Rewind: The Running Back Dead Zone

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Speaker 1: What's up everyone. It's JJ and this is not your typical late round Fantasy football podcast episode, but thanks for tuning in anyway. As I said last week, I took a little bit of a post draft vacation. My family drove down to Disney World and we spent a few days there. Last week, my three and a half year old daughter lost her freaking mind. It was amazing. I'm now getting back into the swing of things, and since it's sort of a downtime of year for fantasy football, I figured I'd do a rewind episode on the running Back dead Zone. I did this episode last year around this time and ended up being one of the most popular shows of twenty twenty one, and looking at what happened during the twenty twenty one fantasy season, the information on the episode ended up being really helpful. Running Backs last year drafted in round four to round six really were not very good. It obviously depends on your ADP source, but you had players like Mike Davis, Miles Sanders, Miles Gaskin, James Robinson, and Kareem Hunt get selected in that range. The biggest payoff was probably Josh Jacobs or maybe Damian Harris, but neither of those players ended up being a true league win. Meanwhile, in that same range, but at wide receiver you had two huge league winning players in Cooper Cup and Jamar Chase. Even Deontay Johnson, T Higgins and Chris Godwin paid off in a big way. Now, I'm prefacing with this because as you listen to this running Back Dead Zone episode from last year, you're gonna hear data that doesn't include last season because the episode you're about the year was recorded prior to last season. That's the beauty of strategy. Though it's evergreen, the running back dead Zone notion was alive and well last year, not just because it was some one off season where we were lucky to see the results that we saw. The running back dead Zone worked last year because it's a proven concept that will help you win in the long run. It's not full proof, but it's an effective way to increase your probability of hitting on league winning players. Now, before I start playing that episode from last year, I wanted to make a quick announcement. I mentioned this on Twitter last week before I left for vacation. But the Late Round Draft Guide is now available for pre order over on Late Round I know. I just finished up the Late Round Prospect Guide, and you can still purchase that on the site as well. If you need rookie rankings and profiles on the incoming class, I got you. But the Late Round Draft Guide is different. It's a season long redraft guide. So for all of you playing redraft this year, which is probably all of you, listen up. I don't want to publish a redraft or a season long guide that's strictly player profiles and rankings. You know that's not my style, and I think there are analysts out there who do a great job with that. With this draft guide, I wanted to do something a little bit different. It's more strategy focused. In the guide, I'll explain why regression matters. I'll talk about utilizing projections and tiers. I'll run through topics like the running back dead zone and the late round quarterback strategy. I'll look into my yearly breakout running back, wide receiver and tight end studies. I'll give my top values, my top players to avoid, my favorite late round dart throws, and my rankings. I'll do all of that, but I want to focus on the strategy side just as much, if not more, than the player analysis side, because I think that's more important. The guide is available for pre order right now over on lateround dot com for nineteen ninety nine and it'll jump to twenty four ninety nine on July first when the guide launches, And once it launches, you'll get weekly updates email to your inbox. So if my top values change, I'll edit the guide and send you a revised version. If and when my rankings change, you'll get the updated rankings. So you'll get weekly updates from the beginning of July through the end of August with this guide. That's the Late Round Draft Guide, and it's available for pre order right now on lateround dot com. I think it's going to be a really helpful tool for your season long drafts this year. But that's my announcement. Let's now fire up last year's episode on the running Back dead Zone. Last year, I did a study on where league winning players come from in fantasy football, and by come from, I basically meant where they were selected in fantasy football drafts. In that study, I found that the high I players drafted, generally speaking, the greater the chance that he becomes a league winning player. And I defined league winner as being a top ten running back or a top eight wide receiver, because historically that's where players saw edges in fantasy points per game. It's a little arbitrary, but there is math behind it. The fact that players drafted earlier have been better in fantasy football. That's not surprising. That should be the expectation unless we were all just horrifically bad at projecting this stuff. But we know early round draft picks and fantasy football are usually better. What was noticeable with that data, though, was how the league winning hit rate for running backs dropped off when round four hit, and that's around the same area that people consider the running back dead zone. I updated that data and I want to share it with you today because it sheds light to this running back dead zone idea. I used ADP data from Myfantasy league dot com for the study since twenty eleven, so we've got about a decade worth of data here. But since twenty eleven, we've seen fifty five percent of first round running back actually finish as top ten options at the position. Now I'm talking first round running backs and fantasy drafts, not the real NFL draft, So fifty five percent of first round running backs selected end up as league winners in Fantasy football. When looking at wide