422: Mailbag 10/2/20

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J.

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Speaker 2: Zacher reson What's up everyone?

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Speaker 1: It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at FanDuel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode four hundred and twenty two of the Late Round podcast and the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast Network.

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Speaker 2: Thanks for tuning in.

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Speaker 1: Fandel Podcast Network Listener League is back for week four and the thirteen game slate is loaded with studs and value plays alike.

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Speaker 2: It's gonna be a fun week, so enter the.

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Speaker 1: Rake free weekly NFL contest made exclusively for you the FanDuel Podcast Network Listener. It's just five dollars and you can compete for your share of the one thousand, five hundred dollars prize pool, including one hundred and fifty dollars for first place. You can enter up to three lineups in the contest too. To enter, visit FanDuel dot com Slash League Slash Listener League Eligibility Restriction Supply. The first question this week is from at ff Life. It says, what should people do with Dobbins, Swift and acres?

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Speaker 2: Now?

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Speaker 1: People probably aren't gonna love my answer. Here, but there's not much that you can actually do. You can't trade them because their values are so low right now. You can't start them because they're not getting enough run in their offense. You've got to just hold tight and hope that one of those players emerges. And for the record, I don't think dropping one of them is the right thing to do either. It's Week three and I think each one of those running backs is talented at the absolute least.

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Speaker 2: At the absolute.

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Speaker 1: Least, they're very high end handcuffs. This last question is from at K one to nine Trust. What are your thoughts on the Rams backfield, Henderson and Acres going forward. I grabbed Henderson off waivers last week, and I'm wondering if he is a hold or a sell. So Henderson saw seventy four percent of the team's running back rushes in about a ten percent target share last week, and he was a f What we saw in Henderson this past week was what I saw as a prospect and why I was into him entering this season. He's now been a top twelve fantasy back in back to back weeks without Cam Akers, and I just think given the way things are trending, he has to be the favorite in that backfield moving forward, at least in this season. He's Pro Football focused his top running back right now, but make no mistake, I'd expect Akers to have a role this year when he's healthy. They've talked about that backfield being a committee for a while now. I just wouldn't be eager to sell Henderson right now because I do think that he's a good running back. I don't think this is a fluke. This is what we were expecting from him last year. As always with the running back position, though, things can change and they can change fast. I just am favoring Darryl Henderson right now. This last questions from AT I suck at fantasy too. Pick one of each quarterback, running back, wide receiver, and tight end that is currently top twelve and scoring that you see finishing outside the top twelve, not including injuries. So these questions are always easy to go for guys that are ranked like eleventh or twelve since they're already on the fringe. But I'll try not to do that. Quarterback is kind of tough to not look at the bottom portion of the top twelve, though, I think Russell Wilson, Josh Allen Pat Mahomes, Sorry, Patrick Mahomes, Dak Prescott, Kyler Murray. I think all of them are here to stay. And Aaron Rodgers is playing really, really well. It's hard to doubt him the rest of the season. And even though Lamar Jackson is the QB twelve, I would imagine that he's going to be a top twelve quarterback at the end of the season. I think I'll probably go with Big Ben as the answer at quarterback, though only because the remaining pocket quarterbacks of these players, basically of the remaining quarterbacks who aren't Cam Newton, so Matt Ryan, Jared Goff and Joe Burrow, Ben Roethlisberger is the one who's exceeding touchdown expectation the most. When you look at how many yards he's had versus how many touchdowns he should have had based on the number of yards that he's had.

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Speaker 2: That was a mouthful. I think you understand. Though.

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Speaker 1: Now, at running back, as tempted as I am to say Nick Chubb, for the reasons that I've talked about on this show, I'll go with James Robinson because it's an easy out. It's only Jacksonville's offense is that great and even though his usage is awesome, he is over exceeding.

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Speaker 2: Based on expected fantasy points. Nick Chubb is two.

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Speaker 1: But at least Chubb has a history, and it pains me to say that about my guy Robinson too, a wide receiver. I would be surprised if both Robbie Anderson and Alan Lazard finish his top twelve guys, and they're in the top twelve right now. And then at tight end it's Jimmy Graham for me. But that position is an s show, so who knows what happens there? This ask questions from at TTE seven to twenty. Is it time to drop AJ Green? No? I would not be dropping AJ Green. He had a tough couple of weeks getting acclimated to things in weeks one and two, and then he faced Darius.

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Speaker 2: Slay this past week.

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Speaker 1: The fact is he's still seeing almost twenty one percent of Cincinnati's targets. He's second in the NFL in air yards. That's a sign that things are going to bounce back in his favor. You don't have to start him, but you won't find wide receivers with those peripheral numbers on most waiver wires. Ask questions from at Mark Shu twenty seven with Bruce Arian's comments about Kishon Vaughn this past week, do you think he can be a potential league winner if the running back room continues to be ambiguously mediocre? Is he worth stashing in redraft or targeting in dynasty trades?

