1000: The Rookie Edge in Redraft Leagues

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha. J J Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode one thousand of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by DraftKings. Thanks for tuning in. Football season's right around the corner, and there's no better way to lock in your fantasy dominance early than with Best Ball on DraftKings, where you draft once and ride your roster all season long. And right now, DraftKings giving all customers a can't missoffer. Draft one, get one entern lineup in the fifteen million dollars Best Ball Contest for just twenty dollars, and you'll score another Best Ball ticket to play free for share of that fifteen million dollars, giving you a second chance to win big. It's easy. Just draft your dream team once, no weekly management required, and let your top scorers automatically start each week across the whole season. 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Eligibility restrictions apply. Voidware prohibited. One per customer enter the Best Ball fifteen million dollars Headliner contest by nine to four to twenty five to get one bonus entry twenty dollars entry required. Reward expires in thirty days. CEE terms at DraftKings dot com. Slash NFL Dash best Dash sponsored by DK When I'm doing Fantasy football analysis. I'm often looking at trends. When something happens in history at a very high rate, at an undeniable rate, then I usually take that into consideration with my forecasting. A lot of my studies and a lot of my average draft position analysis is based off of trends, and trends aren't full proof. They're not here to say that something will definitely happen. Like I did that episode last week on the tight end dead zone or whatever you want to call it. That episode wasn't to say that zero tight ends will emerge after being drafted in the tight end seven to tight end eighteen range. It's simply to say that historically there hasn't been much reason to reach for tight ends in that range. That doesn't mean that it always is that way, and it doesn't mean that I won't be drafting anyone from that range, because there are also trends to look for that tell us who to target from that range. The point is that you better be sure things are aligning and that that pick makes sense before grabbing a player from that dead zone. It's about as usual probability one of those undeniable trends that pops up in the late Round Draft guide each year, which, by the way, you can purchase that guide right now over on lateround dot com for the twenty twenty five season. But one of those undeniable trends is with rookies and how rookie players. And honestly, you could argue at all positions, but definitely a running back and wide receiver, and definitely wide receiver when you compare them to costs. But those rookies tend to be really good bets in your season long drafts. They don't always work out, but they tend to work out at a higher rate than most other career year subsets, Hence the trend. Now, if you listen to my discussion last week on Late Round Perspectives with Jacob Sanderson, then you heard us chat a lot about the fantasy football market getting sharper. With the game of fantasy football maturing the way that it has, with so many people playing and getting more and more into the game, it only makes sense to assume the market's just filled with smarter people people care more about fantasy football. When you care more about something, you understand that something a little bit better. I think we feel that subjectively each year for anyone who is ultra prepared for drafts. Back like ten years ago, you could walk away from drafts with super teams. It just feels a little bit more difficult to do that in today's game. So if the market's getting sharper, then that means some of the trends that we see may not be as strong as they appear, right Because if we're comparing to history and that history includes a time period where the market wasn't as sharp, then our data doesn't necessarily fully reflect the current market. And that was something I was really interested in researching with rookies. So I did rookies have been good value picks in season long leagues, But is that edge actually disappearing? Are people driving the cost of rookies upward leading to them not being nearly as valuable as they used to be. That's the shower thought that I had a few weeks ago, So I researched it, and I'm going to talk about that research on today's show. The first thing I wanted to see with this topic was whether or not we're actually drafting rookies higher today than we were, say, ten years ago, Because if we're not, then case closed. All of the trends from ten years ago applied today. I use average draft position data from fantasydata dot Com, which dates back to twenty fourteen. Now keep in mind this is season long ADP data. You may hear numbers today and be like, wait, that doesn't seem right, But you may also have best ball brain where the ADP isn't always one to one. I'm only going to focus on running back and wide receiver today because quarterback and tight end just wouldn't give us a big enough sample to work off of. I think the rookie discussion focuses a little bit more on running back and wide receiver anyway. So let's start with running backs. Are we drafting running backs earlier than we used to? Well, they're about a thousand different ways to answer that question. When I first did to look this up was see how many rookie running backs the marketplace in the top one hundred and eight, the top eighty four, and