Late-Round Perspectives: Nathan Jahnke

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Speaker 1: Nathan Yanke is the lead fantasy football analyst and a senior software engineer at Pro Football Focus. He once served as the director of Analytics at PFF two. He's one of the best rankers in the game. He's got a degree in actuarial science, so he's mathematically smarter than all of us. These are his Late Round perspectives. This episode is sponsored by Underdog. Underdog is the easiest place to play fantasy sports, and they give you a ton of different games and contests to choose from each week. If you think drafting is over because the season started, you'd be wrong. You can draft teams over there each week in literal minutes right now. If you sign up an Underdog with promo code Late Round, you not only get a deposit offer of up to one thousand dollars, but you also get access to my rest of season rankings. Those will be emailed to you once you sign up. But when you sign up, you have to use promo code late Round. Head to Underdog Fantasy dot com or download the app to do so. Again. That's promo code Late Round. Now back to the show. Yeah, man, so, what what's the what's the jersey? You're wearing today. I know that you're you're a big are you are? Do you have a big jersey collection?

00:01:15
Speaker 2: Uh? Yeah, I've got about one or two for every team. I've got Austin ekleron right now. Typically, when there's one game a night, I try to wear a jersey of a team that I think is gonna win the game. So, right, the Chargers winning, so.

00:01:27
Speaker 1: You got you got the Chargers, You got the Chargers getting the dubs. So this this will just so people know, this will be released on Friday, so we're not we will not hold you to you know, the result of that game. But I've just cut right right exactly. I love hearing though about about like jersey collections. I'm a big well at least, I I feel like in my like the last like five seven years or so, I haven't been collecting as much as I used to. But I was very very into, especially like in my twenties, Like I was very into getting obscure players like as many like I have. Dude, I kid you not, I have a Selvin Young jersey in my closet right now, Like just the most random obscure Like what's what's the craziest one that you've got.

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Speaker 2: Well, like the ones that I've been getting a lot recently are either Walter Peyton Man of the Year winners or nominees, since like I've got some earlier in life and then find out some of the things some players did off the field, and I'm like, yeah, I don't want that jersey. So I'm thinking if I get Walter Payton Man of the Year either winners or nominees, those are generally players that are a well representation of the league that islayers.

00:02:39
Speaker 1: That's an incredibly logical and thoughtful way to buy jerseys honestly, that the like you more than likely won't be burned by them. You know, like you said, doing something stupid. I never even thought of doing something like that. I'm sitting here and I went. I remember I went, and I took a trip to to Soul, South Korea to visit a friend, like twelve thirteen years ago, really long time ago. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, oh, man, I'm gonna get That's where I got Selvin Young. I got a Dwayne Bow jersey there, you know, like I got an art arch it was. It was Archie Manning, Dwayne Bow and Selvin young. It was my it was my haul from South Korea when I went on that the just just the most wid I think. Another another random one I have is a Jeff Blake Bengals Jersey. So I, uh yeah, that's a that's like a that's like a last era or you know, two eras ago basically, uh player there. Uh speaking of Cincinnati, you're in You're in Cincinnati right.

00:03:29
Speaker 2: Oh, yep, I'm in Cincinnati. Once Chris collins Worth bought Propop Focus, they wanted me to move. So I've been in Cincinnati for about a decade now.

00:03:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was there. I think I when I left was about when you guys all started migrating and moving there, because I was there for about four years and I lived in I lived in Covington. Uh, so I was right there, you know, right across the river, so I know the city well. I always uh, I always struggled with it because I'm from pittsborn and raised Pittsburgh. I live in Charlotte now, but born in raised Pittsburgh. And I always it was sort of like because the two cities are comparable, just like as cities and as cultures and stuff like that, and so I would always tell people, because you have pride in the city that you grew up in, uh, that Cincinnati was literally just a worst version of Pittsburgh.

00:04:11
Speaker 2: You know.

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Speaker 1: That's that's that's that's the best way to describe what Cincinnati's like.

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Speaker 2: But I've always like, when I'm wearing the jerseys, if it's a Steelers game and I think they're gonna win, I'm like, Okay, don't go out with this jersey on just where while I'm on the inside. So yeah, yeah, that's get the wrong idea about me or something.

00:04:25
Speaker 1: That's right, That's right. I was. I was in Cincy during like the peak. Steelers were just beating the snot out of them every single year, but like the Bengals were good. It was like sort of in like the the end of the the Tara Lowens era, and you know, like like Ocho Cinco was there. I actually when I when I lived there, I went and got a free movie from Ocho Cinco. So shout out Chad Johnson or I guess I should just call Mocho Cinco.

00:04:50
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:04:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, my wife and I were at Newport on the Levee, right, you know, you know Newport on the Levee of course, and uh, we see this giant line of people and we're like, let's just follow what they're doing because they're just you know, there's like multiple floors to the movie theater that's there, and like the movie area that's there. And I'm like, let's just follow them. Like we're we're young, we got we got nothing else to do, and we followed, and it just so happened to be that it was o Jo Sinko and we went and we saw Bad Teacher the movie for free, and we got popcorn, we got some pop and it was a great experience. Saw them in the bathroom afterwards. Thanked them. But yeah, man, it was a fun time for uh, for for the Steelers Bengals rivalry, especially if you were on you know, the Pittsburgh side of that rivalry during that time. But yeah, so you've been at PFF for a long time now. I feel like, I mean, we've known each other for a decent amount of time. You've been at PFF throughout that entire time frame. I want to ask you, though, like where this all started for you? Where did you? And I do this with every guest because I think it's important to sort of have that groundwork foundation. But you know, where did you get the love for football, the love for fantasy football? Was it always there or was it I saw that you have a background, you have a degree in actuarial science. Yeah yeah, but like obviously there's this like love for math in you. So is that sort of what was the driver for you?

