1002: Regression Candidates

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason, and this is episode 1002 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by DraftKings. Thanks for tuning in. Football season is right around the corner, and there's no better way to lock in your fantasy dominance early than with Best Ball on DraftKings, where you draft once and ride your roster all season long. And right now, DraftKings is giving all customers a can't-miss offer. Draft one, get one. Enter a lineup in the $15 million Best Ball contest for just $20, and you'll score another Best Ball ticket to play free for a share of $15 million, giving you a second shot to win big. It's easy. Just draft your dream team once, no weekly management required, and let your top scorers automatically start each week. Across the whole season, every breakout star, every clutch play, every touchdown will count towards your quest for a share of $15 million. As you know, I'm drafting over there and I'm documenting things with becoming a Best Ball bro, so you can use the information from that show to help you out as well. So download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app now to draft your $20 Best Ball lineup to play for a share of $15 million, and get a second ticket to play free for a share of that $15 million. That's two chances to win big without ever setting your lineup again. Draft one, get one, only on DraftKings. The crown is yours. Gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER in New York. Call 8778-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY to 467369 In Connecticut, help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. 18 plus in most eligible states, but age varies by jurisdiction. Eligibility restrictions apply. Voidware prohibited, one per customer. Enter the Best Ball $15 Million Headliner Contest by 9-425 to get one bonus entry. $20 entry required. Reward expires in 30 days. See terms at draftkings.com/nfldashbestdashball.

Sponsored by DK. We're now officially within the standard Late-Round Podcast schedule. What I mean by that is, each year around this time, I do the same episodes, just with new content. Like this one, this is one where I talk about regression candidates. Next week, we're doing early season schedule analysis. And then players to target, players to avoid, and so on. Which means everything is planned out right now through the end of fantasy season, which is kind of crazy to think about. But as I said, today's episode is about regression candidates. To me, regression is probably the most important concept to wrap your head around in fantasy football. And I still think that it's one that people don't totally understand. When we talk regression, it doesn't always automatically mean bad. It doesn't mean that some player is getting worse. It just means that a player has some average, some mean, that he's likely to perform closer to. If you play golf and you typically shoot in the low 90s, and you have a round of 85, you don't just expect to shoot in 85 the next time that you're on the course. You're expecting to go back to your average, your mean of 90 to 95 You just got a little lucky, and you shot in 85 You didn't actually get better. With fantasy and football in general, something we have to separate is the fact that a player can perform just as well on a real football field while getting better or worse in fantasy football. Because at the end of the day, fantasy scoring doesn't match real football. An 80-yard pass that doesn't result in a touchdown from a quarterback, it's worth less than a one-yard touchdown throw, even though that 80-yard pass is likely way more impactful. Numbers fluctuate, and sometimes, a lot of times, it doesn't have anything to do with the actual skill level of a certain player. So on today's show, I'm going to talk through a handful of regression candidates, players, and in some cases, teams, who did some weird and unsustainable stuff last year statistically. And since the market is likely going to use previous season numbers to project here in the current season, there may be an opportunity to target or avoid these players as a result of regression. So without further ado, let's get to the first candidate.

I think one of the best examples of regression this year is at quarterback, and it's not Jared Goff, who I've talked about a lot this off season. I think there's probably a better example in Baker Mayfield. Now look, I'm a borderline Baker Mayfield stan. I liked him coming out. I've always been kind of an apologist, but my job is to be objective, and being objective leads me to say that Baker Mayfield is going to regress this year. An easy way to spot that is just look at touchdown rate. Good quarterbacks will typically have higher touchdown rates, but it's still a number that regresses to the middle, or to the mean. Baker Mayfield's touchdown rate last year was 7.2%. That's like 3 percentage points higher than the league's average. That resulted in Baker throwing 41 touchdowns, 13 more than his previous season in Tampa Bay, which came in 2023 He's never had a season like he had last year. Now people are going to hear this, and they're going to say, but Baker not only had injured pass catchers last year, they also added to that room this year. How could he possibly get worse? Well, here's the thing. Most regression-related statistics with quarterbacks are going to stem from the team level, because quarterbacks control so much of the game. So if they're doing weird things, then something's probably going on at that team level. And for Tampa Bay, that's exactly the case. Two things happened for the Buccaneers last year. Number one, they were fourth in touchdowns per game at 3.35 touchdowns per contest. Number two, 72% of their touchdowns came via the pass. Now think about this. For a high passing touchdown total to happen, a team will have to score a lot of touchdowns. And then also see a lot of those touchdowns come via the air. One of those two things at least has to happen. There have been 13 teams since 2011 who had 3.25 touchdowns per game or more, while seeing at least 70% of those touchdowns come via the air. The Buccaneers are one of those teams. And they are the only team that did it last year. That means we have 12 teams who have next season data. Of those 12 teams, guess how many ended up seeing an improvement in passing touchdowns year over year? One of them did. And funny enough, only the 2020 Bucs from 2020 to 2021 saw an uptick in passing touchdowns, going from 42 to 43 That was when they had Tom Brady. The average team lost 9.7 passing touchdowns. And yes, some of these teams were even bigger regression candidates than Mayfield and the Bucs. I'm not saying he's a lock to throw 10 fewer touchdowns, but I don't think that's even close to out of the range of outcomes here. My projections have them around 32 Mike Clay, the gold standard for projection building, has met 33 Mayfield ran the ball more last year, and he was more effective as a rusher in fantasy. So, if that does stick, if that rushing component sticks, he may be able to maintain his ADP expectation. Now, I have my doubts personally of that, which is why I'm more on the avoid side than the target side with Baker Mayfield. But regression should hit, even with the Mecha Ibuca in the picture. Mayfield can play just as well as he did last year in real football, while still regressing statistically. That's how regression works. We shouldn't simply expect greatness. And the Buccaneers, they were pretty great last year. Now we talked some team level regression with Mayfield, and I want to shift to another NFC team and look at the Eagles. Because their 2024 was absolutely wild with how they ran their offense. The Eagles were really run heavy last year. When I say really run heavy, I mean extremely run heavy. Their 41.9% pass rate, and that's on attempts for the record, but that 41.9% pass rate wasn't just the lowest in the league. It was the second lowest since 2011 We've only had 7 teams with next season data hit a sub-45% pass rate. The Eagles were way lower than that. Not only did all but one of them increase that pass rate the following year, but the average increase in pass rate from those teams has been 7 percentage points. In games where we accounted for 90% or more of the team's pass attempts, Jalen Hurts averaged just 25.5 pass attempts per game last year. The year before that, that number was almost 33 Before that, it was 31 We can sit here and say that the Eagles are good, that they're going to be run heavy, and that Saquon Barkley changed the dynamic of that offense. I wouldn't even disagree with that, but it's really hard to sustain such a low pass rate. Not only that, but the Eagles have one of the five toughest schedules this year when viewing opponents through the lens of win totals. They might trail in games this year more than they did last year, and that would result in more passing. So this means that we should expect to see more passing volume in this offense, and that's going to help the pass catchers. It doesn't mean Saquon Barkley's dust, but I think we'd all agree that regression is likely going to hit Saquon Barkley on the volume front. I sent a newsletter about this last week, but among players with 300 or more carries in year N since 2011, there have been 24 of them with next season data, the average player tends to lose a few rush attempts per game. So expect the Eagles to throw the ball more here in 2025