863: Sell Candidates

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacheris j J zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode eight hundred and sixty three of the Late Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Last week on the show, I talked through some players you might want to consider trading for in your dynasty league's this offseason. On today's show, I'm doing the opposite, looking at players to sell. It's pretty straightforward. I'll be using different average draft position sources like Keep Trade Cutting, Dynasty League Football, and I'll be talking about some guys I seem to like less than the market does. They're players you might want to trade away. Before getting to those candidates, though, I want to shout out the Late Round Prospect Guide. The guide is exactly what you need to dominate your rookie drafts this season. You get information about what goes into my prospect models. You get prospect profiles, prospect scores, year two model information, year two score, year two profiles, and more. I don't think you'll regret the purchase. And speaking of purchase, you can pre order it right now for eleven ninety nine over on Late Round dot Com. Once it launches in March, that price will rise to fourteen ninety nine. So get on it now and get ready for the NFL Draft. The first player I want to shout out today Romeo Dobbs. I was pretty surprised to see Dobbs at wide receiver thirty seven over on Keep Trade Cut. He's one spot below Christian Kirk. He's one spot ahead of Keenan Allen. He's multiple spots ahead of Deontay Johnson, Calvin Ridley, and Markis Brown. Dobbs is a more attractive age than all of those players, but he's also sitting in a less desirable situation. I've talked about Jayden Reid plenty on this show over the last few weeks. He's a threat to dig into Romeo dobbs target share. Dontavian Wicks currently has a year two score of eighty five that tells us that he at least has a decent shot to be a consistent wide receiver three in fantasy. Christian Watson's there the young tight ends that the Packers have. Both of them showed out and performed well in twenty twenty three. Dobbs could end up being a twenty percent twenty two percent target share player in an offense that lacked alternatives. For sure, he's not a bad player, but when you have a non elite asset, and I use the same argument for Reid a couple of weeks back, but when you have a non elite asset, that asset isn't going to command a difference making target share. Look at what Dobbs has done so far in the NFL. He's played two years. In those two seasons, he's had his sixteen percent and seventeen percent target share. His yards per route run actually dropped from year one to year two. It went from one point three to six to one point three to two. That's really not good at all, especially one In twenty twenty three, Jaden red and don Tavian Wicks both had yards per route run rates over two. Like. I'll be honest, I actually find it kind of fascinating that Romeo Dobbs is ranked fifteen wide receivers spots over Dontavian Wicks. Wicks is younger, has played just one season in the league, and according to my year two model, Wicks is entering his second season in the league with a better year two score. Wicks is at eighty five. Like I said earlier, Dobbs with my upgraded model, he had a year two score of eighty one. I think this ranking is just really coming down to recency bias. Because Dobbs performed well in the playoffs. Maybe that carries over, but I'd much rather bank on the larger sample size that suggests that Romeo Dobbs may not even be a top three wide receiver on his own team. I'm not as into Jerome Ford as others are. According to Dynasty League Football's January ADP, Ford is at RB twenty six. He's RB thirty three on keep trade cut, so he's lower there, but I actually have him even lower than that in my Dynasty rankings. I just don't think Ford was special. In twenty twenty three. According to Next Gen Stats, Ford was actually worse than Kareem Hunt and both e per rush and success rate like by a good margin. Ford also ranked last and stuffed rate last year among backs with one hundred and more carries. Ford was worst at gaining positive yardage. He failed to do so on twenty seven and a half percent of his rushes. Like, what are we expecting moving forward? I'd agree that he can generate big plays, but didn't he just walk into one of the best situations he could have possibly walked into this past year when Nick Chubb went down. Not only was he a high end RB three and PPR points per game, so nothing league winning at all, but he still wasn't seeing a belcow workload in that backfield. He was losing significant work to a running back past his prime. Now, Nick Chubb's injury status is definitely up in the air, but I feel like that has to be playing a role here. I'm just not sure. Why do we'd expect any sort of jump and output year over year from Jerome Ford and he's priced in some spots basically where he finished the twenty twenty three season. I want more upside out of a running back being ranked as an RB three. A player like Chewba Hubbard has more potential in twenty twenty four, in my opinion, than Jerome Ford does, and you can get him significantly cheaper in some spots. To me, Ford's a pretty clear sell, especially at RB twenty six, where DLF's ADP has him. Now, I really