then the top sixty by year since twenty fourteen. And that's overall ADP. Why those parameters, Well, it gives us a look at rookie running back picks through round five through round seven, and then through round nine in a twelve team league and there was not a whole lot there. We really haven't seen a ton of movement from one year to the next. One year there'd be a lot of rookie running backs with high ADPs, and then one year there wouldn't be. So I moved to looking at positional rankings or positional ADP or where rookies ranked among other running backs, and there still wasn't some dramatic shift in US drafting more of them in recent seasons versus previous seasons more of them early. Since twenty fourteen, we've pretty much drafted the same number of rookie running backs in the top forty two, top thirty, and top eighteen at the position. It obviously fluctuates from one year to the next, but there's not some obvious, clear cut trend. But here's the thing. We know that not all rookie draft classes are the same. It could be that there have just been some really bad rookie running back classes lately, forcing us to draft them later. So I came up with a quick way to sort of adjust for this. Rather than just looking at the raw number of rookies drafted by year at running back, I layered on ZAP scores or scores within my prospect model. If there's a really good class by the ZAP model, then I would imagine rookie running backs would get drafted higher in redraft leagues. And that's exactly what we see, and it just so happens that recent seasons haven't been quite as strong at running back compared to the earlier seasons. Within this data set, for example, from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty, we averaged seven running backs per season with a ZAP score of eighty or better. You don't really have to understand the scores to get an idea of what I'm talking about here. On average, per season, seven incoming running backs had a ZAP score above eighty. Over the last four seasons, that average has been four. Now. A lot plays into that. I'm not going to get into all that on today's show, but just know that ZAP scores have been slightly worse in recent years. So obviously, if prospects are worse in recent years, then we probably wouldn't be drafting them as high. The fact that there hasn't been a serious shift in where rookie running backs are drafted actually tells us that we might be drafting them higher. Than we used to, and I can give you some exact data on that too. I was curious what proportion of these running backs was ZAP scores above eighty were then being drafted in the top forty two in redraft leagues. So I simply took the number of rookie running backs drafted in the top forty two at the position, and I divided that by the total number of rookie running backs who were above a ZAP score of eighty. Now, if you're thinking about this correctly, yes, there will undoubtedly be some players here who were drafted in the running back top forty two as rookies and who didn't have a ZAP score above eighty. But this gives us a general idea of whether or not the market was taking good ZAP scores and actually drafting them early. When look at this data, there seemed to be a very, very big shift around the twenty nineteen ten time frame. So let me explain that from twenty fourteen to twenty eighteens, this is five years worth of data. From twenty fourteen to twenty eighteen, we had twenty one total rookie running backs drafted in the top forty two at the position, so four point two of them per season. We also had thirty four running backs during that time period receive a ZAP score of eighty or better, which means twenty one over thirty four or sixty two percent of them were actually then taken in the top forty two at the position. Now, that's just a rough estimate given what I said before in that some top forty two running backs may not have had a ZAP score above eighty. When looking at twenty nineteen through twenty twenty four, we've had twenty nine rookie running backs drafted in the top forty two, or four point eight of them per season. That's a little bit higher than our previous sample. It's not significant, but it is a little bit higher. But from twenty nineteen through twenty twenty four, we also had thirty one running backs with a ZAP score above eighty, meaning hypothetically, twenty nine of thirty one or ninety four percent of the good running back prospects had top forty two running back ADPs. That's significantly higher than the sixty two percent rate that I talked about earlier. That trend exists throughout the position. When looking at top thirty running backs by ADP or top eighteen running backs by ADP. But it's most severe when looking at the top forty two range, which tells me that, yes, we're probably pushing rookie running backs higher up our boards than we used to because when we've had good ones in recent history, we've been more confident in drafting them. We've drafted them higher. But a lot of those running backs seem to fall in that RB thirty one to RB forty two range. We're not necessarily pushing them up, so so far, that's only a portion of the story, though, we need to know how these players are actually performing. Right, we can sit here and say that we're probably drafting rookie running backs earlier than we used to when adjusted for the talent level of these backs, but has it been worth it? This is where looking through the lens of ADP expectation can be really helpful. As any draft guide purchaser knows, every player at every position has some sort of expected points