1080: Sell Candidates

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zachera JJ zacherfan. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode ten to eighty of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast. Thanks for tuning in. I'm back from San Francisco. I'm back from Radio Row. The super Bowl's over. Congrats the Seahawks fans. That means if we're officially in the off season. Though hopefully you guys like the change of pace of last week's shows, but we're full blown back to the regular podcast schedule starting with this episode. What you already saw was sell candidates. I talked about some buy candidates last week. This is just the reverse players you might want to consider trading away from your dynasty teams. Cells are always more difficult than buys because we have fewer players to choose from. With buys, we can get deep, we can talk about bottom of the barrel players who we can get for cheap. With cells, it doesn't make that much sense for me to say that you should sell someone who ranks as like the two hundredth overall player. In order for a player to be a cell, he's got to give you something decent in return, so to help me out with today's list. I looked at my Dynasty rankings and I compared those rankings to keep Trade Cut. It's not perfect, but that site at least allows me to get some baseline for market sentiment. If my rankings like a player far less than where he's ranked on Keep Trade Cut, I figured he's probably worthwhile to call out. Keep in mind, though I don't think these players are trade candidates no matter what. They're just players who I appear to be lower on versus consensus in your individual league.

00:01:35
Speaker 2: That might not be the case.

00:01:37
Speaker 1: This is just a conversation starter, and it allows you to hear some logic that you might be able to apply to your teams and your own circumstances. Now, before we get to those cells, I just want to send another reminder that the twenty twenty sixth version of the Late Round Prospect Guide it's currently available.

00:01:53
Speaker 2: For pre order.

00:01:54
Speaker 1: This year's guide is bigger and better than ever. Seriously, not only have I revamped the models, but you're now to get tight end profiles, not just tight end scores. Myself and Brandon Gadola have been working really hard on getting it all done. It's going to release in the middle of March to learn more and get that discounted pre order price, just head the late round dot Com. One area where Dynasty managers can really win big is not just knowing when to sell players high, but when to sell younger players high. Age is going to be part of the value equation for every player. The older a player is, the less valuable he is in Dynasty. So if you can find a younger player who might have peaked or who might not see that much more of a value bump, and if you sell that player at the right time, it's massive for your Dynasty teams one of those players. For me right now, this might be a little controversial, but it's traveon Henderson as tough as it is to admit that Henderson currently sits thirtieth overall over on keep trade cut for superflex leagues as the RB seven. Now, admittedly I can kind of understand why he's the R kind of I do personally think that someone like James Cook makes more sense than Trayvon Henderson, but running back has a lot of volatility once you get to that range in Dynasty, it's really tough for me to back that kind of cost though. Overall now As many of you know, I have the year two model that helps me figure out how well a player's gonna perform after his rookie season in the league. It takes a player's prospect score, his Zapp score, some Year one inputs, and then it spits out a score that helps forecast the players year two through year four that changed year over year. I used to just look at years two and three. I added year four this year to add some stability to that model. Trayvon Henderson's year two score is seventy three point nine. Now that means nothing to people right now because I changed the scaling of the scores in the Zapp and Year two models, But essentially he's part of the weekly starter category, not the elite producer category. The elite producer category that's where someone like Amri and Hampton sit right now. Weekly starters are solid, and to be fair, Henderson's on the upper range of it with his score, but they're more like RB two types from a ceiling perspective than RB one's. To reiterate, the year two model looks at how well a player performs in years two through four, and it measures that through their best two seasons average in PPR points per game During those three years. We do see some studs come from the weekly Starter category, but eleven percent of them have a best two seasons average above eighteen PPR points per game. Twenty two percent of them get to sixteen PPR points per game. When you look at the Elite Producer category, those numbers go from eleven percent to twenty one percent, and then twenty two percent to.

00:04:41
Speaker 2: Thirty two percent.

00:04:42
Speaker 1: What might be more important here is the rate of getting to fourteen or more PPR points per game that's in the best two seasons average. It's one third of the players in the weekly Starter category, one third of them average fourteen or more PPR points per game, and two of their three seasons that number sixty three percent. When looking at Elite Producers. Now, these are relatively arbitrary cutoffs that just helped me explain the model. But Henderson's borderline between those two categories, and he fits more cleanly in the weekly Starter category. That's where we see far fewer RB twos historically. I also look at his year one and I ask myself, where are things going from here? At least in the short term. I've let it be known that I think Ramandre Stevenson had a fantastic end of the season, but he wasn't very good up until December this past year. Considering what the Patriots just did though, and getting to the super Bowl, and considering the type of snap splits that we saw throughout the playoffs, I don't think Stevenson's going anywhere in twenty twenty six. The Patriots potential out for Stevenson from a contract perspective, it exists in twenty twenty seven, not twenty twenty six.

