1022: Mailbag - Rookie Running Backs, Joe Burrow's Injury, and More

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 1022 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by DraftKings. Thanks for tuning in. There's no better way to get closer to the action than with DraftKings Daily Fantasy, the ultimate destination for football fans. New customers can play free for their share of millions and prizes with their first deposit of $5 or more. Download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app and enter promo code LATEROUND to play free for your share of millions. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. New York? Call 8778-HOPE-NY. And Connecticut? Call 888-789-7777. 18 plus in most states. Eligibility restrictions apply. Ends December 31st. See terms at draftkings.com/promotions.

It's a mailbag episode. Let's get to these questions.

The first question is from Patreon. It's from Definitely Human. It says, Hi JJ, love your work. What do you make of the underwhelming starts by some of the rookie running backs that were widely hyped prior to the start of the season? Gentie, Hampton and Henderson. Should we be concerned with the slow start to their seasons, or is this typical for rookie running backs? Which ones do you feel can ramp up production versus ones that we should be worried about? So after Monday night's game between the Chargers and Raiders, rookie running back takes were flying everywhere. People all over Twitter were calling Amari and Hampton trash. They were saying Ash and Gentie is a bust. And some were saying things like, this is why you don't take rookies in fantasy football drafts. Even the Late-Round Fantasy Football Discord, people were panicking in there. And look, I don't think we should feel the same way about these rookie running backs as we did entering the year. We've gotten new information, and we should act on that information. They've all fallen in my rest of season rankings versus where I had them entering the year. With that being said, we've gotta relax a little bit. We gotta chill out. The first thing I wanna say with this is that rookies are not bad draft picks in fantasy football. Stop with this narrative. There is no data that backs this up. In fact, data says the opposite, especially at wide receiver. Now, if you go back and listen to episode 1000, I did talk about how running back seem to be the position that we should be less interested in based on recent trends. And that's related to rookies. And that's based on how they've performed against average draft position expectation and how rookie running backs have been getting selected earlier and earlier through the years. But that doesn't mean that we should just avoid rookie running backs. That's not what that episode was about. There's still this notion out there that spending up for rookie running backs is a terrible idea. Because Clyde Edwards Allaire. Okay, well, there's also Ezekiel Elliott and Saquon Barkley. You can play this exact same game with veterans too. Anyway, I don't want to get into all that today because I think it's less important. That's draft strategy related. We're in the middle of the season. I wanted to see if all of this was normal. If historically we saw rookie running backs get drafted high and redraft and then we watched them do very little to start the season, specifically over the first two weeks of the season. So I took an arbitrary running back ranking by ADP and I started there. I looked at rookie running backs since 2014, which is as far back as the ADP data goes, and I looked at rookie running backs who were selected in the top 30 at the position. I then filtered out all of the running backs who didn't play weeks 1 and 2 That left me with a clean 25 running back sample. 25 rookie running backs who were drafted in the top 30 at the position and who played weeks 1 and 2 Right now, Marion Hampton is averaging 5.8 PPR points per game. Ashton Gentey, 9.7. Travion Henderson, 8.6. And RJ Harvey, just to throw him in there too, 5.7. Those are all not great scores through 2 weeks. Well, if we look at our 25 rookie running back sample, top 30 rookie running backs by ADP since 2014, 18 of them were averaging fewer than 14 PPR points per game after 2 weeks. The average points per game across the entire sample was 12.4. 10 of the 25 were averaging fewer than 10 PPR points per game, which is where our running backs this year are currently sitting. So this has definitely happened in the past. A bigger question we should be asking though is if players really bounced back. Because what if all the players who started slow just finished slow and they never developed in anything? This is where I do think there's maybe, and I stress the word maybe, some concern. Going back to our 25 rookie running backs since 2014 who were drafted in the top 30 in season long leagues, there were 23 who then after week two went on to play at least eight more games. I want a large enough sample size to work off of to see how these players performed rest of season. Of those 23, we had 12 with 14 or more PPR points per game rest of season. That is after week two, they played at least eight games and they averaged 14 or more PPR points per game. And of those 12 running backs who had rest of season averages of 14 or more PPR points per game, three of them were from the group who averaged less than 10 PPR points per game in weeks one and two. You following what I'm saying here? Let me just put it this way. When we look at top 30 rookie running backs who played weeks one and two and then played at least eight games after that, we can split those 23 running backs into two groups. Players who had 10 or more PPR points per game in weeks one and two, and players who didn't. And yes, I totally recognize that these are arbitrary cutoffs. 