759: Mailbag 4/27/23

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zaferretha, j J Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zachary sin in this episode seven hundred and fifty nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. This episode is being released the day that the NFL Draft starts, which means in just a few days, the twenty twenty three Late Round Prospect Guide will be complete. The guy gives you a breakdown of my prospect and Year two models, and it profiles every running back and wide receiver who are at the combine. And those profiles include the player's prospect score and draft Capital delta. And then there's an entire section of year two profiles as well. I've said it plenty of times in the show already, but check it out for just fourteen ninety nine over on Lateround dot com. The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Chase. It says, what do you think about the S two scores for the quarterback? I'm very scared about CJ. Stroud based on his score. I find the whole discussion around the S two test to be fascinating for those of you who aren't aware. Evidently this S two cognition test has correlated well to success at the quarterback position. And I say evidently, because we have no freaking clue, which is why I find this whole discussion so fascinating. We literally don't know anything. We don't have a data set showing us how quarterbacks performed on this test over the last ten fifteen years. I don't, at least I haven't seen one. All we know are random anecdotes from people on social media that brock Purty scored really well on that test and look at how he turned out, or that this year Bryce Young was amazing with the test and CJ. Stroud wasn't. There may be something to this test. The average person, the fantasy analyst living in his parents' basement, like myself, we have no freaking idea. What we do know is that if this is actually an input for team, then it'll be reflected in draft capital. So rather than worry about this test, just worry about draft capital. If this test matters so much and CJ. Stroud bombed, then that should be reflected in where he gets drafted. Don't focus so much on a metric that may or may not matter. Focus on a metric or a data point that we know does matter, like draft capital for now at least now. Speaking of draft capital, this next one's from at A Vinnner and it says, is there a world where you rank JSN over Bjeon? Robinson say, theoretically JSN goes to the Chiefs and Bijean goes to the Seahawks. Yeah, I could rank JSN over Bijeon, but it has nothing to do with landing spot and has to do with draft capital. I was having this conversation in the Late Round Fantasy Football discord the other day about draft capital in my models. There are definitely people out there who think that it's silly to use draft capital or to lean on draft capital in a model if we need to predict where these players are going to get drafted in order to be good draft analysts. But you see, I don't think that's my job. I'm not doing mock drafts. I'm not working in a front office. My job is not to say this guy's gonna get drafted here, or this guy's gonna fall to a Day three pick. I can have my opinion on those things, but my job, at the end of the day is to help you win fantasy championships period, end of story, and I love it. And ninety nine percent of you are going to be doing your rookie drafts after the NFL Draft is over, which means we're going to get a data point, which is draft capital that's proven to have a lot of correlation to NFL success. Players who were drafted earlier generally do better than players who were drafted later. And even if you're doing your rookie draft before the NFL draft, we have draft capital projections. But this is what the discussion was about on discord. In my model, the draft capital formula is not linear. If a player gets drafted tenth overall and another player gets drafted thirtieth overall, that's a twenty pick difference, But those twenty picks are much more significant than a player who gets drafted one hundred and fiftieth overall versus one who gets drafted one hundred and seventieth overall. It's no different in fantasy football drafts. Each pick matters a lot more in the early rounds than the late rounds. Draft capital is more of an influence in the early rounds within my model than the late rounds, and it makes sense intuitively, when you get to round five, round six, teams are making different types of investments in the early rounds, they're naturally going to do more homework. Let me give a new example of this in the prospect guy. Jonathan Mingo's prospect score is not very good right now, but that was also under the assumption that he was going to be drafted on day three, because I'm pulling that information from NFL mock Draft database, and at the time that the guide was published, Mingo was projected to go like one hundred and fiftieth overall. Now he's projected to go eightieth overall, saying that he can even sneak into round one or at least round two. Now, this isn't a common thing to happen, but that would completely transform him as a prospect. In my model, he'd go from like a sixty fifth percentile player to an eighty fifth percentile one, and that would give him a much greater hit rate. And you might be sitting there listening to this and saying, but JJ, nothing actually changed with Mingo the player, And you're right, he's still the same human being who had subpar college production. But again, the lens that I'm viewing this with is different than how someone like Dane Brugler is viewing this stuff. Dane does amazing work. He's giving us raw evaluations of players and telling us where these guys are going to get drafted or should be drafted. I can play that game to some degree, but that's not what I had in mind when I built the model that I'm working with. I built the model to incorporate how NFL teams view players. I built the model with draft capital in mind, because draft capital itself gets a whole lot of signal for fantasy football. So nothing changed for Mingo as a player. He's the same exact human being. Nothing is changing with all his production inputs, but that draft capital input is changing, and so the model is changing as well. His score is changing. Because again, I'm just trying to help you win fantasy titles. I don't care how we do it. I just want to help you win. So when you ask if there's a way that JSN could jump Bjon Robinson in my rookie rankings, yes, technically there is a way Robinson could fall much further in the draft, which would hurt his overall score. I don't think that's gonna happen, but draft capital is a big input, especially in the early rounds. This last question is an email from Jason. It says, what does Aaron Rodgers to the Jets mean for him? In the pass catchers there? For fantasy football? So I build out projections over the last couple of weeks, and I can say that Aaron Rodgers is still looking