502: Pre-Draft Rookie Rankings

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachersa jj zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at fandel and at number five dot com. And this is episode five hundred and two of the Late Round podcast many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. We finally made it. The NFL Draft is this week, and if you haven't heard, during Day one and day two of the draft, yours truly will be with my colleagues over on the FanDuel YouTube channel breaking everything down live as the picks come in. I'll be providing takes the instant each skill position player is drafted, and I'll be making projections on the fly. You can watch the show on fandal's social channels, more specifically, check us out on YouTube and again that'll be for Day one and day two of the draft. Lots and lots of live streaming for you today to get you all set up for that draft. I want to talk through my rookie rankings. I've had guests on the show over the last few weeks to talk about the big three fantasy football positions, and today I'll wrap up the pre draft process by talking through my top twenty players that i'd be targeting right now in single quarterback rookie drafts, and I'll be talking about those top twenty players by tiers. Now, two things about this. The first is that you can find these rankings over on number fire dot com. I actually have a top thirty that I wrote up about a week and a half or so ago. I'm providing a little bit more context on today's show about those rankings, but they're there for you on Number Fire. The second thing to note is that these are very obviously pre draft rookie rankings. The draft hasn't happened yet where these players get drafted, both in terms of draft slot and the team that's going to change where these players follow my rankings post draft. These rankings are not just based on my model either. I've said this time and time again, but I use my model to guide me to spot red flags, to find hidden gems in a particular class. My model influences where I rank players, but it's not the end all because everything draft related is really really unpredictable, So throwing a little subjectivity out there doesn't bother me in my process. So without further ado, let's get to my top twenty. In tier one, I've got three players, Naji Harris, travesy TN, and Jamar Chase in that order. You may be wondering what separates each player. That's a good question. They're all in the same tier, so they're relatively interchangeable in rank. The reason I have the running backs above Chase is because running backs just matter more in fantasy football, and they're safer bets given their probable draft capital. But if you want to go Chase with the one oh one, you have my permission, not that you need in my permission. With Naji Harris, I just think that he's a very solid prospect all around. This class doesn't have a ton of size at either running back or wide receiver, but Harris has that at two hundred and thirty pounds, and people might view him just as this bruiser because of that side. But he's a really, really good pass catcher. He had the sixth best reception chair among the twenty four running backs invited to the combine in this year's draft class. Now, I know the combine didn't happen, but they still had a combine list. I think Harris is the first back off the board, and I do think it might be Pittsburgh who takes him, but we'll see. If he goes to Pittsburgh, it's easy to see him being the one oh one in rookie drafts this year. Dravis Etn is probably the most explosive running back and pass catcher at the position in this class. I don't expect him to play at the two hundred and fifteen pounds that he weighed in on his pro day, so there may be some size concerns, but I don't think they're big enough to care. We can only work with the information that we have. The fact is he had the sixth best total yards per team carry right in this class, the third best reception chare, and he's likely to have strong draft capital. With Etn, I think we're looking at a DeAndre Swift type prospect. And then finally with Jamar Chase. I've mentioned this before, but when the draft is all said and done, Chase is likely going to be a ninety nine percentile prospect in my model. That'll put him in a group with Amari Cooper, Mike Evans, Sammy Watkins, Julio Jones, Demarius Thomas, and Calvin Johnson. A lot of those players were boosted by draft capital, aside from Thomas, who didn't go in the top twenty, but they were all very very good prospects, and all but Watkins have had insanely good NFL careers. Chase outproduced Justin Jefferson in college when he was a sophomore and Jefferson was a junior. Jefferson just broke the single season NFL rookie receiving record. The ceiling is sky high for Jamar Chase. That's why he's in the top tier. Tier two starts with Javonte Williams. I'm not sure we see the draft capital for Williams like we see with Naji Harris and Traves