With that being said, this season is a little bit different objectively. Back in twenty eleven to twenty twelve, the quarterbacks who are being drafted early, we're all mostly pocket passers. Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Matthew Stafford. Passing numbers fluctuate year to year more than rushing numbers do. To help wrap your head around that concept, let me just ask you a very simple question, assuming both players are totally healthy, which quarterback will score more Fantasy points through the air? This year? Justin fields are Kirk Cousins. I'm sure a lot of you would say cousins. I would say cousins too, but I don't say that with one hundred percent certainty. There's definitely a world where Justin Field steps up, he takes a leap, and he throws more touchdowns than Cousins, even if the yardage doesn't match up, and those touchdowns could swing that number in favor of Fields. Now, let me ask you this question, between Justin Fields and Kirk Cousins, which one will have more points from rushing considering we're assuming that they're healthy. That answer is one hundred percent absolutely Justin Fields. Rushing numbers are stickier year over year, and since we know rushing matters to fantasy scoring. We've known this for years and years, but the Lamar Jackson breakout really got the entire market on board. But since we know that rushing matters for fantasy quarterbacks, then we should have more confidence that this year's set of quarterbacks will have a better shot at repeating as top assets compared to the ones that we saw in twenty twelve. Now there is a big caveat here. Hurts, Mahomes and Allen are going to have a hard time repeating what they did last year because high fantasy scorers are just hard to get to year over year, over and over again. Any projection system would say the same. I've got them projected more in the twenty two and a half to twenty three and a half points per game bucket when they scored over twenty four last year, and then all the while the mid to low end qb ones they're probably going to be better. Last season was the perfect storm of high production from the big three quarterbacks and then really average to below average production from the bottom tiered quarterbacks. The bottom tiered qb ones. That's why the elite quarterbacks had the biggest advantage in points per game that we've seen since twenty eleven. Those numbers fluctuate and regress, It's why in twenty twelve it wasn't the same as what we saw in twenty eleven. So we're sort of stuck in this place where, yes, we should feel confident about the individual quarterbacks that we're drafting and their ability to finish as top quarterbacks, but we should also feel pretty good about the gap between them and the rest of their position closing. So where does this lead us in twenty twenty three. Well, to me, whether you go after one of the elite quarterbacks should be largely driven by the type of league that you're drafting in if you've got an eight or a ten team league, that means your team needs to be very, very good in order to compete. The fewer the teams in your league, the more stacked the teams are, so the better your team needs to be in order to win. So you can take a chance on a quarterback like that. In larger leagues, you can have flaws on your team and still come out on top. And in these larger leagues, your opportunity cost equation changes. If you're in a fourteen team or a sixteen team league, each pick comes with a larger cost because you have to wait longer for your next selection. More players are falling off the board. If you take one of those elite quarterbacks, you might think to yourself, Hey, I'm going to really destroy the quarterback position in this league. My quarterback is going to be so much better than everyone else's quarterback. But you're not realizing that every team is starting more running backs and wide receivers too, at double and triple the rate because a typical fantasy lineup requires more of them. So my stance this season is that the elite guys are draft worthy in smaller leagues where teams need to be very good or honestly in leagues where you know the competition is in very fierce. In more competitive leagues or deeper formats, as long as it's a single quarterback league, I'm not taking on the second round opportunity cost. As I lay out in my guide, that's an area of the draft where you're getting substantially better hit rates at running back and wide receiver, and in deeper formats where more of those players are being started. Those guys are unbelievably important. There are definitely parallels between this year and the twenty twelve season. The market is reacting to what appears to be a semi outlier season at quarterback, pushing costs up for those guys, But unlike twenty twelve, there's more of a reason for early round quarterbacking. Finding a late round replacement is much more difficult. That's it for today's show, though 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, and to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Now if you like what you heard on today's show. There's more on this topic in the Late Round Draft Guide. The guide will help you navigate the quarterback position and I provide quarterback targets for your draft this year as well. You could read more about it and pre order the guide over on lateround dot com. Thanks for listening everyone, I greatly appreciate it. I'll talk to you later in the week.