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Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, it was the math and stats. I grew up in Wisconsin at the peak of the Mic hom Gren area era when they won that Super Bowl, so that was part of it. Got invited to a fantasy football league in nineteen ninety nine when I was in middle school, so enjoyed that league. I ended up that was the first year that I watched the NFL draft, So ended up with Tory Hall, Edrin James Marshall. Fulk was traded right before the draft, so I'm like, okay, I know who these players are. Ended up with just a bunch of colts and rams and ran away with the league. So I hadn'ten playing fantasy football ever since. Then get to about college age. I thought I was going to get into like coaching and teaching, and then made the switch to actuary science because around that time, like Pro Football Reference had a blog on their site. At the time, a Football Outsiders was just getting start. Brian Burke, who's at ESPN now had his own site. So I'm like, I want to do this kind of stuff. So two thousand and nine, volunteered at Football Outsiders as a game charter and then realized, like, if I want to do any of this stuff, I need play by play data since that's what they're all using. Yeah, so that's how I found Pro pop Off Focus. And at the time, like everything was free. They had the player participation who was on the field on every single play, like that was available for free back in two thousand and nine, So I'm like, Okay, this is really cool stuff. And then twenty ten they put it all behind a paywall, had an article about why they were making the change, and at the bottom of that said that they were looking for volunteers. If you volunteer, you get access to it. And as a college kid with no money, I couldn't afford PFF back then, so I volunteered. And that's actually like how a number of people got involved in the early days. To Steve Alzolo, similar thing when he was minor league pitcher and wanted the data and then it was beyond the paywall, But twenty ten first year was doing player participation, Who's on the field, where they lined up, what they did on the play, did that for a number of years. When I joined it was the same month that Mike Clay joined PFF. He started the fantasy department at the company. So in twenty eleven, when I was trying to do as much as I can to get involved with the company to justify eventually getting a full time role, I asked if I could get involved with the fantasy side, and Mike was happy to get me involved, So that was kind of my start into the professional fantasy life. Was doing special teams projections for a couple of years. There had an article on defense utilization that came out like in the middle of the week and the players who were seeing more or less playing time sent by. Like twenty eleven twenty twelve, I was doing the player participation for roughly seven or eight games a week, so that was half the league every single week that I was charting who everyone was and what the roads look like. So you do that for enough games for a team, you get to learn all the patterns just naturally, because the better you can anticipate who's on the field, the faster you can get everything done.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, from there. Eventually twenty fifteen, I started to get more important in other parts of the company, so I had to tone back the fantasy work. But a couple of years later I was able to tone back some of that work a little bit. Started just doing fantasy rankings again for fun. Did Fantasy Pros Ranking Accuracy competition finished eighteenth when I wasn't doing anything else fantasy related, so we decided to get my rankings back on the site. Then finished third the following year, and then that year Jeff Bradcliffe left the company. Scott Barrett also left PFF, so we needed new fantasy analysts, so I was asked to get more involved with the fantasy side again. So the past five or so years have split my time off season doing software development for PFF and then in season doing all the fantasy work that I've been doing.

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Speaker 1: I feel like people don't know that you're doing the software development stuff on the side or none of the side. But as you know, during the off season, I should say, as like a split job. I mean, is it was that something that you just naturally like learned just because you're smart and you're good at like doing that kind of stuff, or is it something that you were schooled in and you you know, you got your training that way.

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Speaker 2: And so, like you said, I got my degree in X ray science, so I had a lot of the statistics background. Yeah, and then like part of my time where I was getting more involved with other stuff at PFF, that involved starting our research development team. So I needed to be able to do things with this huge database of data that we had, So I had to learn SQL, I had to learn R and those kind of things in order to best use the data. So I started spending more and more time with our software development team, and that was a whole bunch of people who were trained up in software development, knew not very much about football. The football knowledge not as much about software development. So it seemed like a good fit to get me more involved there so that I could do things that it's harder for them to do. Whether it's like understanding past concepts. Let yeah, those kind of things where we need this intense definition for what we call something and I inherently know more about it and what other people are talking about.

00:11:23
Speaker 1: That's crazy. I mean, like props to you. That's honestly incredible that you had the drive and also the ability, you know, to do that and wear so many hats and you're still wearing so many hats and what you're doing to the point where, like, I know that people probably only see the surface level, which is the case for a lot of us with as fantasy analysts. It's not like everyone's just listening to our podcast or like really diving into our content. The truth is is that people just see what we are on like social media on Twitter or blue Sky or whatever, and they're like, oh, I know you know, I know you because you're the one who is tweeting about snaps in the middle of the game, and I'm really interested in that, and you're great at that. But like there's just so much more to it, to the point where I don't think people even realize this stuff that you're you know, doing a lot of that stuff in the back end. But you're also I mean, look, I use PFF religiously. I think it's an unbelievable resource for nerds like myself who's trying to you know, do analysis. And you know, obviously I cite PFF every single time I reference PFF. And reference the data because that's that's also unbelievably important to me. But you know, I go whenever I log into PFF, like on a Monday morning or something like that, and I get some of the stuff for like the data dump from PFF that I do on Twitter and whatnot, and there's like four articles from you on the site already, and I'm like, man, this dude is out of his mind creating this stuff. And to know that you're also doing the software engineering, I just like, props to you.

00:12:48
Speaker 2: Man.

00:12:49
Speaker 1: That's it's a really awesome path and journey that you went down. And by the way, there was some overlap with me and you at PFF. I was at PFF for three months at one point where I had not started at number five yet. It was my first year doing fantasy analysis. This is back in like twenty twelve, and Clay messaged me, brought me on and I did three articles. I think one of them was like on like Roddy White, maybe like Pierre Garson too, And I did these articles. But then I got a job at Number five, so I couldn't be doing the stuff at PFF. But I always like to tell people I did. I worked at PFF. There there's like a three month period where I was a PFF analyst and writer. You know, I would have been there with you at that time, which is cool.

00:13:34
Speaker 2: I'll go track down those articles since I was trying to remember what I was even writing back at like twenty eleven, twenty twelve. Oh, I knew I was doing fantasy football stuff for us, but I'm like, what was I actually writing?

