377: Evolving the Late-Round Quarterback Strategy

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachera J J.

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Speaker 2: Zacherison.

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Speaker 1: What's up everyone, It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at FanDuel and at number fire dot com in this episode three hundred and seventy seven of the Late Round Podcast, with many shows that are part of the Fan Duel podcast network.

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Speaker 2: Thanks for tuning in. I think we've gotten.

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Speaker 1: To the point where the majority of fantasy managers, at least the hardcore ones, are drafting quarterbacks late. Your casual work league may still see Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson go in the middle of the first round, but any serious league we'll see quarterbacks fallen drafts. Things have changed quite a bit since I first launched and wrote the Late Round Quarterback Ebook eight years ago. Back then, we had five quarterbacks drafted in the first two rounds of drafts. That does not happen anymore. What's usually misunderstood about the late round quarterback draft strategy, though, is that it's.

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Speaker 2: Not just about a game of chicken.

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Speaker 1: I can't tell you how many times people have hit my mentions and said something along the lines of, look, my QB one was the twenty fifth quarterback taken in this draft. Late round QB would be proud. Guys, I'm not proud of you if Nick Foles is your QB one. I'm questioning if you really are understanding what the late round quarterback strategy is all about. And what it's all about is extracting value. But with things changing across the fantasy football landscape, we should change too when we're drafting our fantasy football teams in order to really extract that value I was just talking about. We have to properly play the market. We have to adjust to what other teams in our league are doing. Every player is a value somewhere. I can say to draft your quarterback late, but if everyone in your league abides by that same strategy, then you should pounce on the top quarterbacks at some point in your draft. This got me thinking about a few questions that a lot of people may be asking themselves this year. Should we be changing our approach with the quarterback position fantasy drafts? With everyone waiting on the position now, is Lamar Jackson specifically someone that we should be targeting early, and if so, when should we be looking to draft an elite quarterback. I'm gonna try to answer those questions today, But before get into them, I wanted to let you guys know about a really fun thing going on over on FanDuel called the Football Multiverse. Each week, my colleague Jim Sonis and I were streaming a Madden game simulation live on Fandel's YouTube channel, and each game has a crazy what if scenario.

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Speaker 2: And week one it.

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Speaker 1: Was what if the Bears had drafted Patrick Mahomes, where we put Mahomes on Chicago and Mitch Trubisky on the Chiefs and it didn't go well for the Chiefs. This week we've got what if Drew Brees had retired, where we're gonna watch Taysom Hill quarterback the Saints against the Falcons. You can test your prediction skills and play a free DFS tournament for three thousand dollars in real prizes by making a lineup with players in that Madden simulation. Head tofandle dot com slash NFL Multiverse to enter, and don't forget to subscribe and tune into fandles YouTube channel on Wednesday at eight pm Eastern to watch. Should be a lot of fun. Okay, So last week on number five, I wrote an article that was called did Lamar Jackson break the late round quarterback draft strategy. Clearly, he was the best late round quarterback value in the history of fantasy football last year, but because of his production and because of how he produced his fantasy numbers, I was curious about whether Jackson was worthy of an early round quarterback selection this year. In order to do that, I had to talk about the late round quarterback philosophy a bit. We can't understand if Jackson is a worthy early round selection without understanding the overall strategy, so let's start there. Some of this may sound redundant if you've been with this podcast for a while, but I still think that it's worthwhile.

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Speaker 2: To walk through.