Etn but I do expect Williams to be the third running back off the board in the draft, and draft capital matters. It not only tells us that a team wanted a player, but at running back, especially those players are going to get opportunity first, and that drives performance in fantasy football. I'm hoping Williams gets good draft capital because I think he's very good. He split a backfield with Michael Carter at North Carolina and they had comparable production, but Williams has the size, and that size aspect of things matters at running back if we're looking for a ceiling. That size also allowed them to break Pro Football Focuses record for broken tackles per attempt. That's what he did last season. I do think that there is some concern about Javonte Williams athleticism, that he could end up being like a David Montgomery type, but I think there's more to his game than what Montgomery brings. So I'm down to draft him in the one zero four spot, though this tier is fairly big. Now. Kyle Pitts comes next at number five. I think Pitts is an incredible prospect. There's also probably one of the safer prospects in this draft. The reason I don't have him in the top tier is because of the position that he plays. Period. Not only is it difficult to be a difference maker at tight end, and not only do they just generally hold less value when you look at startup ADP, but the position is also fairly landing spot dependent. I hope that Pitts ends up going to Atlanta at four because it's a great spot for fantasy, but teams utilize their tight ends in drastically different ways across the league. Pitts hits on everything though that you want out of an elite tight end prospect. He can play out wide. He's got the best athleticism that we've seen since basically Vernon Davis. The production is there. I think Pitts is immediately a top three or four Dynasty tight end, and he'll have a good shot to be a top ten redraft tight end in the right spot. I don't want to spend too much time on him here because we know that he's good, but I have him where I have him because of positional importance. After Pitts in this same tier, I've got Rashod Bateman at wide receiver two. Bateman is super solid across the board, with fewer red flags than the other receivers in this class, and that's really why I have him at wide receiver two. I do think that post draft this could change if one of the next handful of wide receivers finds a strong spot, or if Bateman doesn't have great draft capital. But among the fifty, Combine invites a wide receiver this year, Bateman's best season yards per team pass attempt ings fifth and he has one of the better breakout ages in the class. He saw thirty seven percent of Minnesota's passing yards go his way as a sophomore, and that was while playing alongside NFL or Tyler Johnson. There's some concern that Bateman weighed in twenty pounds less than where he was listed at in college, but he's noted that he had a scary battle with COVID and he dropped some weight as a result. And the other thing too, is that he tested like a solid, lighter wide receiver or a player who's not two hundred and ten pounds. He tested like he should have tested given his weight. He had a good pro day with good speed. Like I said, I do think that post draft, the wide receiver two spot could change. There's a group of six wide receivers who could realistically jump to that spot, but for now, Bateman's my guy. After Bateman is probably my most controversial take among players in the top twenty, and that's having Terris Marshall as my wide receiver three. Now there are medical concerns that popped up last week that could affect his draft capital. It might push Arras Marshall back in the draft if he falls further than I thought he'd go, even just a couple of weeks ago. I'll gladly bump him down this list post draft. That's what we do. With more information we don't need to have take lock and I have no problem if you'd rather go with one of the Alabama wide receivers over Terris Marshall. I just see a really high ceiling for Marshall. He's got a size profile that's tough to find in this small wide receiver class, where he's six foot three and weighs two hundred and five pounds, and he tested well. He's athletic, as you guys know, I prospect very, very heavily through production. The athleticism side really doesn't matter that much. It's more subjective. The three main production metrics that I focus on for wide receivers are best season receptions per game, best season yards per team pass attempt, and best season touchdown share. Stand Alone, yards per team pass attempt is the most predictive and it gets the most weight in my model. But those are the metrics that fit together to try and solve what I was trying to accomplish. Terris Marshall doesn't have absurdly good marks in those categories. He's got a below average yards per team pass attempt, which is definitely a red flag. That's a concern, But I don't blindly follow my