748: Mailbag 3/17/23

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacherwethas j Jake Zacherwson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zachary Sin in this episode seven hundred and forty eight of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in, hey. Check out the Late Round Prospect Guide. You get profiles of every running back and wide receiver who are at the combine. You get a breakdown of what goes into my prospect models. You get information on the year two model, and there's more in there too. You can check out all one hundred and thirty five pages of the guide by going to lateround dot com and purchasing it right now for fourteen ninety nine. Once the draft is over, you'll get an updated guide with new prospect scores and breakdowns directly to your inbox. No additional charge for that. Again, that's lateround dot com. The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Josh. It says both Jalen Waddle and DeVante Smith were able to exceed their draft capital last year due to the discount of having a stud wide receiver in front of them with the DJ Moore trade. Is Darnell Mooney in that same boat, or do you think the market will correct this season? So, first off, I want to let everyone know that next week I'm gonna break down free agency. The early week episode is about free agency. I want to wait for everything to settle before I float some takes out there. Now, regarding this question, I think this is too simplistic of a view, as I always say, we've got a lead with talent first, especially a wide receiver. Jalen Waddle and DeVante Smith were both drafted very very high in the NFL Draft. They both looked very good in my prospect model. As a result, they both are very very very good players. It's not that Darnell Mooney's bad, He's just not DeVante Smith or Jalen Waddle. So strictly from that standpoint, I'd say let's hold on for a second. That's especially true when you give Mooney more context of that chicag Go Bears offense. Part of the reason Devonte Smith and Jalen Waddle were able to still be good fantasy assets last year while being their team wide receiver two is because there was still a lack of alternatives in their offenses. The Eagles had this trio of aj Brown, DeVante Smith, and Dallas Goddard that they threw a high percentage of their passes to. The Dolphins had no consistent threat outside of Tyreek Hill and Jalen Waddle, so not only are they good players, but there was opportunity for them to see a higher target share ceiling in their offense. This isn't to say that Chase Claypole and Cole Cometter studs, but you could argue that's more competition for Mooney than what the Alabama wide receivers dealt with. And the big, big question mark for the Bears offense right now is still passing volume. I understand the excitement around the DJ Moore move. I love DJ Moore the player, and it definitely helps justin fields in twenty twenty three and hopefully beyond. But this is not a Philadelphia Eagles like situation where we saw the Eagles go from a run heavy team to all of a sudden Jalen Hurts supporting all these pass catchers. In twenty twenty one, the Eagles had a forty seven point three percent pass rate, meaning forty seven point three percent of their pass and rush attempts were passes and that was in twenty twenty one. In twenty twenty two, that jumped to forty nine point six percent. They went from four hundred and ninety four pass attempts to five hundred and thirty six. They improved by about two and a half pass attempts per game. Last year, the Bears had quite literally the lowest pass rate of the last decade plus it was just forty point three percent. They had three hundred and seventy seven pass attempts, or twenty two pass attempts per game. And I absolutely believe they're gonna throw more this year. Please don't take this the wrong way. I'm not simply looking at what happened last year and projecting it this year. The question is how much more? And I can tell you that since twenty eleven, only three teams have increased their pass attempt rate year over year by ten or more attempts, and none of them increased it by eleven. In order for the Bears to match the Eagles passing total from last year, they'd have to basically become that. They'd have to be one of those teams. And keep in mind the Eagles passing attack was also efficient, so not only do you need to see some historical volume jumps, which can happen, but you also need to see greater efficiency at the quarterback position, which also can happen. I just don't think it's gonna happen to the same degree that we saw with Philadelphia. So I would not automatically think a player like Mooney can ball out in this offense. Because of guys like DeVante Smith or Jalen Waddle, he may end up being a decent value. I have no idea at this point, but I wouldn't have monster expectations. I don't even have monster expectations for DJ Moore. This best question is an email from Michael and it says I crushed my drafts last year with the assistance of the Prospect Guide and look forward to doing it again this year. The narrative of this draft has been lots of running backs, not great wide receivers. I just looked at the guy and there's currently six wide receivers before you're RB three. Is Draft Capital Delta going to change this a lot? Or is this a place to zig when others are zagging? So I may have to put some sort of disclaimer in the guide next year where the rankings go because it's really important to remember that these are pre draft rankings. Right now, there are so many running backs outside of Bjon Robinson, Jamiir Gibbs, and Zach Sharbonay who could be considered this class as RB four. In my opinion, I think you can make arguments for Sean Tucker, Tank Bigsby, Chase Brown, even Devon a Chain, Kendre Miller. In a place like NFL mock Draft Database sees the exact same thing. I use sites like that for a projected draft capital, and right now you have a whole lot of running backs sort of bunched up together in