1089: Revisiting the Rookie Edge in Redraft Leagues

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacheris j J zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen in this episode ten eighty nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We're in the thick of it with the NFL Draft. We're talking prospects and we're doing so for both a dynasty angle and a season long angle with best ball, especially redraft is becoming more and more of a year round game. Dynasty has always been that way, but it's becoming more evident in the season long game types two. So, since we're talking rookies and dynasty, let's talk about rookies and redraft as well. You might recall, but last summer I did an episode on the rookie edge and redraft leagues. It was actually episode one thousand of the Late Round podcast. There was a lot of chatter about rookies no longer being good redraft bets because the market now rightfully understands that rookies can be valuable redraft. So I dug into the topic. What I generally found was that rookie wide receivers there were good bets across the board. We were also coming off a season where those rookie wide receivers dominated, so that wasn't much of a surprise finding. And for the record, it's something I've written about in the Late Round Draft Guide each year. For running backs, they were still okay enough picks, but it did appear as though the market was drafting them earlier than usual, and when that's the case, expectations change. They weren't players that you needed to avoid, but they weren't players you needed to aggressively target either. Now, thanks to this past season, it seems like people have been mega turned off by the idea of rookies in redraft. That's a big reason why I wanted to revisit this topic because the results last year were not fantastic. At wide receiver, you had Tetero McMillan, Travis Hunter, Amecca Abuka, and Matthew Golden with relatively high ADPs. Only at Buka was able to outperform his ADP expectation. More on all that in a second. At running back, you had ash In Gentamari and Hanton, Travon Henderson, r J Harvey, Caleb Johnson, Jacorey Krofsky, Merrit camp Skataboo Quinchhot Judkins. They all had top forty five ranks of the position, the vast majority of them within what was considered an elite draft class. Most of them failed to live up to the hype, and all year all we heard was this is why you don't draft rookies high in redraft? But should we really abide by that rule? Was last year just a blip? Today's episode is all about answering those questions. Now. Before get into things, I just want to send a quick reminder to check out the Late Round Prospect Guide. You get info in all the zap models, player write ups, rankings, bad dad jokes, and more, all for nineteen ninety nine. It's over one hundred and seventy pages of content. Learn more over on lateround dot com. So the real question we're asking here is is their value in drafting rookies in redraft leagues? The conclusions from last summer said that generally, yes, there is value, more so a wide receiver than at running back, but over there is some value. I want to expand on those results a little bit today because I think what was described on that episode is more tip of the iceberg than anything else. Being of value comes down to a cost benefit analysis. If a rookie's drafted late and he plays just okay, he might still be a value because he was drafted late, But one drafted early with that same production he's not a value. That cost side of the equation is just average draft position for fantasy football purposes, and overall, it does appear that we're drafting both rookie running backs and wide receivers earlier than we used to. Is a little bit easier to explain a wide receiver, so let's start there. My average draft position data, it sourced from Fantasy Data, goes back to twenty fourteen. Since twenty fourteen, we've had just one top twelve wide receiver by ADP, and I'm looking only at positional ADP here since overall ADP it can shift more depending on the source and depending on the type of league that we're looking at. But that one top twelve wider recce was Marvin Harrison Junior. Since twenty fourteen, we've had four top twenty four wide receivers by ADP. Three of those four have come over the last two seasons. We've had ten top thirty six wide receivers by ADP. Four of those ten have come over the last two seasons. I mean, just from that you get the picture. We've been drafting wide receivers earlier over the last couple of years, even top forty two wideouts. We've had twenty four rookies drafting the top forty two wide receivers since twenty fourteen. Nine of them have come over the last two seasons. Now, it could be that the last two draft classes have just been really good, and while they haven't been bad, the ZAP model doesn't really see them as substantially better than some other seasons. Like if you look at the top two categories in the ZAP model legendary performers and elite producers, we've had five of them, and four of them over the last two years. In the ten years prior, we had four point one per season, So we're right at that. Afterge the high end, the higher parts of the position have been mostly the same from a ZAP Model perspective, And that's not the end all, but it's at least telling us it's not like these last couple of classes have been unbelievably great. Now, at running back, it's always kind of been common for rookie running backs to have better draft capital to have better eightps, like, we've had eight of them drafted as RB ones within this data set top twelve running backs. One of those was last year with Ashton genty. We've had twenty two of them draft in the top twenty four. Four of those have come over the last two years, all four of them happening last season. What's kind of interesting is that last year tied for the most top thirty six rookie running backs that we've seen since twenty fourteen, and it tied for the most top forty two rookie running backs too. And you might be saying, well, yeah, it was a good draft class, and yes it was. You could very easily argue that drafters were pushing rookie running backs up the draft board a little bit too much when you compare ZAP model scorers to ADP. For instance, when looking at the top three ZAP score categories, which are legendary, Performer, Elite producer, and weekly starter, we had five of those in last year's class, yet we had seven top thirty six running backs by ADP. That type of proportion is not normal. When we had seven top thirty six running backs before