469: Mailbag 12/23/20

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with with your host JJ Zacher Retha Jay Shake Zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at FANDEL and at Number five dot com in this episode four hundred and sixty nine of the Late Round podcast. So the many shows that are part of the FanDuel Podcast Network. Thanks for tuning in. It's the last show of the season. This is it. It's week sixteen. This is the final relevant week for fantasy football. Your boy needs a break. Don't worry, the show will go on during the offseason. I do two shows per week, with one of them being the Weekly Mailbag, but the fifteen Transaction Show, the Matchup Show, the ten Trend Show, those are done until next season. We've got some good questions for this week's show, though, and I'm excited to get to them. But before doing so, I wanted to let you guys know that we've got another weekly listener league over on FANDEL. Enter the Rake Free Weekly NFL Contest, made exclusively for you the FanDuel Podcast Network listener for just five dollars and compete for your share for the fifteen hundred dollars prize Bowl including a one hundred and fifty dollars first place prize to enter visitfandle dot com slash League slash listener League. Eligibility restrictions apply. The first question this week is from at poco FFB. What of you, as a fantasy player learned the most this year? So I do two episodes each January where I talked through the things I got right and the things I got wrong during the season, and that exposes some of the things that I've may be over or under emphasized. I think one thing we learned this year, though, given the circumstances, is that talent wins out for rookies. This rookie class was really good even before the pandemic hit. My model was obsessed with the wide receivers in particular, but the running backs I thought were underrated. The class was just unbelievable in general. And they came through without a preseason and without a whole lot of reps before the season started. And I think it's a good reminder that if you you have elite talent, it's going to win out. Instead of making excuses about why a player isn't doing well or why a player isn't seeing the field this season is a good reminder that if a player is a special talent, and I'm talking really good talents here, not like wide receiver three types, but if he's a really good talent with elite upside, he's probably going to show up under any circumstance. I sort of learned this with Odell Beckham when he was a rookie, because remember he was injured and then he stepped on a football field and he dominated. But this season really really showed that. It's not something that necessarily shocked me. This year, it wasn't that big of a surprise, but this season definitely solidified that stance. This next question is from at Eric Bulair. HEYJJ, I'd love to hear your suggestions for someone looking to get into rookie prospecting with little to know knowledge of college football players. Thanks. I mean, honestly, I don't dig into prospecting until the NFL season is over, anyway, compared to what people probably think. I know little about college prospects during the NFL season, But once the season ends, it's game on. I just don't have enough time to get you started, though. I'll direct you to two shows a couple of years ago, I did an episode of the Late Round podcast with Anthony Amiko on prospecting through data. That was episode two hundred and thirty, and then episode three hundred and fifty five from last offseason with Peter Howard specifically talks about wide receivers and to me, wide receivers are probably the most fun position to prospect. That's just my perspective with data though, because that's how I prospect. I look at it with a data lens. But I hope that those two shows will help. This last question is from at Aj Tranzano. I find I'm impulsive with players. Good players have a bad few weeks and I dropped them, example this year, DJ Moore, how do you prevent that? I think one of the hardest parts of fantasy football is battling being level headed with the knowledge this is a short season. It's not like we have months and months to wait for players to develop and become a thing. My thing, though, is always asking the question, what's the ceiling of the player I'm about to pick up versus the ceiling of the player that I'm about to drop? With DJ Moore, we've seen that ceiling, we know it exists, and we know he's got one of the better age adjusted profiles that you can find. Even if and when he has a downstretch, we at least know there's that baseline with him. Meanwhile, ask yourself the same questions for someone you're about to pick up. For a player like DJ Moore, chances are they won't have the same type of ceiling at all. This is a tough question to answer, though, because realistically I could just say be patient, be patient, and don't drop players, but sometimes it's easier said than none. I totally understand that you need a process to help you with that. This has questions from at top three three. How do you feel about starting a quarterback as well as the opposing defense, for example, Stafford in the Bucks defense in the same lineup. I generally try to avoid this because it's a low upside way of playing at defense. We want game scripts to favor the defense, which means in this case, a negative game script for your quarterback. And if your quarterback is in a negative game script, that means things aren't going his way more than likely. Meanwhile, a turnover isn't getting your team any points, Like sure, you're not losing points because of the turnovers. But chances are if your quarterback is so turnover prone that you're willing to play his opposing defense, maybe that quarterback isn't the optimal play. But the bottom line here is that it's a negatively correlated thing to do, and it's something I never really do, since quarterbacks control so much when it comes to how an offense performs. So if the offense doesn't perform very well, that means the defense is performing very well. But if the offense isn't performing well, that means your quarterback is not doing well either. This has questions from at Life of SAP going into next year's draft. Should the success of just and Jefferson in a run first offense and the middling returns of Cech in a dream role teach us to put more weight into player talent rather than landing spot. I mean, we should always be putting more weight into player talent, at least when it comes to rookies, for a ton of reasons, the first one being that it can be just as difficult to predict and forecast situation as an individual player's talent and ability. And if you're asking this from a dynasty perspective, which I think This is more redraft focus, but even still, if this is from a dynasty perspective, situations change, so we can't just solely draft off situation. Situations can enhance a player's upside, like Alvin Kamara when he was drafted to the Saints. But it's not everything, It's not even close to everything. But I also think it's important to not make general assumptions through anecdotal evidence here too. And what I mean by this is, was