projected draft spot. The only guy who's separating himself from the pack a little bit is Devon a Chain. But he's a really small running back, and while I think he's a great player, he doesn't have the best profile in the world to be this high volume running for fantasy football purposes. So since this is pre draft, we sort of have all these different inputs from analysts on where these guys will go, and that's resulting in this cluster. Players are gonna likely separate themselves more after the draft. But the reason I'm preferring a lot of these wide receivers over running backs right now is because there's no chance I'm going to draft a running back who's a borderline day two pick over a wide receiver who's projected to go in Round one. I mean that's a high level look at it. Of course, their individual profiles matter a ton, but that's the general gist. A lot of these running backs could slip to Day three. We have no idea right now, and we know that type of capital is not good for their future fantasy potential. I think a lot of these running backs will end up going Day two, don't get me wrong. And those Day two running backs are going to be the ones that I favor a little bit more, and some of them might jump these wide receivers. I think there's a ton of interesting running backs in this class. I see this class as a good one that has some top end talent, and it's deep too. And I don't love the wide receivers, but I don't think the higher end wide receivers are horrible. I love JSN, I think Addison is solid, Quentin Johnston has some positive traits. Zay Flowers could be really good. I love Josh Downs and Jalen Hyatt looks like a lesser version of Jamison Williams in my model, I think it's rational to have all of those wide receivers ranked ahead of these sort of secondary running backs like Sean Tucker at least right now. That could easily change post draft. But a lot of those guys are projected at worst as early second round wide receivers. I'm going to bank on that over banking on some of these iff Yer running back situations. Thea's questions from at mischughana it says, are there diminishing returns in your draft capital delta score? As in, is there a bigger difference between draft capital deltas of zero percent and seven percent compared to between seven percent and fourteen percent? So this question was a great one. I have a few that I got around draft capital delta that led me to sending an email blast via the Late Round Fantasy Football newsletter earlier this week, which you can subscribe to for absolutely free over on Lateround dot com. But buckle up because this is sort of a complicated thing to describe. If you're not mathy, if you don't care about this kind of stuff, I understand if you want to just skip ahead a little bit. For those of you who haven't read the Late Round Prospect Guide or who aren't aware, draft capital delta is a metric that I developed the looks at whether players were overdrafted or underdrafted. Essentially, it's the difference between a player's prospects score and percentile form and a player's draft capital and percentile form. The example I keep going to this offseason is with Isaiah Pacheco. Last year, he had a forty eighth percentile score in the model. As a prospect. He was a two hundred and fifty first overall pick, but that two hundred and fifty first overall pick put his draft capital in the thirty eighth percentile. And for the record, the reason that number isn't lower is because there are undrafted players in the model, So the thirty eight eight percentile is one of the lowest that you can get for a drafted player. That difference between those two percentiles is ten It was ten point four percent. To be exact, That was Pacheco's draft capital delta positive ten point four percent. That was the third highest in last year's class. It was one of the reasons that was in on Pacheco among a lot of others. So what I did in this newsletter was look at a player's draft capital delta and compared to that player's expected output over his first three years of his career based on draft capital. That may not make a lot of sense, hear me out. The model tries to rank players based on how well it expects them to do in what I call B two s or best two seasons. Best two seasons is the average of the top two years in points per game across the player's first three in the league. So let's say a guy scores ten, eleven, and thirteen Fantasy points per game across his first three years. You'd take the top two seasons, average them out, get twelve, twelve, and that's his B two s because his top two seasons were eleven to thirteen. That's B two s. Every pick in the NFL draft has some sort of expected B two s. Higher picks have a higher B two s, lower picks have a lower one. That's because draft capital correlates to how well a player is going to do across his first three years in the league. Now, none of this may make sense, that's totally okay. I'm just going through all this for anyone who cares. Basically, in order to compare player draft capital delta's, I looked at draft capital delta versus this expected B two S score. In other words, draft capital delta versus how well a player outperformed expectation from a draft capital perspective, so how often he exceeded that expectation by two points, four points, six points, and so on. And what I found was that yes, positive draft capital delta's. Players who the model deemed were underdrafted, they outperformed their draft capital at a higher rate than players who were overdrafted or overrated, which is great because that tells me that the model is doing its job. But what was really interesting was that across the entire sample, the intensity of the draft capital delta didn't seem to matter as much. What mattered more was whether or not it was a positive draft capital delta or a negative draft capital delta. And that's especially true a wide receiver. You basically just won someone firmly in the positive range, but a positive four percent draft capital