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Speaker 2: So Bruce Arian's.

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Speaker 1: Comments this week where quote your time's coming, and that was in relation to Kishon Vaughn, who's gotten a slow start to his career after being on the COVID list and being a rookie. But yeah, as someone who liked Vaughn coming out, I don't think this is a bad idea at all, especially because Leonard Fournette is banged up. I'm recording this on Thursday, but at this time, Fournette hasn't practiced this week, which means there's a chance that Vaughn is active in Week four. I don't think the team's running backs have been totally atrocious this year, but I'd like to see what Vaughn could do as a pass catcher in that offense. Given the quote and the foreign t injury, I've added him in a couple of spots. If nothing it comes to fruition, no big deal. This is why I like having one spot on every roster where I can just cycle through players like this each week. This next question is from at Art Classen. You often talk of the correlation between yards and touchdowns. Last week you mentioned it was approximately one hundred and sixty four receiving yards per touchdown for wide receivers. What are the numbers for the other positions? Also, are there any strong correlations to touchdown production? So since twenty eleven, why notts have scored on about every one hundred and sixty five yards, quarterbacks on every one hundred and sixty three or so I might have said one hundred and sixty four the other day. So my bad tight ends score on every one hundred and thirty, running backs score on the ground every one hundred and forty six, and running backs through the air on every two hundred and twenty.

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Speaker 2: This is not the end all.

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Speaker 1: This is not the end all when talking about touchdown regression, I feel like I have to say it every year, but yards to touchdowns is just a high level way of looking at this. It's a high level way of spotting who's over and underperforming in the touchdown column. You ask what else correlates to touchdown production, and it's what you would expect. It's things like touches at the goal line, within the opponent's ten yard line, end zone, targets, offensive situation. There are a lot of things that will help a player score a lot of touchdowns, and those are things that I try to cover on this show when I talk about regression. But hopefully this answer helps you a little bit. This next question says, when is it time to hop off the quote positive slash negative regression train and just realize that's what this player is I e. Aaron Jones, Julio Jones, etc.

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Speaker 2: Never.

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Speaker 1: The answer to this is never, But maybe I should give that statement some context. If you're saying that Aaron Jones is going to score nineteen touchdowns per season because that's just who he is, then I'll give you mountains of evidence as to why that's not going to happen. If you tell me that Aaron Jones is going to score more touchdowns than the average running back in a similar situation, sure I won't disagree with that statement more than likely, but how far do we take it. One of the problems that I've had with people hitting Twitter this year and saying things like Aaron Jones doesn't believe in touchdown regression. Is that Aaron Jones is not in the same situation this year. Last season, he scored about eight more touchdowns than he should have. That's based on a metric that I use, and that's based on Mike Clay's opportunity adjusted touchdown metric as well. But last season, Jones was averaging a fifty seven percent running back rush share per game to go along with a per game target share of about twelve and a half percent, and he was in an offense that finished eighteenth in total yards. This season, Jones has seen sixty one percent of the team's running back rushes, so a similar number but a little bit higher to last year. But his target share has risen by five and a half percentage points and the Packers currently have the second highest yardage total in all of football. Guys, his situation is better.

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Speaker 2: And with that.

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Speaker 1: Newly improved situation, the difference between the number of fantasy points that Jones should have scored so far versus how many he actually has scored it's not that dramatic. It's not as dramatic as what you'll find with someone like Nick Chubb. Last year, it was dramatic because the situation was entirely different. This is why you haven't heard a peep from me about selling Aaron Jones this year. This isn't totally unsustainable in this offense. I think this is where touchdown regression conversations sort of get lost a little bit. There's this assumption of workload carryover from one season to the next. But Aaron Jones is being huge differently than he was last year. And last year was when me and other analysts were saying that he was gonna regress in the touchdown column, and he's been placed in a far better offensive situation this year. That's what this really comes down to. It's the same for Julio Jones too. Jones has had moments where he has underperformed touchdown wise, and then he regresses. We've seen that multiple times throughout his career. But Jones also hasn't been someone who's seen amazing work close to the end zone, at least compared to how much over a volume that he's seen. His twenty seventeen season was truly an outlier performance. He only scored three times, but he tied his career high in end zone targets. He should have scored way more than he did. But we've had seasons like that from players in the past, like Calvin Johnson. If you look at the seasons where Holio scored six touchdowns instead of eight, there's a direct correlation in red zone usage per game and end zone targets per game. And over his career, even with a simple yards to touchdown conversion, he averages underperforming in the touchdown column by one point seventy five per season. That doesn't even factor in how he's being used. It just factors in yards, and he compiles yards better than anyone. But to go back to the original question here instead of digging into the two examples that were mentioned, never bet against regression. But I do think some of this is subjective and it depends on how people consume the true meaning of regression. Like I think that we would all agree that Russell Wilson's not going to maintain this pace of scoring touchdowns all season long. That doesn't mean that he won't be well above average and that he can't. He's been above average and touchdown rate his entire career because he's good and the offenses that he's been in have forced the ball down the field, and they target receivers in the end zone. Those things are going to boost a player's overall touchdown numbers. So I guess what this long rant is basically saying is everything always needs context. When I'm speaking about regression on this show, I'm attempting to provide that context for you. But situations change all the time, and every situation is unique. This beast question says, is it time to move on from Logan Thomas until there's a quarterback change. It's frustrating seeing the metrics, but it's not producing in fantasy, thank you. I wouldn't drop Thomas because his peripherals are literally some of the best in football at the tight end position, and we study and analyze those secondary numbers because they're important for future performance. We can't just look at fantasy points score. I don't think it's time to move on because we've only played three games. We're only seeing three games played now. I also don't think that Dwayne Haskins is very good, So don't get me wrong here, I.

