969: Mailbag 1/31/25

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha, j J Zacher Reason. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Eson in this episode nine and sixty nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in before you getting the mail back questions today. Did you know that you can already draft basketball teams for the twenty twenty five season. You can join big board contests right now over on underdog for all different entry prices. It may sound crazy to draft this early, but the contest will close before the NFL Draft, so everyone's working with the same information. You just can get an edge right now if you know this draft class. Well, I'm not quite there yet, but I will be soon and I'll be posting my rankings on the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon when I am there. To get ready for that, make sure you sign up on Underdog Fantasy dot com and use pro Late Round when you sign up. That'll get you a nice deposit bonus up to one thousand dollars. It's promo code Late Round and also the Late Round Prospect Guide is available for pre order right now as well. Just head to Lateround dot com. Make that purchase. It'll give you everything you need to crush your rookie drafts this year, but the information in it can definitely help with season long and best ball formats too. You can see samples of what you get over on lateround dot com. If you're still deciding the price for the Prospect Guide. It's currently fourteen ninety nine. It's going to rise to nineteen ninety nine once it launches on March tenth. Then it's going to be updated after the NFL Draft happens. That's all on lateround dot com. Check it out. Now, let's get to these mailbag questions. The first question this week is from the Polymath on Blue Sky. It says, are there any numbers that support this newfound success with rookie tight ends? Are we witnessing just an outlier driven by pure talent or is there any information we can use moving forward? So a couple of years ago, in the Late Round Draft Guide, I had Sam Laporta as a late round dart throw. And I'm not saying that to just pat myself in the back. I'm saying it because of the logic that was used. People were fading rookie tight ends because we hadn't seen strong rookie tight ends in the past. It was a rarity. The problem with that logic, though, and this is what I wrote about, was that teams didn't usually give their rookie tight ends a whole lot of run. They were running a ton of routes, but the players who were running routes they were totally fine when it came to fantasy scoring. Now, I know that sounds like such an obvious and simple take, but it's true. Since twenty eleven, we've only had twenty three rookie tight ends hit three hundred routes run in a season. In total, those tight ends average a yards per round run rate that was only about point one yards lower than veteran tight ends who had that many routes run. Veterans are naturally going to be a little bit better than rookies, but when rookie tight ends get run, they're still able to score some points. They're able to be relatively efficient. Now in recent history, teams are giving their rookie tight ends a little bit more love. Over the last two years, we've had five rookie tight ends hit three hundred routes run. Now, that's an arbitrary number. But it gives us an idea of a player who's getting a decent amount of playing time. Since twenty nineteen, so the last six seasons, we've had thirteen of those players, thirteen rookie tight ends with three hundred or more routes run. In the eight years prior to that, there were ten of those types of players. So it's going from one point three of those tight ends per season to two point two of them. That's not nothing. So we're seeing a slight uptick and just the sheer number of guys who are running a high number of routes as rookies. But your question is being asked, I'm sure because in twenty twenty four we had Brock Bowers. In twenty twenty three we had Sam Laporta, And if I look at my prospect model, I think what we're seeing is just a combination of more opportunity and talent. Sam Laporta graded out really well as a prospect, which is why I called him out in that twenty twenty three draft. Guy in the first place, Brock Bauers was elite. Even Kyle Pitts, I know he's really really underperformed, but as a rookie he was great from a fantasy perspective, and that's because he got opportunity and he was a good prospect. So I personally think it's just that simple teams are using these guys more, and in recent history we've had some really really good prospects. I wouldn't just draft a rookie tight end just because he's a rookie tight end, because Brock Bauers and Sam Laporta really buck the trend. You still want, and arguably need, the higher end profile attached to that tight end for him to be more than a streaming type. This question is from Matt on Patreon. It says, how would you approach Terry McLaurin in Dynasty? On one hand, he's now attached to an incredible quarterback and the results were awesome. The other, he's going to be thirty and it seems doubtful the touchdown luck will continue. So right now, Terry McLaurin is the wide receiver twenty six on Keep Trade Cut. He's ahead of DK Metcalf, DJ Moore, Brandon Ayuk, Mike Evans, Jaden Reid. He's right below Jalen Waddle and George Pickens. Now I haven't updated my Dynasty rankings for February just yet at the time of this recording, But I'd probably say that's a few spots too high, and it has nothing to do with how special Terry McLaurin is and this new connection that he has with Jayden Daniels. But as you said, he's twenty nine, he's going to be thirty in September, so to at least question how long he's going to be able to sustain the production. But I actually don't think that's the main reason that he's more of a cell than a bye. I think touchdowns are inflating how people view Terry McLaurin right now in all formats. In twenty twenty four, mclaurin's yard per out run rate, it was really good, but it wasn't anything that we hadn't seen from him before. Three