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Speaker 1: There are four main concepts that drive the late round quarterback strategy. The first one is supply and demand. I've talked to you guys about this enough, but in your single quarterback league, each team only needs one quarterback. This natural brings down the cost to acquire quarterbacks in your fantasy drafts. If teams need fewer of them, then they won't spend up to get them. That's why we find usable passers in the double digit rounds every single year. The second idea is predictability. And this can be looked at on a season long level and a weekly level. On the season long level, we look at predictability in terms of how a player was ranked or looked at in the preseason versus how that season ended for that player, so preseason ranking versus postseason result. One of the things that early round quarterback drafters have liked to say over the last decade is that getting one of those quarterbacks early is safe. That quarterbacks drafted early don't bust at the same rate as other positions. But that's not really true if you look at top twelve quarterbacks versus top twenty four running backs and top twenty four wide receivers. And we're looking at twelve versus twenty four here because you start at least twice as many backs and wide outs in your fantasy league. But if you look at the R squared values between preseason EIGHTDP and then postseason result, there's actually a stronger correlation at running back and wide receiver. And I did that across the last nine fantasy football seasons. What that means is that average draft position explains top twenty four running back and wide receiver season long fantasy point totals better than it does top twelve quarterbacks. So elite quarterbacks and quarterbacks in general are actually not more predictable from a season long perspective. They are more predictable week to week.

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Speaker 2: Though.

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Speaker 1: If you build out projections each week, you'll have an easier time projecting quarterback than the other positions because they control so much of the game. There's just a larger sample to work with. Now, I have math behind that, but I'm not going to bore you with that math on today's show. Hit me up on Twitter and I can link to an article on the coefficient of variation and what it says about weekly predictability if you really want. But because quarterbacks are predictable each week, it means you'll have an easier time streaming the position. You can find usable guys on the waiver wire, as we know, because of supply and demand, but those usable players are also usable because they're predictable. All of that just devalues the quarterback position even more so, quarterbacks are cheap because of supply and demand. They're not predictable on a yearly basis, but they are on a weekly one. All of those things devalue the position. The third thing to make note of is scoring variants at a really basic and high level. The top quarterback each year over the last decade or so has outscored the twelfth best quarterback by one hundred and twenty three total points. That's per season. The top wide receiver to the twenty fourth wide receiver is one hundred and forty seven points, and at running back it's two hundred and eighteen. There are other ways to look at this, including changing the baseline players to look more accurate and to be more accurate. Or you can look at the drop in usable weeks by the different positions to show how much better top running backs and wide receivers are against their position versus quarterbacks. But the general idea here is that top quarterbacks have typically not outscored the rest of their position at the same rate as wide receivers and running backs. But here's the thing, guys. Historically quarterbacks may not be giving you this huge edge in fantasy football, But what if Lamar Jackson is different? Like, Jackson did give you a pretty big edge last year. He was a difference maker, and that's despite the fact that he played a replaceable position. This leads me to a section that I wrote about in the article Surrounding Regression, Lamar Jackson may be able to do what he did with his legs last.

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Speaker 2: Year year over year over year. It'd be a.

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Speaker 1: Crazy feat, but let's just assume that it's possible. That gives him a really high floor each and every week and season, so we know he's likely going to finish. Let's say is like the QB six each year. That helps out on the predictability front for sure. What I know though, and this is almost with one hundred percent certainty, I know he's going to regress through the air. Last season, Jackson threw thirty six touchdown passes. Not only was that just the thirty second time that that touchdown total had been hit in NFL history, but he did it on four hundred and one attempts. That's a nine percent touchdown rate, and touchdown rate, for those of you who don't know, is just touchdowns divided by attempts. He threw a touchdown on nine percent of his attempts in NFL history. That's the second highest mark among three hundred plus attempt passers of the twelve quarterbacks who have next season data. While also hitting an eight percent touchdown rate in year n so that's a full percentage point lower than what Lamar Jackson had last year. None of them improved on their touchdown rate year over year, each touchdown rate got worse, and the dip in rate, the decrease in rate.

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Speaker 2: On average was three percent.

