1076: Analyzing 2025's Biggest Misses

**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 1076 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. During the offseason, you'll typically hear either a mailbag episode or a perspectives episode every Friday. But with this first week back, the schedule's a little bit different. Today, we're going to look at what went wrong for me in 2025 Some of you might wonder why I do these episodes. One of the things that I got wrong, one of the things that I got right. It's not to sit here and just go over every prediction that I made before and during the 2025 fantasy season. There are hundreds of them. That wouldn't really be helpful or realistic. I do these episodes to talk about the big stuff and to show you how I think about results. Because, even when a result says one thing and my process said another, I may not be that concerned about that miss. And the reverse is true too. Sometimes I get things right, but I get things right for the wrong reasons. And I also think transparency is really important in this business. The way I analyze this game isn't to just say, hey, here are the answers to the test, just trust me, bro. I want to show my work. I want to explain how I came to the conclusions that I came to. And I want you guys to go on that journey with me. Because in my opinion, that's how you win fantasy championships, in a more sustainable way. You understand the process, not just the results. So with that being said, today's the day where I make fun of all the stupid things that I did this past year. In fantasy football, as an analyst, you don't want to hear all the stupid things that I did as a human being walking through life. It was a good fantasy year overall, though. I thought it was better than 2024, and I know I had a more successful year with my own teams than I did in 2024 But there were some big misses, some of them with bad process. So let's dig in. I mentioned this in the middle of the Season on a Mailbag episode, but there were two glaring misses for me this year that were really, really annoying. Because I strayed away from my general process. One of them was with Calvin Ridley. I added him to the Players to Target list over the summer, and I completely regret doing that. Not just because he was a total bust, I can live with a total bust when my process is sound. I just went away from that process. I've preached for years how pass catchers with rookie quarterbacks tend to underperform versus expectation. And in those scenarios where you have a wide receiver with a rookie quarterback, you can draft those players, you just shouldn't overdraft those players. Literally, the first sentence in the blurb for Ridley, which was added August 15th to the draft guide, so fortunately, it was later in the draft season process. But the first sentence I wrote for Ridley said, Rookie quarterbacks generally aren't good for their pass catchers in fantasy football. Yet, I made excuses, because even though that's true, I did note that in order for wide receivers to combat their environment with a rookie quarterback, the ones who actually did perform well with a rookie quarterback, they almost always had really strong target shares. As I said with Ridley in the draft guide, the 16 wide receivers who finishes top 24 options with rookie quarterbacks averaged a 25.9% target share per game rate in their offenses. That's a borderline elite share, and that's the average. Instead of saying to myself, wow, it's probably gonna be pretty hard for Calvin Ridley to hit that high of a mark, I said, Ridley can do that because of the competition around him. So I broke two of my roles from a process standpoint. Number one, pass catchers with rookie quarterbacks are usually not great bets. And then number two, I assumed an elite target share for a non-elite player. Not only that, but I literally had a trend in the guide about projected team touchdowns for middle-round wide receivers and how that was a red flag for Calvin Ridley. It was just really dumb process. I'm mad at myself for adding Ridley during the final weeks of draft season. It was a process error, and in hindsight, we shouldn't have been surprised by that result at all.
The other very blatant and clear process error that I had this year was with the Cowboys' backfield. I thought Jadon Blue was a good double-digit round pick. I thought Javante Williams wasn't as good of a value, and saying that out loud today makes me want to curl up into a ball and never talk to anyone again out of sheer embarrassment. This was all bad process, at least most of it. I'm actually not that annoyed at liking Jadon Blue this year. The problem was not at least hedging my bets a little bit and being okay with Javante Williams. I was lower than ADP with Williams and slightly higher with Blue. And that was dumb from a results standpoint, of course, but also a process one. Blue did look decent in the ZAP model because of his age-adjusted receiving production combined with a solid speed score. But even when I wrote him up as a late-round dart throw in the guide, I talked about him being a change of pace player with 100-plus attempt potential. Clearly, if that was his potential, that meant there was a lot of work elsewhere to be had in that offense. And that work would go to Gervonta Williams because I did like Gervonta Williams quite a bit more than like Miles Sanders. But when I talked about Williams being more of an avoid, I realized after the fact that partway through the season, that a lot of that logic was just field-based. It wasn't super objective. Back in August, I first talked about how Williams was really inefficient in 2024 with Denver. And then essentially, just gave Jaden Blue the receiving work from a projection standpoint. All the while, I took some quotes from Dallas Coaches and formed my story around that instead of hard data. And that hard data, the more objective pieces, is that we really shouldn't bank on day three rookies to play a significant receiving role. Number one. Number two, there was clearly enough early down work for Gervonta Williams to be involved in some way. And number three, I talk about this all the time, but I don't want to overstate previous season efficiency marks at running back, because it isn't super sticky year over year. And that was all inside what projected to be a good offense. I bought into the Cowboys offense this year. Basically, I just made a lot of field-based assumptions with that Cowboys backfield. And they were all pretty stupid. I had some Gervonta Williams, thankfully, because there were some leagues out there where no one wanted him, but I 100% should have been higher. And that's not even a results-based take. That's a process-based one.