didn't think i'd be going this direction on today's show, but I saw Chase Brown's January adp on Dynasty League Football last week, and I realized that there are going to be some people who are very very high on him this offseason. Let's first look at the pluses, because there are some. I understand the argument for Chase Brown. Joe Mixon is a cut candidate again, and Brown is the second best running back on that roster. He might even be the best running back on that roster. No Mixon would mean better things for Chase Brown. Now on top of that, Brown shown off something that Joe Mixon doesn't really have, and that's explosion. He carried the ball forty four times this past season. He gained twenty or more yards on two of those rushes. Yes, small sample size, but it's a twenty plus yard run rate of four point six percent. Mixon has been above two point five percent within that statistic just once across his entire career. Brown had one fewer twenty plus yard run last season than Joe Mixon on two hundred and thirteen fewer carries, and two of his fourteen receptions went that distance too. He was just making big plays, and we knew that can happen given how strong Chase Brown's forty time was at the combine last year. And then another plus is that Brown started seeing more work in that Cincinnati backfield as the season went on. He had a thirty percent running back rush are per game rate across his final six games. He could hypothetically improve on that in twenty twenty four. Those are the main positives for Brown. He's explosive mixing could be cut, and he was already starting to carve out a role in that Cincinnati backfield. Now for the negatives, I think people assume that Chase Brown had a lot of usable weeks down the stretch last year because he was recommended by analysts like myself off the waiver wire and on sleeper shows and then sleeper articles. He actually scored more than eight point one PPR points just once last season. His peripheral numbers weren't very good either. I know he made big plays, but Brown had just a twenty five percent success rate last year. That was more than fourteen percentage points lower than Joe Mixon's success rate. Yes, again, that's on a small sample size. But if we're going to credit him for the big plays that he made, we also have to point out the fact that he was a high variance runner. Now, I will say his yards per route run last year absolutely elite among players who ran thirty or more routes. Last season at running back, Brown's yards per route run was by far the best in the league, and since twenty eleven, he's just the third running back to have a yards per route run rate north of four on twenty or more routes run. Now, is that really predictive? I'm not so sure. The other two backs alongside him in that sample are Antoine Smith and Silas Red. Exactly, we have to ground ourselves a bit here. Brown was a fine prospect within the context of where he was drafted, but he was drafted where he was drafted for a reason. Day three running backs who do what Chase Brown did in year one typically don't pan out in any significant way. Since twenty eleven, we've had one hundred and thirty three running backs get drafted after pick one hundred of the NFL Draft to then score fewer than five PPR points per game as rookies. That's on a minimum eight games played. So Chase Brown is part of that group because Brown scored four and a half points per game. Now, let's shrink that sample from looking at all players since twenty eleven and focus on guys who have played at least three years in the NFL. So we'll look at backs who were drafted from twenty eleven to twenty twenty one. That still leaves us with one hundred and ten running backs to look at. Of those one hundred and ten, so again, these one hundred and ten running backs were drafted between twenty eleven and twenty twenty one. They scored fewer than five p pero points per game, and they were drafted after pick one hundred. But of those one hundred and ten, guess how many of them ended up scoring sixteen or more PPR points per game in either year two or year three of their NFL career. Keep in mind that's about an RB one season. Two of them did. One was James Connor, the other one was Miles Gaskin, and only five of them scored more than twelve PPR points per game. And then this past year, for the record, we did get Kyrin Williams. He's just not part of this sample, but just looking at those two simple facts, that shows us that Chase Brown's likelihood of being someone that you can rely on in fantasy football, it's pretty slim regardless of situation. We have to remember that Day three running backs who didn't truly ball out in year one and Chase Brown did not. Those types of players typically don't become difference makers in fantasy. Some of you might feel good about Joe Mixon not being in Cincinnati next year, but even if that's the case, the Bengals are probably gonna do something at running back because Brown doesn't have an unbelievable pedigree. So if you're in a league where someone is really really interested in Brown, I think it's fine to trade them away, and I don't typically do that with second year players. He's just got a year two model score of sixty four. History tells us that a player in that range has less than a six percent chance to even be a flexworthy contributor, So you can use that information