like a QB two this year, just given the competition across the league. The bottom line is that in today's game, it's hard to have huge sealing from a projection standpoint without much rushing production, and Rogers hasn't given us much rushing juice over the last handful of years. So right now he's QB fifteen according to those projections. He can definitely rise and be better than that with maybe an eightieth percentile outcome and touchdown rate, but I still think he's sort of in that Kirk Cousins Gino Smith to a type range, and then you get to a player like Daniel Jones, who has more of that rushing upside, who I'd much rather have. But as for the pass catchers, the one guy that we're all concerned with is Garrett Wilson. And Wilson is the wide receiver nine according to my PPR projections. I've seen a lot of analysts say that now is the time to sell Wilson in Dynasty because for Wilson you can get Chris a Lave plus or Drake London plus. That Wilson's value will never be higher. And I get all that, but his value will never be higher because he's so good to be able to have this hive of value in the first place. I'm not really a believer in auto selling players because they hit a peak like this, especially at why receiver. I understand it a lot more at running back, but elite wideouts like a Justin Jefferson can be so valuable. But I just don't really see why Garrett Wilson's the one that we're calling out at the top and not someone like Jalen Waddle or even AJ Brown. Wilson is going to be twenty three years old in July. He's coming off an awesome season, and he gets an immediate quarterback upgrade. And we can say that the immediate situation doesn't matter as much in Dynasty, and I won't say that's totally wrong, but it still matters Wilson's a good bit ahead of a law venge Rake London to my current projections for twenty twenty three. Maybe when their careers are over, we don't see a massive difference, but it's a whole lot easier to project one year out than many years out, and Wilson does have a leg up over the rest of the wide receiver class from last year, largely because of this deal. I'm fully expecting Wilson to ball out this year, and I don't think this is some cell high moment. I see him as a cornerstone piece for your dynasty roster, and that was the case even before this Aaron Rodgers move. I've got one more question for you this week. It's from Garrett from Patreon. It says, hey, JJ loved the show. Thanks. In previous years, one of the best skills you've had is highlighting players after the draft that had landing spots that presented opportunities that were within their range of outcomes for them to be fantasy relevant. For example, Isaiah Pacheco last year had a great weight adjusted forty yard dash time and he was drafted to an offense with notoriously unexplosive running backs. Your model also highlighted him with a positive draft capital delta. Other examples include guys like James Robinson signing with the Jaguars and then the subsequent waving of Leonard Fournette. What teams do you think present unique landing spots at either running back or wide receiver if the right player lands with them. What mid to late round players do you think could succeed regardless of landing spot. Thanks as always, So look, there's a lot of questions within this question, but it's really asking how to find low key good landing spots for late round players or how to match a late round player in his skill set with said landing spot. With this when we're talking later round players, we really don't see big impacts very often at all. We may see it in stretches during a rookie season, but even Isaiah Pacheco, when we look back and do analysis, we wouldn't look at his rookie season and say, this guy won us a lot of leagues that year. He was an awesome dynasty value in an awesome rookie pick, and hopefully he can build off of that rookie year. But he was mostly good because of expectation, not because he was this huge RB one or something. So I think the first step here is recognizing that Day three players usually don't give us good rookie year production. Since twenty eleven, just ten wide receivers have given us double digit PPR points per game after either being drafted after pick one hundred or going undrafted. That numbers thirteen at running back, So thirteen Day three running backs or undrafted running backs they've given us ten plus PPR points per game since twenty eleven. But it does happen more often at running back than wide receiver. More wide receivers get drafted in general, so the fact that more running backs been relevant as rookies from the late rounds is pretty telling. It seems like we get one of them per season. Last year was sort of Damian Pierce, depending on how you're defining this, maybe Isaiah Pachecko, but again, Pachecko wasn't amazing all season long. We've had Elijah Mitchell, Michael Carter, went after pick one hundred, James Robinson, Alfred Morris, Andre Ellington, Jordan Howard, Zach Stacy. This is more of a running back question than a wide receiver question. With that being said, I'm just looking at team fit and what's on a team's depth chart. It's really that simple. I may like a late round player a little bit more when his landing spot ends up being favorable, but I'm likely not going to buy into a guy who had a bad prospect score to begin with. My process led me to Pachecko last year pre draft, and then the fit was undeniable. He was explosive when they lacked that explosiveness, and he comped to Damian Williams, a player who thrived in Andy Reid's offense. So I'm looking at specific fits like that. But then when you look at personnel, obviously the more ambiguous the better. We got that from the Texans last year with Damian Pierce. And while there are plenty of teams with locked in starters, there are tons and tons of teams that could see a late round running back come in and shake things up. And if that player is good according to the model, then I'll be more interested in shouting that player out, like I did with Pacheco last year and James Robinson a few years ago. We always go into these drafts thinking that depth charts can't be moved, but a team like Carolina or Chicago or even a team like Washington. These aren't impossible depth charts to climb. These teams don't have an elite running back, so it's all case by case. But when there's a player that you like who goes late, and when that player finds a spot with an ambiguous backfield or a non elite running back in that backfield, it's easier to take a chance. And that's been especially true when there are specific traits the player brings to the table that you know that specific team once or needs. That's going to do 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 searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't fret to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I greatly appreciate it. I'll be back in your ears next week. Enjoy the draft