1012: 10 Trends for Week 1

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Speaker 1: This is the lad podcast with your host JJ Zacherasa Jay Jake Zacher Reason. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Esen in this episode oney twelve of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by DraftKings.

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Speaker 1: Are a prohibited one per customer and to the Best Ball fifteen million dollars Headliner contests by nine four to twenty five to get one bonus entry twenty dollars in free. Required reward expires in thirty days. CEE terms at DraftKings dot com. Slash NFL dash Best Dashball sponsored by DK. This ten Trends episode is the shortest one that you'll listen to Each week. I come prepared with ten statistical nuggets that are either actionable or just informative, and hopefully you walk away with a little better understanding of the fantasy football landscape since the season had asn't started. I'll be giving ten trends this week that stem from previous seasons, so let's do it. The first trends about the Green Bay Packers offense last season. They finished the year ranked thirtieth and pass rate fewer than forty eight percent of their pass in rush attempts ended up being a pass, meaning they ran it more than they threw it. Under Matt Laflor's lead. For five seasons prior to last year, the Packers never had a pass rate below fifty four percent, and in particular, their neutral script rate, which I define as plays run in the first three quarters of games when the scores within a six point margin. They've been third, thirteenth, fifth, eighteenth, fourteenth, and then thirty second in neutral script ratio. I'm anticipating more passing for the Packers this year, which should help the whole offense in fantasy football. Even Josh Jacobs should be okay because they'll see an uptick in overall targets. It's an offense worth investing in. They've been top ten and touchdowns per game in all but one season. Under the floor and in that one season they ranked fourteenth. Brian Thomas was a monster last year. If you read the Late Round Prospect Guide this offseason, then you saw just how good his year two score looked. In that year two model, his yards per ute run was elite, especially for a rookie. He saw target on twenty five percent of his routes run and he did that all while.

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Speaker 2: Mostly playing a perimeter role.

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Speaker 1: Here's some more context of just how good Brian Thomas's rookie season was. He's one of just three rookie wide receivers who finished that first year with at least a twenty percent target year per game rate and averaged up the target over eleven yards. Thomas's was aut eleven point nine and a yards after the catch per reception above six and this is since twenty eleven. So they were getting down the field but still doing a good bit of work after the catch, and they were seeing a lot of volume.

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Speaker 2: The other two wide.

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Speaker 1: Receivers who hit these marks Jamar Chase and Julio Jones. I talked about Chris Rodriguez on yesterday's fifteen Transactions episode, and I briefly mentioned how I do have Jacory krossky Merritt as the top running back in that backfield. Now that's largely due to ambiguity. We've gotten a sample of Rodriguez in the NFL and Austin Eckler, while a value in drafts, he's thirty years old. I'd want to throw that dart at the young unknown asset. With that being said Bill krossky Merrit, he's definitely a unique prospect. The ZAP model database includes all running backs who are either drafted or at the NFL combine since twenty eleven. Sometimes, like Jacory krossky Merrit, you get players who are drafted but not at the combine. In that database, only twenty one running backs were entering the NFL past their twenty fourth birthday.

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Speaker 2: Now we've gotten more of.

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Speaker 1: Them in recent years due to the pandemic and due to transfer rules. But the only player in that group who's given us a PPR point per game season above twelve is Andre Ellington, and he did it once. Now again, like I said, we've gotten more and more of these types of players. These older prospects, Tyrone, Tracy RJ Harvey, Ray Davis Woody marks players that I genuinely like a lot and the model even likes him a lot too, despite their age. The interesting part with Krosskey Merritt, though, is that he also had a worse breakout score than those other guys did. Breakout scores determined by age and schedule adjusted receiving yards per team pass attempt, and Krosskey Merritts is just twenty seven point six. That's out of one hundred Tyrone Tracy was at ninety eight because he played wide receiver in college.

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Speaker 2: RJ.

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Speaker 1: Harvey was over fifty woody marks about seventy nine. Andre Ellington is the only player in this subset who also didn't have a great breakout score. Now, the good news for Krosskey Merriot is that a lot of his more secondary numbers that the model doesn't include they look pretty good. His explosive run rate is good, his yards after contact per attempt is elite. If those numbers weren't good, I'd be out. But with Day three picks, like I've said all summer, and like I said in the newsletter, we often just need an ambiguous backfield, and that's what we have with Washington and with Krossky Merrit, which is why he can still be targeted just don't be shocked if this goes south, because he'll need to be somewhat of an outlier to be a fantasy football stud. This is all why I've kind of just been at market with him rather than well above it.

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Speaker 2: Now. I know Jacoby Myers is wanting a new contract.

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Speaker 1: There's a lot of stuff going on off the field, but I found this next trend really interesting. I have an average draft position database that goes back to twenty fourteen. I use that historical data to see the number of points we'd expect a player to score at a certain ADP. So if he's a fiftieth overall pick and he plays wide receiver, he'd be expected, based on history, to score x number of points per game. Jacoby Myers has now been drafted for four seasons twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, and twenty twenty four. I guess five if you.

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Speaker 2: Count this year.

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Speaker 1: He outplayed his average draft position expectation by point five PPR points per game in twenty twenty one. In twenty twenty two, though, he outplayed expectation by four point six points per game. In twenty twenty three, he did it again by four and a half points per game, and then last year it was by five point seven points per game. Now, he's never given us a monster ceiling, but Jakobe Meyers has been really undervalued by the market, not basically every single year that he's been relevant in fantasy football. We'll see what happens here in twenty twenty five. We saw a running back renaissance last year, and while I do think a lot of that in fantasy football had to do with the health of running backs, and I talked about that at the start of the offseason on episode nine to sixty six, we also have to recognize an NFL wide macro trend. Pass rates are decreasing. From twenty eleven to twenty twenty, the average pass rate was around fifty six point seven percent. That's on pass and rush attempts. Over the last four years, that's progressively gotten lower. It's gotten from fifty six point three percent in twenty twenty one, to fifty five percent in twenty twenty two, to fifty five point six percent in twenty twenty three, but the last year it was fifty four point eight percent. That was by far the lowest pass rate of any season since at least twenty eleven. It's gonna be interesting to see if offenses still operate the same way here in twenty twenty five. It's definitely something to keep in mind and to watch.

