623: How Players Rebound

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachera JJ zacher reson. What's up everyone.

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Speaker 2: It's jj zachar Esen and this is episode six hundred and twenty three of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in.

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Speaker 1: I sit on this.

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Speaker 2: Show all the time and talk about how there are two major parts to dynasty fantasy football. The first is actual player production. Of course, you need to have players who produce because you need to score fantasy points. You can never lose sight of that. But the second part is one that I think goes ignored far too often, and that's the market and how players appreciate and value year over year over year. The way I see it, you eventually need production. You'll eventually need to score a lot of fantasy points to win a title, but all the while, you want your dynasty roster to retain as much overall value as possible year after year after year. It's sort of like buying a home. Yes, you want the home to do what you need it to do. Maybe you want four bedrooms for your family, maybe you need at least two full bathrooms. That's your production, but you also want that home to gain value. You'd much rather have a home that does what you need it to do, all while gaining value with each passing year. And as I just said, I think the market value side of things that gets ignored far too often. Most fantasy analysis is based on how sustainable player's production is, when that same analysis should consider how sustainable a player's market value is. Today, we're going to completely push aside the production side of things. We're going to focus solely on the market. And by the market, i'm referring to average draft position, or in dynasty, the value of a player during a startup draft. I ask questions about the fantasy football market all the time. I'm a nerd about this stuff. Those are my shower thoughts deal with it. One question that's been on my mind recently is how do players rebound? But not on the production front. I'm not saying, hey, this guy really suck this year producing, is he gonna bounce back? I'm asking this on the market front. If a player drops a whole lot in average draft position doesn't matter. What does it tell us about that player's future market value?

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Speaker 1: Because honestly, guys.

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Speaker 2: The market is typically sharper than you think we can utilize it to fine edges, for sure, but the market isn't this irrelevant thing that we should completely ignore. So that's what today's Study An episode is all about. I'm gonna look at players who saw drops an average draft position, and I'm gonna look at what happened next. And let me tell you some of the numbers that you're gonna hear today. They're shocking. They were to me at least now before we get into the study soccer fans, this season, Fandling Captain Morgan are teaming up to give you a one of a kind soccer contest, introducing Captain Morgan's Soccer Pick Them, a weekly fantasy contest that's entirely free to play. The contest is simple. All I have to do is answer ten questions about Captain Morgan and that week's soccer matchup. People with the most correct answers will earn their s of cash prizes. Head over to Fandle and enter the Captain Morgan's Soccer Pick Them Today. Must be twenty one years or older to participate. For more details as at fandle dot com or download the Fandle Fantasy app. Eligibility restrictions apply and don't forget to make your game day more delicious and sub in the captain. Okay, so let's talk about this study. I really leaned on my friends at Dynasty League Football dot com for information here. You guys need to check out what they're doing over there, because you can uncover a lot of the trends that I'm talking about today.

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Speaker 1: You can do it yourself.

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Speaker 2: But this entire study was thanks to DLF single quarterback average draft position data, which anyone can access. I looked at January data through the years, or since twenty fourteen, and I looked at what happened when players saw significant decreases in average draft position or ADP. Because again, the question I'm asking here is what happens to players when they see a dip in ADP? Do they ever rebound? Do they ever get their market value back? The problem going into this was that I didn't really know what significant decrease in eight ADP meant. If a player drops by twenty spots in an average draft position year over year, is that a big dip? I mean, we have no idea without context, right, So what I did was I group players into buckets. I looked at what happened to a player's cost, if it fell ten to nineteen spots, if it fell twenty to twenty nine spots, if it fell thirty to thirty nine spots, and so on. And that's in year over year average overall draft position, not positional ADP. So let's say a running back had an average draft position of fifteen one year. If he had an ADP of twenty four the next year, then he didn't hit the cutoff that I was looking for. If he had an ADP of twenty five, then he did because he dropped ten spots year over year. He fell into the drop ten to nineteen spots bucket. I also needed to cut off for the type of player that I was analyzing with a study like this. Someone who gets drafted like one hundred and seventieth overall is probably going to be more prone to big fluctuations in ADP. And we also don't care that much about picks that deep in the draft. So what I decided to do was look at players selected in the top one hundred of startup drafts. That way, we're focused on the more important players in dynasty. So we're looking at top one hundred players who saw significant drops in ADP from one year to the next.

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Speaker 1: Are we good? So far? Everyone following? Okay?