model. Like I've said, I think there's important context with Marshall that isn't captured with his production. For those of you who don't know, Marshall played at LSU and was part of that twenty nineteen team that had Joe Burrow. It also had Jamar Chase and Justin Jefferson. You could argue that Marshall's teammate wide receiver competition that year as a sophomore is better than what he's gonna see in the NFL. He was competing with Jamar Chase and Justin Jefferson that season. Marshall hurt his foot during the team's fourth game. He basically missed the second half of that contest. Through that game, he actually had just one fewer reception than Justin Jefferson in one more touchdown. Jamar Chase, through that time had missed a game, so it's not as much of an apples to apples comparison. So Marshall at the very least was competitive with two incredibly good prospects, and then this past year happens. Marshall becomes the guy at LSU since Jamar Chase didn't play, and he moves into justin Jefferson's role as mostly a slot receiver. He played in seven of ten games for LSU because he opted out early, so his season long numbers don't look as strong. But in the games that he played, he accounted for twenty eight percent of LSU's receptions, thirty three percent of the team's yards in an absolutely absurd fifty nine percent of the team's touchdowns. So his freshman season doesn't do a lot that happens with freshman's sophomore year. He's competing well, but he gets hurt and his numbers don't look as strong as a result, and then he opts out early his junior season. Analytically, across the fantasy football world, where people think more analytically, I feel like if Marshall had just played every game for LSU this past year, his profile wouldn't be so controversial. He made the choice to opt out, it's not like he had poor play. This is why I don't view this as making an excuse for Marshall that I'm not making for other players, the circumstances last year were not normal. Players were playing through a pandemic. With someone like Henry Ruggs. When he was coming out, people were making an excuse for his lack of baseline numbers, saying that it was the result of teammate competition. I viewed the teammate competition side of things to hurt a ceiling more than a floor. Ruggs never had that baseline. He never had that floor. Terras Marshall has the floor. He just checks a lot of boxes. He's got the size. Like I said, he's still just twenty years old. He's in early declare, which is important. And get this, he moved more to the slot this past year, but according to Pro Football Focus, when he lined up on the outside, across his collegiate career, quarterbacks had a perfect quarterback rating. Throwing Terris Marshall's way. I hope he can find a good spot with good draft capital. That latter piece may not happen because of these medicals, but I'll likely still be higher on Marshall than the consensus post draft. Now after Marshall are the Alabama wide receivers and they close off this second tier. I've got DeVante Smith aheaded Jalen Waddle right now, and I'll likely have that post draft. I'm not one who's fading DeVante Smith strictly because of his BMI. Does BMI matter at wide receiver, Yeah, it's in my model so does to some degree, but it doesn't matter as much as a lot of people think. I did an entire episode on this topic. You can listen back to it. It's episode four hundred and eighty eight. Smith's production profile is great, it's elite. I've got no issues there. I actually think the biggest red flag is the lack of early declare status. We can sit here and say, oh, that doesn't matter. He won the Heisman and showed that he's really good last year, and that's not wrong, which is why I've still got Smith in this second tier very very easily, and it's why I'm open to Smith moving up to the wide receiver two spot if things break certain ways during the draft. The reason I think it still matters though, this early declare status is because there's signal there. We've seen fifty three wide receiver since two thousand and six get drafted in round one. That's where my prospect model dates back to Of those fifty three, thirteen were not early declares, so they played all four years in college, and of those thirteen, only five of them posted one single one thousand yard season in the NFL. Only one of those non early declares posted more than one. That was Dwayne bow It's not everything, it's just something. The early declare stuff points towards a player being talented. He wouldn't leave school early unless he thought that he was maximizing his draft capital his draft potential. And if a player is going early as an early declare, he's likely got some talent. So ask yourself, if DeVante Smith were a first rounder last year, what are the chances that he'd actually stay at Alabama. I don't know the answer to that. No one knows the answer to that, But that adds the ambiguity. And he did. He stayed at Alabama because