890: Taking Advantage of a Reactive Fantasy Football Market

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachersa JJ Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode eight hundred and ninety of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. You've had a three week break from these early week Late Round podcast episodes, and I'm so glad to be back in your ears. The Late Round Draft Guide it's out there, it's done. It launched on July first, and I know a lot of you have already read it and given me feedback, which I greatly appreciate. If you haven't gotten that draft guide, there's still plenty of time to do so you can head the Lateround dot com and purchase it for twenty four to ninety nine. You get over two hundred pages of information in it, and about eighty percent of that information is strategy and game theory focused. The remaining twenty percent gets updated each week. That twenty percent includes players to target, players to avoid, and late round dart throws, as well as my rankings. And if you didn't take advantage of the Underdog offer before, you can still do that too. If you sign up on Underdog Fantasy with promo code Late Round and then make it a posit. Underdog will email you a copy of the guide. That's a twenty five dollars value to just play some best ball or maybe a little pick them. You get a nice deposit offer when you sign up too, So that's Underdog Fantasy dot Com promo code Late Round. Make a deposit and you'll get a draft guide for absolutely free via email, along with a deposit bonus. Now, today's episode isn't about me, just letting you know about these offers and where to get the Draft Guide. So let's shift our focus. I'm a big fan of analyzing market trends in fantasy football. The market being average draft position. Some people think it isn't a worthwhile thing to do, but I have the opposite belief. Not only can it shape the way you approach a draft strategically, but the wisdom of the crowd idea isn't wrong. It assumes that charge crowds are collectively smarter than individual experts. A group's collective knowledge leads to better decision making and problem solving. Now, I don't think average draft position is flawless. I know it isn't, and I do think that you as an analyst, as a player, you can be better than ADP. We see bad picks by ADP all the time, but at a baseline, ADP probably isn't as bad as you think, especially on certain platforms and on certain sites. And if you think that it's atrocious, if you think that we can't learn a thing from average draft position, then you may be overconfident in your own abilities. Now. Regardless of all of that, one of the reasons I like analyzing the market is because in a game where there's so much unpredictability, we need to find sources of predictable behavior. We need to find things that we can feel confident are gonna happen year in and year out, and then we can work off of those things. For example, mobile quarterbacks. Quarterback has become a lot more predictable and fantasy football over the last five years, and it's largely because of rushing. Mobile quarterbacks are more predictable. We know who the mobile quarterbacks are gonna be going into a given season, and since they're the ones scoring a lot of fantasy points now because they're good passers as well, we now have a better feeling about the quarterbacks at the top of our rankings like Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson. Ten years ago, we didn't have that type of predictability, and knowing that information means that we can attack our drafts more accurately. But predictability isn't just something that we need to worry about with players or with positions. We can also look at human behavior, our opponent's behavior and extract value in our fantasy drafts that way. Year in and year out, fantasy drafts kind of go the same way, but not totally. We know that running backs and wide receivers will get drafted early based on supply and demand, and then we'll get some earlier round quarterbacks and some tight ends sprinkled in there too. But there are small things that do shift from one year to the next. Maybe the first and second rounds will be a little bit more wide receiver heavy. Maybe the top couple of quarterbacks fall off boards in round four instead of round two. Stuff like that does fluctuate from one year to the next, and usually when that kind of thing happens, it predictably happens. Twenty fifteen was a rough year at running back. When you look at the correlation between top forty eight, top twenty four, and top twelve running backs by ADP versus how many points they actually ended up scoring. That year, they had the worst season of any year since twenty fourteen, meaning we weren't very good at projecting which running backs were going to perform well and all this ADP data today it's courtesy of fantasy data dot Com that lack of predictability at running back in twenty fifteen it showed up in how well the top running backs ended up outscoring the rest of the position as well. In the draft guide, I've got a table that shows each position by years twenty fourteen, and it shows the average points per game difference between the top part of a position to a replacement group of players at that same position. So the top six running backs, they're average points per game versus the RB nineteen to RB twenty four. And further record, this is by actual performance, not ADP, So the top twenty four running backs by how many points they actually scored. It's the top quarter among the top