back in twenty twenty, we had eight running backs in one of those top three categories. What I'm generally getting at here is that the market is behaving a little bit differently with rookies. The last couple of years has really seen wide receiver shoot up draft boards, and when you consider the quality of running back, I generally say that we're drafting running backs earlier as well. And for the record, I'm not talking tight ends on today's episode, just because there's not that much data to look at, and I think people were generally on the same page with rookie tight ends anyway. But look, what all this means is that in order for these players to live up to the hype, to live up to expectation, they need to be even better than they used to because their cost is higher than it used to be. So now the question becomes, are these positions performing worse against expectation? Yes? And no. Let's start at wide receiver first. We really don't have a large sample of wide receivers to work off of when looking at top thirty players of the position by ADP, so we'll focus solely on top forty eight wide receivers by ADP. Here I alluded to this earlier, but I calculate how players perform versus eightyp expectation. Essentially, if a player's drafted fiftieth overall, then that player has some sort of expected PPR points per game number based on what we've seen historically from other players with that draft slot. So maybe a fiftieth overall wide receiver is expected to score twelve and a half PPR points per game. But then what if he finishes with thirteen and a half PPR points per game? That means he ended up exceeding that expectation by one full PPR point per game. This isn't the only way to evaluate how well a player performed, but it's at least an interesting way to factor in cost when doing that evaluation. Historically, if you look at top forty eight wide receivers who at least eight games in the season, and this is positional ADP, so someone who's drafted wide receiver forty six is part of this data set, Rookie wide receivers have actually outperformed non rookies when you look at sealing outcomes. For instance, with looking at top forty eight wide receivers who outperform expectation by four more PPR points per game, fourteen point three percent of the rookie wideouts in that group have done that since twenty fourteen. For non rookies, it's thirteen point six percent. If you look at how well they exceed expectation by two or more PPR points per game, rookies almost thirty two percent, non rookies twenty six to twenty seven percent. So when looking across the entirety of the season, rookie wide receivers drafted in the top forty eight are generally outperforming non rookies versus expectation at the high end. This type of analysis has been the Late Round Draft Guide every single year that I've done the guide, and it's not gonna be any different this year. However, something that I haven't touched on very much in that guide is downside risk, and that's a key point that I want to talk through today. Fantasy football, from my perspective, is one with upside. Upside is everything you want to chase sealing outcomes and not worry that much about floor outcomes because as Nelly one said, two is not a winner, and three nobody remembers. We just want to get first. But I think it became very evident last year that floor outcomes can matter when managing a team week to week, at least to some managers. So in the name of transparency, let's not only look at these sealing outcomes or exceeding expectation by two or four PPR points per game. Let's look at floor outcomes two and that's where things look different for rookie wide receivers. Among top forty eight rookie wide receivers since twenty fourteen, they've underperformed versus expectation by four more PPR points per game at a seventeen percent rate. For non rookies that numbers thirteen percent. It's lower. You can do the exact same thing when looking at players who are underperforming by two or more PPR points per game. Rookie wide receivers thirty four four percent, non rookies thirty percent. To put that another way, rookie wide receivers over the last twelve years, they've given us a higher ceiling versus cost, but they've also given us a lower floor versus cost. And to me, this is exactly why we have these strong opinions about rookies in redraft because look, the average fantasy manager, they're not doing this kind of analysis. I wouldn't expect them to. They shouldn't be doing this kind of analysis. I'm a sick individual. This is not their job. They're gonna go off their own experiences. Maybe someone drafted a rookie wide receiver with a single digit round pick three years in a row, and there's a chance that all three of those rookies really busted, and that shapes that manager's opinion about rookies in general, whether fair or not. The same thing happens on the other end. We get these really high end outcomes with rookie wide receivers, and people who landed those players in their drafts they love it, and whether fairly or unfairly, that shapes their own perception of rookies and season long leagues. The truth of the matter is that what we think is the most obvious answer actually is the most obvious answer. Rookies are volatile. There's a wide range of outcomes. To me, that's a good thing. That's the way that I play fantasy football. I embrace that volatility to get that league winning player. But to some they don't like that. They want more of a floor. That's the way they like to manage their fantasy teams. This dynamic has only been emphasized in more recent years. If you split up this ADP data and you look at twenty fourteen through twenty twenty, and then twenty twenty one through last season, so twenty twenty five, you get some very clear trends. Over the last five years, twenty one percent of rookie wide receivers drafted in the top forty eight have underperformed versus expectation by four more PPR points per game. That number is just twelve and a half percent with the earlier grouping or rookies drafted from twenty fourteen through twenty twenty. But if you look get the rookie wide receivers who outperformed expectation by four more PPR points per game from twenty fourteen through twenty twenty, just six percent of the wide receivers six percent of the rookie wide receivers were able to do that. But over the last five years, rookie wide receivers have outperformed expectation by four more PPR points per game at a twenty one percent clip. That is insane. The ceiling outcomes have been crazy. So now we've got this