00:13:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean I look back, and I'm sure you feel the same way, but I look back at my analysis back then, and I'm like, this is honestly embarrassing. Like I'm embarrassed for myself. But what people don't realize, like if you go back and listen or even or you know, read, or if you go back and listen to like old podcasts and stuff, I mean that's what was available at the time, you know, Like we we didn't have not only that, but I think just naturally you get more reps and you just get better at like knowing what to look for and all that kind of stuff. But like we didn't have that much available to really work with. Like target share wasn't even like a thing. We were just looking at raw data, raw targets, like we weren't thinking that deeply because some of that stuff just wasn't introduced at the time, and so you know, it's just it's it's it's always again embarrassing going back and looking at that kind of content. But then at the same time, you know, you feel a little bit encouraged in the fact that you're not that bad anymore, or you know, as bad as you as you used to be. One thing I want to ask you, you've been at PFF for so long now, what do you think has been the biggest benefit of working at PFF.

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Speaker 2: I think it's probably two things. It's the data and the people. Data wise, like we have our premium stats that people have access to, and that's all data summed up either on the game level or on the season level. But I have access to everything on a play by play level of nearly I think nineteen years of data, ten plus years of college data right now, even like UFL data, Canadian Football League data, all that stuff too. So that's fun. Stuff I did on software development side is like all these other spring leagues that popped up every single.

00:15:17
Speaker 1: Year, Oh my gosh.

00:15:19
Speaker 2: So having that and then also having all that tie to footage so I can very easily, Like if I want to watch every interception of Patrick Mahomes's career, I can get that set up and watch that within a minute if I needed to, So I can easily do that with the data. So that very much helps me with my analysis, having both access to the data and the film. And then just the number of people that have come in and out through PFF throughout my fifteen years there and being able to have worked in so many different departments in terms of data collection, research and development, software development, and fantasy. Like there are people who worked at pffan see that I didn't even realize worked at PFF Fantasy at one point, but plenty of people who have gone on and have very successful careers in the fantasy football space. A number of people who are offensive coordinators in the NFL right now, multiple people and analytics departments throughout the NFL. A number of people who like worked in the NFL for a number of years and then came back and worked at PFF for like the end of their careers. So guys like Mike Stober who was the director of football System for the Jaguars for decade, Michael Ayres, who was the director of research for both the Vikings and the Packers for like thirty years, so being able to have worked with so many people and even like people that others haven't heard of, but I have worked more closely with the NFL. So like any question that I have about anything football related, fantasy related, there's been people that I can ask and have get expert opinions on right away.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, that's super cool. It's a great, great resource to have. Another thing I wanted to ask you about PF is even I as someone who doesn't work for PFF, but like just respects the work that you guys do you know, loves the data suite all that. I even get frustrated looking at what people are constantly saying about PFF. So one of the things I want to ask you, from your perspective having been there for so long, what's one of the things that you think that people just seem to misrepresent? I mean, I know people are going to just get tilted and just start screaming on the internet, because that's what people do. But what are the things that, like, while they're screaming, they might just not be understanding at all about how PFF works and operates.

00:17:37
Speaker 2: I guess or. One of the first things is we don't hate your favorite player. So there's that when we're collecting data and everything, we have several people who are working on each game, so like there's probably twenty or so people that touch each game at this point in the various data collection processes. So there's and there's not like a consistent this is the person who works on the Browns game, this is the person that works on the Chargers game. It's all. Everyone works on all different stuff. And it's a lot of it's college too. Since there's only like the sixteen NFL games each week, there's one hundred plus college games each week if you go far enough down. So we've got people working on all those levels. So there's no room for bias for a player. And we wouldn't even make sense for us to be biased towards a player because we sell this to teams, we sell this to other people, we sell this to consumers. If there is a bias in there, people aren't going to buy our stuff, so it doesn't make sense for us to have it. An interesting thing that I saw recently, Andrew Kramer of the Minnesota Star Tribune had an article about a week ago on Brian O'Neill the Vikings right tackle and how O'Neill didn't necessarily agree with some of our stuff, But a lot of that was we are process based or we are result based, and they care more about the process of like if they mess up their footwork a little bit but still successfully make their block, we don't care about that stuff. We are still going to grade to you positively for making the block, however you do it. I don't care how pretty a past looks. If you get the pass to where it's supposed to be, we're going to grade that past positively. Yea. So we aren't too worried about the technique where players are concerned about that, So like it can be understandable that what we view a player as and what a player might view themselves as, it makes sense that those things are different. We're just trying to be better than what's already out there. Of like simple things like if a pass goes right to a receiver's hands, it bounces off their hands, it's an interception. It's bad for fantasy, it's bad for their expected points. But we can still say no, that was a good throw. So we are still trying to separate out the players from each other, but it's still results based uff up. The player did what they were supposed to be doing, regardless of their technique.

00:19:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's actually a really important thing that I haven't really deeply about because I mean I've seen I've seen players themselves obviously just like go out and get angry and say like this is stupid. Why is my grade?

00:20:08
Speaker 2: This?

00:20:09
Speaker 1: Whenever X, Y, and Z happened. But I would assume that they're going to critique how they performed based on you know, their craft and just what they know about the game or what they what they know about how they their their body works, right as opposed to you know, you talking about more of the result based stuff. But at the same time, like while you guys are grading, is there like a like, are there often disconnects between you know, what a defender, let's say, is supposed to be doing and this is this is something that people always bring up, right, like assignments, right, like placing blame and stuff like that. Like I've always viewed it, and I'd love to hear your insight on this. I've always viewed it as this is a imperfect science, but it's more perfect than what else is out there in a way, like you're never gonna be one hundred percent accurate with everything, whether you're grinding film or whether you're grading things, and you're trying to I mean, this is essentially just putting numbers to the film. But you know, you're never gonna be one hundred percent accurate. This is just the most accurate that you will find based on this insane process that you guys have put together. And so you know is are do you do? You have the playbook and you're do you know the assignment for this middle linebacker who you know a bit whenever? Whatever? Uh, you know, do you have that or not? I mean, I understand the critique, but at the same time, I've always viewed it as over the long run, I would assume that evens out a little bit. Number one. But also if you kind of approach us as this is an imperfect science and it's not a foreshore kind of thing, and this is just another layer to your analysis, I think it's a lot easier to kind of consume that is that is that the proper way to think about that?