to make the best decision for your fantasy squad. I just thought it was worth pointing out because there are some sites like DLF where Brown seems to be priced a little bit too high. Most fantasy football rosters start just one tight end. That means, in order for that tight end to be a true difference maker in fantasy he's got to be extra good. There's no room for air. He has to be elite. Yards per route runs a pretty good test to see if a tight end is a leader or not. We've had thirty three tight end seasons since twenty eleven where the tight end ran three hundred or more routes and hit a yards per route run rate of two point zero or higher. Of that group, we only have fifteen unique players, and the vast majority of those players were year in year out ballers in fantasy football. They were the difference makers. Like it really really captures the elite guys. I'll just read the names so no one's wondering. George Kittle, Trey McBride, who obviously now has a bright future, Travis Kelce, Mark Andrews, Kyle Pitts. We'll see with that one. Rob Gronkowski, Dallas Goddard, Jared Cook, zach Ertz, De Laney Walker, Greg Olsen, Jordan Reed, Jimmy Graham, and Vernon Davis. Yards per rout run is predictive at both wide receiver and tight end. So when a tight end is getting some love but the yards perrout run rate doesn't necessarily match, I'm always a little skeptical. That brings me to Jake Ferguson. I've been doing more research into him, and he's definitely someone who's going to be dropping a little bit in my Dynasty rankings next month. Now, I was on Ferguson this past year. He was a player to target in my draft guide. He had some really interesting rookie season efficiency numbers and there was a clear vacancy in Dallas this past year at tight end, and he came through. He had over one hundred targets. He ended the year as a tight end one. He was top ten in PPR points per game at the position. He's now being ranked as a top ten tight end in Dynasty, and at first like in my most recent Dynasty rankings update, I thought that made sense. You look at his age, you look at a situation, Sure, let's put him there. But Ferguson's year two yards per round run rate was actually kind of mediocre. It was one point four to six. His target share per game was great, But Dallas effectively used Jake Ferguson like they had used Dalton Schultz. And for a couple of years on this podcast, I sat behind this microphone and I talked about Dalton Schultz as a low ceiling player. It's probably the same for Jake Ferguson. He's an outlet for Dak Prescott who can take advantage of the way that most fantasy leagues are scored. But Ferguson had an averaged up of target this past year of just six point two. If we consider twelve PPR points per game as threshold that we really need our tight ends to hit in order to be at least a mid range tight end one, it's pretty rare for an a dot that low to result in that kind of production. In fact, since twenty eleven, only four tight ends with a six point five average up of target or lower have gotten a twelve PPR points per game. Two of them, Evan Ingram and David and Joku got there this past season. Again, I'm not sure Jake Ferguson, who's not that great of an athlete, I'm not sure he's gonna be enough of a difference maker. It seems like he's solid enough and he was in the right place the right offense at the right time, But I don't know if he's going to be an elite tight end. I actually don't think he will be. As I sat back and I thought about his ranking, I realized that where he's being placed is sort of at the top of his tier. If you can get someone like Cole Kamet plus for Jake Ferguson, I do that all day and guess what. Cole Comet's actually younger than Jake Ferguson. Sometimes it's difficult to know exactly how the masses are viewing a player, But DLF has Deebo Samuel listened to Wide Receiver fourteen and their January startup ADP, and that's insanely, insanely rich. Deebo's listens ahead of Michael Pittman, Jordan Addison, T. Higgins, DK Metcalf, Jackson Smith and Jigba, z A Flowers, Tank Dell, Nico Collins, Rashi Rice, and Drake London. You could make an argument pretty easily for any of those players ahead of Deebo Samuel right now. Samuel just turned twenty eight, so he's around to potentially pass the AJPEX at wide receiver. He's coming off a strong season, sure, but Samuel saw his lowest target share per game rate since twenty twenty this past year. His targets per out run was Lois since his rookie year, and according to PFF's expected touchdowns formula, Deebo outperformed touchdown expectation by over five touchdowns in twenty twenty three. Of course he's good, he's gonna do outlier type things, but keep in mind in twenty twenty two he underperformed expectation. It's not like he's a lock to be five touchdowns better than expectation year over year. If you can get any of those wide receivers that I just mentioned plus something else in a trade with Deebo Samuel, I'd go for it. You'd be getting younger, and you'd be getting a player who has a similar range of outcomes in the short term. Now, I love Deebo the player. It's hard not to, but wide receiver fourteen is really high for a twenty eight year old wide out who can't seem to stay healthy, who saw a slight dip in volume this past year, and who's a touchdown regression candidate. So I think Deebo makes sense