488: The Wide Receiver BMI Debate

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Speaker 1: This is the Label podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha, JJ zacher Resa, what's up everyone? It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at fandel and at number five dot com in this episode four hundred and eighty eight of the Late Round podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. I would assume everyone listening to the show has gone to the doctor before. If you haven't, you should probably get on that to make sure that everything's okay. Maybe you went and you got your yearly physical. You get there, they weigh you, they get your height, and they input those numbers into the computer and it spits out your body mass index, or what we know as BMI. You could argue all day if BMI is a good indicator of someone's overall health. That's not what I'm here for. I'm not a doctor. I'm a fantasy football analyst. But I do want to talk about BMI on today's show because if you hop on Fantasy football Twitter during any NFL offseason, you'll see debates about BMI player BMI. That is, on one side, you've got folks who swear that BMI is a big deal for players, specifically for wide receivers. On the other you have people who think that it's irrelevant, and it's just these idiot nerds who believe in that kind of detail. Now, I've alluded to my answer to this question on the show in the past, and I'll resurface and talk about that again today. But I want to dig into this topic, and honestly, today's show is sort of like a giant rant, but quite simply, I want to answer the question does BMI matter for wide receivers at least as it pertains the fantasy football Now, before we get into this thrilling topic, I want to remind you about Fandel's NHL Breakaway contests between March third and March ninth. If you enter one of the contests and any player in your lineup scores a hat trick, you'll win a share a five thousand dollars in bonus cash. That's in addition to your regular contest prizes. So head over to fandle today and play some daily fantasy hockey. For more details at fandle dot com or download the Fandel app. Eligibility restrictions apply. So to kick things off, I want to take you guys, back to when you first learned about fractions, you learn that a fraction had two parts to it, the numerator and the denominator, the numerator being the top number in the fraction, the denominator being the bottom number. I've seen and read a good number of BMI related arguments in the fantasy football space on both sides of the argument, and one thing that I've noticed with the pro BMI arguments is that they typically only focus on the numerator. Not all of them do, so don't think that I'm taking sides or tearing down someone's work here. It's just something that I've noticed with this analysis, an analysis beyond the BMI debate. But really, in order to get a good picture of this, we need to relate that numerator to an overall sample or population. Let's just run through an example of what I mean. A pro BMI argument for wide receivers may be something like the following. If you look at top twenty wide receiver seasons over the last fifteen years, you'll notice that the majority of those seasons are from players with BMI's north of twenty six. And that's true over the last decade. The average wide receiver twenty season has resulted in two hundred and twelve PPR points. Now, over the last fifteen years, one hundred and thirteen wide receivers have hit that mark at least once in a season. Among those one hundred and thirteen, only twenty one of them, not even twenty percent of them were from wide receivers with BMIs below twenty six. At phase value. This may seem like drafting bigger wide receivers as the way to go, but it really doesn't tell us that much at all, because hypothetically, what if the NFL only had thirty wide receivers with BMIs of twenty six or lower. What if our population size of lower BMI wide receivers was only thirty, then all of a sudden, it's almost as if we should be striving for a low BMI wide receiver. We shouldn't be avoiding them, because twenty one of thirty would have posted the top twenty season. That's an incredibly high hit rate. Only focusing on the numerator ignores the overall population. It ignores how many players were choosing from in each subset, those subsets being a BMI of twenty six or more or a BMI of less than twenty six. The truth is there's a lot more to this in just looking at fantasy results and saying, see, bigger wide receivers are better, because in the end, there are more bigger wide receivers than smaller wide receivers in the NFL, so they should be better, they should be represented at a higher rate when we look at postseason results. Let's think of it this way with a focus on the twenty twenty season, and keep in mind this is merely an example to helps show what I'm talking about. In twenty twenty, according to stadthead dot com data, there were seventy seven wide receivers across the league who had a BMI under twenty six who also played one game. Twenty six is completely arbitrary, by the way. I'm only referencing it because that's a number that a lot of analysts point to being an important one for wide receivers to hit. But if you're curious, there were nineteen wide receivers who played one game this past year with a BMI below twenty five. And look, a lot of those players didn't do a whole lot. I'm not denying that at all, but if you look at all the wide receivers with a BMI greater than twenty six with one game played, that sample jumps to one hundred and seventy one. Let's just use those as our denominators. Seventy seven wide receivers with one game played under a twenty six BMI and then one hundred and seventy one wide receivers with one game played at twenty six or over. If you look at the top twenty wide receivers in Fantasy football this past year, five of the twenty had BMIs under twenty six. Now, that's relatively in line with what we found over the last fifteen years. Right, Remember earlier when I said that just under twenty percent of the top twenty over the last fifteen years have been from players under a twenty six BMI. That's pretty in line with what we saw in twenty twenty. Well, now, divide that five by the number of wide receivers who actually met that threshold across the league, or the ones who played at least one game this year. Since it is hard to define what across the league really means, we're defining that as having played one game. Five divided by seventy seven is six and a half percent, meaning of all lower BMI players, and we're defining all by players who have played at least one game, six and a half percent of them gave us a top twenty season. When looking at the bigger BMI guys, our denominator is one hundred and seventy one, with fifteen top twenty wide outs remaining. That means fifteen divided by one hundred and seventy one, or eight point eight percent of the bigger BMI wide receivers finished in the top twenty. When you actually look at the proportion of players who fall into these admittedly arbitrary BMI buckets, you start to see that things are a lot closer than you might have thought, or they're closer than you might have been told. Now, the twenty twenty season was definitely a good one for smaller wide receivers. I'm just using it as an example because