508: Insights From Building Projections

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Speaker 1: This is the LA Podcast with your host JJ Zachersa j J Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at Fandle and at number fire dot com in this episode five hundred and eight of the Late Round podcast and many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. I build out projections every season. They're not published anymore, since we already have a system in such and place over on number fire dot com. But I do it because it's helpful. It's helpful for me to talk intelligently about players and situations. When you build out projections, you start to see where there could be opportunity and where there might be tough competition. The way I build these projections is from the top down. I start at the team level and I work through pass rates, some volume numbers. I then get to quarterback projections, and then I work out the rest of the skill position players. What's important to no one understand about projections is that even though it sounds super super fancy, there's a lot of subjectivity involved for anyone who's building them. I have formulas that help me calculate yardage and touchdowns and such, But things like rush share and target share there's subjectivity involved. You're not just like straight up guessing, but by looking at historical trends and how things usually go for players, you're sort of making sound educated guesses. Like I say it all the time on the show. But targets they're earned, and generally speaking, the elite Alpha wide receivers are rarely going to see fewer than twenty four or twenty five percent of their team's targets. So when we project, we at least know a general baseline before we start assigning target shaars to players. A lot can go into building projections, though, and as I build them each year, I learn something. I learn a lot of things, and that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about some things that I learned through building projections for this upcoming season. Before getting into those things, though, I want to let you know that the twenty twenty one NBA Play In Tournament is officially underway, and Fandal and Netflix have teamed up to add another layer of excitement to the Winner Go Home round, introducing Fandal's free NBA play and contest, presented by Netflix's Army of the Dead, a free to play NBA Fantasy contest spanning across all four nights of the play in tournament. The contests are simple. All you have to do is build your best nine man roster while staying under the salary cap, and then you compete against other users in the contest for your shot at twenty five thousand dollars in cash prizes. And as an added element, Netflix is providing an Army of the Dead bonus where if a lower seeded team comes back from the dead and wins their matchup, all users who participated in the contest on that night will receive a voucher to play in a paid NBA playoff contest and earn the right to take home the ultimate prize, a big payday courtesy of Army of the Dead. The games tip off in just a few hours, so head to fandle dot com or download the Fandle Fantasy app and enter the free NBA play In contest presented by Netflix's Army of the Dead today and check out Army of the Dead, starring Dave Bautista, Ela Purnell, and Omari Hardwick, only on Netflix May twenty first. Eligibility restrictions apply I want to start things off today by just giving a high level take on the running back position. One thing that's always evident at the beginning of the season is that positions seem deeper than they actually are. When we're talking about this stuff in May, we're working with perfect information. We make assumptions about certain backfields and the number of workhorses that are out there. But more importantly, to that perfect information idea, no one is hurt, no one's injured. The running back position is always the best example for this, Since we see injuries to running backs all the time, the position always appears deeper in the preseason than the postseason. This is why the logic of this player finishes the RB ten last year and now he's ranked as the RB sixteen, you have to draft him. That's why that logic has never made sense to me. There's a very good chance that he could have just been healthy throughout the year while other running backs weren't healthy, and that elevated his overall status. Where a player ranked the year before is not always all that relevant. With all that being said, I do think you have to feel better about the upside potential of a lot of the earlier roundbacks this year. I don't want to say the position is deep, but you can get to the RB seventeen or the RB eighteen spot this season and have a running back who legitimately has top six running back upside, and even after that point, you still have players who have a good chance to exceed their average draft position. A lot of this is driven by a very good twenty twenty running back class, because in that group includes Jonathan Taylor, cam Akers, DeAndre Swift, Antonio Gibson, and Clyde Edwards Hilaire. I think that's a huge reason that we're seeing what we're seeing at the top of the position this season. One player who I