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Speaker 2: Now.

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Speaker 1: That wasn't really in or out on Mike Evans this year, but one thing is clear when you watch his twenty twenty four season and you look at the underlying metrics, He's still really good at football. Evans finished last year with a yards proute run rate of two point four to one that was actually the best rate of his entire career. He saw a target on twenty six percent of his routes run. Only two wide receivers had a better yards per rout run rate and year ten or later of their NFL career since twenty eleven, and Kwan Bolden in twenty thirteen that was year eleven for him, and then Andre Johnson in twenty twelve, which was year ten. In twenty fourteen the following year, and Kwan Bolden finishes the wide receiver twenty three and PPR points per game. He dropped from wide receiver sixteen, so he was still plenty usable, though he did see a dip in production. Andre Johnson from twenty twelve to twenty thirteen went from the wide receiver five to the wide receiver ten. So Evans has already proven to be an outlier. I wouldn't count him out just yet. The Browns backfield is just one giant question mark right now. You've got Jerome Ford, who's been there, and then there's Dylan Samson. They recently added one of my pre draft favorites and Rocket Sanders. But there's optimism right now surrounding quin Shawn Judkins finally signing his contract. The one thing that's been stuck in my mind is the fact that Cleveland's not going to be very good this year. They'll likely face a lot of negative game scripts. And the player who led them in long down and distance snaps and two minute snaps last year according to Fantasy Life data, was Jerome Ford. The player in second on that team was Pierre Strong. Strong is no longer a Cleveland brown Both Judkins and Samson don't have like unbelievable pass catching profiles according to zap model, and they're also rookies. In turn, I ended up drafting a decent amount of Ford late in Bestball drafts this summer as a cheap PPR option, but I'm gonna be very interested to see how they deploy him if and when those negative game scripts hit.

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Speaker 2: He might end up being a.

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Speaker 1: Very easy to acquire option in PPR formats, though I do still prefer Dylan Samson as the upside option. When you look at the wide receivers who ranked in the top ten last year in air yard share, you get only top thirty wide receivers by adp aj Brown, Elague Neighbors, Courtland Sutton, Calvin Ridley, George Pickens, Marvin Harrison, DK Metcalf, Mike Evans, and Terry McLaurin except for one player, Rashid Shahed. Shaheed was added as a late round dart throw to the Late Round Draft Guide because he's seemingly healthy and he's just a really underrated player. He had a twenty two and a half percent target shapper game rate through six games last year, his yards per out run was over two yards, and the averaged almost thirteen PPR points per game. Now, people may be down on him because of the situation in New Orleans, but at least we've got Kellen Moore coaching that team now and during his five seasons as an offensive coordinator, his team's never finished with fewer than sixty.

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Speaker 2: Five plays per game. They play at a fast pace.

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Speaker 1: The average plays per game last year in the NFL was sixty two point two more as well. Above that as his baseline, I think Shaheed could finish as a wide receiver three this year. He's been a value in drafts. Our squared essentially tells us how well one thing explains another thing. As I say in the Late Round Draft Guide, it's almost like how much credit should we give this variable score? And our square of one or one hundred percent means there's flawless correlation, and our square of zero means that there's none. Dating back to twenty fourteen, and this is a chart in the Late Round Draft Guide too, but dating back to twenty fourteen, I've looked at how well a verge draft position explains points per game at each position in fantasy football, and with quarterbacks, we've seen quite a shift over the last five years, largely thanks to the predictability of rushing. But from twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen, when looking at top twenty four quarterbacks by ADP, we had our squared values of twenty four percent, zero percent, twenty nine percent, five percent, eleven percent, and two percent. That's looking at top twenty four quarterbacks by ADP versus actual points per game scored over the last five years, though those numbers have jumped to forty seven percent, fifty five percent, thirty five percent, twenty seven percent, and twenty four percent.

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Speaker 2: That's because the same quarterbacks are.

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Speaker 1: Giving us high end output that wasn't always the case in fantasy football. So I'm bringing this up because number one, it's a trend quarterback has gotten more predictable.

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Speaker 2: But number two, the.

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Speaker 1: Position is really deep this year and I'm really curious to see what the R squared value is going to look like at the end of the season. The last trend this week is another one straight from the Draft Guide. Since twenty fourteen, among top eighteen running backs by ADP previous season receiving points per game has been pretty predictive. In fact, when you remove Derek Henry from the data set because he's such a freaking anomaly of a human being, We've had thirteen running backs draft in the top eighteen at the position with a previous season receiving points per game so PPR points on receptions. Only thirteen running backs with receiving points per game of zero to three.

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Speaker 2: None of those players.

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Speaker 1: Outpaced their average draft position expectation by even two points per game. Every other subset three to five receiving points in the previous season, five to seven points, and seven or more points.

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Speaker 2: Each one of those.

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Speaker 1: Subsets outplayed expectation by two or more points per game by at least a twenty nine percent rate. Now, I don't want to ever bet against Jonathan Taylor, so I didn't even do that this year, even if I was slightly underweight. Last year, Taylor was at two point seven receiving points per game. That's just something to think about. 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 by stretching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found in different to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper Show.