639: Insights From Building Projections

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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 Zacharyeson in this episode six hundred and thirty nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by a FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. I build projections every year, but I don't use projections the way some of you probably think. To me, projections are a guide. They're a way for you to get a better understanding of situation, and they're a way for you to spot really glaring miss prices in the market. But there's a lot of variants in fantasy football. Projections provide you with the most likely outcome for a player, but they don't capture the range of outcomes very well, and some players range of outcomes are a lot greater than others based on the information that we have. I don't build projections to plug into a value over replacement level formula for my drafts. It's not unhelpful to do that. But I go through the exercise of building projections because, like I said, you can really learn a lot about player situations by doing that. I do this episode every year in April. I build out my projections, then players get drafted during the NFL Draft and I modify them, and then here in May I talk about some of the things that were interesting, and then I jotted down while these stat lines were being created, while I was building projections. My plan is to share some of those insights today before doing that, those sports fans, there's no better time than today to sign up for Fandle Fantasy. For users who have it, to make a deposit on Fandle Fantasy, you can deposit today to receive two free entries. All you can do is deposit a minimum of ten dollars into your fandldfs account and you will be instantly rewarded with two free vouchers. Is a limited time offer, so be sure to deposit now and play for free. Head over to fandle dot com or download the Fandle Fantasy app today. Eligibility restrictions apply. Go to fandle dot com or download the fandel app for more details. Let's talk about Deebo Samuel, because he's polarizing and my projections don't like him as much as the consensus does. As it stands today, Deebo is the wide receiver eleven in PPR formats, according to my projections, he's getting selected at wide receiver seven. Though in early Best Ball drafts that may not seem significant, but when we're talking about the early rounds, it's pretty significant. The opportunity cost is pretty high. Deebo's season last year was a tale of two halves. During his first eight games, he averages one rush attempt per contest, and he was averaging twenty point seven PPR points per game during that stretch. During his final eight games, those rushing numbers rose to six point six rush attempts per game, and his point per game total jumped by a full point. I think there's this belief that Samuel was only a true fantasy stud when he was seeing work on the ground last year, and that's not really true. He was dominant during the front half of twenty twenty one. He was averaging over a thirty three percent target share per game. That's part of the problem with Deebo's projection for twenty twenty two, At least part of it. Is he going to continue seeing the kind of work on the ground that he was seeing down the stretch last year. Now this is purely speculation on my part, but the issues that he's having with San Francisco right now, there's a chance it has to do with that fact that he either wants a ton of money or he doesn't want to be used the way that he was used last year, because it's gonna likely shorten his career. And I wouldn't blame him for that at all. Now, even if he maintains the rush attempts that he was seeing last year, it's hard to imagine a scenario where he's keeping up the touchdown production. He scored eight rushing touchdowns on fifty nine attempts last year. Now he's Deebo Samuel. He's a beast. I'm not discounting that, but a rushing touchdown in every seven point four rush attempts is still out of this world efficient. Not that this is in apples to apples comparison, but since twenty eleven, wide receivers have scored touchdowns on average on every twenty eight rush attempts. Samuel was almost four times as efficient as that. So then we jumped to the target share problem. He dominated looks in that San Francisco offense last year, especially during the front half of the season. Like I said, we shouldn't forget though that George Kittle was a little bit banged up during that time, and Brandon Ayuk was not getting starter snaps. He wasn't quite there despite what he did as a rookie, Deebo can hit a high target share. That's not what I'm arguing or saying here. My argument is that he's very unlikely to hit the kind of share that he was seeing when he dominated fantasy football without the rushing production. You've got to look at the team level here too. Trey Lance is a big deal now. Deebo's splits last year with and without Trey Lance showed that he was below his average with Lance playing, But there's a lot of noise to that. The bigger picture is what's more important. And as I talked through on episode five hundred and ten last year, mobile quarterbacks are rarely a good thing for their teammates, and it makes sense they gobble up a larger share of their offense for themselves. Not only in that, but San Francisco likes to run the football and that's reinforced when you've got a mobile quarterback that can then limit receiving volume. It's not that I dislike Deebo. I love Deebo. Samuel the player. He's amazing, but I do think that you can make the argument right now that he's being a little bit overdrafted and his projection shows that. Now, I'm gonna go from a controversial topic to one that absolutely no one cares about or is talking about. But I have to at least say it because it jumped out to me. Daniel Jones looks good in my projections. I mean, maybe not good, but he looks way better than I expected. Jones runs the risk of potentially not even starting the whole year if things go bad, and I'm definitely not advocating you draft him as your starter. There's no need to do that. But let's dig into this. The Giants sucked last year on offense, Like they were just terrible. They only scored twenty three offensive touchdowns or one point three to five touchdowns per game. That was the seventh lowest per game average since twenty eleven, and since twenty eleven eighteen teams averaged one and a half offensive touchdowns per game or less. Remember, the