790: Risers and Fallers

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host jaj Zacher Retha j Jae Zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's jj Zacharyesen and this is episode seven hundred and ninety of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Things change in fantasy football throughout a summer, even before a regular season game is played. Players get hurt, players hold out, players reportedly play roles that we didn't expect them to play. How we felt about guys back in May and June isn't always the same as how we feel about them in August and into September. And that's what today's episode's all about. It's about highlighting these risers and fathers, or the players who have gone up in my rankings a lot over the last two months, and the players who have gone in the opposite direction. I say on the show all the time, we should change our opinions with new information. This is not a game about being first and then sticking with that take forever. It's a game about being accurate. Now, before get into the players for today's show, I want to send another reminder to check out the Late Round Draft Guide. It's got fantasy football strategy, philosophy, players to target players, to avoid rankings and tiers, and more. It's everything you need to dominate your leagues this year. You can read more about it over on lateround dot com. And then one last thing. I didn't call out Ramandre Stevenson and Breese Hall on today's show despite them being followers because I talked about them on last week's Mailbag episode. But they are followers for me. They got dinged from the Dalvin Cook and Ezekiel Elliott signings. If you want my take on those players, you can hit pause and listen to the beginning of last week's Mailbag episode. Okay, that's out of the way, let's get to it. It's tough to do a show like this one and not talk about Javonte Williams. Williams entered the offseason with a lot of pessimism surrounding him. We watch JK. Dobbins suffer through a similar injury last year and he couldn't get right. But Williams definitely looks to be ahead of schedule in comparison, and that's why he's a riser. It's fine to play it a little cautiously if you're not much of a risk taker in fantasy. If you were opting for other players in Williams range this summer, that's defensible in some formats, but right now today you should be adjusting. Not only was he able to play in last week's preseason game for Denver, but he actually looked pretty good, especially as a receiver. Now. He had a rough drop, but he ended up catching four or five targets, which is good news because Williams has a lot of upside as a receiver. In three or four games last year, he had a fourteen percent target chair. I think it's also important to remember that Javonte Williams was a very very good prospect. He was over the ninety fifth percentile on my prospect model, which tells us that he had a pretty elite profile, and the model looks at production metrics, and he split a backfield in college with Michael Carter, so he's been rising at my rankings. I think he has the right risk reward where he goes, especially if you're getting him Moore as an RB three on your team. James Cook is another riser for me. He checks a lot of the boxes that we should be looking for in a breakout running back. He's likely going to see a higher target shair than he saw last year, so we can label him as a pass catcher. He's part of an ambiguous backfield given where Damien Harris gets drafted and there are no Bills running backs getting drafted before James Cook, and being part of a good offense doesn't hurt either. Now, Damian Harris has been banged up, but Cook has been seeing some great preseason usage. According to my friend Dwayne McFarlane of Fantasy Life, in the Bill's last preseason game, Cook saw eighty six percent of the team's first team snaps, seventy five percent of their rush attempts, a seventy percent route participation, and all of the short yardage snaps. He was essentially a bell cow in that game. And by the way, you should check out Fantasy Life for real. I always get asked where to go statistics from Free Statistics in particular, and they have awesome tools that their building for fantasy managers and they're absolutely free, so go check them out fantasylife dot com. But yeah, it's the preseason, I get it. James Cook being a belcow in the preseason doesn't really really really matter. But it's just evidence of the other stuff that we know about him that he's a good player, that he was a fine prospect. Maybe he's a little bit undersized, which is somewhat of a worry, but he's got the potential to be a big value in drafts the season, and he's someone I've ended up drafting a lot here in August. Now, I do expect Harris to see more goal line work than James Cook. But even if Cook doesn't see it, it's not like he won't score touchdowns. It's not like he just end up as a bus no matter what. If he can capture a ten to eleven percent target share in this offense, which is very possible, he'll be just fine. Now, speaking of Damien Harris, I actually think that he's a pretty big faller. Harris has