recency bias at play. Take everything I just said about the individual fantasy manager and how they might view rookies, multiply that by one hundred, because we've had this really polarizing five year window of rookie wide receivers. The overall bottom line here, though, is that rookie wide receivers in some they've had better cost based outcomes than non rookie wide receivers have since twenty fourteen. The problem, though, is that they've also had lower floors. Now at running back, it's not as straightforward. I've written about this in the guide as well, but there are other career years other than rookies that are much more advantageous to draft versus costs. At running back, rookies have just usually been fine, nothing special, just fine. And if you look at history or since twenty fourteen, across the board, you're generally gonna find non rookies outperforming rookies at running back. It's just really close. Usually. For example, among top forty eight rookie running back since twenty fourteen, sixteen percent of them have exceeded ADP expectation by four more PPR points per game for non rookies. That's seventeen and a half percent. It's not a massive difference. Both groups have exceeded two or more PPR points per game at the exact same rate, basically, but you guessed it. The downside risk is very evident with rookie running backs when looking at how frequently they underperform by four more PPR points per game, rookies are at a twenty three percent rate, non rookies just fourteen percent. For underperforming by two or more points per game, it's thirty nine percent versus thirty percent, And the exact same trends exist for top thirty running backs too. We can look at top thirty running backs because our sample size is large enough to work with, it's not big enough at wide receiver to draw any meaningful conclusions. So to put all this another way, we found that rookie wide receivers they had higher cost based ceilings than non rookies. They've also had lower cost based floors. For running backs, they've had similar season long ceilings, but they've had lower floors. That's not the combination you want to see. However, with all of this analysis, I'm looking at season long numbers, but fantasy football isn't just a season long game, it's a weekly one, and it's a weekly one where the end of the season matters most, since that's when the playoffs start, and in a lot of leagues, half the teams are making the playoffs with rookie running backs. Yes, season long wise, you're gonna get a similar ceiling outcome as a veteran while getting a worse floor, And that is bad. It is objectively bad. But if you focus strictly on the second half of the season, that equation starts to shift. I did this same analysis, but instead of looking at running backs who played eight games across the entire season, I looked at running backs who played five games during the second half their season or past week eight. I then categorize those players as rookies and non rookies. All of a sudden, everything looks a whole lot better for the rookie running backs. Not only do rookie running backs during the second half of the season have better ceiling outcomes, but they have better floor outcomes too. Across the board, the rookies exceeded expectation by two to four PPERO points per game at a better rate than the alternatives, and the veterans are underperforming at a higher rate as well, by four or five percentage points in almost every bucket. Now, this is counterintuitive because we've been taught for years that running backs are able to perform right away in the NFL. You can just drop them in an offense and they'll be fine. Wide receiver needs a little bit more time. Now, this is all still true, but my guess is that teams are still just hesitant to make these rookie running backs belcals right away, even if they're capable, and so as the season goes on, they not only get experience, but other injuries might occur to that backfield to allow them to get a bigger workload because remember, generally speaking, there's only one running back on the field at once. At wide receiver, a rookie can probably find the field in run routes and if he's good enough, he's going to earn targets. But it's funny because I don't think there's a better example with this than last season in twenty twenty five. Ashton Genti was a little bit better in fantasy football. During the second half of last year, Traveon Henderson was better. R J. Harvey was better. Like we saw this really come to be with three of the top rookie running backs from last year, all for one reason or another. And I think this is the consideration that you have to make when you're drafting your teams, whether it's a managed league or whether it's best Ball, you have to understand that historically we do see rookie running backs providing us a scary floor, but we're taking that on in our drafts knowing that and a ceiling might eventually come. What that means is that a balance is really necessary. If you find yourself drafting a lot of rookies early on, that's not a horrible thing necessarily, you just really need to cover yourself later on in the draft as the draft unfolds, and you need to cover yourself for the early part of the season. And there are backfields where you can find some that early season production from non early round players, But at running back, if you do go the route of a rookie, you really should have that balance top of mind. And that's something that it's my bad I have not talked about that enough through the years. At wide receiver, like I said, they're just volatile bets, especially in recent years, your own risk tolerance can really dictate how heavy you want to go with rookie wide receivers. And again, this is something that I should speak to more because not every fantasy manager is okay with playing fantasy football the way that I do, which is really searching for those ceiling outcomes. Look, some of this is pretty intuitive, but it's nice when data can guide us in these intuitive directions. There's comfort in that. And what the data says is that anyone who claims that rookies in redraft are terrible bets that just hasn't been the case yet. There's just more nuance than saying draft rookies no matter what. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by strooting for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. I'll be back in your ears on Wednesday on YouTube with the Late Round Fantasy Football Show, and then later this week we've got another episode of Late Round Perspectives. I'll talk to you guys then