in my eyes, he probably wouldn't have been a first rounder. And then he has the season that he has, which just created this combination of so many factors that we'd never seen before. That's why I'm totally cool with saying I don't know, Like, why should I pretend to have these concrete answers on these players when my job is to find trends and help people win in fantasy football. The problem with Smith is that trends don't exist for him. We can say that low BMI players haven't hit in the NFL, but we can also show that Smith when he's inevitably a first round pick later this week, he joins Dmarius Thomas and Des Bryant as the only first round wide receivers in my model with a best season yards per team pass attempt eight above four. So I fully recognize Devonte Smith's ceiling. If he ends up slipping in rookie drafts because people are worried about his size, I will gladly take him. I just think that there are still some red flax, like his lack of early declared status and him not having the best breakout age in the world. The big differentiator for me between Marshall and Smith isn't so much the safety of the prospect. Smith is a safer prospect, it's the ceiling. Marshall has Alpha size while checking boxes of an alpha fantasy football asset. Smith doesn't check all those boxes. Now, with Jalen Waddle, I want to start out by saying that Jalen Waddle is not Henry Ruggs. Ruggs had an absolutely crap production profile. Wattle, despite being injured last year, has a better profile in my model. He also had a really strong freshman year where he finished with more receiving yards than Ruggs, DeVante Smith, and Irvsmith. Jerry Judy had more that year, but that was it, and those guys were older in terms of college years than Jalen Wattle was now. Waddle sophomore year saw him lose snaps, which could have easily been the result of seniority, and then last year, competing with DeVante Smith, Wattle caught twenty five balls for five hundred and fifty seven yards in four games before being hurt. He had more yards than Devonte Smith through that point in time. Now, within my model, Jalen Waddle has a negative stat score and he's almost a lock to be a first rounder. In the history of my model, no wide receiver with a negative stat scorer who was drafted in Round one has hit. At least so far, nine players fit that mold forshad Perriman, Philip Dorsett, Kelvin, Benjamin Cordero, Patterson, Darius Hayward, bay Ted gin, Craig Davis, Anthony Gonzalez, and Henry Ruggs. None of them were fantasy studs for a large stretch of time. I do think Waddle has a good chance to buck that trend given the context of his profile, But because of the profile that he has and the fact that we have to do some projecting, I'm having a hard time elevating him to like wide receiver two status in this class. So a new tier starts after Waddle and it's two players deep. It's Elijah More and then Rondell Moore. I'm a big fan of both moors. I just have concerns that both players can end up being locked into a slot role at the next level, and that would make them a little bit more landing spot dependent. But if one goes to like Green Bay or to Kansas City, I'd feel a lot better about them, both in the short and long term. And for the record, when I say that I'm worried about them being locked into more of a slot role, it's not that I'm totally concerned about them not producing at all in fantasy football at the next level. It's more than if they're strictly slot players. Their ceiling is just inherently capped. It's hard and pretty rare for strictly a slot receiver to be a high end wide receiver in fantasy football. And I'm not talking like Keenan Allen types. I'm talking Cole Beasley types, or even Jujus Smith Schuster, who hasn't been nearly the same type of fantasy receiver since moving to the slot more full time. I think Elijah Moore has more upside to not just be that, though his production profile is one of the best in his class. He had a thirty six percent reception share both as a sophomore and a junior. His yards per team pass attempt rate is eighth best in the class, and his touchdown share is fourth best. My comp for Elijah Moore is Tyler Lockett, where I could see him playing a good bit in the slot but still being a team's number two guy and moving more to the outside as he develops. But that development piece is key because of Cordon. To Pro Football Focus, he had a seventy eight percent slot snap rate last season and only thirty eight snaps were against press coverage. So there's some projecting that's going on with Elijah Moore, and that's fine, but that comes with the little bit of risk With Rondel Moore, He's got one of the most interesting profiles that we've seen in recent memory. My model takes the best seasons out of these particular production metrics, and all of Moore's best season numbers came from his freshman campaign, and despite that, he still has one of the best production profiles in this class. That's