00:21:52
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Like I think sometimes with like an offensive line or what the defense is doing, it's pretty obvious what they should be doing based on what everyone else is doing, since like the whole point of the defense. If you're like doing on a run play, every defender is supposed to cover a certain gap, or if it's two gaps, but it's they're not going to have two defenders trying to get the same area and one area that no one's supposed to defend. Everyone's supposed to defend somewhere. So as long as it's just one person who's not doing what they're supposed to do, you're able to figure out that that's the players who's out of position. There will always be things like with routes, how there's like option routes. I don't know what options you had as a possibility. I just know you did a good job on your play based on whether it was design for you to run that route or you made the decision based on what the coaches allow you to do in your system to run that route based on what the player saw. So I don't know if it's the coach called a good play or if the players made a good decision. We don't know that level. But that's like when teams are scouting each other. They also don't know that level. Yeah, Brian Burke had a good thread on Twitter a couple of days ago, or might have just been yesterday. Of Like, when people complain about EPA, for example, they're like, EPA is a team stat, but it's like everything else before that is also a team stat. Passing yards is a team stat. Passing touchdowns is a team stat. You need the offensive line to block well in order for the quarterback to throw a well to throw a touchdown. So like I think when people start thinking of advanced analytics and like the more complex numbers that you might not know exactly how that numbers come up with, you start trying to find the imperfections in it and trust the numbers that you that are easier to understand. But that doesn't necessarily mean the numbers that are easier to understand are the better numbers for evaluation.

00:23:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really great point, a great segue into another thing I want to ask you just about, like metrics and data and pieces of data that that you found, you know, being being such a a math heavy and mathematical minded person, pieces of data that you found to be you know, helpful within the fantasy football world that maybe the community doesn't pay enough attention to. But but before I I sort of get to that, uh, I think it's really important that people understand that when you or I or anyone who is pretty data heavy, and that's gonna be a lot of fantasy analyst because this is a numbers driven game that we're playing at the end of the day, right like it, it matters deeply to to at least wrap your head around, uh, what these numbers are saying. I think that that it needs to be like understood in general that every single metric is going to be team based in some way to the point of like, like, you know, a very popular and go to and predictive metric is yards per out run, which you guys have been measuring for a really long time. But you know, yards per out run a wide receiver. It's predictive, it's good. It gives you a little bit of a different feel than like, you know, something as ridiculous as like yards per target or something like that. I mean, this is a much more real re presentation of player performance than what you'll find from you know, yards per reception, which is more of like an a dot thing than anything else, right, But with yards per route run, you know, you can then take that to the next level and say, okay, how many wide receivers run? You know, is this is this wide receiver running in a lot of eleven or twelve personnel, where obviously, if they're an eleven personnel, there's gonna be more wide receivers that they're competing for targets with, which is going to naturally drive down their total yards. Or like, if there's bad quarterback play, it's gonna obviously impact a player's yardage total, you know, Like like I, it doesn't mean that the metric itself is bad. It just means that there's always context, there's always a gray area that we need to look at and deal with with this stuff. So now with that being said, I do want to ask you though, like, are there any metrics that you've dealt with or that you've seen that you think the fantasy community might not be high enough on or understanding enough that it even exists.

00:25:54
Speaker 2: Ah. Yeah, First, since you brought up yards per rout run, I'll mention I was the first one to write about yards per route run in two thousand and eleven.

00:26:00
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for your service. Because I use it all the time.

00:26:04
Speaker 2: That's nice. But one thing that I did want to talk about here is a preseason utilization, since even though I have that math background, having so many reps of watching every player on every play and learning the patterns of the players, that's how I got into like tweeting about snap counts, and then the last couple of years have been doing it on the preseason as well. And even though there's like a whole bunch of games where there's really nothing to take away, like the Rams aren't going to play their starters throughout the preseason, the only thing to know is, hey, they didn't play this one player, so maybe they actually do like this player. So there's those things. But like looking back at my top ten recap on the first week of the preseason this year, almost all of them played out over the course of the season. Of like Christian Kirk didn't play in twelve personnel. It was like only two plays, But we saw the same thing last preseason. It played out for one week last year. And then Zay Jones gets into it's how Christian Kirk goes back to being in every down receiver so that I look silly for the rest of the year, but this year Kirk continued to be the third receiver and not playing as much in twelve personnel. The Jay Wuarris offense didn't play as well throughout the year, so that also contributed to Kirk not playing as well, But his playing time was down this year compared to what it's been in past years. So like that's an example of yeah, it was just one drive in one preseason game, but there are things to take away of what happens there if you've seen enough of the preseason and can understand what is noise and what's not noise. Like another one, Xavier Worthy played a lot with the starters in the first preseason game. That doesn't necessarily mean that Worthy is going to be good, but it at least means he's going to see the playing time if he's already playing with the starters in the first week of the preseason of Sam Laporta Jahan Dotson, two players the year before that they played as starters in the first preseason game. That continue to be the case the entire year, whether or not one was good, one was not good, Yeah, but it was still you know that they're going to play where other rookies, you're not as sure they're going to play.

00:28:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a really really good call out something that you know, folks seem to be way too focused on actual production in the preseason as opposed to just the usage side of things, when the usage side seems to be something that we could really gain an edge with. So, look, let's get into some some fantasy football takes and stuff that's gone on this year. It's been, in my opinion, a pretty interesting fantasy season. You know, there's been you know, some some interesting stuff that's happened at the running back position. You know, some of the high end wide receivers haven't panned out. But what's the thing when you look back now that we've I mean, we only have two weeks left in the fantasy season, But when you look back, what's like the one thing that's probably surprised you most about this twenty twenty four campaign.