point three percent target share again, very strong, but it was right in line with what we typically see from Terry McLaurin. The fact is Terry McLaurin had a career year with almost sixteen pper points per game because he scored thirteen touchdowns. He never had more than seven receiving touchdowns in a season before twenty twenty four Now, let me put it to you this way. McLaurin accounted for over forty four percent of Washington's receiving touchdowns this year. We've only had thirty four seasons since twenty eleven where a wide out hit a forty percent touchdown share, and McLaurin went well above that mark. Of those thirty four players, the only guys that do it more than once since twenty eleven have been Mike Evans, DeAndre Hopkins, DJ Moore, DeVante Adams, Brandon Marshall, and Des Bryant. Now, is Terry McLaurin as good as those players? I think some of them for sure. But you have to keep in mind that McLaurin was doing this on a team that had twenty nine receiving touchdowns. DJ Moore's on that list while scoring seven and eight touchdowns because Carolina and Chicago had nothing going for them. We're talking like prolific touchdown scorers here, guys who are known for finding the end zone. Like that is what Des Bryant did, That's what Mike Evans does. And I'd feel better about this had McLaurin simply played at expectation with his touchdowns scoring. If he was getting absolutely fed in the right spots. But that wasn't the case. According to PFF's expected touchdowns formula, McLaurin ranked fifteenth this past year among all pass catchers and expected touchdowns. His expected touchdowns number was seven point seven. Again, he scored thirteen touchdowns. Now you might be sitting there and you're thinking, well, Jade Daniels is going to get better, and that raw total for Washington. As Jaden Daniels gets better, it's only going to increase. And I do agree that there's a good shot that Daniels gets better. He's probably the best rookie quarterback that we've ever seen. But don't discount how good the Commanders already were. In twenty twenty four, they were sixth in offensive touchdowns per game. They were top ten in passing touchdowns per game. So regression is likely going to hit for Terry McLaurin, and it feels like that side isn't being factored in quite enough. I don't think he's like a really, really obvious cell, but he's someone that I would at least see if I can get a nice return, like if I could get Jalen Waddle, who's barely ranked ahead of him right now and keep trade cut. I'd make that flip. This nast question is from Twitter. Is from at Go Vike zero nine to one zero. It says, with all the recent success of older running backs, what does it mean for our assumptions about running back AJPEX? So I'm not gonna lie. At first, I had this long winded answer for this one. I was thinking into the specific running backs who actually beat the typical age trends this past year, and I was gonna mention how we're probably overstating the number of older running backs who thrived in twenty twenty four, which I think is probably true. Derrick Henry, Aaron Jones, do a degree, James Connor, Alvin Kamara. They had good seasons past the standard AJPEX. They're at in age where we typically see running backs decline, and they gave us good numbers. But I want to take this question and talk about things more philosophically. Instead, I want to speak more about the application of this sort of thing. There's been a ton of research done on running back age. Most will say that at the very least, if we had wide parameters, most of the high end running back seasons will come from running backs who are twenty one to twenty eight years old. If you want to shrink that, maybe you could say twenty two to twenty three to twenty six to twenty seven. But we have to keep in mind that these are trends and we should never blindly follow trends alone. This is the exact same thing that happens in prospecting all the time, literally every year. A great example of it is with early declare wide receivers. I wrote about this in depth flash year. But when it comes to prospecting via numbers, people will swear by the fact that you should fade non early declare wide receivers because the trends tell you to. Since twenty eleven, and this is according to my database that I quickly queried, but since twenty eleven, we've had fifty three first round wide receivers who have had an opportunity to play at least three years in the league AKA they were drafted between twenty eleven and twenty twenty two. Now, of those fifty three, thirty eight of them were early declare wide receivers. That means that fifteen of them played more than three years of college ball. Now, of those thirty eight early declare wideouts their best season across their first three years in the league. Minimum eight games played averaged out to be thirteen and a half PPR points per game. So the ordinary first round wide receiver who was an early declare wide out saw best season on average of thirteen and a half PPR points per game across their first three years in the league. With non early declare wideouts, that number was ten point two. Now. I can go on and on about how early declare wide receivers are better than non early Declare wide receivers, and I actually do think there is some signal to it. Better players leave college earlier, generally speaking, but people always take that fact way too far. The truth is, since twenty eleven, a lot of the non early Declare wide receivers have just sucked. If you look at my breakout score metric, which I did revise a bit this year, the average breakout score among these wide receivers. Among non early Declare wide receivers was seventy seven point five. Among early Declare wide receivers, it's eighty eight, meaning the quality of player is just better. Because breakout score is something that does correlate to NFL success, this is exactly how I feel about AJPEX discussions. Just like early declare status, I do think there is some signal to it, because it's logical as players get older, they start to perform worse. Just