372: Mailbag 5/8/20

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with with your host JJ Zacherisa Jay Jake zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyeson, the editor in chief at fandled at number fire dot com and this is episode three hundred and seventy two of the Late Round podcast many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. There's some great questions this week, so I want to get to them right away, but first I want to remind you guys about Fandel's free Props Pick Them contest. All you have to do is correctly pick five props every day and go at least twenty five of thirty five over the course of the week to split the twenty five hundred dollars weekly payout, and then you can just get back in on the action the next week. It's that easy. Agent location restrictions apply, no purchase necessary, void where prohibited. For more details, visit fandle dot com and check out the Win from Home banner and the FanDuel Lobby. The first question this week is an email says, hey, JJ, hope you and your family are doing well and are healthy. Thank you given how much I peppered you with questions. You know, I love the pod. I have a variance question for you. I like to take players early who have a high floor and the narrowest range of outcomes ie Michael Thomas. In the later rounds, I want players with high ceilings and the broadest range of outcomes ie Preston Williams. A player on a team that retains the same coaching staff, quarterback, offensive line, etc. Seems much more likely to have predictive outcomes than a player who either changes teams or sees a lot of changes on their current team. So my question is how do you measure the degree of variants when you project player outcomes? Furthermore, which factors have the greatest impact on the degree of variants? All the best, Nick, So I don't build range of outcomes in my projections. I don't give a low range and a high range when I'm building my projections, mostly because I don't use projections as an end all for my drafting. I'm just looking at the most likely outcome with my projections. But I think you're right with the way that you're looking at and player evaluation. Those are the right types of questions to ask. Is this the same coaching staff, are their new pieces to the offense, has the quarterback changed? Is the offensive philosophy going to be different? Could the team see different game scripts this year than last year. If the answer to those questions that things are generally the same as the previous season, then you'll have more confidence in your projection and outlook for a player. But ambiguity drives variants. The range of outcomes for a lot of second round rookie running backs this year is pretty crazy compared to someone like Alvin Kamara, whose workload is generally set. And then to your other question of which factors have the greatest impact on the degree of variants, I don't think there's a list of them per se, But I think you can go back to the classic fantasy football formula of talent plus opportunity equals fantasy success. If a player is talented and he's seeing a ton of opportunity, then he's going to have success. If there are question marks around a player's talent, and that'd be especially true of younger players, and then if there are question marks around opportunity, like a new coaching staff, more talented players in an offense, and so on, then you're naturally getting a higher variance fantasy asset. But back to the projections thing. This goes back to why I'm a believer that the act of building projections is more important than the projection itself. The projection can help, but understanding the different directions a player and team can go in which you can really grasp when you build projections, that will help you understand variation a whole lot better. This nast questions from at BPOFSU which of the rookies being drafted in the top twelve of rookie drafts are most likely to bust? So rookie ADP is obviously going to vary. But the easy answers to these types of questions is looking at the tail end of that round, because those players are being drafted there for a reason. They're being drafted a little bit later, for a reason they're not as good as the player is being drafted at the top. As much as I like Keishan Vaughn, I think he is the obvious answer. I mean, you want to talk about high variants, Vaughn's talent isn't as indisputable as players like Clyde Edwards Hilaire or Jonathan Taylor. And we're still not one hundred percent sure about what his opportunity is going to look like now. I like Keyshawn Vaughn. You guys know this by now, but there's still a lot up in the air about the kind of impact that he can make. I'm not blind to that. It's just that I'm recognizing the variability to his profile when looking at talent and opportunity, which is why I still think that he's find to take at the end of the first round of rookie drafts. But he's my answer here. This last question is from at FF Life. Does Miles Sanders last season help us answer the hotly debated question last off season about Doug Peterson's usage of running backs? So I think a little bit. Yes. Sanders was in an article that I did on Players to Target and Fantasy drafts last