it just happened. Previous seasons saw just two or three top twenty wide receivers with that type of BMI, which means the proportion of solid hits at lower BMIs was lower. I just wanted to share the twenty twenty example to show how our brain should be thinking about this stuff that instead of looking at it from the perspective of this many players had this BMI, we should be looking at the proportion of players with that BMI. That's step one. Step two is recognizing that this type of thinking extends into things that go beyond how many fantasy points a player scored. For example, we've seen fifty three wide receivers selected in round one of the NFL draft over the last decade and a half, or since two thousand and six. Of those fifty three wide receivers, the average BMI has been a little over twenty seven and nine of those fifty three, so seventeen percent had BMIs under twenty six. When you look at round two, the proportion of smaller BMI wide receivers jump to about twenty two percent, so it's about a five percentage point jump. Why am I bringing this up, Well, if we assume draft capital tells us something about a player's talent, then it does seem that more talented wide receivers tend to come with higher BMIs. BMI does drop when looking at second round wide receivers versus first round ones. Over the last fifteen years, bigger wide receivers are being drafted early. But this doesn't mean that lower BMI wide receivers should just be avoided at all costs in the first round. We have to look at the greater picture here. Once a wide receiver is in the first round, you've already made a whole lot of assumptions about that player. There's a lot that's already been stated about that player. Given he's a first round pick. Some team saw him as a good route runner, as someone with great production. They saw something that made them choose him in the first round. This is the key to the entire BMI debate. In my opinion, BMI is an input in my wide receiver model. It does matter to some degree, and those small percentage differences that I've shared those explain and show why it does seem to have some influence. But and this is a really big butt, BMI should be working in conjunction with other metrics. For example, if you look at the nine first round wide receiver since two thousand and six, with smaller BMIs, we had three drafted in the top ten, aj Green, Tavon Austin, and Ted Gin. Ted Gin had crappy college production, so it's not a shock that gen didn't have this amazing Hall of Fame career. And you could argue that both Gen and Tavon Austin were elevated because they were fast, when it's been proven time and time again that athletic testing forty times. More specifically, they don't matter for wide receivers. Meanwhile, there's aj Green. Green at least had plenty of height, but he was just thin, hence the lower BMI entering the league. But he checked every box across the board. He had great production, he had a strong breakout age, he was in early declare. The list goes on and on. It's not surprising at all that he was the lone top ten hit among lower BMI wide receivers over the last fifteen years. And this is sort of what it all comes down to. It's the application of the information. Do I think BMI matters at wide receiver all things being equal, Yes, I think there's some edge for a bigger wide receiver when it comes to BMI. If I had two identical prospects, but one had a BMI of twenty four and the other had a BMI of twenty eight, I would rather have the wide receiver with a BMI of twenty eight. This is why it's in my model. The problem is that this isn't how it works. We don't work with precise information like this in football. This is why I care about Devonte Smith's BMI, but I don't care so much about Devonte Smith's BMI. His low BMI doesn't like disqualify him because in order for Smith to have done what he's done on the production front, and in order for him to then be a first round pick and a potential early first round pick, then he clearly has other factors going for him that go beyond his frame. Do I wish I had a Devonte Smith analytical profile for a player who had like a BMI of twenty eight or twenty nine. Yes, of course, we're not building these guys in labs, though we're looking at them in totality. And again, it's the application that matters here. If other fantasy managers are going to discount BMI and they're gonna put someone like DeVante Smith in the same bucket as second round picks post draft, and this is a hypothetical, by the way, but if they end up putting Davante Smith with second round wide receivers in their post draft rankings, because they're afraid of his size. Then I would say that that's overstating the impact of BMI, and that's overstating it, especially in today's NFL. That's the other thing that I didn't really talk about yet, which is the fact that in more recent classes we've gotten smaller wide receivers. A lot of the BMI talk has sort of created based on what's happening in the most recent draft class. Over the last five seasons, the average BMI for a first round wide receiver per class has hovered the twenty six point six range. During the five years before that, that number was well over twenty seven. So you've got to keep in mind that the denominator in our fraction is constantly changing, that what seemed true five years ago can be less true now, not just because the NFL as a game is always changing, but because the supply of a particular wide receiver is changing. Two. So let me recap number one with this debate. You shouldn't just focus on the numerator. You shouldn't just say this is the BMI of good wide receivers in the league. Therefore, must be a BMI that we should all strive for, because we don't know what the actual proportion of those players are. Second, keep selection biases in mind. If a player is a first round draft selection, we shouldn't disqualify that player simply because of a low BMI. Yes, we'd ideally want a larger BMI, but the top twenty hit rates among smaller first rounders versus bigger ones, it's not that significant. The truth of the matter is the sample size is small for smaller wide receivers being picked in the first round, and there are just so many other factors that matter more, like breakout age and general college production. And then the last thing is just to remember the application of all this, how are you actually applying what you know about BMI that even if you say wider s BMI matters, does that mean that you're removing all small wide receivers from your consideration set. Because from what I've found and what my model season, from what I've talked about today, I'd say wide receiver BMI does matter, but not to the degree that some people seem to talk about it. So in essence, because the fantasy football world skews analytical, there's a chance that you can get discounts on smaller framed wide receivers. Knowing what you know about BMI that if all things are equal, sure it matters, but we know that's never the case, and as a result, we know to focus on things that matter more before we get to that BMI talk, because that's just the truth. Other aspects of wide receivers, from what I've found, they matter much much more than BMI. That's going to do it 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 don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week with the weekly mailbagshit ou