per game output at their ADP. Like if a running back gets drafted fiftieth overall, based on history, he'd be expected to score or something like twelve and a half PPR points per game. Now that might seem low, but you have to remember players also do poorly from that range, so it's just giving you sort of the median outcome. We can then see how well players do against that expectation. If a guy hadn't expected output of twelve and a half PPR points per game, and then he scored thirteen and a half PPR points per game, then he exceeded ADP expectation by a point per game. Looking at things through this lens, there may be something to point out with these rookie running backs. Let's split this data up into two buckets again. The first bucket from twenty fourteen to twenty eighteen, or the Early years bucket, and then the next one twenty nineteen through twenty twenty four or the current years. Those are the two groups that we just talked about a minute ago. The Early years group saw rookie running backs in the top forty two by positional ADP exceed expectation at a fifty percent rate, so they outperformed their draft day cost at a fifty percent rate. The Current years one was at a forty eight percent rate, so basically the exact same, despite the current years running back group likely being boosted up in ADP a bit based on their talent profiles. But here's the thing. What we are seeing with this data is that current year running backs don't seem to be exceeding expectation at nearly as high of a rate as the early years group was. I looked at how well these top forty two rookie running backs exceeded expectation by two or more points per game, and then three or more points per game. The early years group beat out the current year group by about eleven percentage points when seeing how well they exceeded expectation by two or more points per game, and then they doubled it up when looking at exceeding expectation by three or more points per game. Now, I know this can be incredibly difficult to follow. I'm sort of just brain vomiting a lot of data to you. But to summarize what I'm seeing, it's simply this, in terms of raw volume, we're not drafting running backs earlier than we were in the past. However, we probably are when you factor in the talent level of rookie running backs that we've seen in recent years versus what we saw like pre twenty nineteen. As a result, players have seemingly done fine versus expectation, but we've seen the hit rates drop when looking at rookie running backs who really outperform their expectation. And look, I'm just sharing top forty two running back data with you here. I was curious what this might look like if we looked at top twenty four rookie running backs, and the trend was actually the exact same. The sample size was a lot more limiting because rookie running backs don't get drafted in the top twenty four very often, but the results were pretty clear that in recent years rookie running backs haven't been as good of bets compared to previous years versus expectation versus their cost to be Be's honest, the data and the draft guide it kind of shows this too. It wasn't screaming that you should take rookie running backs at every portion in your draft. There were spots, for example, where year two backs were better values. But I do think it's interesting that when looking at season long points per game, rookie running back drafters have seemed to have lost a little bit of an edge in recent years because the talent level of these rookie running backs in recent years hasn't been as strong, and yet we haven't adjusted our ADP, so the expectations are still the same. And when talent isn't as strong, that means it's going to be much more difficult for these running backs to exceed expectation. And to be clear, this episode is not about fading rookies. Rookie running backs are still find a draft in fantasy football. When you consider their hit rates, they're still better than a lot of other career years, and we also see a nice boost in production from these guys during the second half of the season. Typically that's the most important part of the fantasy football calendar. So let me put a flash alert sign in your head right now. I'm not saying you should avoid rookies. What I am saying is that adjusting for talent, we seem to be getting less of an edge with rookie running backs than we used to. To be honest, though, I was more intrigued to do this work with wide receivers because, unlike running back, wide receiver was a spot in the draft guide and in previous draft guides where I've been very vocal about targeting rookies that rookie wide receivers are often undervalued by the market, and there's some of the best investments that you can make in your season long fantasy football league. So I did this exact same exercise, but with wide receivers, and this one was totally different because fantasy football managers just haven't drafted a ton of rookie wide receivers very high through the years. Like get this, Since twenty fourteen, we've averaged four point five rookie running backs getting drafted in the top forty two at their position per season. That's just one point eight at wide receiver. And I know that sounds absolutely bonkers. We're coming off a season where we had five rookie wide receivers in the top forty two. But there was a stretch from twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen four seasons where we only picked one rookie wide receiver in the top forty two one across four seasons, and unsurprisingly, those were the years where we had the worst ZAP scores