Giants were at one point three to five, so they're part of that group, as was Jacksonville last year. That gives us sixteen teams to hit that low of a mark with next season data. Among those sixteen, only one of them saw drop in touchdowns year over year, and that drop was by one total touchdown. On average, those teams saw an increase of point eight two touchdowns per game, which across a seventeen game season equates to almost fourteen touchdowns. The picture I'm trying to paint here is that it's going to be incredibly difficult for the Giants to be as bad as they were last year offensively. I just shared touchdown numbers with you, but you could look at something like yards per play too, and that's just based on what we naturally see happen year over year with teams. Bad teams make changes, and those changes often result in better numbers. That's what we've got with the Giants. Brian Dables in town. Not to say that Daniel Jones is going to be Josh Allen, because he likely will not be Josh Allen, but Dable was Josh Allen's offensive coordinator when he made the jump. That certainly can't hurt the Daniel Jones argument. And Jones himself not that bad last year all things considered. He ranked seventeenth in points per game. Last year, among quarterbacks with eight or more games played, he averaged as many points per game as Derek Carr did, and that was on fewer than one passing touchdown per contest. The Giants don't have bad weapons. They also don't have Jason Garrett anymore. Daniel Jones makes a ton of sense as a QB three in super flex or Bestball formats this year. If his price holds, Michael Pittman might be the most undervalued potential stud in fantasy football. A lot of people in early Bestball draft seem to realize that, but there are a lot of casual fantasy players out there who probably don't realize that. As a second year player last season, Pittman was pretty good. He was a low end wide receiver two in PPR points per game, and most importantly, he saw a target share of almost twenty six percent. He's moved exactly as you'd like to see a player move from year one to year two. He dealt with some injury issues as a rookie, but on a per game basis, his target shair was still in that fourteen percent range. And then we saw the breakout happen to some degree last year with his twenty six percent target share, you may be wondering why Pittman wasn't even better last season. Part of the reason is because the Colts were so run heavy. They had a pass to rush attempt ratio that was barely above one last season, meaning they passed it just a tiny bit more than they ran it. They were twenty eighth in football in pass rate, but when in neutral game scripts that number jumped to seventeenth and that's actually more predictive that number is to next season pass rate. So the Colts with Matt Ryan could see more volume through the air, and even if they don't, even if they continue with their pass rate, Pittman should still be able to hit strong numbers in his third year. The Colts didn't do that much at pass catcher this offseason at least, that could really hurt Pittman in redraft. Pittman seems like a pretty safe option and my projections are quite bullish on him. Now, speaking of passing volume, let's have a chat about the Baltimore Ravens. A lot happened last year for Baltimore that helped guide them to a more pass heavy approach. They lost their running backs, their defense was really banged up. They drafted Rasha Bateman. In turn, the Ravens were twenty third in pass rate. That's far different than what we've seen from the other two seasons in this Lamar Jackson era. I think that alone tells us that they're probably not going to be as pass heavy this season. But what really compounded and helped the passing attack in twenty twenty one was the number of plays that they ran. Baltimore was twenty third in pass rate, but they were ninth in pass attempts, and it's because they ran by far the most plays in the league. They're running a lot of plays. So even though their pass rate was low, volume both in rushing and passing was pretty strong. They were ninth and pass attempts, Like I just said, they were third in rush attempts. To give you guys some context, Baltimore's year over year plays per game rate increased by the sixth highest amount since twenty eleven, and since that point in time, Baltimore's plays per game last year was eleventh highest. You probably know where I'm taking this if you look at the top two twenty seasons since twenty eleven and plays per game assuming we've got next season data. Zero of those teams ran more plays the following year, none, and the average drop in plays run was four per game, meaning we should probably expect Baltimore to run about four fewer plays per game, which makes some sense because that's close to their average with Lamar Jackson in the two years prior to last season. Four plays per game is not some insignificant number. It can have enough of an impact to make you not want to buy into the team's pass catchers as much. Now. I still like Rashad Bateman. I still like Mark Andrews. Andrews is still my tight end two in redraft. He's still fine, He's still gonna ball out. But it does mean that those players need higher target shaars than they did last season in order to perform the way that they did last year, all else being equal, at least Andrews Bateman's a little bit different of a case, but with Baltimore, it's definitely something to keep in mind because they could get more conservative again with the defense and the running back room being healthier. Now that all leads me to Hollywood Brown. With the Ravens pass catchers, I think it more so hurts the secondary options in that offense rather than Mark Andrews and Rashad Bateman, since both of them have an opportunity to really capture a large target share in that offense. But the Marquise Brown situation is really interesting to me, as we know a lot of managers draft off of what happened the previous season, and that previous season production is not irrelevant with Brown. He's coming off a year with one hundred and forty five targets in a bottom half wide receiver two performance in PPR points per game. Now he's going to Arizona to play with Kyler Murray. It can only get better, right Well, he's being drafted as a top twenty wide receiver. I don't want to make this episode about how I really view these guys versus the market, but it's kind of impossible to find interesting things with projections without comparing those projections to how