00:05:50
Speaker 2: And if Stevenson is.

00:05:51
Speaker 1: There, we may just see a little bit more production, a little bit more volume from Trayvon Henderson in twenty twenty.

00:05:57
Speaker 2: Six, not a huge bump, and look.

00:06:00
Speaker 1: Stevenson ended up leading the league this past year and rushing yards over expected per rush. That's my general fear here. There's no doubt that Trayvon Henderson has a weekly ceiling. We saw that this past year. He's very explosive.

00:06:15
Speaker 2: But will New England allow for that volume to.

00:06:17
Speaker 1: Exist in twenty twenty six And what happens when the Patriots aren't winning, when they aren't facing as easy of a schedule, Because we generally see regression hit for teams like New England. Now, this has nothing to do with him having an overrated season. I think they were worthy of representing the AFC in the Super Bowl. It's just what we historically see. We see a little bit of a drop off with a team like New England, and with Henderson not being relied upon back in pass pro for them this year, and with Stevenson still there another year, I can argue that Trayvon Henderson is much more of a sell than he is a bye, especially if you need that twenty twenty six production. But like I said, I don't think he's necessarily overinflated within running back rankings, although I do think James Cook should be ahead of Trayvon Henderson. There's just a lot of wide receivers that I like more So, if you want a more stable asset, I think trading away Trayvon Henderson right.

00:07:12
Speaker 2: Now does at least make some sense.

00:07:17
Speaker 1: Let's stay with this theme of year two running backs. Let's look at RJ.

00:07:20
Speaker 2: Harvey.

00:07:22
Speaker 1: I'm a few running back spots lower than consensus with RJ. Harvey, and there's a few reasons for that. First, let's just look at him as a prospect. Now, I didn't mind Harvey coming out last year. But you can listen back to old shows or I mentioned that there's definitely a Harvey ive out there who likes him a lot more than I do. He was definitely explosive as a prospect, but he was an older prospect, and his metrics in the ZAP model they were good, not great. They weren't elite. And now today, looking at the year two model, he's in the weekly starter bucket. His year two score is about ten points lower than Trayvon Henderson's, which does make sense when you compare their current value in the market. But there are some things that at the very least make RJ. Harvey a little bit more volatile than the market might realize. Advanced metrics are not the end all at running back. I'll say that forever. They're less predictive than what we see a wide receiver. In fact, with the year two model, if you look at how a player performed in year one and pper points per game, it's less predictive than a player's ZAPP score when you're looking at year two to year four output. In other words, you're better off ignoring year one ppuer points per game for running backs and focusing on how they looked coming into the league.

00:08:31
Speaker 2: But RJ.

00:08:31
Speaker 1: Harvey's advanced numbers were really worrisome last year, or at least kind of worrisome. Harvey was third worst among forty eight qualified running backs last year and rushing yards over expected per attempt, he was thirty second in success rate. When in that same offense JK. Dobbins was twelve. He was fine as a pass catcher with a ten percent target chair. He had a solid one point three to six yards per out run rate, and that's where we might see some fantasy jews from Harvey in the future. But his numbers overall, they weren't spectacular last year. I think the touchdown total from last season is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. People will point to his twelve touchdowns as reason to go in the other direction than this recommendation, But actually, we've seen rookie running backs bust in the past with double digit touchdowns, or at least players who didn't go on to have some studley career in recent memory. Philip Lindsay that was won back in twenty eighteen. But then there's Antonio Gibson, DeAndre Swift who's been good but not excellent. James Robinson, Eddie Lacy, Alfred Morris. Those guys certainly weren't bad, but they make up like a quarter of the rookie running backs to hit ten or more touchdowns since twenty eleven. The year two model has what I call journey comparables, where the model finds historical comps for players who entered the league with a similar Zapp score and then finished year one with a similar Year two score. They're players who went on a similar journey. They're not stylistic comps, they're simply score comps. R J. Harvey's top comparables right now are JK. Dobbins, which is kind of funny, Zach Moss and A Abdullah Now, Kenneth Walker is pretty close, and David Montgomery.

00:10:04
Speaker 2: He's like sixth or seventh on the list.