been dealing with a knee injury and that played a role in Cook seeing the usage that he saw in the preseason. But there's been a lot of positive reports about Latavious Murray out of Bills camp, and on Monday, Ty Johnson signed with the Bills. That could mean absolutely nothing, but it could also point to Harris maybe not being quite there. Who knows. What I do know is that I was low on Harris before all of this happened. This has only enhanced my feelings about him. He's been a pretty one dimensional back since entering the league, and with James Cook there, Harris was unlikely to see a huge target share in this offense. His upside was goal line work, but if Murray is trending upward and with this knee injury, that may not be there for him either. He's just not someone I've drafted that much this year, which probably sounds familiar because I've never been a Damien Harris drafter in fantasy. I've talked about Rashi Rice as a prospect on the show in the past and how he wasn't really doing it for me. He didn't quite get to the eightieth percentile on my prospect model. That's a mark that I want players to hit, and that's because his break age was pretty average. He was a four year wide out at a non Power five program, and his best season marks weren't even that great within that program, they were good, not great. Because of those reasons, I don't think you need to necessarily invest in Dynasty, but the cost to acquire in redraft totally different. We have to have an open mind about our evaluations and those evaluations just being wrong. And an easy way to get some action on Rashid Rice actually being really good is through redraft. He's been getting some first team reps, He's flashed his yak ability in the preseason. It's not a depth chart that's horribly difficult to climb. Now. My rankings have shown Rice as being someone that I'm higher on than the market throughout the summer, oddly at least compared to the expert consensus rankings over on Fantasy Pros, but I haven't necessarily called him out as a player to target and redraft. I do think chances are he won't be a league winning player just given the stuff that I look at. But I also think when a player is attached to Patrick Mahomes, and when that player shows a little something in the preseason, including playing with the first team, you should adjust your priors. He's a fine target and redraft someone who I've low key dropped in my rankings over the last handful of weeks as cam akers and the simple reason Kyron Williams. Jordan Rodriege of The Athletic has reported that Williams not only looks great in all phases, but he's also been splitting reps with starter cam Akers, and my fear with Akers is that Williams ends up playing a pass catching role in the Rams offense. Kyrian Williams is someone who got dinged big time in my prospect model because of a poor weight adjusted forty times, like a really, really bad one. But he had a best season reception share over fifteen percent at Notre Dame. He can be a satellite back. He can play that role and on a team like the Rams that could be trailing a good bit this year. I do think there's a scenario where game script just doesn't play into cam Akers' favor. Acres is one of those guys who looks great by projections. I talked about that back in May, but things could go south quick. It's why he's living in the dead zone and it's why he's not been a player that I've aggressively targeted this summer despite that projection looking good. Duce Vaughn was one of the toughest prospects for my model to figure out. Like ever, he has arguably the best production profile on the database of all running backs. Dating back to twenty eleven. He was obscenely productive in college. But of course he's small. He's a tiny running back. He weighed in at just one hundred and seventy nine pounds at the combine. His BMI isn't that bad, but weighed itself as a metric that does matter. And then his reported forty time was also really bad. Pairing that with his small weight gave him an awful speed score. So he was lower than the threshold that I want running backs to hit entering the league. Here's the crazy thing about duce Von. Despite that low speed score, he still had a very high draft capital delta. In that model, a speed score under ninety means a player is almost definitely going to have a negative draft capital delta. Now, for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about right now, draft capital delta is simply a look at how my model views a player versus how the league did or his draft capital. So a positive score means the model liked him more than where he was drafted. A negative one is in the opposite. Since twenty eleven, there have been over eighty running backs in the Prospect Model database to have a speed score below ninety, so they had a bad way to adjusted forty time. Only six of those eighty plus had a positive Draft Capital delta. Now, players under a ninety speed score they're not good prospects. When a prospect is good, when he's productive in college, he generally has a good speed score too. The best player that we've seen with a sub ninety speed score probably