as a cell. We're going to finish today's show with Kenneth Walker once again after digging into individual seasons from players this past year and writing up some year two profiles for the Prospect Guide, I realized that was too high on a player. This time it's Kenneth Walker. Look, the running back position right now is tough. In dynasty, you can make the case for a few guys up top, and then you start to get into question marks as early as like RB six. I understand why Kenneth Walker's ranked as the RBA eight RB nine. As a result, you have to rank someone there. But after taking a deeper look into this, I also think that you can use this running back landscape and the way things look to your advantage. I mentioned it over and over again during the draft process when Walker was coming out, but he had serious pass catching concerns. As a prospect. We had to do a lot of projecting to assume that he'd be a true bell cow back in the NFL, and so far, through two years in the league, he hasn't been a true bell cow Walker saw sub seven percent target chair per game rate as a rookie. It was under eight percent as a second year player. If we want to use sixteen plus PPR points per game as a cutoff for an RB one season since twenty eleven, just ten percent of sixteen plus PPR point per game seasons came from running backs with a sub eight percent target chair per game rate. There's a new coaching staff in town, so there's some variants involved with Walker's workload or projected workload. Walker's usage could completely flip. Maybe that's the case. We just don't know. But don't forget about Zach Sharboney. Sharpney essentially saw like a thirty percent backfield chair last year. Let's say it was a seventy to thirty split in favor of Walker, maybe sixty five thirty five. He ended up seeing a higher target share per game rate than Kenneth Walker did. But what's really interesting is what happened on the ground. When you look at what those two running backs did as rushers, it actually wasn't all that different. I think a lot of people would assume that Kenneth Walker was by far the better runner between the two, and he's definitely the more explosive and the more entertaining player to watch. But according to next gen stats, Sharpenay was better and rushing yards overexpected per Kerry. His EPA per Kerry was almost identical, and his success rate was about a percentage and a half point better than Kenneth Walker's. And what's really interesting about this comparison between Walker and Sharboney as rushers is that Sharponnay had a better rate than Kenneth Walker last year at gaining ten plus yards and twenty plus yards, and Sharbonnay was better at not getting stuffed, something we all figured out would end up happening, because in twenty twenty two, Walker really struggled at times to gain positive yards. That was my reasoning as to why I thought the two of them could pair well together. Sharbonet is more of a bruiser, He's like James Connor. Walker has more speed, and he's more of a home run threat. That combination could really work in a run centric offense. In twenty twenty two, so two seasons ago, Walker ranked last in his rate of gaining positive yards per rush. He was dead last among all one hundred plus attempt rushers. In twenty twenty three, he ranked in the bottom ten. Now, I'm not saying that these metrics are the end. All my eyes tell me that Walker is the better runner when compared to Zach Sharboney. What I do think it says is that we're still looking at a home run hitting running back who's sharing a backfield with a player who's very capable himself, and that's going to cause issues for Walker, at least in the short term over the next two years. I mean, for as good as everyone knows Kenneth Walker is, he really hasn't been that good in fantasy football. He still hasn't given us a PPR point per game. Season above fourteen, he was the RB twenty and PPR points per game this past year. He was the RB seventeen as a rookie. And now we've got a ton of uncertainty and a reasonable backfield teammate who's sharing work with him. I was too high on Kenneth Walker with my latest Dynasty rankings update, and I know that people are gonna think that I'm just some hater. This is not the first time that I've called Kenneth Walker a cell. I did the exact same thing last offseason before the Seahawks drafted Zach Sharboney. I just generally don't invest in this type of running back at this moment. We're looking at a guy who's not a high volume receiving back and who's sharing a backfield with another good running back Walker himself is definitely able to have monster weeks with his big playability. I just don't want to bank that, and at RB eight or RB nine, when you really dig into the situation, you're kind of banking on that. Now. There are plenty of players I don't like quite as much as the market. This is just a glimpse of a handful of them. If you want to see where I have guys ranked, you can catch those rankings on the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon. Check it out by heading to Lateround dot com. That's it for today's show, though, thanks all of you for listening. If you subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't for it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. I'll be dropping a new Late Round Perspectives episode on Friday, so I'll talk to you then.