00:28:50
Speaker 2: I think the tight ends have been the most frustrating for me, and which tight ends actually improved compared to which tight ends we thought would improve this year, Since going into the air, had already felt like it was going to be a weird year for tight ends, since we had Travis Kelce, George Kittle, Mark Andrews, t J. Hockenson, four guys who were just consistently top six tight ends and at least Fantasy points per game every single year for a number of years. Darren Waller was also in that conversation, so it seemed like we had had that consistency at tight end. But we knew we had these order tight ends getting older. We had a bunch of young tight ends that we thought would do well, and really the only two young tight ends that have panned out are Brought Bowers and Trey McBride. Were almost all the other young tight ends did worse in Fantasy points per game this year than last year. And then we have all these older tight ends, John hu Smith, Will Disley, Taysom Hill, Mike Giseki, Austin Hooper to go along with Kit All those are all of the tight ends who improved the most year over year, outside of some backup tight ends like Brenton Strange to better this year, No ugraded better Tucker Kraft, who was a backup a lot last year. So like all of these tight ends who did see improvement, all these older tight ends that we didn't really think about too much before the season.

00:30:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, did you have a you did some work on this right earlier this season? Where do you do you have a theory as to why? Because when I looked at the data, the first couple of weeks were really really bad, like like atrociously bad for tight end to the point where you know, I saw regression coming, and it has come to some degree, maybe not to like you know, last year's levels or what have you, like in terms of the higher end tight ends and whatnot, but you know, they started out really really bad and it hasn't been, like you said, a great season for a lot of tight ends. Kyle Pitts, Dalton Kincaid have both been pretty atrocious. I mean Mark Andrews, I don't think I still don't think people realize how much he's just living on touchdowns, you know, like his usage is down pretty dramatically year over years. Still, I mean last week he still only had like an eight or nine percent target share despite finding the end zone. But what was sort of the the reasoning? And I can't remember when you I remember you you wrote something about it, and you did a little research it, But what was some of the reasoning that you found as to why maybe tight end scoring was down in twenty twenty four compared to some of these recent seasons.

00:31:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, like I did this around Week two or Week three, there were a lot of teams that were having different tight ends and eleven personnel verse twelve personnel. They were happy to have different tight ends on the field just based on their personnel grouping. And that was happening for like a quarter of the league, which we hadn't really seen much of in previous years. And I think probably the biggest thing is the number of wide receivers that have come out of college that have done well. I feel like heading into this year, in a couple of years before this, teams were heading more towards tight ends being this dynamic weapon that you can have kind of of a positionless offense where you can confuse defenses and maybe face a base defense with the tight end on the field and take advantage of that in the passing game, where now I think there's just too many good wide receivers in the NFL that teams are happy to just have one tight end on the field in the passing game. And because passing has been so successful in recent years, defenses are more playing against the pass, which has made running more successful. So we've seen all these running backs who are doing better this year than we've seen in other years, and I think part of that is teams are having their run blocking tight ends on the field more often. And even though like typically on pass plays, you have your passing tight end, your run places, you have your run blocking tight end, but you can't be that transparent and obvious al Vatel of Okay, this guy's on the field, so it's one hundred percent a run. Teams just can't do that. So you're seeing all these plays where a run blocking tight end is on the field and it's a passing play, and this happens even more at the goal line or near the end zone, so you get more of these blocking tight ends who are scoring touchdowns, like we saw Josh Oliver have a nice stretch of games for a couple of weeks, even though he's the clear run blocking tight end for Minnesota, but he's on the field a lot. And like Atlanta, we've seen this with Kyle Pitts, like his playing time just completely bombed up. Because Charlie Warner is one of the top run blocking tight ends in the league, So he's helping their run game out and it's therefore is not on the field as much.

00:33:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a really really important point to make, and it seems like there's sort of a trickle down effect and it impacts literally everyone in fantasy football. It's some degree where if passing is let's just make it simple and say it's lowered or worse or lessened versus previous seasons. You know, if you think about what a tight end is doing on the field, it's usually not like the tight end is not not always going to be and usually not going to be the first read for a quarterback. Right, So if a quarterback is number one, not playing as well, probably not progressing as well, you know, through his options and you know, maybe just going to his top wide outs instead of opting to that tight end, that's a bad thing. But then if teams are also, to your point, leaning on the run a little bit more, that's been helping these running backs perform better. And running back health obviously has helped a lot this season, you know, until of course, until the fantasy playoffs hit, but running back health has been very very good and fortuitous for you know, the good running backs in the league, and so because they've stayed healthy and because these teams are leaning on the run a little bit more, that also is having an impact on just the playing time for these pass catching tight ends. So it's sort of like this, it's just two things that are going on right now that are probably making it just just combined, making it a really bad situation where quarterbacks aren't necessarily playing as well or at least developed, like like going through the progressions as quickly, and they're if they're not dropping back as much, they're obviously not going to see as much volume either when passing attacks. Basically, what I'm saying is when passing attacks are worse, tight ends are going to be impacted, probably more than wide receivers are, just because they're sort of like the secondary options in their offenses to begin with. And if passing touchdowns are lower, that's touchdowns are driving tight end scoring more than any other position in fantasy because they're not doing as much from a receiving standpoint in terms of accumulating yards and receptions and stuff. So I think it's a really important note to make. I mean, would you imagine though, that next year it's just gonna make Brock Bauers and Train McBride that much more valuable in fantasy football.

00:35:08
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I think they're gonna pretty well skyrocket in value. Like just thinking about twenty twenty five rankings and like two or three weeks ago, it's like, there's no way that I need to talk that much about Brock Bauers over the next year because everyone's going to have him at tight end one. There's no debate trade McBride's number two, no debate, like unless the Raiders somehow find a way to get worse at quarterback over the off season, which that's not going to happen. So it's like those are the top two. George Kittle's in that conversation, But George Kittle's again getting a year older, and we've seen like George Kittle Dallas Goddard have kind of been on the opposite ends of the forty nine ers wide receivers haven't done as well as we expected, So Kittle has been a bigger part of that offense. And then Dallas Goddard, we saw him have huge weeks when Aj Brown Devonte Smith were injured or not doing well. Once everyone's healthy, that's been The nice thing about the Eagles offense in general is like anytime someone's injured, it's not like the backup's getting a lot more balls. It's those balls are going to the star players more so.

