1054: Mailbag - Brock Purdy's Return, RJ Harvey's Outlook, and More

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, 1054 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, a classic mailbag pause. Thanks for tuning in. Before I get to the mailbag questions this week, I've got a favor to ask you. If you check out the description for this episode, you'll see there's a link to a survey. That survey shouldn't take that long to fill out, but it's really, really helpful for myself and David Kitchin, my COO, to get honest feedback from you guys. Like I said earlier this week, I want Late-Round Fantasy Football, this podcast, the content that I'm doing, I want those things to be as helpful and entertaining as they possibly can be. And the best way to do that is through listening to what's working for you guys and what's not. So if you could fill it out, I would greatly greatly appreciate it. Now let's get to these mailbag questions.

The first question is an email. It says, Hey JJ, love the podcast, got a couple of hits from you this year. Awesome. Can you explain your adjusted fantasy points allowed stat? I don't understand it, but you bring it up every week when talking about matchups. Thanks Isaac. Yeah, I think this is a good thing to bring up because people come and go with this show and don't automatically know exactly what I'm talking about. I adjust a lot of different metrics. Target share, points allowed, rushing yards allowed. The list goes on. All the adjusting is, is adjusting for strength of opponent, for strength of schedule. So let's just take the Cowboys against wide receivers this year. They've allowed over 360 PPR points to wide receivers in nine games played. But technically, according to my numbers, the Steelers have actually allowed more points to wide receivers, like one more point. So we might conclude, based on the fact that both teams have had their buy, so on a points per game basis, the Steelers are technically allowing more points to wide receivers than the Cowboys are. We might conclude that the Steelers are a better matchup for wide receivers in terms of fantasy points allowed, because they've technically allowed one more PPR point across the season to the position. At the very least, they're really comparable. But what I do is look at who they've actually faced, and how many fantasy points those teams generally score as a wide receiver room. So Pittsburgh, when you look at that, they're still bad against wide receivers. But wide receiver rooms generally are scoring 7.6 PPR points per game above their average when they face Pittsburgh. Wide receiver rooms when they face Dallas, they're scoring 11.6 PPR points per game above that season long average. That's a pretty significant difference. So I do that for a lot of metrics to kind of give us a better sense of who's actually been good and who's actually been bad in Fantasy Points Allowed, or some other metric, right? Like target share. A lot of times there's going to be overlap. Like the raw numbers are going to look a whole lot like the adjusted numbers. But this gives you a true raw number when thinking about how well a team might perform above or below expectation based on how things have gone during a season. And for the record, all these numbers, they're on the Late-Round Fantasy Football Patreon. This next question is from that Patreon is from Ballgame4. It says, Hi, JJ, what are your thoughts on Jayden Reed's role when he returns? And in offense lacking a yards after the catch option in Tucker Craft's absence, I'm curious if you believe there's a chance for an increased role despite the wide receiver snap carousel we typically see from Green Bay. The schedule looks strong down the stretch. Thanks for all your thoughtful analysis. Look, I love Jayden Reed. I've been a truther since he came out of college. I think he's an awesome player. But, the Packers deploy their wide receivers and deploy Jayden Reed in particular in a really specific way, which is via the slot. And that leads to fewer routes run than the other wide receivers. Just to give you some data with that, over the off season, I did some research on this type of player. And Josh Downs is included in this mix too. They're wide receivers who look the part, who have great metrics to back it up. But their teams refuse to give them bigger roles. They're slot guys. I wrote a newsletter back in early August that was titled, Does Jayden Reed's Slot Only Role Matter? And what I found was that it's pretty rare for players with lower route participation rates, like under 80% and then high slot rates above 60% to give a significant production in fantasy football. In fact, we've only had five seasons, five instances since 2011, where a wide receiver was within those parameters, who then finished as a wide receiver two or better in fantasy football in points per game. And when you look at those successes, Victor Cruz in 2011, Keenan Allen in 2022, Percy Harvin in 2011, Randall Cobb in 2012, and Hunter Renfro in 2021, four of those players scored at least eight touchdowns. The only one who didn't was Keenan Allen, but he only played 10 games, and he scored four times in those 10 games. Their median target share was also 23%. That's been really hard to achieve in this current Packers offense. At least across a large stretch of games. So I guess what I'm getting at here is that, yes, hypothetically Tucker Craft being out, the wide receiver room looking like it does. Yes, Jayden Reed would be a great asset to have, like potentially top 20 rest of season, that kind of ceiling, hypothetically speaking. And I do think that he's someone that you can stash right now. I almost had him as an ad on 15 transactions earlier this week. And to be fair to Reed, who again, I think he's very talented. He has an outlier type of profile. He's been so efficient per route run to start his career. If there's someone who can kind of buck this trend, I think he'd be on the short list. But if we're strictly looking at this from a probability driven lens, in order for Reed to be a consistent player across a large stretch, the Packers need to change up his role, period. Maybe they do that post injury. I just wouldn't bet on that. And that lowers the type of ceiling that I was just talking about. But look, we know he's capable of having spiked weeks and generating big plays. Maybe it all comes together and he's just super efficient down the stretch while facing what my numbers say is the third best wide receiver schedule rest of season. Again, you can add him, especially in deeper leagues. I'm just pointing out that he does have a cap ceiling in this offense because of the way they deploy him. And it's unfortunate because he's a really awesome player.