delta probably not that much different than a positive eight percent one. At running back, you start to see better numbers when guys are in like that ten percent plus range, the Isaiah Pacheco range, and again this is across the entire sample, so all drafted players since twenty eleven. But I also looked at only top one hundred draft picks at running back and wide receiver, and when doing that, draft capital delta got more predictive. When a player had a positive draft capital delta, he far far outperformed a player with a negative draft capital delta, And as those numbers got larger at wide receiver, things seemed to get better. I'll just give you an example. We haven't had a ton of top one hundred wide receivers from twenty eleven to twenty twenty with a draft capital delta a five percent or more. Just nine of them have gotten there. So nine wide receivers since twenty eleven who have played three years in the league. That's how we'd be able to calculate B to s. But of those nine, six of them exceeded their draft capital expectation by four more points in B to S. Remember that's best two seasons, the average of a player's top two seasons in points per game across their first three. Meanwhile, of the sixteen wide receivers with a draft capital delta in this range, that's worse than minus five percent. Only nineteen percent of them were able to exceed expectation by four plus points. So we're looking at six out of nine, which is a very high percentage versus nineteen percent. And running back is more interesting in my opinion, of the running backs who have been drafted in the top one hundred from twenty eleven to twenty twenty who had a positive draft capital delta, twenty eight percent of them exceed their draft capital expectation by four more points and B two s so twenty eight percent. Now compare that to all the top one hundred running backs with a negative draft capital delta. You know how many exceeded expectation by that amount nine percent? And when talking about exceeding by six or more points, those numbers are twenty two percent versus three percent. Now, I know how difficult all of that was to follow. I totally understand it. I know that it's a lot easier to follow when it's sitting in front of you on a piece of paper or on a computer screen. It's hard for me to communicate these ideas on a podcast, but they're important because a lot of people have these questions. Basically, you want super high draft capital deltas at running back. Ideally they're just positive, especially for early round picks at wide receiver in the early rounds. If there's an intensely high draft capital delta, that's a good sign. Overall, though, you just want positive draft capital deltas. And if you do want to put it in front of you on a computer, you can read more about this by going to lateround dot com. You can click up the newsletter archives. The newsletter about this was sent earlier this week, and for the record, the Prospect Guy can provide all of these scores for you guys post draft. Now, speaking of the Prospect Guide, this last question is from at CE Lots of F's twenty one. It says, JJ love the Prospect Guide. Thanks. Who is someone in the guide who your model views favorably but you don't see yourself rostering very much? And who is someone who your model does not view favorably but you could see yourself rostering a ton? So let's start with the player my model views favorably, but I don't like as much. This one's at wide receiver and it's Parker Washington. Washington had a really good breakout age and he's an early declare. But his production metrics don't look very good. They're not like horrific, but his top season in yards per team pass attempt is pretty poor. But because of those other factors, to go along with projected draft capital, he doesn't look too bad. The problem I have with him is I'm not sure he's gonna be someone who warrants a ton of looks in the NF. He didn't really see an uptick in production at Penn State last year without Johan Dotson in the mix, and he's sort of built like a running back. He really reminds me of Amari Rodgers, who, as we know, ended up being a bust. That was his top comp of my model, followed by Paris Campbell. So even if the model likes Washington, I won't like Washington as much as the model does. And then at running back, a player my model doesn't like enough in my opinion is Kendre Miller. He's got great size, but his best season reception share was only six percent, and that's bringing his score down a bit. But he's one of the youngest running backs in this class, and he was more efficient than Zack Evans back in twenty twenty one within that same offense, I wouldn't be surprised if I end up liking Zach Evans more than my model does too. I just kind of want to wait and see where he goes in the NFL Draft. But Kendre Miller is someone I like more than my model currently does, and Parker Washington is one who I think my model's overrating. But that's it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't for it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Now, if you made it this far in the show, then you're in luck. Friend of the show, Curtis wants to donate five Prospect Guides to people who may not be able to afford the guide otherwise, So if you haven't gotten the guide yet, head to Lateround dot com go to purchase the twenty twenty three Prospect Guide, and during checkout use promo code Thanks Curtis for a free copy. That's thanks Curtis, and that's spelled c r Tis. Please make sure that the discount works. Before clicking purchase, it'll show a total of zero dollars for the purchase if it worked, if last year's any indication. These will go quick if you're listening in the late morning or in the afternoon. I'll try to do some of these on Twitter over the next month too. I want everyone to get an opportunity to get a guide for free. But thank you so much to Curtis for the donation. Thanks for listening everyone, have a great weekend. I'll talk to you next week.