didn't even include in that top seventeen or eighteen group that I just talked about at the running back position is David Montgomery, and it's because Montgomery doesn't look super strong in my projections right now, at least compared to where he finished a season ago. I haven't been shy when talking about Montgomery's outlier finish to his twenty twenty season. From weeks one through nine last year, Montgomery averaged twelve point three PPR points per game. At that time, he was handling about ninety two percent of the Bears running back rushes per game and about an eleven point six percent target share per game. Those are both good market share numbers, but he wasn't giving you good fantasy production. He was the RB twenty six and points per game through that point in time through week nine, and then the cakewalk schedule hit from Week twelve through Week seventeen. Montgomery finished no worse than the RB eight and weekly PPR scoring. He averaged almost twenty six points per game while handling almost ninety seven percent of Chicago's running back rushes to go along with a twelve and a half percent target share per game. It was night and day, but there's no way Montgomery keeps up that pace in twenty twenty one. Not only was he averaging over a touchdown per game during that crazy stretch, but the backfield itself had zero competition last year after Tari Cohen's season ending injury. That's why my projections aren't as bullish on Montgomery this season. Cohen should come back and immediately command some target share in that backfield, and the Bears may even use Damian Williams in a pass catching role as well. Cohen played three games last year. In those games, Montgomery averaged an eight point six percent target chair per game. Outside of those games, that number shot up by four percentage points. With the aforementioned competition at the position across the league, some of which didn't even exist last season, when Montgomery finishes the rbfore, it's easy to see how Montgomery takes a step back this year. I think JK. Dobbins is one of the better runners in football, and the Ravens should be good offensively for a third straight season. That doesn't automatically make him a fantasy football stud I brought this up before on the podcast, but Dobbins really does have a cap ceiling as a receiver in this Ravens offense. The Ravens are once again projected to be one of the more run heavy teams in football, and that lowers the potential fantasy output for all pass catchers on that team. But it's especially true at the running back position. During Lamar Jackson's two years as starter in Baltimore, the Ravens have ranked fourth to last and eighth to last and running back target share. Now, that might not seem that bad, but it's pretty horrendous when you consider they've also thrown by far the fewest passes in football over this time. And here's the thing. They were throwing at that low over rate to the running back position with pretty bad wide receivers. Now they added Rashad Bateman. It's just not that logical to assume that that running back target share goes up or increases in any sort of meaningful way. And as a result, JK Dobbins is a scary bet. Because top running backs, especially in PPR formats, generally see strong target shairs. We can't assume someone like JK. Dobbins is gonna be Derrick Henry. Let's talk about Kyle Pitts. My projections have Pits as the tight end six right now, which I'll in one hand is insane because he's a rookie tight end, But on the other hand, it kind of makes a lot of sense. The tight end position is still not very good, and Pits is in a spot to succeed. On the projection's front, Atlanta looks like a team that's gonna pass a lot. The defense has holes, and the offense now has three pass catchers who are big playmakers. When you get an offense, it's likely to throw the ball a lot players don't need as high a target share in order to get good volume, and that's really the case for Kyle Pitts. I haven't projected immediately for a sixteen and a half percent target chair. That might seem high for a rookie tight end, but it's not like Atlanta is deep at receiver, and it's not like Kyle Pitts isn't the best receiving tight end prospect that we've seen in recent history. He immediately becomes the number three option in that offense. The crazy part about Pitts and his projection is that there's technically some room for growth there too. Like what if he doesn't just hit, but he really hits. What if he's able to capture a twenty percent target chair as a rookie where his ADP is trending. We're almost making that assumption in redraft leagues. But let it be known that I understand the allure. I understand why Kyle Pitts's average draft position is rising the way that it's rising. It's because he has an insanely high ceiling as a rookie. I'm sort of jumping all over the place on today's show, but I want to now shift our focus to Brandon Ayuk. If you recall, between weeks seven and fifteen last year, Ayuk's worst performance came in at wide receiver nineteen on a weekly basis. During that stretch, only Devonte Adams and Tyree Kill averaged more PPR points per game across the entire NFL. That's pretty nuts as a rookie. One hesitation I have