00:36:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there hasn't been any any Johnny Wilson breakout that's happened this year with all those injuries. Yeah, I mean I think that that I would I would agree, especially with like a kittle or something. You know, he's he's run pretty well in terms of just things that have gone favorably for his situation in fantasy this year. Right, you get CMC being out for the first trunk of the season, then he only plays a few games. You have Brandon Ayuk, you know, tearing his a cl and then there's Deebo Samuel who I want to ask you about Debo? What? What what's going on?

00:36:37
Speaker 2: Man?

00:36:37
Speaker 1: Like, what's going on with Deebo? I might have to rely on him in a semi final in Dynasty this week. Please tell me that I'm not going to lose everything because of that.

00:36:48
Speaker 2: Hopefully he can get some production in there. I think a lot of this is probably just injury related, Like, yeah, the injury reports over the course of the year. He's been listed with a rib injury and oblique injury, a wrist injury, a cat injury, and an illness, all at various points this season. And like we know, teams aren't always reporting everything on the injury report, so he hasn't been on there for the past couple weeks. But I would not be yet all surprised if he is dealing with one or more of those things. It doesn't like looking at the film, it doesn't look like he is quite the same player he was. And I think almost out of any wide receiver in the league, Deebo Samuel is the one who, like if you looked at is avoided tackle rate was leagues better than all the other wide receivers. So if any wide receiver needs to be athletic to make moves, to make big plays, it's Deebo Samuel. So if he's not one hundred percent, he can't do the things that make him great. So I think that's probably been the biggest part of him this year.

00:37:42
Speaker 1: That's a great point. You know, it's not like this is a DeAndre Hopkins type situation where you know he's always just kind of used his natural abilities as a route runner and as a as a wide receiver to be able to separate, you know, not in his case, not even like massively separate, right, Whereas Debo needs that body and needs it to be healthy more than likely in order to really fully be the kind of player that we know that he can be. That's a that's a great point, and I think Kyle Shanahan echoed it too in a press conference this week talking about Debo where he's just gone through a lot this season and you know, we don't know. I think this is one of the harder parts of being a fantasy analyst. Not that I'm complaining that we're fantasy analysts, but uh, you know, I do think that it's difficult sometimes just know exactly how a player is feeling, both physically and mentally. You know, like like there are things that we cannot apply. We just cannot know, you know, based on Like of course, there's great people who are doing great injury related analysis now that we can kind of piggyback off of and and and get information from. But even they are are doing at least some guesswork. It's not like they're sitting in team meetings and talking to team doctors to know you know exactly what's going on with these players. So I think it might be as simple like you're saying as Debo being you know, banged up, and that's that's a big reason why the Brown's offense is now not going to have Jameis Winston. And this is actually the decision. I would love to ask you on the spot I have in that same Dynasty League, I have Jerry Judy versus Deebo Samuel, and I am scared out of my mind to use Jerry Judy for obvious reasons. But are you seeing something different? And I also have Jerome Ford on that team, But are you seeing something different or are you as nervous as I am about this Brown's offense moving forward without Jameis Winston.

00:39:34
Speaker 2: I'm definitely nervous about them. I did move Judy down my rankings by a Brown ten to fifteen spots, so I think I have Judy slightly ahead of Samuel right now. I think I have Judy right around wide receiver thirty. It's just like with Thompson Robbins say the three games we saw him start last year, who was averaging one hundred and forty yards per start, where Winston was averaging two ninety yards per start, So that's like ridiculous numbers. If I'm projecting either quarterback as to start, are projecting Thomas Robinson to have more than one hundred and forty yards, I'm projecting Winston to have less than two ninety yards. But that means a pretty big decrease for Judy, at least compared to what we've seen. But at least he's been the clear number one wide receiver for a while now. Not even sure if Cedric Tillman will be back this game, so hopefully eventually he gets better from his concussion, but so expect you to be the top receiver. I did think Ford probably moves up a little bit for me though, have him right at the borderline of running back to running back three. But Winston he makes his big plays down the field. He does not check down to the running back very often, where Thompson Robinson. It's a small three game sample size that we've seen him as a starter last year, but he was throwing to board roughly twice as much as Winston had been throwing to board. So I think Ford, along with his increase in snaps that we expect with Nick chub about the increase in carries, which might not be too much considering who they're playing, but then the offenses that they're playing and how many points they'll be putting up. But expect or to be at least more involved in the past game than I was before with Winston.

00:41:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that call. There there were some there was I can't I wish I knew who had posted it, but someone put it on the Late Round Fantasy Football discord today talking about and showing a chart of quarterbacks and how frequently they dumped the ball off essentially checkdown merchants? Was the was the the phrasing that that the person used. I wish I knew who who had posted it. I'm sorry for not citing, but there were two guys that were in the lower corner of this chart, as in, they just don't check down at all. One of them Anthony Richardson, of course, who was just completely destroyed Jonathan Taylor's fantasy value, and then the other one was Jameis Winston. For the reasons that you were talking about, I mean, I think to some degree, personnel is probably playing some role there. But at the same time, we know that Winston has that sort of just down the field mentality, and he has you know that that to me, like, I can't think of a quarterback has had a bigger perception difference between real life and fantasy. Uh, like like Jamis Winston. You know, if the fantasy community is like, oh, why are they doing it? Guys that the Browns offense has been like bad on from like an EPA perspective and just like a on a per play basis because of the turnovers and the bad plays that they're that they're making. Just because he's making these splash plays and throwing the ball down the field, it's good for fantasy, It's what we want for fantasy. But at the same time, he's not been, you know, a great real life quarterback. I felt similarly to like Joe Flacco last year, where he was playing better than what Jamis has been playing. But even like going into the playoffs, you know, folks were like pretty pretty into Flacco and I'm sitting here, I'm like, I get it from a like an accumulation standpoint, and and uh, you know, we're all we're all looking for those numbers to be posted because we care about fantasy so much, but from a real life perspective, it really hasn't been there to the degree that that people probably would think not to say that, you know, Deshaun Watson is as a as a better alternative for them, you know in Cleveland. But I do think it's at least something to keep in mind as you you know, get frustrated with Kevin Stefanski because he ruined your fantasy team in the semi finals.