receiver league winners or players who finish in the top eight at the position, that number seventy percent. Now let's look at the second round. In the second round, the running back league winning rate has been thirty six percent. It's forty six percent at wide receiver. Keep in mind, these numbers don't automatically mean that you should be drafting a wide receiver over a running back in the first two rounds of your draft. Not only are we looking at full rounds here, and high end first round running backs generally have higher hit rates than late first roundbacks, but we're not looking at the degree in which these players hit. Elite running backs generally give you the biggest edge in fantasy football, so having that player is still more beneficial most of the time than having an elite wide receiver. Wide receivers are more consistent, though, in terms of average draft position versus posty a result, at least in these early rounds. The data I'm looking at shows a pretty big drop off after round two for wide receivers in terms of how well they convert to being league winning players. In round three, the wide receiver league winner rate has been fifteen point four percent. It's still thirty three percent at running back. More on this in a second, so hopefully you're following so far. I know it can be hard sometimes with the podcast like this, but I'll wrap things up as well as I can, I promise. Round four is really where things get iffy with this data. The running back league winning hit rate goes from thirty three percent in round three all the way down to eleven percent in round four, and that's what the benefit of a league winning player of Jonathan Taylor happening this past season. At wide receiver, the hit rate for league winners actually increases from round three to round four. It goes from a little over fifteen percent to a little over sixteen percent. In round five, the hit rate for wide receivers is over eighteen percent. At running back it's fourteen point eight percent. So thus far we have wider receiver hit rates being a good bit higher than that running back in rounds one and two, running back then dominating in round three, and then wide receiver taking over again in rounds four and five. What's interesting is what happens at these positions as we go into round six and seven, And this is something that can't be lost with this discussion. Eventually we'll run out of places to get league winning players. If historically all running back league winners came in rounds one through three, then it would make a whole lot of sense to just start your fantasy drafts with three straight running backs every single year, because no league winners are coming later. So you wouldn't use your middle and late round resources on the running back position. And we have to keep roster construction in mind here too. Let's say you start your draft with three straight running backs and then let's say in round four you get a quarterback. Then all of a sudden, you're like, oh man, I'm gonna absolutely crush the wide receiver position over the next three or four rounds. Well, the problem in doing that is that the drop off and hit rate at wide receiver in that point in the draft is way more significant than running back. There's a more significant cliff, if that makes more sense. In round six, the wide receiver league winner hit rate is eight percent. In round seven it's zero percent. Now, this is all obviously dependent upon the ADP resource that you're using, but it still tells us a story that not many hits are happening in round seven. At wide receiver, in round eight, it's two and a half percent, with just one league winner happening there since twenty eleven. In round nine to ten, it's also zero percent. So from round seven through ten, across the last ten seasons, we've had one wide receiver give us a top eight season in points per game. Some of them have given us good seasons, don't get me wrong, but they weren't top eight seasons. At running back. That's not the case now. Part of this is because the league winner parameters are slightly larger for running backs. But throughout this time period we've seen league winners from every middle round aside from round nine. Round six brought us a thirteen and a half percent league winner rate that's actually higher than what we saw at running back. In round four, Round seven it's ten and a half percent, round eight it's seven percent, round nine zero percent, and then round ten about seven percent. What this data is telling you is that it's easier to get middle round running back league winners than it is at wide receiver, and it's a good bit easier. These margins aren't that small. Running Backs being drafted in round seven through round ten, they're hitting at a much higher rate than wide receivers are. So you may be wondering, what does this have to do with the running back dead zone. Well, go back to my example where you go running back heavy and then you take a quarterback in round four. There's an opportunity cost in doing that, and that cost isn't always captured in a traditional value over replacement player formula. Because of your choices that you already made, you're now forced into a particular roster construction. And by the way, I'm not talking about best ball leagues yet. This is all managed redraft focused, but you're forced into going ham and drafting wide receivers after to that kind of start. But the problem is good wide receivers are gone. We don't get league winning wide receivers in the middle rounds. No matter how good you think those middle round wide receivers are on paper, no matter how good they look, it's generally a bad idea to have to rely on them after round five or round six hits. What that means is that you have to pick your spots as to where you should snag wide receivers in the early rounds, and this data tells us that while you can definitely go with a super wide receiver heavy approach and start your draft