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Speaker 1: Just imagine Lamar Jackson with a six percent touchdown rate instead of a nine percent one. That would mean that he would have thrown twelve fewer touchdowns and he threw last year. Now, clearly, if Jackson threw twelve fewer touchdowns, the Ravens wouldn't have scored twelve fewer times. They could have just ran more and Lamar Jackson might have had more rushing scores as a result. But then there's a regression related problem to that as well. Balt Yore had fifty eight touchdowns last year. Of the eleven teams that have hit fifty five touchdowns since twenty eleven, only one of those teams increased their touchdown total the following year, and the average drop in touchdowns from one year to the next was fourteen. Now, part of that big drop was because there were teams who legitimately broke records. It was very, very hard for those teams to repeat that feat But even if you look at the teams who scored fifty to fifty four touchdowns, so teams who scored fewer than Baltimore last year, we've seen them drop by eleven and a half touchdowns a year over year on average. So, just to put this all another way, Baltimore is unlikely going to score fifty eight touchdowns again in twenty twenty. That plays into the idea that Lamar Jackson's touchdown rate is going to regress. But we can't assume that a regression through the air would mean an improvement on the ground. It basically means that it's very very possible that we just saw the best of Lamar Jackson statistically. So in turn, I highly doubt Lamar Jackson gives Fantasy the edge that he was providing last season. I do think he'll give you an edge, just not to the degree that we saw in twenty nineteen. Okay, that's the stuff that I needed to talk through before get into what I think is the most important and interesting part of the late round quarterback strategy, and it's the fourth and final concept, which is opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.

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Speaker 2: So if you get.

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Speaker 1: Lamar Jackson at twenty fifth overall, which is where he's currently being ranked over on Fantasy pros, the opportunity costing getting Jackson there is Juju Smith, Schuster, DJ Moore, or Leonard Fournette. Who are all players being ranked at or behind him. For purposes of this podcast and for the article that I wrote over on number five, I wanted to make opportunity cost really consumable for people. I wanted to think of it more philosophically because I think it's a concept that's just so so overlooked in the fantasy football space. People far too often get fixated on the player that they're drafting, when they should really be concerned about the players that they're not drafting. Instead, it's easy to say, I want Lamar Jackson, But what are you not getting when you get Lamar Jackson. One way to look at opportunity costs differently is to think of things in a more binary way. Our goal in fantasy football in the end is to draft league winning players. We want the guys who are giving us a huge advantage week in and week out. So where are those league winners coming from because if the league winning running backs are typically drafted in like round six, then why would it matter if you took Lamar Jackson in the second round. You can just get one of those running backs in round six. To figure this out, I first wanted to define what a league winning player looked like. What I did was I charted all the RB ones, RB twos, RB three's, and so on up to RB twenty five, and I mark down their average points scored over the last nine years. So RB ones players who finishes the RB one they've averaged three hundred and eighty one PPR points over the last nine seasons. RB twos have averaged three hundred and twenty nine points. I did the exact same exercise at wide receiver. I then wanted to define where league winners typically finish. What I noticed was that after the RB eight spot things started to flatten out a bit. Meaning your RB eight has traditionally given you X amount of points. Your RB nine has given you a pretty big dip in points scored from X. But the RB ten to drop off from the RB nine to the RB ten is not super significant, and it continues to be not super significant as you moved down rankings. Essentially, all I found was where your big advantage of both running back and wide receiver stops. That's why I was saying earlier this is a binary way of looking at whether or not a player is a league winner. That happened at the number eight spot for running backs and the nine spot for wide receivers.

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Speaker 2: So all top eight.