how insane his freshman season was. But he hasn't been able to stay healthy over the last couple of years. He's really undersized of just five foot seven, though he's insanely athletic and he's a part of hashtag Team Thick, and he only played sixty seven snaps out wide throughout college. I kind of see Rondel Moore's ceiling being a combination of t Y Hilton and Curtis Samuel. But I think we see him play more of a slot role and stay closer to the line of scrimmage to start his career, and that could really limit his upside if he's on a team that doesn't throw the ball a whole lot, or if he finds an offensive scheme that's not creative. Now, that's something that's hard to predict even just two years down the line, so he's not dropping if his landing spot isn't phenomenal. I highly doubt that Rondell Moore will drop outside my top seven wide receivers. It's just that if the landing spot isn't great, he won't be rising in these rankings post draft. At tier four, I've got four wide receivers. This wide receiver class is objectively better than the running back one, so to me, it makes sense that I basically only talked about wide receivers over the last ten or zero spots. That's also part of the reason that it's easier to go running back with an early pick within this class, because there's still some good wide receivers to choose from in the second round. But at the twelve spot is Tylan Wallace. He's one of eleven wide receivers in this class that hit a three point zero yards per team pass attempt rate. And when you filter those players down to the ones with a breakout age under twenty years old, you ever shot Bateman, Elijah Moore, Isaiah McCoy, and two too at Well. McCoy's out of a smaller program and Ken State, and at Well weighs like forty pounds less than I do, so there's a reason that those two aren't getting more love, and Atwell is actually getting some love. Production is not the problem for Wallace. It's more of the fact that he didn't decl early and for an explosive wide receiver or with that element being so important to his game, he didn't test exceptionally well. This is sort of where I insert that subjectivity with athletic testing. Now, maybe this is all tied to an ACL tear from twenty nineteen, but that's still a concern too. I think he's a super solid prospect though, and like Curtis Patrick mentioned on the show last week, Wallace could be considered in a tier above where I have him placed. I feel pretty good about him. I feel good about Dami Brown too, who's next on this list, Tiland. Wallace had good deep ball numbers last year, ranking fifth in deep ball catches across college football, but d'amy Brown did as well. He was second in deep ball yards and he was seventh and average depth of target. That put together a yards per team pass attempt rate of three point zero eight, which is a top ten number in this class. He also had back to back seasons of twenty or more yards per reception. I think there is some concern that Diami Brown translates into being some one trick pony, like maybe a little bit better than a Marquez Valdez Scantling, but he at least has a trick. He'll have some role right away that he can then build off of. Now at fourteen on my list is Kadarius Tony, and I gotta be honest with you, guys. I have him placed here not because I think he's a very good prospect, or at least a safe prospect. It's just that his draft capital is projected to be strong, and that alone boosts him in some way. But Tony's one of those players my model with a negative stat scorer. If he goes in round one, then he'll be grouped with the affourmentioned players who didn't pan out in the NFL, and the difference between him and someone like Jalen Wattle statistically, even though they have negative stat scorers, Wattle has that early declare status whereas Tony doesn't. So not only does Tony not have production, but he's also not in early declare, which historically has been a recipe for disaster for first round picks, but we can't deny Tony's ability with the ball in his hands. He's electric. He moves in ways that human bodies don't move. That may give him an intriguing ceiling in the league, but I still think he's got more bust potential than success potential despite potential first round capital and then rounding out this tier is Amen Ross Saint Brown. I've sort of viewed Saint Brown as a high floor, low ceiling prospect throughout this process. He actually never led his college team in receiving yards. That's somewhat of a concern, but he did play alongside Michael Pittman up until last year. When last year hit, though, Saint Brown's receiving yard and reception shars both went down, and that happened when he moved from playing eighty nine percent of his snaps from the slot in twenty nineteen to just twenty eight percent in twenty twenty, So he faced tougher coverage on the outside and he performed worse. That's not a great sign. The good signs, though, are that he's got decent enough