with a couple of wide receivers, especially if you're in a PPR format with a lot of wide receiver starters in the flex, you really should be relying on wide receivers in rounds four and five, where they're giving you a decent edge over running back in terms of hit rate. The difference in hit rate at running back from round four through round seven is not very significant. A round four running back is not giving you that significantly higher of a hit rate in terms of being a league winner than a round seven running back. That drop off is much more significant at wide receiver. So it then makes sense to get the wide receivers first and then fall back to running back when you get into that round seven range. And by the way, I didn't mention this at the start, but this is all based off of a twelve team league, but this is really what the running back dead zone is about. Hit rates fall pretty dramatically after round three or even towards the end of round three, and those hit rates remain pretty consistent up through round seven. After round three, a wide receiver there's a drop after round two, and then round three through round five give you pretty similar hit rates. So it makes sense to maximize your output by getting those round four and five wide receivers. Hence the running back dead zone. Don't get your running backs there because you can get your running backs a little bit later for similar output. Now, another way that you can examine this phenomenon is by plotting average draft position versus fantasy points scored. When you look at that trend line, so a trend line of where a player gets drafted versus how many points he typically scores, it shows something really similar. Jack Miller over at Established the Run talked about this in a recent article on the running back dead zone. He created that chart. Jack's article also takes this idea of the running back dead zone and he attributes it to Best ball leagues. It's just more evidence of this area of the draft is very real and that getting running backs there is not optimal. What he found for best ball formats, which are a different beast than traditional redraft leagues. For the record, but what he found is that player win rates back up this idea as well. Here's what Jack wrote. He said, quote another way to look at. This is using player win rate data. Remember the expected win rate for any player's eight point three percent one hundred percentage points divided by twelve teams per league. Wide receivers picked in rounds three through six have averaged an above expectation win rate in six consecutive seasons. Running Backs in that area have been below expectation for six straight years. Jack also found the same thing. The redraft data that I'm analyzing is showing running backs in round seven through ten have had better win rates than wide receivers have. Now, anytime there's data like this in fantasy football, I ask myself, why, why is this happening? What's the psychological factor that's driving this? And I think it comes down to the fact that when we draft our fantasy teams, we overestimate our ability to project, but we also panic. When round four hits. We look at our draft boards and we see names of really good wide receivers that are just buried on rankings lists that we know are going to be available in round six, round seven, round eight. All the while we're panicking because the opposite happens at running back. The running back position typically drives up fast. So our solution is to pick up a running back and wait on wide receiver, but the opposite should generally be happening. This is where the overestimating our ability to project comes into play. It's so so important to not just look at a rankings list and say wide receiver is deep. We've said this in the last seven years. People say this every single season. Wide receiver is always. The reason we probably feel this way is because those players are seeing the field all the time. In today's NFL, they're getting some work each week, whereas it's not as easy for a running back to see a decent workload each week because at any given moment there's usually just one of them on the field. Don't let that alter the way that you're thinking about this, though, because we have mountains of data that shows us that you're getting better value in those mid to late rounds by going running back instead of wide receiver, whether you're playing a managed league or a best ball league. And look, guys, these are all just trends. Even the win rate numbers that Jack provided. It's not that it's a one hundred percent thing versus a zero percent thing. It's just an edge. There's an edge in going after wide receivers in that running back dead zone range. You don't have to absolutely, without a doubt avoid running backs in that area, but what I'd task you to do is make sure you're drafting a player who has a sincerely high range of outcomes, one where the path to relevancy isn't only there if he ends up being an outlier. Basically, make sure you're not drafting that running back because of supply and demand. Make sure you're drafting him because he's just really good and he could break fantasy football. Like Jonathan Taylor last season, despite his being in the running back dead zone I liked Taylor at his ADP, and I'm not just saying that either I've got receipts on older podcasts. He had a floor because he was likely to see work, but he also had a stealing if he either just took over that backfield or if an injury happened to Marlon Mack and the injury happened early on to Marlon Mack. It's important to then also know how taking a running back in that range can affect your team build. Relying on multiple running backs from the running back dead zones probably not going to lead you to the fantasy football promise land taking a shot on one is a little bit different, but it's all very real. The running back dead zone is real, and it's something to take seriously when you're drafting