13 of the 23 had 10 or more PPR points per game in weeks one and two. We'll call them the start of the season off hot group, or just the hot group. 10 of the 23 did not score 10 or more PPR points per game. They're the cold group. They're the guys that we have this year. 9 of the 13 players from the hot group went on to score 14 or more PPR points per game rest of season. That's a rate of 69%. 3 of the 10 players from the cold group ended up scoring 14 or more PPR points per game. That's a rate of 30%. So a running back who starts a season off relatively well, a rookie running back, and I say relatively well as if 10 PPR points is like awesome, but a rookie running back who has started well, generally has a little over double the odds of giving us an RB2 season or better after week 2 To put that another way, let's just say Ash and Gentie was averaging 11 PPR points per game right now, instead of where he's actually at. Based on history, his bucket would hit 14 PPR points per game from week 3 onward at more than twice the rate as someone who was scoring under 10 PPR points per game. Now that sounds like terrible news for all of these running backs, and look, it's certainly not great news. However, the correlation between average points per game in weeks 1 and 2 with these running backs versus their rest of season points per game is roughly.26. That's the R squared. One way to interpret this is that weeks 1 and 2 points per game for rookie running backs explain about a quarter of how they'll perform rest of season. It's something, but it's not everything. And we've seen some hits from running backs who have started slow. Sometimes just hearing examples can help you out. In 2019, Miles Sanders, RB 29 by ADP, he started the year with 5.2 PPR points per game. His rest of season average was almost 15 Joe Mixon started his career really slow. He had 17 carries for 45 yards in his first two games. His rookie season wasn't fantastic in fantasy football, but obviously he's had a fine career. Very recently, Jamir Gibbs was at 10.3 PPR points per game after two games. He finished the season after week two with over 17 PPR points per game. Christian Freaking McCaffrey averaged fewer than 10 PPR points per game at the start of his career. His rest of season number was 14.9. This is why I've been saying it's fine to react. It's fine to push these guys down rankings, because clearly we're not going to get tons of production from them in the short term. But this isn't totally abnormal. I think what's abnormal is that it's all compounding and happening at the same time. But it's a sample size of just a few players here. Like, we may get a season where the opposite of this happens, and all three guys are dominating after two weeks. But you still have to look at this at the individual level. Amari and Hampton and Ash and Gentie, in my opinion, do not look the part yet. But their offensive lines have also been horrific. I do have some concern about Gentie's usage and him not being like a full-blown bell cow. And then Hampton, who will probably have Najee Harris to deal with. It doesn't bury those guys, but they're honest concerns at the moment. Travion Henderson, I talked about on Tuesday's show. I actually feel more confident that he's going to get going soon because we've seen his speed and we've seen his ability on display this year. We've seen it at least flash. And you can listen to Tuesday's episode to see what happened this past week. Look, I think it's fine, it's normal, and it's smart to be concerned. It would be crazy to not be concerned. What I don't think you should do is panic, call them all buss and say that it's over. When you draft rookies, you know that there can be growing pains. And you know that the second half of the year is generally when they're going to thrive for your fantasy team. The nice part about this happening right now is that we have no bi-weeks and injuries haven't piled up yet. So hopefully some of you might have Jalen Warren or JK Dobbins, that kind of replacement that you can use for an Amarion Hampton right now. Until you see some production from these rookie running backs. You just might have to wait a little bit for everything to come to fruition. Patience is so important in fantasy football though. It's something I talk about every single year on the show. And right now with those players, you have to at least be patient.