with Ayuk this year, though, and just utilizing those splits and saying that he's bound to do really well, is that both Deebo Samuel and George Kittle missed significant time in twenty twenty. That week seven to fifteen stretch for Ayuk, which was eight games long. Deebo Samuel only played in four of those games, George Kittle played in two of them, and the overlap between Samuel and Kittle was just one game, which happened to be Ayuk's worst performance over that stretch. On top of the competition factor, Ayuk is going to be playing in an offense this year that could eventually have Trey Lance under center, and if that happens, San Francisco may run an even more run heavy offense than they've already been running. Again, just to reiterate what I already said. When offenses don't have as much passing volume, players that need to see a high percentage of the team's targets to maintain good volume numbers. But with Ayuk it may not be so easy to come close to the thirty percent target share that he was seeing last year. With Samuel and Kittle sidelined twenty percent, sure, twenty two percent, twenty three percent. Yeah, that's possible, but anything more is really tough to project. Like any player I'm talking about today, though, it'll all come down to what the market says. But to me, Ayuk is definitely more of a wide receiver three than a wide receiver two. Based on what I saw while building projections over the last couple of sear Austin Eckler's been someone who is much more of an attractive floor play than a ceiling play. Part of that is evidenced by last year's two goal line rushes, and he's actually total just seventeen goal line attempts across the last four seasons. Even still, Eckler comes out looking good in my projections, or I should say he's about where the market views him. I think the difference this year than last year with him, though, is that we've got a brand new coaching staff in town. A projection is going to look at a median or predicted outcome, and for Eckler that shows someone who may not see a ton of rushing touchdowns. But there's some room for growth with Eckler's projection. So unlike the way that I viewed him last season, where he sort of had a cap ceiling with a great PPR floor, I think that ceiling is elevated this year. That's especially true when you consider that we're not dealing with an ambiguous quarterback situation. We know that justin Herbert's good We didn't know that last year. So Eckler, to me, he was kind of a pleasant surprise because his projection came out around where his market value will likely be. But there's a little bit room for that to get better too. X offense is really hard to project right now because of the Deshaun Watson situation. But I think regardless of how that plays out, Brandon Cooks will end up being of value because you have to imagine if Watson plays, Cooks's ADP will reflect that and if he doesn't, it'll reflect that. But in my projections, partially because Cooks is just an underrated player, and partially because there's not really that much competition in Houston. Cooks comes in as a fringe wide receiver too. That's under the assumption that Watson plays some games. But even if Watson is out, that projection will still likely be in the wide receiver three range. I don't typically believe that a lack of competition means a player can see an obscene amount of volume, because good players see volume. Like I said at the top, at wide receiver, you actually have to get open in order to see a target. Targets are earned. But it's not like Brandon Cooks is some average wide receiver. He's said at least one thousand and eighty two receiving yards in five of his last six seasons. That's the difference between a player like Brandon Cooks and what could be a bad offense and someone like aman Ross Saint Brown a bad offense. Not that they'll be grouped together in cost, but we can't just assume that Saint Brown sees like a twenty five percent target chair because his competition sucks. He's going to actually be good, and we know that Brandon Cooks is good. That's why we can have confidence in him in twenty twenty one. Despite the offense that he's playing in. The Raiders haven't used Josh Jacobs the way the fantasy community wants the Raiders to use Josh Jacobs during his two years in the league. He just hasn't been used that much as a pass catcher. His highest single season target chair has been eight point six percent, and he hasn't been above the ten percent mark when you look at pro rated numbers either. And now the Raiders have Kenyan Drake and John Gruden's out here talking about finding ways to get Kenyan Drake the ball, and that could very easily come through the air. Even still, I think a lot of people may end up fading Josh Jacobs because of this competition, because of Kenyan Drake, and I would agree that he fits the mold of a running back who probably doesn't have the type of sealing that we want in a top twenty four running back. I would agree with that. But with that being said, Jacobs still came out as the RB nineteen of my projections despite a poor receiving profile and projection, and there's still a world where the Raiders utilize Jacobs differently than what we're expecting. I don't even think