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Speaker 2: Just don't know what your alternative would really be. Off the waiver wire.

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Speaker 1: The tight end position sucks, it's awful, so I'm still holding on to Logan Thomas in spots where I don't have a weekly plug and play tight end, and there aren't many of those guys.

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Speaker 2: This next question sort of relates.

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Speaker 1: That's from at sixty seven Mike Brown, tight end's taking up roster spots, Ingram Howkinson Schultz. You see any of them being an easy every week starter moving forward. I don't, at least right now, But like I just mentioned, I think that there are only maybe like four or five guys who are weekly plug and play starters. Hackinson is still the tight end nine right now in PPR formats too. I think that's another way of looking at all of this. It feels like our tight end suck, like the tight end on your roster feels like it's terrible that he's not performing very well, and then we look at how they're doing in the context of the position, and they're really not that bad. I mean, mo Ali Cox right now is a top ten tight end and he barely ran any routes last week.

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Speaker 2: It's just a disaster of.

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Speaker 1: A position, and whether you keep them or not is going to depend solely on what your waiver wire looks like and who you'd be picking up for one of those players. This last question is from at hen Underscore Diddy. What are your thoughts on Miles Sanders? Trade or keep him? The Eagles offense is decimated and I feel teams can just focus on him and that will cap his ceiling. I mean, to be fair, the Eagles offense was decimated last year too, and Miles Sanders was great down the stretch. I don't think selling him right now is a great idea because the market doesn't seem to realize how tough it is to find his market share numbers in two games, Sanders's average about seventeen and a half percent of the team's targets per game and seventy nine percent of the team's running back rushes.

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Speaker 2: I mean, he's a bellcow.

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Speaker 1: The upcoming schedule is going to be tough, but I'd ride it out given those peripherals. The last question this week is from at Slinky Pudding. Sorry if I missed it in the off season, but was there any process to the idea that Seattle would quote let Russ Cook this season? Was the only difference between past seasons that they now have dk metcalf. I thought for sure they'd just repeat the same run heavy script as usual. So Seahawks fans have been talking about letting Russ cook for some time now.

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Speaker 2: It was a movement.

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Speaker 1: It is a movement because anyone who's watched the Seahawks in recent history, they've tilted their faces off watching one of the best quarterbacks in the league handing off the ball to his running backs and then having to come back in the fourth quarter because of that week over week. Now, in terms of it being foreseeable, I don't think it was just totally predictable. But I talked about this a lot on this podcast. In the off season. A conservative run first offense was sort of being embedded into Seattle players ADPs Tyler Lockin and DK Metcalf specifically, they were both being drafted as if the Seahawks were absolutely going to be the same old Seahawks. But there was always that's the possibility that with Metcalf another year in and with the way the season went last year, that they would just turn things up a bit, and if that happened, which is what we're seeing now, then players like Metcalf and Lockett would end up as huge bargains when we're drafting, and look, I tried to stress this as much as possible in the offseason. So this is not me just being an obnoxious hindsight analyst, but when we're drafting in fantasy football, we should look at whether or not there's obvious room for growth with a player's projection and a player's ADP. Sometimes it works out, like DK Metcalf and Tyler Lockett, sometimes it doesn't, like Derrick Henry. Like Derrick Henry had a chance there was at least a chance that he'd see a higher target share this year because there wasn't that much backfield competition and he's seen a slight uptick and target share, but it just hasn't been all that meaningful yet. But he was being drafted as the guy who was not going to be that player. He was being drafted as a player who wasn't going to see a lot of receptions. So even if we didn't see that higher range hit, we at least that we would get something from Derrick Henry, And that's what made him a pretty decent mid first round pick, is that there was at least some room for growth there. That's similar to what went down with the Seahawks. Even if they didn't let Russ cook this year, we still would have gotten usable fantasy assets at their ADP. It just so happens that so far they're letting Russ cook. That's gonna do it for today's show though. 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. Don't forget to follow me on Twitter. I tweet a lot at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, appreciate you all listening all week. I will talk to you next week.

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Speaker 2: Enjoy your weekend