00:10:07
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of questionable running backs on that journey comp list, and that scares me a little bit. I said it on the mail bag a couple of weeks ago, but the Broncos probably won't enter twenty twenty six with R. J. Harvey, Jalia McLoughlin, and Tyler Bidet at running back. Maybe they just re signed JK. Dobbins but we saw in twenty twenty five how JK. Dobbins very legitimately dug into Harvey's upside. Maybe Harvey in year two deserves more looks, and I think he will get more looks. But I'm gonna anchor to the things that I know are predictive, and that's a solid ZAP score and a profile that's not being boosted by touchdown production. It's not like Sean Payton's a coach who loves Belkow running backs anyway. So to me, I don't mind Harvey. He may even be a redraft target for me this year, but I do question his cost in Dynasty right now. Now, here's a spoiler alert for today's list. I have a lot of year time two players. It's just what the market is giving me right now. I don't hate these guys. I don't hate them as players, but if I think there's a little inflation going on, I'm not gonna hold back, even if it might bite me at the end of the day. I at least want to share the logic. But here's the only guy on today's list who's not a year two player, Michael Wilson. Right now on keep Trade Cut Michael Wilson's listed right below Jordan Nanison and Jalen Waddle and right above Jaden Higgins and Ricky Pearson. And as much as I want to kind of be a contrarian and buy in to Wilson, who I don't think is a bad player, I'm definitely more into those guys at those prices than Michael Wilson. Wilson averaged twenty one point two PPR points per game from Week eleven onward last year. The only wide out with more PPR points per game was Pookin Akua. Michael Wilson broke out. He showed everyone that he can handle a lot of looks in his offense. But that was also under some pretty specific circumstances Marvin Harrison Junior missing time last year, and games where Harrison jar was active and played more than fifty percent of Arizona snaps. Michael Wilson averaged five and a half PPR points per game. If you want to filter that further and just look at games where Jacoby Bursett was under center, it's seven point five.

00:12:12
Speaker 2: Now, I don't doubt.

00:12:13
Speaker 1: That Wilson's a better player than most of us thought entering twenty twenty five, where he went undrafted.

00:12:19
Speaker 2: But this ranking feels very selective.

00:12:22
Speaker 1: It feels like it's filled with recency bias when you look at the greater sample. His season last year was good, not great. Twenty point four percent target chair, one point five to nine yards per route, run rate to target on twenty percent of his routes run, thirteen PPR points per game. Those numbers are fine, but they're not inspiring. And that was on an Arizona team, by the way, that ran first in the NFL and passed right over expected. They had more pass attempts at six forty nine than any other team. Chances are that passing volume is not going to stick.

00:12:55
Speaker 2: Year over year.

00:12:56
Speaker 1: If Wilson had more of a backbone before doing what he did during that stretch and two twenty five, I'd be more willing to buy into it. But with him being ranked around some really good young wide receivers, and with so much up in the air situationally in Arizona right now, I'd be willing to part ways with Michael Wilson at that listed price. Tyler Warren may seem like a crazy sell candidate because he objectively just had a pretty good rookie season. This is just a price thing, though, and a tight end ranking thing. Most of my tight end ranks, they're pretty aligned with the market at the top. But I like Colston Loveland straight up more than Tyler Warren moving forward, and the market over and keep trade cut does not.

00:13:37
Speaker 2: Let's just do a.

00:13:38
Speaker 1: Quick comparison of the two players. Warren did hit eleven point three Ppier points per game in relevant games last year versus Loveland's nine point three, but he also finished with an eighty three percent route share Loveland was at sixty five percent. Completely ignoring the playoffs, where Loveland went nuts. Loveland hit a seventy percent route share in just five games last year. In those contests, he averaged seventeen point eight Pper points per game. Tyler Warren was added above a seventy percent routes share mark in every single game last year, and that's a talent signal for sure, which is why I think Warren deserves to be ranked relatively high in Dynasty. But quite literally, every single efficiency metric favors Colston Loveland. Yards per route run one point eight six Warren one point sixty three. Loveland show that he can get down the field and not just be an easy outlet target.

00:14:31
Speaker 2: His a dot was four yards higher.