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Speaker 2: So the DLFADP dates back to twenty fourteen, so that's where I started. I went from twenty fourteen to twenty fifteen, to twenty sixteen and so on, seeing where players saw drops an ADP of ten or more, twenty or more, et cetera. The one thing I realized when doing this was that I couldn't just go all the way through twenty twenty one because there's not a lot of data past twenty twenty one, because it's only twenty twenty two right now. What I mean is the entire point to this study is to see how players rebound, so we have to give players enough time to actually rebound. If a player dropped fifteen spots in overall ADP from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two, we have no idea how that player rebounded, or if he even did, because he hasn't even played in twenty twenty two. So I wanted to give players enough time to be able to come back from a drop in ADP, which meant I stopped at twenty nineteen. So from twenty fourteen through twenty nineteen, I analyzed top one hundred players in DLF startup ADP, and I specifically focused on players who saw drops in ADP year over year. I want to be very clear how I approach this that everyone's on the same page before moving on. I know this isn't all that complicated, but it's better to over communicate these things than under communicate. The overall question here is what in the world happens to players when they see a drop in ADP, and more specifically, do players actually ever recover from a drop in ADP? Do they ever get back to their original average draft position. Let's take Trent Richardson in twenty fourteen as an example, just so we're all thinking about this the same way. In twenty fourteen, Richardson had an ADP over on DLF of about forty. He was being drafted fortieth overall in startup drafts, so he was a top one hundred player. The following year, his ADP was about one hundred and fifty seven, so he fell roughly one hundred and seventeen spots in average draft position year over year in the following years, So in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, and so on, Richardson didn't even have a startup ADP at all, so he never recovered back to his original ADP of forty. He actually never got back to his ADP of one hundred and fifty seven either. Now I broke down this data by position, and I want to start sharing this data by asking you a question. From twenty fourteen through twenty nineteen, we saw one hundred and nineteen running backs drafted in the top one hundred of startup drafts who then saw their ADP fall by ten or more spots the following year. So some of these running backs saw their ADP fall by eleven or twelve. Others saw a drop more substantially. Wherever you're at right now, maybe you're in the car driving home from work. Maybe you're at work trying to get your mind off the things. Wherever you're at, I want you to guess how many running backs out of those one hundred and nineteen who saw their ADP drop by ten or more, guess how many running backs were able to get back to their original ADP. So, if a running back had an ADP of thirty and the next year it was fifty, what are the odds that he eventually got back to thirty. How many of the one hundred and nineteen running backs got to their original ADP. How many of them fully recovered? I'll give you a second. I'm sure a lot of you guys guess something like twenty that twenty of the one hundred and nineteen running backs got back to their original ADP after falling ten or more spots, Because ten spots really is not that much. So there's got to be a handful of running backs and a ten to twenty drop range who recovered, right, Well, what if I told you that the answer was three, Because that's the answer. There have been three running backs in our sample out of one hundred and nineteen who saw a year over year ADP drop of ten or more who were actually able to get back to their original ADP. One of those players was Derrick Henry, one was Dalvin Cook, and one was oddly doing Duke Johnson. That's it, just two point five percent of our sample.

00:09:05
Speaker 1: Now.

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Speaker 2: I started with the running back position here because it was the most dramatic. It is the most dramatic of any positions in the study, and I wanted you guys to get sucked into this study like I did. But I think this actually does make a lot of sense. Intuitively, if a running back drops in ADP by ten or more, it's likely because he either had a bad season or he got hurt. No matter when that happens in a running backs career, chances are it's just going to be really tough for that running back to get back to his original ADP.

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Speaker 1: Like take JK. Dobbins.

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Speaker 2: He had an overall ADP of fourteen in January twenty twenty one. He had that type of ADP throughout last offseason. He then gets hurt and he misses the entire twenty twenty one season. Then in January of twenty twenty two, he's got an ADP that's twenty six overall. It fell by twelve spots despite his not playing. But that makes sense because number one, we don't know how well he's gonna recover, But number two, he just missed out on a year of playing. We know those years are limited at running back. He's an extra year older, and we know that running backs often don't give us that much production after their rookie contract. So yes, based on that, it's highly unlikely JK. Dobbins ever gets back to his ADP of fourteen getting back to that original ADP is what I'm calling a recovery. That player recovered and was able to get.

00:10:24
Speaker 1: Back to it.

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Speaker 2: So three of one hundred and nineteen running backs recovered back to their original ADP after dropping by ten or more spots a year over year. What about the other positions, Well, in our sample of players from twenty fourteen through twenty nineteen who fell in ADP by ten or more, we had one hundred nineteen running backs, as I just said, thirty one quarterbacks, one hundred and forty eight wide receivers, and thirty tight ends. So you're probably wondering what those recovery rates look like.