00:43:05
Speaker 2: You know, it did the same thing with Justin Fields. It was like Justin Field is playing better than he had been in the past, Right, man, I really want him for my fantasy team.

00:43:14
Speaker 1: But I understand yeah, right, exactly exactly. And look, that's what you know, as Mike Tomlin says, that's why he's well compensated because he knows he knows to make the switch in those in those instances. Another quarterback switch that we're getting this week is Kirk Cousins. To Michael Pennix, what are your thoughts on that and how that might impact from a fantasy perspective the weapons there.

00:43:37
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I ended up not really changing the rankings for any of the players. I feel like what we've been seeing out of Kirk Cousins recently, which hasn't been great. I think it's been a little overstated how bad it's been. I think it's been a little bit better, Like still not the level we expect out of Kirk Cousins, but I think what the average expectation for Pennix would be roughly the same. I think it adds a bit more variance. Could be so much better than Kirk Cousins and that helps everyone. He could be worse and that hurts the wide receivers. We've seen both situations play out plenty this year, like the Giants benching Daniel Jones. It made everything worse than the offense. They just knew they wanted to move on from Jones, where we've seen other times where a quarterback gets fence the backups better. That helps everyone, But I think generally average expectation is roughly the same, like still trusting b John Robinson, fine, still starting Drake London, still hopefully not starting Kyle Pitts. And I think an interesting thing with the Falcons though, is a lot of times when a backup quarterback comes in, there tends to be like this fourth wide receiver on the depth chart who starts doing better or second tight end. We saw that play out last week with Lison Rudolph in the fourth quarter, it was like the backup tight end who started Josh Wiley start catching passes. The Falcons don't rotate their players enough for that to happen. They keep their three wid on the field. Every other team in the league has at least four wide receivers with that's at least seventy routes. The Falcons are the only team that doesn't, and the Falcons similarly, like twenty nine teams have at least two tight ends with ninety routes. Falcons one of the three that don't. And it's clear, here's the receiving tight end, here's the blocking tight ends. So I don't think there is really anyone who's going to see an increase in target because he's on the field, Like maybe there's a chance he got more work with Ray Ray McLoud or something like that during practice, But they use so much eleven personnel that i'd expect Ray Ray mclod to be playing with the starters throughout practice.

00:45:35
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I'm in the same boat where I didn't really change things up because Kirk Cousins has just been playing so horribly over the last month and a half or so or a month when it comes to Pennix. Oh and by the way, I got a shout out FTN was the where the chart was from, just so I can get that out there. But yeah, So with Pennix himself, are you optimistic about what he might be able to bring to the table as a fannas asset? Like one one I think kind of interesting dilemma that people might have would be like Patrick Mahomes versus Michael Pennox this weekend, Like do you think that that's a reasonable question to ask or do you think no, you can't start the rookie. There's no way go in that direction. Just play Patrick Mahomes.

00:46:17
Speaker 2: I'm probably playing Mahomes just because, like there's definitely a chance that Penix could be excellent this week, but there's also a chance that, like he could throw an interception on the first play and it's like, okay, let's just go back to Kurt, Yeah, and then that's all you get. So like it's such an unknown situation that it's hard to trust it for one week in fantasy, And like, even if he has a good game, I don't know if I'm trusting him in a Fantasy Championship, like outside of super flex leagues where that's different, but single quarterback leagues like, yeah, you're stuck with two. That basically that's the.

00:46:48
Speaker 1: Hard part about this time of year and about like stashing. You know this is this isn't something that I had thrown on the show sheet, but I think it's at least an interesting conversation. But like today we learned that Isaac Grendo is probably not going to play this weekend, right, and we look at the San Francisco backfield and we see number one San Francisco obviously not really competitive anymore, but the backfield now you have Patrick Taylor and then they recently a few weeks ago signed Izzy Abanacanda, who, in my opinion from like a football perspective and schematically, I think fits what they would want to do in this offense with a running and what they have done with their running backs in the past. But the problem is you can't go into Week sixteen playing Izzy, right, you can stash him and maybe all of a sudden they give him a bellcow workload, But the issue is if they don't give him a decent workload, and maybe they just split the backfield and that's a favorable outcome for Izzy. Like if we were in week four and this we're going on, you could stash Izzy and then maybe in week four he sees like forty percent of the backfield, and then in week five that climbs a little bit more and then climbs. But it's just so hard to imagine a world where it just becomes his backfield that it's it's so predictable in week seventeen that you're slotting them in as an RB two in in your championship, you know, Like, I think that's kind of where we're at to some degree with a guy like Penix. Is that how you're kind of looking at things too? With the final two weeks this season?

00:48:14
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Like even the forty nine ers one that specific situation they played the Lions next week, you know, and like they trust Kyle used Check as their passing or passing running back on third down. So yeah, if they're passing a lot, it's going to be Kyle used Check on the field, regardless of which of those other running backs gets those early snaps. So even if someone does have a really good week this week, still probably not trusting them next week. But I think it's a similar thing where it's just like we've never seen them before. With running backs, I can trust it a little more because so much more of running backs is volume based, where quarterbacks is more how well you're performing. So I think there is a pretty big difference between trusting running backs versus trusting quarterbacks at this point of the season. And I think the forty nine ers are also unique and like this is their fifth running back in sixth three running back. Yeah, and like Keishaan Vaughan was on the practice squad and is on the roster now, so like he could get involved too. So because they're so far down to depth chart, we don't know what they might do. Where I feel like almost any other team, if their starterup goes down, we can pretty accurately predict how snaps would get distributed between the other running backs.