like if a player enters the NFL at an earlier age, he's probably a little bit better than someone who goes back to school for another year. But you always have to look at the sample, and you have to look at the players that you're analyzing. It would be one thing if we had all these like aged running max guys who are twenty nine thirty years old. It'd be one thing if a whole bunch of them came from nowhere this past year and performed well. Instead, it's literal pro bowler after pro bowler. Some of them are Hall of Fame talents. A lot of the guys who performed well this year at an older age had already proven to be really really good talents. They've been borderline outliers when you consider their journey and what they've accomplished. There's nothing wrong with recognizing that running back age does matter, because when you get older, you get less athletic. You can't do the things that you used to do. I know ninety five percent of you listen to this show right now are nodding in a great like. I got really into running during my sophomore year of college. I was never a runner before that. I ended up running a five k at a six thirty pace at thirty six, almost thirty seven years old. I'm never gonna do that again in my life because I'm not nineteen years old anymore. It didn't take that much training for me to get to that point. So, of course, the running back age curve and when running back's peak, there's always going to be validity to it. What we witnessed this season was really good players being really good players, and we should be open to that possibility when we're looking at trends that include every player, not just the really good ones. The last question this week is from Jamie on Patreon. It says the twenty twenty four running back class left more questions than answers. How are you viewing players like Marshawn Lloyd, Jalen Wright, Trey Benson, and even Tyrone Tracy moving forward? I mean, the short answer is not very favor Now. I rework some stuff in the running back model over the last month. Nothing dramatically changed, but the way that I'm measuring breakout score did, so the scores are a little bit different than what they looked like a year ago, regardless of the gist of the class looks the exact same. Jonathan Brooks was the obvious and standalone RB one. Then there were a ton of question marks. I know the model still doesn't love Bucky Irving. I got a question about that. Actually, someone had emailed me asking about overfitting my models after I talked about Brian Thomas's zapp score getting better. I talked about that on the episode earlier this week, and it's a valid question given how I communicated that. But I want to be clear that Number one, it's pretty tough to overfit the sample that I'm working with. It's a lot easier when you have just a few years of player data. Number Two, part of what I work on every year is making sure that that kind of thing is not happening. I'm not going to tailor my prospect model just to fit one or two particular prospects because the model got those guys wrong. That's just how scouting goes. I'm not trying to be perfect, because that's impossible, But It's always fun to look back and see how hits like a pukainakua, how they look after some adjustments are made. Nikua, for example, does look better than he used to. I wish I had this current model back then, not that I was like low on him or anything. Anyway, the model's updated, which means that year two scores they're a little bit different too, because one of the major inputs in that year two model is ZAP score. Now, to put all that in another way, the year two model measures how well running back or wide receiver is going to perform a year two or year three of his NFL career, and one of the things that it looks at is how strong of a prospect that player was when he entered the league, or his ZAP score, because that still does get good signal after year one. In fact, prospects score alone, it's a better predictor of year two and year three success than year one points per game is that's at running back, not at wide receiver. Wide receiver totally different story anyway. Only one running back in last year's class has a year two score above ninety, and it's barely above ninety, and that's out of one hundred, and that running back is Bucky Irving. His score is being driven down by the ZAP model still not loving him, and then Tyrone Tracy is a few points behind that. Since twenty eleven, that's the first time that's happened, we only have two running backs with a score over eighty. Like after one year, the twenty twenty four running back class is looking like the worst one that we've seen in over a decade of Fantasy football. Now, obviously there's a lot of reasons for that. The quality of player wasn't very elite from last year's class. Obviously, we only had one really good prospect in my eyes, and that guy was coming off in ACL and he tore his ACL once again during his rookie year. So how I'm viewing those guys, it's not really favorably. I can tell you that out of the bunch that you mentioned, the Year two model likes Tyrone Tracy by far the most. But I'm always going to be hesitant to tell anyone to invest heavily in a Day three back like Tyrone Tracy. He showed really good traits in year one, but I don't know if any of those traits were elite Bucky Irving's just a different kind of player. If I'm strictly basing this off of talent and what the comps are saying and what the year two model is saying. Outside of Irving and Tyrone Tracy, I think Ray Davis might be the most interesting versus cost at this point. But in general, things are looking rough for last year's running back class. Fortunately, so far in my research, the twenty twenty five to one looks a lot better. That's it for today's show, though thanks to Alivy for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found. You don't follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. I'm going to check out Lateround dot com pre order that Prospect guy. Otherwise, everyone have a great weekend. I'll talk to you next week.