at the position. During that twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen stretch, those seasons averaged seven and a half wide receivers with a ZAP score above eighty per season, when you look at the other seasons from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty four, that number rises to eleven point three. But like, you dig into those seasons and it's not like there were zero viable rookie wide receivers to draft. There were loads of first round wide receivers who ranked outside the top forty two at the position by ADP. Now that'll still happen these days, but it happens far less than it used to. Like, just last year, one hundred percent of the wide receivers with ZAP scores above ninety were drafted in the top forty two at the position, and twenty twenty three, two thirds of them were. Two of the three were Those are the two highest rates that we've seen since twenty fourteen. So I think pretty definitively, yes, we are indeed drafting rookie wide receivers higher as a consensus. But has that actually been harmful? My answer to that absolutely not. The beautiful part about there not being a ton of earlier round rookie wide receivers from twenty fourteen through about that twenty nineteen range is that much of the data that I've looked at that says rookie wide receivers are great values. It basically just stems from recent years. We remember the Marvin Harrisons of the world not living up to the hype. But my goodness, I don't know how you walk away from last season saying yeah, rookie wide receivers have inflated costs. Among the whdouts who played at least eight games last year, four of the top fifteen best values by ADP expectation were rookies. Moreover, and only looking at top fifty wide receivers by ADP, three of the top five best values were rookie wide receivers Brian Thomas, Malik Neighbors, and Lad McConkey. And in the top fifty, fantasy gamers were selecting seven rookies in total. That's an absurd hit rate. Three of the seven were top five values at the entire position. And yeah, that's just one season, and that one season was with a really great rookie wide receiver class. Twenty twenty three wasn't as kind, with two of the four top fifty rookie wideouts exceeding expectation, and Quentin Johnston was a huge bust that year. To be fair, though none of the rookie wideouts from twenty twenty three were drafted in the top thirty six as a wide receiver three or better. Going back to twenty twenty two, Drake London was neutral, Chris Alave exceeded expectation by three points per game, and then Sky Moore busted, but none of those players were drafted higher than why wide receiver forty two. With wide receivers in particular, yes back in the day, we'd see some crazy discounts with rookies. As we talked about on Perspectives last week, Garrett Wilson when he came out in twenty twenty two, he wasn't even a top fifty pick at the position despite being the tenth overall selection in the NFL draft. We've seen that kind of thing correct itself over the last couple of seasons. Like I doubt that we see a top ten pick of the position ever go outside the top fifty ever again. But the masses are probably getting too fixated on Marvin Harrison Junior's ADP from last year while not realizing that most of these rookies still aren't going significantly high. And again that's in season long leagues. This is not a best ball take as much as a season long one. Ted McMillan has a late fifth round price tag in season long right now. A comparable player from the past wouldn't have gone that high. The only rookie wideouts who have generally gone in the first six rounds by season long ADP historically have been uber a Eat talents, at least according to the ZAP model, and by draft capital you've got a Marii Cooper, Malikue neighbors, Marvin Harrison, and Jamare Chase's ADP actually fell because of how poorly his preseason went during his rookie year. But like we're only talking about the elite of the elite, Ted McMillan as a prospect is not part of that, at least in my opinion. He has a chance to be part of that, but he's not looked at the same way as those other guys were. And I think that many example is sort of the answer to the are we drafting rookie wide receivers earlier than we used to? The overall data says that we are, but you can even look at it at that micro level with Ted McMillan, we definitely are drafting them earlier. With that being said, a slight rise in ADP with these rookie wide receivers still doesn't place us in some wild opportunity cost region of our drafts. If a player like McMillan would have gone eightieth overall back in the day and now he's going like fifty fifth overall, that's a difference of one and a half peep yere points per game in expectation. Now, that's not nothing, but we're not talking about going from twelve PPR points per game in expectation to sixteen. That's the thing with this type of conversation that we really need to wrap our heads around. I have this in the draft guy, but since twenty fourteen, top six wide receivers by ADP have scored sixteen or more PPR points per game at about a seventy five percent clip, and sixteen points per game is a really strong difference making type season some when you absolutely need in your lineup. The next six have done that a fifty percent rate. That it's thirty percent than seventeen percent than fourteen percent. The true opportunity costs in fantasy football comes in the first few rounds of your draft, where hit rates are by far the highest at the two most important positions in the game. If you'd rather not invest