size, he's an early declarer, and he had a really strong breakout age, so I think he belongs in this tier, and with draft capital, he should be a solid second round rookie pick. So I've got five more players to talk about today. The first four are technically in a separate tier than the fifth, but I'll group them all up to close out today's show. At sixteen, I have Trevor Lawrence. I don't think much needs to be said about Lawrence, but I do think that we should note that he has athleticism, He has that potential cheat code element to his game for fantasy purposes. He gets comped to Andrew Luck all the time, and I think that that kind of makes sense, especially when you think about what Andrew Luck did and what he could bring with his legs to fantasy football. Lawrence is a top prospect at the position, and he's the safest bet at quarterback in Dynasty. After Lawrence, I've got my RB four in this class finally, and that's Tray Sermon. Given Sermon's college journey, he doesn't have a complete production profile whatsoever. He really wasn't a true workhorse in any full season in college. But here's the thing. This running back class kind of sucks and it lacks size. So the RB four spot is wide open, and Sermon is one of the few backs in this class who could step in and be a competent starter right away. And I could see a team falling in love with him after he posted three hundred and thirty one yards on the ground against Northwestern the Big Ten Championship and then one hundred and ninety three against Clemson in the College Football Semi Final. If draft capital is there, then Sermons should be the RB four in this class. Absolutely. I think there's a chance that we see him fall to one of those attractive landing spots where he could see immediate work, and that would make him more of the consensus RB four in this class, whereas that's not the case right now at eighteen. I've got justin Fields. Jim Snis alluded to this on the Quarterback episode from about a month ago, but almost eighty eight percent of fields As attempts last season came against sp plus top fifty defenses. Field saw the toughest schedule of any quarterback that's been drafted since twenty ten. All the while Fields ranks in the seventy fourth percentile and adjusted yards per attempts among first round quarterbacks since two thousand, so he has good passing numbers, and then he goes out and he runs a four four four forty. The athleticism is there to be a crazy good duel threat quarterback. Now we'll see how this quarterback group shakes out, but for now, Fields is my QB two at eighteenth overall. After Fields is then Kenneth Gainwell. Gainwell is the type of running back that I fall in love with every single draft. He's got the second best reception share in this running back class, and at Memphis he played ahead of Antonio Gibson. He led all Memphis backs back in twenty nineteen in rush attempts by a pretty huge margin. That was his last collegiate season. The reason he's not ranked higher is size. He weighed in at two hundred and one pounds at his pro day, and the fear is that a team is only going to want to use him as a satellite back at the next level. Antonio Gibson was a size speed freak. Gainwell's not that. Unfortunately. I love him as a prospect because I love these types of running backs, but I have to be objective and I have to recognize there could be a cap ceiling for Gainwell in the NFL, and then lastly at number twenty, it's Michael Carter. Like I said earlier, Carter did have comparable production to Davonte Williams last year. But my fear with Carter is that you have this smaller framed running back who's just two hundred and one pounds, who also didn't test with a lot of speed. The difference analytically between Carter and Gainwell is that Carter was a decent bit slower at his pro day. I think he's also going to be forced into a satellite back role at the next level and that limits upside. That's why I've got Sermon ahead of both of those guys. But as we know, landing spot and draft capital matter a lot more at running back than they do a wide receiver. So we'll see how things work out. There's a chance at the non big three running backs see some changes in post draft rankings. So that's it. That's my top twenty. You can find the rest of my rankings over on number five dot com, or you can hit me up on Twitter and I'll send them your way. Once the draft is over, I'm going to redo the rankings at that time. We'll have landing spots, we'll have draft capital. And while landing spots can be overrated and overstated, sometimes the draft capital piece is important. If someone drops who we don't think will drop, we've got to adjust with that new information. That's going to 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, and never forgot to follow me on Twitter Late Round QB. Thanks everyone. I'm gonna do the Mailbag episode on Thursday this week, so that should drop Thursday morning. I'll talk to you then