twenty four running backs versus the bottom quarter. It's just a quick way of looking at how valuable the top players were at a position in a given year. Twenty fifteen was the worst year for running backs. That's across the last ten seasons of fantasy football. The top six to the position at the end of the season were five point three PPR points per game better than the RB nineteen to RB twenty four. That was by far the lowest that we've seen since twenty fourteen. So number one, we were bad at projecting which running backs were gonna be good that year. But then number two, of the running backs who were actually good, they weren't giving fantasy managers that big of an edge. You know what happened in twenty sixteen. The following year, that's right, running back average draft positions dropped. The RB twelve and twenty sixteen fell off draft boards at pick thirty one. The year prior to that, it was twenty fourth overall over the last ten years. When you remove that twenty sixteen season, you look at all of the other seasons, the RB twelve had an average overall ADP of twenty that's eleven spots higher than what we saw in twenty sixteen. You can do the same exercise for almost any running back spot. Running Backs were drafted later in twenty sixteen as a complete and total reaction to a bad season for running backs in twenty fifteen. This isn't some uncommon occurrence in fantasy football, and most of the time we do see bouncebacks. There hasn't been a position where there's been a general trend downward with our predictability, And there hasn't been a position and fantasy football where there's been a general trend downward with how the best players are performing against the worst hypothetical starters at those positions. To put that another way, a bad season for a position it happens, but there's almost always some sort of bounce back. It's usually not nearly as bad as it was the previous season, And we can obviously use that to our advantage because if people are going to react at a high level, at a positional level to what happened the previous season, and there's a chance that if we don't heavily react, we might be able to find some value. This exact same scenario happened just last year, just in the opposite way. In twenty twenty two, we saw quarterbacks dominate fantasy football. The high end quarterbacks were so so good versus everyone else. The group of three quarterbacks at the top outscored the QB ten to QB twelve by seven point four points per game. No other season was higher than five point five within that little metric since twenty fourteen. Last year, that seven point four point advantage turned into a three point nine point one and now we're seeing slightly lower costic quarterback than we did a year ago. But the one place where I think that we can probably take advantage of this most here in twenty twenty four is with tight ends. My stance on elite tight ends through the years has been to either go big or don't worry about the position at all. Not that I think that you can easily stream the position. That's not an easy thing to do, but there's really not a huge difference in ceiling outcome between players you can get in the last rounds versus tight ends that high end tight end two range, maybe even low end tight end one range. This year, I think it's far more advantageous to get an elite tight end or a higher end tight end. And there are some reasons for that outline in the draft guide that I won't get into today, reasons like what's going on at running back, for example, The opportunity cost equation is shifting a little bit, but focusing solely on tight ends. One of the main reasons I'm gonna be leaning on some of these higher end tight ends this year is because of how the market is reacting to twenty twenty three. You see, tight end wasn't very good last year. Let's are the same exercise as before. We'll look at top three tight ends and compare them to bottom three tight ends within the top twelve, So tight end one to tight end three their average points per game versus tight end ten to tight end twelve, and their average last year, those top tight ends saw four point four PPR point per game advantage. That was the second lowest that we've seen since twenty sixteen. And guess what's happening this year? Tight end prices are falling. The tight end one from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three, on average, was drafted fourteenth overall. This is for regular PPR leagues. This is not for tight end premium leagues. This year, according to Fantasy pros consensus rankings, the top tight end is being ranked twenty seventh overall. When looking at the top eight tight ends this year, they're almost all going later than they have in previous seasons. So the tight end one is going later than the typical tight end one has gone, the tight end two later than the tight end two historically, and then so on. And this isn't just by one or two spots. Some are being ranked and being drafted a full round later. We've seen this happen in Best Ball Drafts two. I've brought this up on becoming a Best Ball bro countless times. But the higher end tight ends are getting drafted later than they typically get drafted. Now. Some will say this is just the result of Travis Kelcey and Mark Andrews going later, that they're the one skewing perception. But according to ADP and comparing that data to how players are being ranked, it's not just because of those tight ends, because it's not just the top two spots going later in the draft, it's the top eight