justin Jefferson's landing spot actually bad? Am I in the minority by thinking his landing spot was decent. Sure, he walked onto a team that likes to run the ball, but there was a huge target share for him to capre in that offense that wasn't exactly a bad landing spot. And with Cech, he's definitely disappointed. But I don't think anyone was projecting Le'Veon Bell to sign with the Chiefs mid season. Cech was still a low end RB one to high end RB two before Le'Veon Bell came along. No, I don't think he's looked as good as I thought he would, Don't get me wrong, But let's also not pretend that Cech was some scrub talent coming out of LSU. That's sort of the issue I have with the presentation of questions like this, like what would you change what would you have done differently? With Clyde Edwards Hilaire in particular, like after the fact, it's easy to say he's not as talented as we thought, But that's precisely the point. We thought he was really talented, and he still might be. I actually don't think that Cech is bad. I'm just saying, looking back, it's easy to say should we put more weight into talent? Should we put more weight into talent side and not just the situation side, But we kind of did put weight into talent. Cech was not only in a good sity, but he was also very talented. He was a first round running back. I think maybe the better example would be ki shan Vin if we're focused on rookies here. The problem for me personally is that I thought, and I still think to a degree, that Kishan Vaughn is talented. So it was just a talent evaluation missed from me. But I think the larger fantasy football community probably didn't think key Shan Vaughn was as talented as I did, and they were looking strictly at situation. I was looking at both. I just happened to miss on Kishan Vaughn, but Vaughn's value in both Redraft and Dynasty. Like back in July, it was very much situation driven, and I think that's a better example of us as a whole needing to focus more on talent. Like I said, I just missed on Vaughn because I actually thought that he was talented. I'm just trying to think from the perspective of the entire fantasy community. The bottom line answer here, though, is twofold Number one, when you look back and you evaluate things, try not to bring any biases. There's a lot of hindsight bias when we pretend that we could easily separate situation in talent. But number two, Yes, talent is more important. It wins out. That's what I talked about earlier. If you can nail that and feel confident with your process for talent evaluation, you'll win out in the long run. This next question says, how do you feel when you're starting the same guys every week for the entire season and then someone shiny like Jalen Hurts comes along right before championship week, do you bench one of the guys that you've been starting for Hurts? Yes, The answer is yes. Fantasy football is a weekly game, and it's a small sample size game. Because a player did really well from weeks one through eight doesn't mean he's a lock to do well from weeks nine through sixteen. And the reverse is true too. And the other thing with Jalen Hurts or these shiny players, as you say, the thing about these guys is it's not like we have this sample size of them having an opportunity and then disappointing. Like I understand, it feels risky to play Jalen Hurts, but he's only done well given the opportunity, and he does the things we want him to do for fantasy purposes. That's what actually gives him a high floor. He's a mobile quarterback. He's giving you that rushing and that's why he's a worthwhile fantasy asset. If he wasn't giving you that rushing upside, we wouldn't be touting him as a start, at least not as heavily. You can't let what happened early in the season dictate how you manage your fantasy team, right now, at least not totally. Things change, players and teams regress. If we focus on what happened in weeks one through four, all we're doing is falling victim to an anchoring bias where we put too much emphasis on what happened first versus what's actually happening. This is why Russell Wilson is so hard to trust. It's why we can play Marvin Jones despite his slow start. Things change in fantasy football. You play the players who project to give you the best chance to win, and this week that's Jalen Hurts. In most cases, this week's Mailback episode was a little bit shorter because it's a little bit more difficult to ask relevant questions in Week sixteen, But I'll end with one one that helps bring together and conclude the fantasy football season. It's from at Nark, the Shark Fantasy MVP this season. So the V and MVP stands for valuable. As we know, and when I think about value in fantasy football, I think bang for your buck. I could go with Dalvin Cook, I could go with Devonte Adams, but I'm gonna answer the last mailbag question of the season by going with the guy who really helped me and some of you tremendously this year. James Robinson getting a running back, the most important position in fantasy football, Getting a running back for free that posted high end RB one production throughout the season, that's a win. That's a huge win. I don't know how you get any more valuable than that. Of course, he could derail your championship plans this weekend, but a lot of you got Robinson off the waiver wire. He's been immensely valuable. And even though he's slowed down a little bit with just two performances over his last six where he's ranked higher than RB twenty and weekly scoring, he still hasn't scored fewer than ten PPR points in a single game this year. James Robinson to me, is the clear fantasy football MVP that's going to do for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you've get subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and nofri it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Now, before I let you go, I just want to take a second to thank each and every one of you for supporting this show this season and listening every single week. To be transparent, this has been an incredibly difficult season for me. Throughout this pandemic, my wife and I have had our two year old daughter at home with us. She's usually in daycare during the day, but we made the decision to keep her at home because my wife would be working at home with me, and as much as I'm obsessed with my daughter and I love her to death, working during an NFL season with a toddler running around it's not been easy, but it was so rewarding for me to be an outlet for all of you during such a devastating time in our lives. It's been tough for me, but I know it's been tougher for so many others. So I just want to say thank you for being patient if and when some of my analysis was maybe lacking. Thank you for being understanding if the show wasn't perfect. Thank you for understanding that I'm experiencing some of the terribly difficult things that some of you are experiencing. Most of all, thanks for tuning in. Like I said, I'm gonna be off during Week seventeen, but I'll be back the week after that with off season content where I'm podcasting twice a week. Have a great holiday everyone, and i'll talk to you then