00:14:34
Speaker 1: Loveland had just as many red zone touchdowns on two thirds of the amount of red zone targets. Warren got him on volume, but that was largely due to the fact that the Bears didn't unleach Loveland until later in the season. So my point and bring all this up is that on keep Trade Cut, Warren is listed ahead of Colston Loveland. I'm one hundred percent on Team Loveland, and since that's the case, if I can get Loveland plus or even a swap, even if I don't love swapping players like that, I'm doing that all day long at this point. Don't forget too, Loveland's two years younger than Tyler Warren. It's honestly kind of shocking to me that Warren is ranked ahead of Colson Loveland. Right now, I think the discussion should be Warren versus Harold Fan and not Warren versus Loveland. Next Sun unless is Travis Hunter. This one's a little bit more feel based than anything else. But I'm also looking at where I have Hunter versus where the market does, and I'm like six or seven wide receiver spots lower than what keep trade Cut is telling me. The ZA model didn't like Hunter quite as much as other analysts did, though I did think he was a top tier wide receiver in last year's draft. That was larger driven by draft capital and the fact that he was just such an insanely difficult wide receiver to evaluate for so many reasons. I genuinely think that he was really about to catch on for Jacksonville before his injury this past season, which is really unfortunate, but that led to the Jags not only using Parker Washington more out of the slot, who ended up being a really good player, but they traded for Jacobe Myers too, and Myers he got his deal with jack Xonville through at least twenty twenty seven the way that deal is structured. So you have Jacobe Myers, who we know is a great route runner and he can command decent target shaars. You have Parker Washington, who really established himself as a decent slot player, really good slot player. And there's Brian Thomas who had a disappointing season but he's still a legit perimeter thread on his rookie deal. You can bin in all of that with the recent reports from ESPN that say that Travis Hunter could play cornerback with special offensive packages. That's a pretty bad sign when a player like Jalen Waddle, who we know has at least wide receiver two potential in him, when he's ranked below Hunter as a twenty seven year old wide receiver, I'd rather go in that direction. Or Jordan Addison. He's twenty four years old and he's been mostly Fantasy relevant every year that he's been in the league. He's below Hunter on Keep Trade Cut right now, and Travis Hunter's year two comps they're not pretty you guys, Quentin Johnston, Henry Ruggs, Alshon, Jeffrey Tavon, Austin, Jalen Reger. It's a whole lot of first round bus and semi bus. Al Sean's only on that list because the ZAP model really liked him when he came out. So I'd be fine with taking the l with Travis Hunter and trying to get some legitimate, usable pieces for him right now. The final player today, it's another year two guy, Matthew Golden. Golden had a ton of analytical red flags entering the league, and he didn't walk away from his rookie season answering many of the questions that we had about him. He had a sub twelve percent target chair, his yards PERU run rate was a pretty mediocre one point three to five, and he saw target on just sixteen and a half percent of his routes run. Let's look at all players in the year two model database that goes back to twenty eleven, all wideouts who ran at least one hundred routes as a rookie and then had below a one point five yards per OU run rate and below an eighteen percent targets per rou run rate. For what it's worth, both of those numbers are a good bit higher than where Matthew Golden was at this past year. That results in ninety five wide receivers in the model's database. Of those ninety five, just ten players were able to give us a season of fourteen or more pper points per game in either year two, year three, or year four. And if you're curious, here are those players. DeAndre Hopkins, DeVante Adams, Sterling Shepard, Tyler Boyd, will Fuller, Cortland Sutton, DJ Shark, Michael Pittman, Nico Collins, and George Pickens. When you hear that list, and you look at that list. What stands out to me is that many of the players who sort of buck this trend are ones who profiled more as like a true Alpha X receiver. The guys who didn't profile that way, they weren't necessarily elite throughout their career. They were solid, like a guy like Tyler Boyd. He had a solid career, but it's not like DeAndre Hopkins. And then there's this situation itself. Green Bay with Matt Lafleur is not the place that we generally feel warm and fuzzy about wide receivers. Yes, there's a chance that we see a different type of wide receiver room in twenty twenty six, but we've seen the Packers rotate their wideouts quite a bit over the last full of years and that's resulted in worset production. Lafloor got to Green Bay in twenty nineteen. From twenty nineteen through twenty twenty five, the Packers have had four wide receiver seasons where the wide out finishes a top twenty four player at the position and PPR points per game during relevant weeks. So we're removing the final week of the season. DeVante Adams has three of those four seasons. The other one's Christian Watson actually from twenty twenty five. He finishes the wide receiver twenty with thirteen point two PPR points per game, and Golden's year two journey comparables, they don't make me feel a whole lot better about this. We're looking at Justin Hunter, kJ Hamler, ad Ni Mitchell, and Zay Jones. Now next in that list is DeVante Adams, but Adams is also known as a huge outlier with how his career started and what he turned into.

00:19:50
Speaker 2: That is not something I want to bank on. So that's why to me, Matthew Golden right now is kind of a decent cell candidate. So that's it.

00:19:58
Speaker 1: A ton of Year two players, and then Michael Wilson. Maybe I'm being too bold today, or maybe the market really is just that optimistic with some of these players becoming big in fantasy football. I don't necessarily dislike some of the players on this list, especially someone like Trayvon Henderson. I'm just playing this based on the market, and I have other potential sell candidates too. You can check out where I have players rank by heading to the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon all found on lateround dot com. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by shooting for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB.

00:20:40
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening everyone.

00:20:41
Speaker 1: Make sure you're tuning into the Late Round Fantasy Football show on Wednesday over on YouTube. That's at noon Eastern, but if you miss it, I'll drop it in this podcast feed on Thursday morning. And then this is a Perspective's week as well, so on Friday, I've got a brand new episode of Late Round Perspectives for you.

00:20:57
Speaker 2: I'll talk to you then