people were drafting players. And right now, in Best Ball drafts, Brown goes as a top twenty wide out even with the DeAndre Hopkins suspension. My projections don't see it. In twenty twenty one, Marquise Brown saw twenty four and a half percent of Baltimore's targets on a per game basis, because he played sixteen games and not seventeen, that's over a twenty six percent target share. That's a very high number, and it's one that came within an offense that I just talked about that ran a lot of plays. Last season. Baltimore actually had more pass attempts than Arizona did. Baltimore ranked ninth with six hundred and eleven. Arizona was eighteenth with five hundred and ninety one. According to Pro Football Focuses expected Fantasy points statistic, Brown did play a couple of points per game below expectation last year, so he has some room for growth, and maybe that's why people were bolish. But this is a really good example of what I talked about on the Mailbag show this past week. Favorable regression doesn't mean you automatically target a player in your fantasy draft. It doesn't automatically mean the player is going to be better. Because Brown's in a new offense with new competition, he should lead that team in targets this year now that Hopkins is suspended. But you can't just lock him into a twenty six percent target chair like you saw with the Ravens last year, and remember that was on a team that threw the ball more last year than Arizona did. That allowed for more overall volume. It's not that I think Brown is bad, but he's closer to wide receiver thirty in my projections than he is wide receiver twenty, and that means the projections CM is overvalued. One thing that projections can be useful for is seeing where there's a drop in tier. If you go from one player to another and look at the player's point per game projection, when there's a big drop, that's when you know that there's a potential tier break. At running back, that initial tier break is pretty clear. I've got Jonathan Taylor and Christian McCaffrey in their own tier at the top, or my projections do, and then at wide receiver it's another two players. And you could argue that those two players at wide receiver have a bigger edge over their position than Taylor and McCaffrey have, but it's Cooper Cup and Justin Jefferson. Tight end is a little bit trickier. The projections do have Travis Kelcey as the tight end one, and then Mark Andrews is the tight end two Kyle Pitts, George Kittle, and Darren Waller. But the point projections seem kind of scrunched together, meaning that edge at tight end doesn't look as promising as it's looked over the last few seasons. We saw that a little bit last year, but this high level look could be the start of focusing more in a later round tight end approach this year. I don't want to definitively say that, but by projections seem to be calling for that, and I wanted to give it a shout out on this episode. Now, the last thing I want to mention surrounds the Bengals and specifically Joe Burrow. When I did these initial projections, I noticed that Jamar Chase was a top five wide receiver, but he wasn't really in that top tier of wide receivers with Cup and Jefferson. I don't think that's much of a take though, and T Higgins looks fine versus ADP two, So where Chase and Higgins are getting drafted makes sense makes enough sense to me. But then there's Joe Burrow in early Best Ball drafts. Burrow's the QB six off the board. He's the QB twelve in my projections. That was one of the most glaring things that I know. Notice at the quarterback position. Why does there seem to be such a difference there? What are my projections seeing? Well, it's first realized that Burrow finishes QB ten last year in points per game. We shouldn't just use previous season finishes to justify ranking a player in a certain spot the following year, but it's good context just generally have. It's not like Burrow was QB three and my projections now all of a sudden see hi as QB twelve. Usually I can pinpoint something and just say this is what the projections are seeing that the market is not seeing. Like a quarterback, I could usually just pinpoint touchdown rate because that's something that regresses year over year, and while six and a half percent touchdown rate for Burrow may be tough to repeat, that's just part of it. There seem to be a lot of smaller things that could just slightly regress for Burrow this year, like that touchdown rate, or like his yards per attempt rate that was tenth best since the turn of the century. It's a lot of those things. I understand he has great weapons. It doesn't mean sustaining those lofty numbers as easy, though, and for the most part, those Cincinnati weapons stayed relatively healthy last year. There's also some slightly different competition for Burrow at quarterback this year. Russell Wilson's now in Denver. Jalen Hurts is better weapons. I mean, honestly, someone like Jalen Hurts has way more potential to break Fantasy football this year than Joe Burrow does. Hurts is QB four in my projections, but he's often being drafted after Burrow. I do think, though, that should correct itself as we move through the summer and closer to the season. So Burrow right now seems very overrated based on my projections, and since he's a popular player for good reason, I felt like that was a necessary thing to call out. But that's it. Those are some of the more interesting things that I noticed when creating projections this year. And by the way, if you're curious about the projection building process a little bit more, I actually did an episode on that very topic a couple of years ago. It's episode three hundred and seventy three that should help you wrap your head around things even more. But that's gonna do it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got to subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. As a reminder, the Late Round Draft Guide is available for pre order right now over on Lateround dot com. It's a season long guy that launches on July first, and it digs into a lot of the strategic concepts that I talk about on this show, and then on top of that, I'll have the typical stuff like favorite values, favorite Late Round dart throws, and more. It'll be updated and sent to your email inbox every single week once it launches, so check it out. Preorder it now for nineteen ninety nine before it jumps to twenty four to ninety nine in July. But thanks everyone. I'll talk to you later in the week with the Mailbag Show.