in a rookie wide receiver in that range, I get it. Now, I'm gonna have a more nuanced take than that, and I'm not gonna say I'm gonna avoid it. All comes yes, but of course I get it you'd rather take the sure thing. I just asked that you don't overstate the true meaning of a late fifth round selection in your season long draft, especially when you can balance that selection with one in the very next round. That sort of appeases your desired floor outcome. You know, get tederoa McMillan and pair them with I don't know, Khalil Shakir. Even if we're drafting rookie wide receivers early, we're not drafting them so early. So that's the current state of rookies in your season long leagues. Let's recap this a bit first. At both running back and wide receiver, it does appear that the market is drafting rookies earlier. It's not as obvious at running back, but when you adjust for talent, it becomes more obvious, and the hit rates for rookie running backs have gotten a little worse. They're not bad. They just used to be very, very very good. Now they're just fine at wide receivers. Straight up, we're taking more rookie wide receivers earlier in our drafts, and while that does mean that we could run into some issues when they get boosted into that Marvin Harrison Junior range like we saw last year, there's still really good bets in season long, because at the end of the day, if all rookies were to rise by like two rounds, they're still not rising into areas of your draft where there's seriously bad opportunity costs. And with wide receivers, I'm not sure we ever actually see that dramatic of a change. At least in the short term. Wide receiver is relatively deep with talent. It might not be super deep with elite talent, though it appears to be this year, but there are always gonna be those wide receiver two, wide receiver three types littered throughout your draft, and that's how at best the masses are likely going to view rookie wide receivers. The funny thing is we look at Marvin Harrison Junior's rookie season as this reason or this example to show how the market is now overvaluing rookie wide receivers. But he actually may be the reason why we continue to see rookie wide receiver dominance because his outcome, his rookie season totals are surely going to scare people off, even if that's not a rational response. So keep drafting your rookies. The ambiguity the uncertainty surrounding them leads to lower costs, and those lower costs give you an opportunity to buy low on a league winning player. That's it for today's show, though thanks to all of you for listening. If you had subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are brestorting for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found. You follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Now, it wouldn't be right for me to walk away from episode one thousand of this podcast without really recognizing the milestone. And I say this for the end of the show because I know plenty of you don't care, but yes, this is episode one thousand. I've now done one thousand Late Round podcast episodes, which for the most part they've been solo shows, just me with the microphone, the Perspectives episodes, the Becoming a Best ball bro episodes. They're not part of this count. This show started over eight years ago, which is really hard to believe. I wasn't even thirty years old when I published the first episode. You guys have listened to me say stupid things like fade Derrick Henry or Target twenty twenty four Jalen Waddle. You've heard me fall in love with late round running backs like Jerry McNichols, John Kelly and Eno Benjamin. You've listened to me at my lows as a fantasy football analyst, because, as I always say, this is a probability driven game, We're gonna be wrong a lot. But some of the highs have been so much fun. I think back to Isaiah Pacheco and calling him out as a player to target right after he was drafted by the Chiefs. Or Lamar Jackson's breakout season when that Week one game happened where he threw five touchdowns against the Dolphins after I relentlessly talked about him throughout the offseason. That was amazing. Or puokinaku is rookie season and being on top of that, you listened to me at some of my best moments as a fantasy football analyst too. It's been great to share my thoughts on fantasy football on this show over the last eight plus years. But easily the greatest gift that this podcast has given me is the connection to so many people, not just across the country, but across the world. I've connected with other parents who have kids the same age as mine. I've met strangers at the grocery store who happen to recognize me despite usually just hearing my voice. I've made legitimate, lifelong friends simply because they found this podcast. I'm forever grateful to be able to wear Jim shorts every day and analyze fantasy football for a living. I can't even explain to you, guys how lucky I am for that alone. I haven't had the Sunday scaries for years now because I legitimately am in love with what I do. And a huge reason I love this so much is because of all of you. Genuinely, so thank you. Thank you for being along on this ride with me through the good advice, the bad advice, the birth of my daughter, the adoption of my son, a pandemic, the grieving after losing a friend and colleague, and Mike Tagliire, thank you, Thank you for letting me do me and appreciating the hours that I put into this show. Oh I think about it every single day, and I'm truly honored to been able to do this show a thousand times. Here's do a thousand more.