1080: Sell Candidates

**JJ Zachariason** (0:11)
What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode 1080 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. I'm back from San Francisco. I'm back from Radio Row. The Super Bowl's over. Congrats to Seahawks fans. That means we're officially in the offseason, though. Hopefully, you guys like the change of pace of last week's shows, but we're full blown back to the regular podcast schedule. Starting with this episode, what you already saw was cell candidates. I talked about some buy candidates last week. This is just the reverse. Players you might want to consider trading away from your dynasty teams. Cells are always more difficult than buys because we have fewer players to choose from. With buys, we can get deep. We can talk about bottom of the barrel players who we can get for cheap. With cells, it doesn't make that much sense for me to say that you should sell someone who ranks as like the 200th overall player. In order for a player to be a cell, he's got to give you something decent in return. So to help me out with today's list, I looked at my dynasty rankings and I compared those rankings to Keep Trade Cut. It's not perfect, but that site at least allows me to get some baseline for market sentiment. If my rankings like a player far less than where he's ranked on Keep Trade Cut, I figured he's probably worth while to call out. Keep in mind though, I don't think these players are trade candidates no matter what. They're just players who I appear to be lower on versus consensus. In your individual league, that might not be the case. This is just a conversation starter and it allows you to hear some logic that you might be able to apply to your teams and your own circumstances. Now before we get to those cells, I just want to send another reminder that the 2026 version of The Late-Round Prospect Guide is currently available for pre-order. This year's guide is bigger and better than ever, seriously. Not only have I revamped the models, but you're now going to get tight end profiles, not just tight end scores. Myself and Brandon Gidula have been working really hard on getting it all done. It's going to release in the middle of March. To learn more and get that discounted pre-order price, just head to lateraound.com.
One area where dynasty managers can really win big is not just knowing when to sell players high but when to sell younger players high. Age is going to be part of the value equation for every player. The older a player is, the less valuable he is in dynasty. So if you can find a younger player who might have peaked or who might not see that much more of a value bump, and if you sell that player at the right time, it's massive for your dynasty teams. One of those players for me right now, this might be a little controversial, but it's Travion Henderson. As tough as it is to admit that. Henderson currently sits 30th overall over on Keep Trade Cut for Superflex Leagues as the RB7. Now, admittedly, I can kind of understand why he's the RB7. Kind of. I do personally think that someone like James Cook makes more sense than Travion Henderson. But running back has a lot of volatility once you get to that range in dynasty. It's really tough for me to back that kind of cost though overall. Now, as many of you know, I have the year 2 model. That helps me figure out how well a player is going to perform after his rookie season in the league. It takes a player's prospect score, his zap score, some year 1 inputs, and then it spits out a score that helps forecast a player's year 2 through year 4 That changed year over year. I used to just look at years 2 and 3 I added year 4 this year to add some stability to that model. Travion Henderson's year 2 score is 73.9. Now, that means nothing to people right now because I changed the scaling of the scores in the zap and year 2 models, but essentially, he's part of the weekly starter category, not the elite producer category. The elite producer category, that's where someone like Amari and Hampton sits right now. Weekly starters are solid, and to be fair, Henderson's on the upper range of it with his score, but they're more like RB2 types from a ceiling perspective than RB1s. To reiterate, the year 2 model looks at how well a player performs in years 2 through 4, and it measures that through their best 2 seasons average in PPR points per game during those 3 years. We do see some studs come from the weekly starter category, but 11% of them have a best 2 seasons average above 18 PPR points per game. 22% of them get to 16 PPR points per game. When you look at the elite producer category, those numbers go from 11% to 21%, and then 22% to 32%. What might be more important here is the rate of getting to 14 or more PPR points per game. That's in the best 2 seasons average. It's one third of the players in the weekly starter category. One third of them average 14 or more PPR points per game in 2 of their 3 seasons. That number is 63% when looking at elite producers. Now these are relatively arbitrary cutoffs that just help me explain the model. But Henderson's borderline between those 2 categories, and he fits more cleanly in the weekly starter category. That's where we see far fewer RB2s historically. I also look at his year one and I ask myself, where are things going from here, at least in the short term? I've let it be known that I think Ramandre Stevenson had a fantastic end of the season, but he wasn't very good up until December this past year. Considering what the Patriots just did though in getting to the Super Bowl, and considering the type of snap splits that we saw throughout the playoffs, I don't think Stevenson's going anywhere in 2026 The Patriots' potential out for Stevenson from a contract perspective, it exists in 2027, not 2026 And if Stevenson is there, we may just see a little bit more production, a little bit more volume from Travion Henderson in 2026 Not a huge bump. And look, Stevenson ended up leading the league this past year and rushing yards over expected per rush. That's my general fear here. There's no doubt that Travion Henderson has a weekly ceiling. We saw that this past year. He's very explosive. But will New England allow for that volume to exist in 2026? And what happens when the Patriots aren't winning, when they aren't facing as easy of a schedule? Because we generally see regression hit for teams like New England. Now, this has nothing to do with them having an overrated season. I think they were worthy of representing the AFC and the Super Bowl. It's just what we historically see. We see a little bit of a drop off with a team like New England. And with Henderson not being the relied upon back and pass pro for them this year, and with Stevenson still there another year, I can argue that Trevion Henderson is much more of a sell than he is a buy. Especially if you need that 2026 production. But like I said, I don't think he's necessarily over inflated within running back rankings, although I do think James Cook should be ahead of Trevion Henderson. There's just a lot of wide receivers that I like more. So if you want a more stable asset, I think trading away Trevion Henderson right now does at least make some sense.