been Devin Singletary since twenty eleven. Maybe theoretic he's in there too, but considering those are the players that I'm talking about in here, clearly it's not good to be under that mark. I just think that Deuce Vaughan is completely unique. His size, his production, it's unlike anything that we've ever seen. And he's looked really, really good in preseason action. Throughout the summer. He has not been in my top two hundred rankings, but this week when I update those rankings, he will be. I'll be making a Draft guide update about this this week. But Sean Tucker man, what a whirlwind. I love Tucker pre draft, and then he went undrafted due to a diagnosis of a heart condition, and now he's on the Buccaneers. Maybe that has long term effects. I'm not sure. I'm not a doctor. Clearly doctors don't wear Jim Schwartz and their mom's basement every day. But the cost to acquire Tucker is nothing. You shouldn't worry about the heart condition from a fantasy football perspective. You should worry about it from a human perspective. Hopefully Tucker doesn't actually have to deal with this, that would be awesome. Hopefully this is all behind him. But the risk involved in drafting Tucker is zero because you're not spending anything to get him. Now, you might be listening to that and saying, but JJ, you like Rashad White. How can I be drafting Sean Tucker if you like Rashad White so much? And yeah, Rashad White's a target for me this year. But as I've said, I'm not right one hundred percent of the time. The Buccaneers can deploy these running backs in a lot of different ways, and as we know, Rashad White is not a proven commodity. I think he's talented. I think that talent's gonna show out, but that's not a lock. And we know that later round picks can overcome depth charge better when their teammates are in the dead zone. And not in the early rounds, and Sean Tucker's a rookie, which is also a plus. Now. I explained draft capital delta earlier with Duce Vaughan, and Tucker's was third highest in this year's draft class, behind Lou Nichols and Evan Hall. His prospect score is not fantastic because he went undrafted. It's in the forty seventh percentile. But Tucker's the eighth best undrafted running back in my model's history, and one of the backs who's really close to him is James Robinson, who ended up having an amazing rookie campaign and likely would have had a solid career if not for an achilles injury. We should be throwing darts at good players. Had Tucker not had that heart condition, he wouldn't have gone undrafted. So if you miss out in Rashad White, feel free to take a chance on Sean Tucker. At least have his name ready for waivers. The last player want to get to today, Greg Dolcic. I've been pumping up Dulcic this offseason. If you've been listening since January February, you know that I like Greg Dolsicic. His year one peripherals were great. His target share per game rate was third best from any rookie tight end since twenty eleven, behind only Kyle Pitts and Evan Ingram, two productive tight ends. I've got a tight end prospect model that's still in beta mode, but in that model, his year two score looked great. That points to good things happening in year two and year three of his NFL career. Everything looked glaringly obvious to me. Greg Dolsic was gonna be the go to late round tight end for me this year. But there's a new offense in town, a new coaching staff. Sean Payton got his man and Adam Troutman from New Orleans, and Troutman is sharing tight end duties with Greg Dolsich. At first, I didn't think this was gonna be a big deal. I didn't think that Adam Troutman was that big of a threat. But you could argue very easily that, judging strictly by preseason usage, Troutman is a more attractive option strictly from the preseason. Now. I'm not there yet. I'm not gonna say to draft Adam Troutman above Greg Dolcich, but I have bumped Ulsage down my rankings a decent bid and that's sad. But like I said at the top, I don't want to just stay with a take forever. When we get new information, I want to help you guys win Fantasy Football Championship pips and at this moment, we should be moving Greg Dolsage down our rankings now. Fortunately, the market's doing the exact same thing, and to me, he's still a player that you can target. As a result, if his ADP stayed the same, then yeah, you shouldn't be going after Greg Dolsage, but it's not. He's a lot cheaper than he was even a month ago. He went from someone who I thought was an obvious late round target to one who's still a pretty good target, but he is a much scarier floor. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you had subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are bestarting for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't follow me on Twitter on x at Late Round QB. And also if any of you are on Instagram, check out the Late Round Fantasy Football Instagram. It's at late Round FF. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll talk to you later in the week with the Mailbag Show, and this week we have the first episode of Late Round Perspectives. I'll talk to you then, Ter