offseason, and I talked about this very topic in detail. It's true that they split their backfield with Peterson as head coach. They've had a split backfield entering last year. Twenty nine teams had more twenty plus point performances by an individual running back over the previous three seasons then the Philadelphia Eagles. It's because the Eagles were splitting their backfield. But if you look at who the Eagles running backs were, it's not that much of a surprise that they weren't carrying big workloads. You had La Garrett Blunt, Ryan Matthews, Josh Adams, Darren Sproles, Wendel Smallwood, Corey Clement, and Jay Jay. None of those running backs are very good or good enough for coaches to say, we need you on the field all the time. Now, with that being said, Miles sanders season really turned around when Jordan Howard got hurt. With Jordan Howard, Sanders was averaging about thirty four percent of Phillies running back rushes per game and about a nine percent target share. Without Howard, his running back rush share jumped by over thirty percent, it almost doubled, and his target share per game rose by three percent. Now, I don't think that this means Sanders is set to regress back to what we saw during the first half of last year in Philly. He was a rookie, we hadn't seen what he was capable of doing, and the Eagles didn't really invest in the position during this offseason. So where I sit is that sure Other running backs like Boston Scott will be involved in that offense in some way. We don't usually see running backs just own backfields in today's NFL anyway, but I lean towards Sanders' second half of the season numbers in the first half, since he's their first legitimate back that they've had under Doug Peterson. There was reason for them to not unleash him until that Howard injury. He was a first year player, and then he was really good, and then the Eagles did nothing to really give him legitimate competition this offseason. Even if I'm a believer that the running back position is fairly replaceable, talent still dictates touches, and touches mean everything in fantasy football. This next question is from at Fantasy Underscore, Dude, cost being the same, would you rather keep Kareem Hunt or Philip Lindsay? At a high level, I think the obvious choice here is Kareem Hunt. You've got a number two back in both cases, but the Browns are likely to have a better offense than the Broncos are. We also are probably going to get more juice from Hunt as a receiver. Philip Lindsay's target share started to disappear down the stretch. Last year, he didn't hit higher than a nine percent target share in any of his final four games. Went through the first half of the season, his average was well over thirteen percent. Kareem Hunt didn't have lower than an eight point eight percent target chair in any game that he played last year. Now it's a different offense this season, so there are some question marks, but I'd expect him to still be involved as a receiver. Maybe not to the same degree as last year, but he'll still be involved. And here's the other thing to always keep in mind. With these secondary running backs. They have standalone value, but if an injury happens to their starter, which one gains more value? To me? The obvious answer there is Kareem Hunt. Kareem Hunt without Nick Chubb would be an RB one right now. My projections have Hunt scoring about thirty more Fantasy points than Philip Lindsay, so he's my choice. This next question says you're one under the radar rookie draft steel based on what you've seen consistent in rookie draft ADP. So I don't know if there's one singular answer here, so instead I want to go buy tier. I think people are sleeping on JK. Dobbin's ceiling. I've got him in his own tier and tier two behind Ceh and Jonathan Taylor, but Dobbin says, just as high of a ceiling as those guys do. I've seen him go behind DeAndre Swift in drafts and I just don't understand that at all, And it's mostly for reasons that I talked about on Monday show. So I'm not gonna rehash things. In that second round of wide receivers tier. I like Michael Pittman a whole lot, and again, I'm not gonna bring back some of the things that I've already said about these guys, but Pittman can be a top target for the Colts right away, and aside from his age profile, everything looks really good for him. And then I guess I'm gonna say Van Jefferson in that lower tier of players. I talked a lot about Van on that Monday show, so if you didn't listen to that, I hit pause here right now and go listen to that first. There's a lot of detail around this. I didn't even like Van Jefferson as a pro, but he's fallen so far in some rookie drafts that he's just hard to ignore given the draft capital that the Rams spent to get him. This last question says, I'm in shock how Vaughn is the second rated back in your model's stat score. Briefly looked at his two years at Vandy and didn't see anything eye popping. Was he that good considering the context of the offense he was in? Also, you think what age in RB enters the NFL matters. I don't know what you looked at when you say that you looked at his first two years at Vandy, but if it's in reference to his production, I can explain that for you. His