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Speaker 1: What quarterback?

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Speaker 2: Of the thirty one who fell by ten or more in ADP, only four of them were able to fully recover. That's a recovery rate of twelve point nine percent. At tight end it was three of thirty or ten percent. A wide receiver it was ten of one hundred and forty eight or six point eight percent. So running back had the worst recovery rate. But these numbers are pretty shocking across the board. It's very rare for any top one hundred player in fantasy football to fall and startup ADP by ten or more spots a year over year and actually get back to his original ADP. So you're probably thinking, now, okay, JJ, but what about players who dropped by ten to nineteen spots versus players who drop by like fifty or more. There's got to be a difference there, right. Generally speaking, yes, if a player dropped by ten to nineteen spots in year over year ADP, he generally had better odds to get back to his original ADP than if he dropped by like sixty spots. For example, two of the four quarterback recoveries in this sample came from the ten to nineteen bucket. In the end, thirty three percent of quarterbacks who fell in ADP by ten to nineteen spots were able to get back to their original ADP. So that wasn't too bad. When you look at the next tier or quarterbacks who fell by twenty to twenty nine, that rate falls to twenty five percent. Thirty to thirty nine was fourteen point three percent. And then we've never seen a quarterback get back to his original ADP after falling forty or more spots. And remember these are all top one hundred players by ADP. So if a quarterback had an ADP of like seventy and the next year it was one hundred and ten, we've never seen a quarterback like that get back to his ADP of seventy, at least not in our sample. At tight end, it's pretty similar, but in our sample, a tight end who fell by thirty or more spots never fully recovered, and running back was similar to but with lower recovery rates. In our samples, zero running backs got back to their original ADP after falling by thirty or more spots zero, and only six point three percent of them who fell between twenty and twenty nine spots were able to get back to theirs. Of the backs who fell ten to nineteen spots, just four eighteen percent got back to their original ADP. And then with wide receiver it was a little bit weird. We actually had zero full recoveries of the twenty one wide receivers who fell between ten and nineteen spots, but of the wide receivers who dropped fifty or more spots, seven and a half percent of them fully recovered. I think the main takeaway is still that if a player drops by ten to nineteen spots, it's still really bad news, but it's not as bad as if they were to fall by thirty or more, at least at the non wide receiver positions. Another thing that was pretty evident in this data was at the higher the ADP, the tougher the recovery. If a player was ranked in the top twenty five before his ADP drop, he had a much much lower recovery rate. In fact, zero quarterbacks, tight ends, and wide receivers who fell ten or more spots after being ranked in the top twenty five got back to their original ADP after falling, and only one running back did. Almost all of the movement happened after pick twenty five, which makes sense because it's really hard for a player to maintain a high ADP. When he falls out of that high ADP range, chances are he's not going to climb back now. The last iteration of this that I wanted to share was whether or not a player recovered to his new ADP. In other words, if a running back started at an ADP of seventy and then he fell to an ADP of one hundred and ten, does he ever get back to that new ADP? Does he typically get back to that ADP of one hundred and ten, or is it just.

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Speaker 1: A free fall?

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Speaker 2: To put this another way, I want to see if the ten plus drop in ADP was the start of a trend. Perhaps it was a signal that the player would just never even remotely get back to his original spot. And generally speaking, that happened more often than not. In total, forty five percent of quarterbacks were able to maintain their ADP after the drop. So a quarterback fell by ten or more spots and he was able to maintain that new ADP forty five percent of the time. That was by far the highest of all positions. Tight end it was thirty percent, wide receiver twenty four percent, running back twenty one percent. So what that tells us is that when a player at any position falls by ten or more spots and startup ADP, chances are he's going to keep falling. It's not a guarantee players like Joe Mixon happen, but if you're playing the odds, you should bet on that initial drop being the start of a trend. Now, I just threw a lot of data at you. Let's quickly recap players generally don't get back to their original startup ADP when they fall by ten or more spots in ADP year over year, no matter where they were drafted in the top one hundred, the degree in which they fall does matter. If a player drops by thirty or more spots, his odds of recovering are a lot worse than a guy who falls by like ten to nineteen. But don't let that overshadow the fact that a drop of even ten spots is typically the start of a bad trend at each position. It probably matters least a quarterback and most at running back, but it's a common theme for all positions in fantasy football, and we can use that knowledge to our advantage. We're going to have a list of players each year who fall by ten or more spots in ADP. We can literally use that list as a starting point for players to trade away in dynasty and that's pretty cool. But I do want to add to that statement. You have to keep in mind what I said at the top. This is a study purely about market value. Players can still be productive despite slipping in market value. You just ideally want productive and appreciating assets in fantasy football. So from that perspective, I do think this study means a ton for a rebuilding team. When you're rebuilding, you should absolutely avoid players who have just fallen in ADP by ten or more spots. You may see it as a buying opportunity because they're now cheaper, but chances are they're not going to appreciate in value, and when you're a rebuilding team, you care more about the market value than actual production.