spots. And it's no coincidence that this is happening a year after the tight end position just completely burn people. Travis Kelcey, by his standards, had a down year, Darren Waller flopped, Dallas Goddard pits they weren't anything special. And then all the while we had this influx of rookies with Laport, Dunkincaid, and then Trey McBride and Jake Ferguson. They had big seasons. They were all later round picks who did well. It was the perfect storm for a bad tight end season, at least by adp Not to be fair, you could argue that if there are more tight ends that look like they could be usable, there's less of a need to go after one of those tight ends, Right Like, if there were twelve very good tight ends out there in fantasy football, why would you go out and reach for a tight end in your twelve team league draft. Maybe that's why these guys are being pushed down because in that scenario, everyone would get a tight end hypothetically, but there's not necessarily twelve of them, and history has shown us that there won't be some giant tier of twelve guys at the top, or even seven or eight guys. Some may say that Travis Kelcey's done, or that Mark Andrews is coming off an injury, we should be afraid, but historically we've still seen by far the best hit rates to tight end. When looking at the top three or top four players of the position by ADP. Like by far in the draft guide, I've got a table that displays hit rates by tight end EIGHTP grouping since twenty fourteen. I took the tight end one to the tight end three by ADP. I grouped them together, and I showed how frequently they scored ten, twelve, and fourteen PPR points per game. Then I did the same thing with tight end four to tight end six and so on all the way to tight end eighteen. And because I knew that two tight ends in particular Rob Gronkowski and Travis Kelcey would likely skew this data, I removed them from the data set. And you know what the data showed. It still showed that the top three tight ends by ADP were so significantly better in hit rate than any other subset. Tight end four to tight end six they were pretty strong two, but there was a clear divide from that first group to the second group, and then that second group to the rest of the position. What's really glaring about that is that the tight end seven to tight end A to tight end nine MATT group, they really haven't been that much better than guys who are ranked like tight end sixteen, tight end seventeen by ADP. But think about what this means. Even without Kelsey and Gronkowski in our data set, top tight ends are hitting at a wildly good rate. It goes back to my go big or don't draft one at all strategy. It's fine to get an early round tight end because they've been good in the past, even the guys not named Kelsey or Gronkowski. But if you don't get them, you probably should wait. But those guys are usually drafted in the first couple of rounds, the first three rounds. Now you're seeing them in round four and round five. The cost to acquire used to be a lot greater. Now, if you're drafting this season based on last year's results, then you'd be under the impression that this data isn't as relevant. That top tight ends nowadays just aren't giving you the same type of edge because that's what we saw last season. I'd argue that that's not totally rational. You'd be basing things off of one season versus many seasons. And yeah, the tight end landscape might look a little different this year than year's past. Maybe the top three tight ends are slightly worse and the next three tight ends the tight end four to the tight end six. Maybe they're a little bit better than the type of tight ends that we typically see there, but remember, all of these tight ends this year are generally getting drafted later than what we've typically seen. It's not just a Travis Kelcey and Mark Andrews problem. It's the majority of these top six top eight tight ends. There's no doubt in my mind that the market is reacting heavily to a weird tight end season in twenty twenty three. And while it's not a guarantee of the position bounces back at the top, it seems like a pretty good bet that a few of these tight ends, whether that's Kelsey or Laporta or Andrews or kincaid or McBride, a few of them probably won't be giving your fantasy teams a significant edge this year because they have time and time again throughout history, and now they're cheaper to acquire. We see this kind of thing happen a lot in the fantasy football market, and I do my best to highlight those things each year in the draft guide and on this podcast. We talked about the quarterback position regressing on the show this time last year, but this year. I think it mathematically makes sense to believe that tight ends will have a bounce back year and the market isn't totally accounting for that. That's it for today's show, though, Thanks all of you for listening. If you subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere. Podcast can be found in know for to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. I've got to becoming a Best ball bro episode dropping tomorrow, so to be ready for that. And then this is a Late Round Perspectives week, so I'll be getting that to you guys on Friday. Oh and make sure you're subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel. I'm gonna be picking things up and doing more live streams over there, so make sure you're subscribed so you get notified when i'm live. That's YouTube dot com slash at Late Round FF. Thanks for listening. I'll be back tomorrow