00:49:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great point. One last question about just a player specific, team specific thing. The Texans passing attack has been probably one of the bigger disappointments for a fantasy perspective this year. I mean, Nico Collins has gotten his but we've seen CJ. Stroud really struggle this year statistically, at least, you know, Obviously there's other things going on, but at least from a fantasy perspective, he has You know, Tank Dell hasn't played well. We had Stefan Diggs go down. I think most people thought that we'd see a little bit more from Tank Dell post Stefan Diggs. What do you think is going on with Houston? And is there? And look I'm not I'm not having you on here to throw your your boy under the bus, you know, not, nothing like that. But you know, is it is it? Is it scheme? Is it offensive line? What's going on in Houston right now?

00:50:03
Speaker 2: I think it was a combination of a couple of different things. He has graded better the past two weeks, so things have started to look up a little bit. I think the offensive line was part of it. Kenyan Green was not grading well as a pass protector. They recently moved juice drugs from center to left guard Patterson at center. Patterson's been playing better as a pass blocker, not quite as much as a run blocker, so I think fixing the offensive line helped a little bit. I don't think Tank Della is playing as well as last year. Like Yeah, there have been a couple of plays where they could have gotten the ball to Dell, but I just don't think he is doing the same things that he was doing last year, So I think that's part of it. Part of it was also losing digs, and I think they just had a rough stretch of games in there. Played the Packers, Colts, Jets, and Lions four back to back to back weeks, and those are four of the better secondaries, both in terms of like PFF grades as well as preventing fantasy points to quarterbacks. So I think part of it was just too they were playing as well.

00:51:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, are you are you optimistic about twenty twenty five with the with the passing attack or do you think that we're gonna maybe see something in the middle of like what we saw strouge rookie year to what we've seen this year.

00:51:12
Speaker 2: I think it should get better like we've seen other players, and a sophomore slump and then rebound from that. Like Sam Laporta is another example of like he was excellent in his rookie year and hasn't done as much this year, and there just looks like everything is just slightly off from what you expect. So I think part of it could just be defenses seeing what the quarterback did last year, or is they about to start game planning for it better because we see all the time, like someone makes their first start, there's no film on them. They do really well immediately and then fall off a little bit after that, which we might see out of Penix this week.

00:51:44
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, But the problem is if we see it out of Penix and people want to play him next week and then all of a sudden, you know, that's when the that's when the disaster happens. Before I let you go, is there is there a player out there, whether on waivers, whether even rostered, just a player in general who you think could surprise us over the next two weeks and you know, maybe be a league winning type guy.

00:52:05
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go with Romeo Dobbs. He's been someone I've talked about on the waivers it seems like every single week because people just aren't picking him up. But when he's starting, basically since he was suspended for that one week, he's been playing relatively well. He just had that two touchdown game this past week. Two good opponents for wide receivers, the Saints and Vikings upcoming, He's consistently been the lead Packer in terms of rocks run and offensive playing time in general. So I think Dobbs is someone who can have some pretty good weeks and just depending on your league size and structure, if you're in the league that starts through wide receivers, I think Dobbs is someone who can be in fantasy starting lineups these next two weeks.

00:52:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great call out. I think it's nice that we finally sort of have a more locked in rotation with the Packers, like a more predictable one where we had some injuries earlier in the season, and you know, Christian Watson at times was straight up splitting with Dontavian Wicks and now we're finally seeing him just be that dude, and Wich is playing the fourth role in that offense and you know kind of being and the obviously Jayden Reid to people get upset about Jayden Reid, but his role has been consistently the same. It's this is what he did last year too, out of the slot, and then you just have the consistent staple in Romeo Dobbs. So I like that that shout out a lot. He's been someone that I've talked about on the show quite a bit this year because his percent roster number, this is consistently way too low, it seems like, so like.

00:53:28
Speaker 2: Just to go back to earlier about preseason data, this is what Jayden redid in his first week, in his first preseason game about it, after two drives of like, Okay, this is how it's going to be used in the Packers offense, and they have not changed it in two years.

00:53:41
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, look, he's a dynamic player and amazing with the ball in his hands, probably the most talented wide receiver on that team. But if you're a slot guy and you're not going to be running out, especially since they've gotten more run heavy, like that's the other thing that's that's really hurt him is that when you're going to be a run heavy team like that, you're probably not gonna run as much eleven. And so if that's the case, and you're going to see Les Jayden Reid on the field, and we've seen that kind of play out, you know, over the last couple of months. Man, this was great, It was great catching up and talking to you. Thank you so much for joining. Can you let everyone know where they can find you? And all your work and what you're working on.

00:54:15
Speaker 2: Ah. Sure, so you can find everything at Pro Football Focus social media I'm most active on now is Blue Sky So at PFF, Nate YANKI there rinding down right now in the season. My probably biggest articles at the recap articles that are still going so while the games are going on. If you're not familiar, I am writing about the games. For the night games that go on, the article goes out immediately after the game. For Sundays, it's within an hour or two of the game ending, since I have to do all the games, but the recap articles are there and then upcoming. I know we talked earlier about me switching my role with software development for part of the year. This will be my first off season doing fantasy football full time, awesome, So I will be writing more articles, will be doing more podcasts. We'll have twenty twenty five rankings and dynasty rankings for example, going out early January, so if you're interested in those kind of things, they'll be up at PFF as well.

00:55:07
Speaker 1: That's awesome. Are you gonna be doing any like prospect type stuff or more so just focused on like the dynasty and redraft stuff? Of the of the existing guys.

00:55:16
Speaker 2: I'll be doing some prospect stuff for sure with all the college data we have.

00:55:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, on awesome, awesome resource and dude, I mean you do awesome work as well. One of the hardest working guys in the space, There's no doubt. Definitely check out Nate's work for sure. I'm on Twitter and on blue Sky at Late Round QB. You guys can check out all my stuff over on lateround dot com of course, and as always, for the last time, this is the last Late Round Perspectives episode of the Fantasy season because of the schedule next week. Thanks for tuning in.