raw numbers don't look special by any means. But within this draft class, he ranked second and final season touchdown share behind only James Robinson, a small school guy. He ranked second in reception share behind only Eno Benjamin, and he had a final season total yards per team play of one point seventy five, which was fifth best in the class. This is why looking at raw numbers doesn't really give us a good picture of a prospect prospecting through data and why Vaughn is looking decent in my prospect model, more so pre draft. But he still has an eighty second percentile score overall, which gives him a decent chance to hit, and regarding age, it didn't do a whole lot in my model. I think it's one of those things that we at least have to be aware of, but it shouldn't drastically change our evaluation on a running back at wide receiver. It's a totally different story. This next question is from at bay FFB. It seems the fantasy community is quite mum on zach Ertz. Do you think he is a buy, sell or hold in dynasty? Various trade coalcs have his value all over the place, but consensus rankings have him in the top five tight ends. If selling, what would be a good return for him? So, zach Ertz is a very clear cell in my opinion. Not only is the tight end position generally overvalued in all fantasy formats given you're only starting one of them in a typical league, but Ertz has been a very, very volume dependent fantasy piece. He's been fined the last two years because he's he's seen one hundred and fifty six and one hundred and thirty five targets, But in twenty eighteen we saw his target share drop a good bit when the Eagles got Golden Tate, and last year, Ertz's target share was significantly better When the other pieces of the Eagles offense was sidelined, his per game target share dropped by about three and a half percent with al Shan last year. The year before that when Golden Tate entered the picture, when Tate played significant snaps, we saw Ertz with a target shair below twenty percent. Like I think Zach Ertz is fine, but I think we'd all agree that he's not a player who's rising and ascending. He's got more competition for targets now. Dallas Goddard is emerging, and Ertz is going to be thirty years old next year. He's a good sell if you can get something strong and just so it's out there, and I'm not trying to be a jerk if it comes off that way, But I generally don't do the what would be a good return for him type of questions. I don't think that's the way that we should be thinking about trades in fantasy football. What if the player or the players that I tell you who you should target, and an urch trade or on teams that already have good tight ends that wouldn't do you any good. Your goal should be to find a team that's in need of a tight end and find players on that team that you would want to target in a trade. Every team in every fantasy league has a player or two that you would be fine with trading for. Your consideration set for players to trade for should be big, not small. This last question is from at DODA veteran. On a recent episode, you said you're not a big fan of rankings. Other analysts aren't fans of tiers because it's unclear where one tier ends and another begins. Can you share your thoughts on these beliefs and how fantasy players should organize their thinking for drafts. I don't know why an analyst would rather rank players than tier them when tiering gives you a way better idea of value and it provides a lot more flexibility. Not all drafts are going to go the same way. We know this. If you're in a league where wide receivers are being drafted early and often, then you'll need to adjust in some way, and the easiest way to do that is with tiers, where you know where the last acceptable player is to draft in a particular tier before there's a big drop off. Rankings don't tell you that. Maybe the questionnaire is, how do you know where that big drop off comes? Well, you can look at projections to help, and you can see where there's a big gap from one player to the next. Or you can look at things a little bit more subjectively and go with how comfortable you'd feel with one player versus the next. When that comfortability gets more intense, a new tier starts. But rankings are linear. One player is one spot better than the next, who's one spot better than the next. If you chart projections or fantasy points scored at the end of the season, the results are not linear. That's why I don't like rankings, because my goal with my job is to help you be more engaged with this game about a game that we all love. If you're just drafting blindly off of rankings, you're not going to be engaged. You're not going to really understand how to best extract value because you won't be paying as much attention to where certain drop offs and player value occur. So if I'm any of you listening to this, I would tier my players during a draft. It allows you to properly assess when you should pounce on a player and when you should wait based on how a draft is unfolding. Rankings don't do that as accurately. They're just way less flexible. That's gonna do it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, have a great weekend and I'll talk to you next week.