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Speaker 1: Running backs since twenty eleven were league winners and all top nine wide receivers were league winners. Again, I'm doing things this way because it's an easier way to think about opportunity cost. If you're in a draft and you think of this in terms of I likely can get a league winner here or I likely can't get a league winner here, then it makes your decision to take a quarterback a little bit easier. If your probability of getting a league winner is small, then you can get your quarterback. So the question now is where if top eight running backs typically been drafted, and the same question applies for top nine wide receivers. What I found was what we'd sort of expect, A very solid sixty three percent of top eight running backs over the last nine years were drafted in the top thirty, just eleven percent of them were drafted between picks thirty one and fifty, and twenty six percent of them were drafted after pick fifty. That twenty six percent number may seem high, but keep in mind that a lot of running backs get drafted late, and this includes free agents too, are guys who weren't drafted. Your hit rate sucks after the first few rounds of drafts, even if there's a decent percentage of running backs that produce. The numbers are pretty similar at wide receiver too. Fifty nine percent of top nine wide receivers drafted in the top thirty, and then between picks thirty one and fifty you see just eleven percent of them get drafted. So what this data is telling you is that league winning players or how I'm defining league winning players, but league winning players are generally drafted in the top thirty A lot of them are. There's a substantially higher hit rate at running back and wide receiver during the first two and a half rounds of drafts. What that means is that if you're taking Lamar Jackson or any other quarterback that early, even if you believe that they're giving you a strong point edge, you have to recognize that your opportunity cost is incredibly high. It doesn't start to drop until the end of the third round and into the fourth round. Now, another point to make with all of this, which makes it risky to get Lamar Jackson is that if you're the first person to draft a quarterback, you run the risk of really devaluing that pick. When you're drafting, you want to be the person that starts a draft run, not the person who finishes it. If you get Lamar Jackson first and the next quarterback doesn't go off the board for six more round, then you could have been able to wait a lot longer to get Lamar Jackson. Patrick Mahomes six rounds after Lamar Jackson is.

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Speaker 2: A way way better value.

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Speaker 1: And if you're in a draft room with savvy late round quarterback drafters, then you run that risk. You run the risk of devaluing Lamar Jackson. You know, this is part of the reason why I'd probably rather actually draft Patrick Mahomes in most cases this year than Lamar Jackson, because Mahomes is likely gonna go after Jackson, so you don't have to be the one to make that first move. And my projections actually have Mahomes scoring just six fewer Fantasy points than Lamar Jackson. And that's really my take specifically on.

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Speaker 2: Early round quarterbacks.

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Speaker 1: If you're gonna get one this year, I think Mahomes is the better value, especially if you're not sure when teams are gonna pounce and get quarterbacks in your draft, and that sweet spot to get an elite quarterback is likely in the middle of the fourth round, just given opportunity cost.

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Speaker 2: Yes, the data says.

