1000: The Rookie Edge in Redraft Leagues

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zachariason.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 1,000 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcasts sponsored by DraftKings.

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Sponsored by DK. When I'm doing fantasy football analysis, I'm often looking at trends. When something happens in history at a very high rate, at an undeniable rate, then I usually take that into consideration with my forecasting. A lot of my studies and a lot of my average draft position analysis is based off of trends. And trends aren't foolproof. They're not here to say that something will definitely happen. Like, I did that episode last week on the tight end dead zone, or whatever you want to call it. That episode wasn't to say that zero tight ends will emerge after being drafted in the tight end 7 to tight end 18 range. It's simply to say that historically there hasn't been much reason to reach for tight ends in that range. That doesn't mean that it always is that way. And it doesn't mean that I won't be drafting anyone from that range. Because there are also trends to look for that tell us who to target from that range. The point is that you better be sure things are aligning and that that pick makes sense before grabbing a player from that dead zone. It's about, as usual, probability. One of those undeniable trends that pops up in the Late-Round Draft Guide each year, which, by the way, you can purchase that guide right now over on lateround.com for the 2025 season. But one of those undeniable trends is with rookies. And how rookie players, and honestly, you could argue at all positions, but definitely a running back and wide receiver. And definitely wide receiver when you compare them to cost. But those rookies tend to be really good bets in your season-long drafts. They don't always work out, but they tend to work out at a higher rate than most other career year subsets. Hence the trend. Now, if you listened to my discussion last week on Late-Round Perspectives with Jacob Sanderson, then you heard us chat a lot about the fantasy football market getting sharper. With the game of fantasy football maturing the way that it has, with so many people playing and getting more and more into the game, it only makes sense to assume the market's just filled with smarter people. People care more about fantasy football. When you care more about something, you understand that something a little bit better. I think we feel that subjectively each year. For anyone who was ultra prepared for drafts back like 10 years ago, you could walk away from drafts with super teams. It just feels a little bit more difficult to do that in today's game. So if the market's getting sharper, then that means some of the trends that we see may not be as strong as they appear, right? Because if we're comparing to history, and that history includes a time period where the market wasn't as sharp, then our data doesn't necessarily fully reflect the current market. And that was something I was really interested in researching with rookies. So I did. Rookies have been good value picks in season-long leagues, but is that edge actually disappearing? Are people driving the cost of rookies upward, leaning to them not being nearly as valuable as they used to be? That's the shower thought that I had a few weeks ago. So I researched it, and I'm going to talk about that research on today's show. The first thing I wanted to see with this topic was whether or not we're actually drafting rookies higher today than we were, say, ten years ago. Because if we're not, then case closed. All of the trends from ten years ago apply today. I use average draft position data from fantasydata.com, which dates back to 2014 Now, keep in mind, this is season-long ADP data. You may hear numbers today and be like, wait, that doesn't seem right. But you may also have best ball brain, where the ADP isn't always one-to-one.