00:16:52
Speaker 1: You need your team to get better year over year. But I don't think the players who drop by ten or more spots are total avoids for everyone, because you have to keep in mind that player values reset. James Connor is a really good example of this. Back in twenty nineteen, he had a startup ADP of nineteen that fell to fifty two and twenty twenty, so technically that should have signaled that he wasn't going to get close to that ADP of nineteen ever again, and he hasn't. In January twenty twenty one, that ADP fell once again to about one hundred and seven, and in this past year, which to be fair, this ADP is before the new contract, but in January twenty twenty two, Connor had an ADP of one oh two.

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Speaker 2: Just because Connor fell in ADP back in twenty nineteen to twenty twenty doesn't mean that you absolutely need to avoid him now, at least based on this study. This is more about being reactive to the one season where that occurs, though, as it did share typically it's the start of a trend for players. And of course, guys, this is not fool proof. Nothing in fantasy football is. Had you followed this method, you would have missed out on buying into Deebo Samuel or Cooper Cup last year. It just so happens that the two biggest outliers within this method and within this data set, they occurred in twenty twenty one. That's gonna happen, though probably not to the same degree as Samuel and Cupp, and to be fair, wide receivers see bigger bounce backs than running backs. Two. But I don't think a couple of examples take away from the bigger picture here, and that bigger picture is that when players see dips in ADP, it is a bad sign for their future ADP. It may not be a bad sign for future production, but it's definitely a bad sign for ADP for market value, and we know the two are correlated, so what's that mean for this season? Well, I think it's easiest to start at running back because we know those are the players who tend to get crushed by this the most. There are a ton of running backs who are in the top one hundred last year who then saw their ADP fall by thirty or more in January twenty twenty two. Remember, in our data set, we never saw running back recover from that type of drop. Those running backs, in no particular order, Zach Moss, Kenyan Drake, Miles Gaskin, Chris Carson, Ronald Jones, Kareem Hunt, James Robinson, Miles Sanders, Clyde Edwards, Zilaire, and Josh Jacobs. Again, this doesn't mean that those players won't be productive or will never be productive again. It does tell us that they're highly highly unlikely to ever get back to their original ADP, and the majority of those running backs won't even get back to their new ADP. So if you're rebuilding, I would consider each one of those players a cell candidate. Now, using that same filter for wide receivers, we get players like DeAndre Hopkins, Robert Woods, Juju Smith, Schuster, Laviska Schanolt, Kenny Galladay, and Michael Thomas. There are even more of them, but I can't read all of them on this show. I'll plan on setting some information about this in my newsletter, though, so make sure you're subscribed to it by going to Late Round dot com. Now, the way I'd approach this is to then look at these players and then go back to Dynasty League Football dot Com and look at their trade finder tool. You can see recent deals that have gone down with the players that we're talking about. So with Michael Thomas, for example, there was a recent deal where he and Damian Harris were traded for Elijah Moore.

00:20:06
Speaker 1: Brilliant.

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Speaker 2: That's the right kind of move to make in this environment, especially if you're more of a rebuilding team who needs assets to gain value. Elijah Moore is that kind of player. Someone also traded Josh Jacobs for Amen Ross Saint Brown. Again, if your goal is asset appreciation, then that is absolutely perfect. I talked all about how I viewed Saint Brown on last week's Mailbag episode, but he's likely to maintain decent value year over year, whereas Jacobs is unfortunately part of the group who fell thirty plus spots in ADP year over year. Josh Jacobs is unlikely going to see an adp of what he saw in twenty twenty one. Ever, again, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't get Jacobs in redraft or anything. It's just taking advantage of the market trends in Dynasty.

00:20:49
Speaker 1: Now.

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Speaker 2: I don't know about you, guys, but this data was pretty eye opening to me. The fact that these players very rarely get back to their original average draft positions. It does make sense, but at the rates that we saw, especially running back, I thought that was pretty surprising. So moving forward, this should be part of our process. This should be something that we always keep in mind. That's going to do it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you had to subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and over it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Again, big thanks to my friends at Dynasty League Football dot com for the data for today's show. Really really appreciate it. Otherwise, everyone, I will catch you on Friday with the Weekly Mailbag show.