Jacobs is a bad pass catcher. He certainly wasn't a bad pass catcher when he was entering the league. He may be someone I avoid if I'm in a shallower league where I know that I'm gonna need a big season from most of my starting lineup spots. But if I'm in a deeper format, I'm not gonna ignore Jacobs just because of Kenyan Drake. His projection was better than I expected. Michael Thomas was a disappointment for fantasy managers last year, There's no doubt, and now he's entering the season without the quarterback that's been helping him be a fantasy said over the last handful of seasons. That might scare you off of him, but I'm running towards Michael Thomas this year. And games played last season, Thomas averaged a thirty percent target chair per game. He had his typical elite target share, and that wasn't with Drew Brees. Brees was injured in Week ten last year, and Thomas's regular season consisted of games in Week one and then games from Week nine through Week fourteen. Week ten through fourteen was when Drew Brees was out. In those games without Breeze, Thomas averaged a target share per game that was north of thirty five percent. That's absolutely absurd. In this offseason, what did the Saints do at wide receiver? Absolutely nothing. That's when high ceilings can come into play. Like I said earlier, generally speaking, elite players will see good target shars no matter the circumstance. If a player is really really good, he's probably gonna get like a twenty five percent target share. But if that same player lacks competition in his offense, there's a really high target share ceiling. That's what we saw from Thomas in twenty nineteen, and it's what we've seen from players like DeAndre Hopkins in the past two Even though Drew Brees is not there, Thomas should be absolutely fine. My projections haven't met wide receiver seven. I think he's a solid wide receiver one this year. The last situation I want to call out on today's show is the Seattle passing offense. We all know how last season went for Russell Wilson, Tyler Lockett, and DK Metcalf. They started off hot with Russ, averaging almost thirty Fantasy points per game across his first seven and then he averages seventeen per game after those seven games were played, and that was reflected in DK Metcalf and Tyler Lockett's performances too. DK Metcalf averages thirteen Fantasy points per game in PPR leagues from Week ten onward. Last year, across the first nine games of the season, that number was twenty one. Same deal for Tyler Lockett nineteen PPR points per game with some monster performances across his first ten, and that drops significantly until the end of the year. I'm buying this passing attack in twenty twenty one, though partially because of recency bias, but also because I still see Russell Wilson as a dual threat passer who can finish as the top three quarterback in fantasy, which is what we want and need to give us an edge at the position. I do think it's weird that people seem to give a pass for DK Metcalf falling off towards the end of last year, but not Tyler Lockett. Lockett actually finished last season with more targets than Metcalf. He may have been slightly more inconsistent, but we're chasing volume in this game, and that volume is what's also stickiest year over year, not efficiency or consistency. This isn't to say that I'm projecting Metcalf to have fewer targets again this year. I still like him more than Tyler Lockett straight up. I'm just confused by the way that people view the two. From a redraft standpoint, the Seahawks are a good bet given Russell Wilson's efficiency and tendencies close to the end zone. They're a good bet to have a decent number of passing touchdowns, even if they end up being relatively run heavy. That's why russ still looks good in my projections, because at a team level, they should still score and there's upside, and that we don't know exactly how the offensive coordinator change will impact this team. We know Wilson is good, so there's at least a baseline, But what if there's more. What if there's a higher ceiling than we can confidently project. So I like the Seattle passing attack more specifically Russell Wilson and Tyler Lockett given their projected I think people are overstating what happened at the end of last season, and my projections do too. Those are the items I wanted to call out most on today's show. There's some other things that I found while building projections, though, too, like how it's hard to see a path to a high ceiling for any Miami pass catcher, or how Adam Thielen and Cooper Cupp are both looking pretty good heading into twenty twenty one versus how the public is viewing them. I'm also a little bit down on Kenny Galladay and a little bit up on Michael Carter's potential as a rookie. But hopefully by me talking through all this today you were able to get a better understanding of how I view projections. It's not just about that end number and where players are ranked. It's about analyzing individual situations and seeing where there might be areas to attack during your fantasy drafts. That's going to do 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, and don't forgot to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week.