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Speaker 1: More in the middle of the third round to the late third round, but going in the middle of the fourth you're giving yourself a little bit of a buffer to ensure you're making an optimal decision. But let's be honest, I'm likely not going to be drafting those two players in anything outside of an expert or in analyst draft where literally everyone drafts quarterbacks late. I actually got Lamar Jackson in the fourth round in the draft that I did with industry people earlier this month. If you follow the middle of the fourth round rule, you're probably not going to get Lamar Jackson or Patrick Mahomes this year, and you're probably going to continue following a late round quarterback strategy. And I'd agree in probably eighty to ninety percent of leagues out there, drafting your quarterback late is the route to go. Yet again this season. At the very least, you know it's a pretty safe way of drafting given the depth at the position. But in leagues where the managers are a little bit sharper, in leagues where a lot of them wait to get a quarterback, I think there's an argument now that getting more of that second tier a middle round quarterback makes a lot of sense. Historically, drafting a middle round quarterback has been a waste of time. The average points scored among quarterbacks ranked five through ten in average draft position has actually been lower than the average points scored by the QB twelve through the QB fifteen over the last nine years. Think about what that means. Your late round quarterbacks on average have actually outproduced middle round quarterbacks over the last decade. But the market is getting smarter. Years ago, given what Ryan Tannehill accomplished last year, we would have seen Tannehill be a top five quarterback in ADP this season, but instead he's a mid range QB two. Because people are understanding regression more, they understand how Tannehill accumulated points and then it wasn't totally sustainable. The market is also understanding the importance of rushing at the quarterback position. Years and years ago, on Number fire Sharp football analysis is Rich Reebar wrote an article and claimed that rushing quarterbacks were the Konami code of fantasy football. He wrote that article over a half decade ago, and people were just now really truly seeing that impact. Traditionally, we'd see a random great rushing season, or maybe a set of seasons if you're Cam Newton, but we wouldn't ever see the passing numbers to match the rushing ones at the quarterback position. Rushing numbers really strengthen a quarterback's fantasy total, but for that player to go over the top and be a Lamar Jackson type like we saw last year, he needs the passing element to his game too, And like I said, traditionally it hasn't been there until now the NFL has changed. We've not only got Lamar Jackson giving us insane rushing numbers, but Jackson gave us those insane passing numbers last year too. And we've got a handful of quarterbacks who have that type of ceiling. Maybe not a Lamar Jackson twenty nineteen ceiling, but a QB one or a QB two ceiling, and that's really all you're looking for with a fantasy football quarterback to give you a significant advantage at the position. But think of the quarterback landscape and think of the players who have that dual rushing and passing upside. Lamar Jackson obviously comes to mind. Patrick Mahomes and his underrated rushing ability also comes to mind. Kyler Murray, Dak Prescott, Russell Wilson, DeShawn Watson, maybe Josh Allen. Those are the guys who have that true difference making upside in fantasy football. The problem is that they're all being ranked that way. For the first time in my years of doing fantasy football analysis, the market seems super efficient at the quarterback position. Of course, I have my favorite late round quarterback choices. Ryan Tannehill is someone who has that rushing upside to go along with the passing upside. He's someone that you can target late, but he's not as safe and interesting as someone like Kyler Murray. He doesn't have the same type of profile as Russell Wilson or DeShawn Watson. This is where the late round quarterback strategy has gotten really, really interesting. Instead of us entering our draft rooms knowing that we'd be getting someone late, knowing that we could just draft loads and loads of running backs and wide receivers early to build depth and increase our chances of hitting on those players, we may have to start thinking differently. And why not think differently? Why not in leagues where a lot of fantasy managers are waiting on their quarterback, why not take one in the middle rounds? Because let me reveal something that a lot of you may not know. When I wrote the late Round Quarterback ebook back in twenty eleven and twenty twelve, I didn't write the book saying to draft a quarterback in round twelve or round thirteen, or even round eleven. Late at that time was round eight. It was where opportunity cost clearly was not significant. The difference between a round eight pick and a round eleven pick is not that significant, you guys. Taking on an opportunity cost in the eighth round is not a whole lot different than doing the same in the eleventh. And you know what's interesting. Back in twenty eleven, the QB twelve for the last hypothetical starter in your twelve team league. He was being drafted at pick eighty that's the middle of the seventh round. Last season. In twenty nineteen, Jamis Winston was the QB twelve. According to my fantasy league's ADP, he was falling off draft boys words at pick one hundred and eight pick eighty, where the QB twelve was drafted back in twenty eleven.

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Speaker 2: Pick eighty was where we saw the QB six last year.

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Speaker 1: If opportunity costs wasn't significant in round seven or round eight and twenty twelve when I published the late round quarterback, then why would it be significant in round seven or round eight today?

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Speaker 2: Sure, the quarterback position is deeper. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing the opposite end.

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Speaker 1: Taking on a middle round quarterback hasn't been profitable in the past, but it also hasn't been all that costly.

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Speaker 2: It just hasn't mattered.

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Speaker 1: But if we're cognizant to the fact that the market is getting a little bit sharper, and that the market is now paying more attention to mobile quarterbacks with passing upside, then we may want to think about our own philosophy shifting. I'm not ready to change my Twitter handle to Middle Round QB. Please don't take this the wrong way. Drafting quarterbacks late is still a very good approach, especially in particular formats. I'm merely saying that in the twenty percent of where everyone's sharp and everyone's ready to go with a late round quarterback, you can and should adjust. A late round quarterback a decade ago is a middle round quarterback today. The opportunity costing getting Kyler Murray or Dak Prescott in some leagues is not very high, and you should pounce on that opportunity because this is not a game of chicken. This is a game of value. That's gonna do it. For today's show, thanks to all of you for listening. If you've yet subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week.