1082: Mailbag - Transfer Data, Luther Burden, 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, 1082 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. Before getting to the mailbag questions today, I just want to send another reminder that The Late-Round Prospect Guide is currently available for preorder. This year's guide lets you know everything that goes in the ZAP model. It's got profiles for every running back, wide receiver, and tight end going to the NFL combine. And there's also the year two profiles. I have my year two model for second year NFL players. I've got a little over 30 profiles for running backs and wide receivers in this guide, too. Basically, there's a ton in this guide, and you can preorder it right now for $14.99 over on lateround.com. That's going to go up to $19.99 when the guide launches in mid-March. Again, just head to lateround.com and you can learn more there.
The first question this week is from Twitter. It's from at sf underscore David Geo. It says, As you dig into the prospects, have you noticed any more impact of this transfer era now that there's a larger sample? Or does teammate score account for it enough? So modeling was definitely a little bit more straightforward before players started transferring the way that they are right now. Mostly in that things were a little bit more contained and a little bit more controlled. You could more easily do things like account for teammate competition. Teammate score though is a complicated thing to really nail down from a statistical perspective. I've been thinking about this a lot with Judarium Price in particular this year. With him having played behind Jeremiah Love. On one hand, you're going to hear people say, of course, his production profile sucked. He played behind Jeremiah Love. I actually got an email about that this week. It's an incredibly valid thing to say. For the record, Tuesday show will just be talking about production only. But on the other hand, yeah, we may not have many instances where legit running back played behind a stud like this. But it's not like we haven't seen split backfields in college in the past with multiple NFL backs. You can look at Ohio State just last year, and we can give those players a little bit of a boost. It's just a question of how much, and that's where you can really get yourself into trouble. I mean, think about Roshan Johnson. He plays behind Bijon Robinson in college, and so we excuse away some of his lack of production. But he hasn't been usable in the NFL. So if we make too many excuses, it can lead to misses in our evaluation. Now, I think I've built a reasonable teammate score that can properly boost a player like Price. He'll be right there from a Zap score perspective with Jonah Coleman and Emmett Johnson, more than likely. Which I think is fair right now here in February. But what does make teammates score a little difficult is at number one, what I just talked about, which is knowing the degree in which you should boost a player's profile. But then there's number two, which is underclassmen. For my teammates score, I'm essentially looking at the final two years of a player's career to see if he played with anyone good. And I helped define good by draft capital. So Jenarion Price, he gets a boost for playing with a guy who's likely going to be a top 10, top 15 pick. But think Jackson Smith and Jigba on the wide receiver side. He played alongside some really good wide receivers in college. His sophomore season was insane. And he was playing with Garrett Wilson and Chris Alave, who were early first-round picks. So the model can recognize that because they came out a year before he did. But Chris Alave and Garrett Wilson, their teammates scores, it was boosted because they played with each other. Yes, and they were coming out in the same draft class. But their teammates score didn't recognize how good Jackson Smith and Jigba was, because JSN came out a year later. Like look at Carnell Tate this year. Tate has a good production profile, but he's playing alongside Jeremiah Smith. Now, we know that Smith is going to be looked at favorably when he eventually comes out. But you can probably start to see where things become kind of an issue from a modeling perspective. I can make that claim pretty confidently for Smith. But where do you draw the line? All of a sudden, if you're projecting the underclassmen, you're injecting a lot of subjectivity that can easily do more harm than good with a model. So teammates score is not perfect to begin with. The transfer stuff, it's not as big of a deal though, because I can model things to recognize teammates at different schools. The bigger problem for teammates score is that it's just hard to capture properly. It does get signal in the model, but I try to find the right balance. What the transfer era has done, the bigger impact that has nothing to do with teammates score, it's made classes generally older, and we have fewer early declares too. Now to be clear, I don't think this is only transfer-related. It's just a piece of the pie. Something that I think is playing a huge role is the COVID season that shifted eligibility and kept players in school a lot longer. So this short-term data is going to be skewed higher than what we'll probably see in 2027, 2028 and beyond. So it's the transfer era, it's the COVID era, and there's also NIL. At least some players are going to stick around school longer because they can still make money doing so, all while hoping to improve their draft stock. But let's focus on the transfer stuff. Transferring comes in to play with age because it gives players an out. Rather than having to sit out a year, they can now immediately go somewhere else and play. Which means if a player is contemplating going to the NFL, where he might be looked at slightly unfavorably, maybe has like a fringe day two to day three pick, he might say, screw it, I want to find a better situation somewhere else in college, and I want to improve my draft stock. I'm going to stay in college. I tweeted this the other day, but just look at recent running back draft classes. If you look at the last three draft classes at running back 2024, 2025, and then this year, 2026, when we look at running backs who were in the ZAP model, which is every back who is either drafted or at the NFL combine since 2011 From 2011 through 2023, we had 11 running backs who were 24 years or older by the time they're drafted. Over the last three years, 2024, 2025, and 2026, just three draft classes, we've had 15 of those backs. So we far surpass that mark of 24 years old in just three seasons. Meanwhile, early declares are dropping. Now, I care more about declare status at wide receivers. Let's just look there. From 2011 through 2023, we frequently saw 10 or more early declare wide receivers with each draft class. Over the last three years, we've had fewer than 20 total. What's happening is typically only the best wide receivers are now declaring early, because like I said, college players now have more outs. It's not only due to transferring, but that's definitely playing a role. Now, I know the common response to this type of thing is, well, your model isn't capturing those things properly now, because the model is tested off of data that goes back to 2011, and the landscape has changed. Yes, that's true. The landscape is different. With that being said, younger players are still generally better bets than older players are. And you can still look at this through the lens of age-adjusted production. That hasn't really changed. Maybe it's a little bit more difficult for players to break out early, because now there are older, more capable guys that are sticking around college. But let's not pretend that that sample is massive. We only have 20 running backs in the combine this year. There are fewer than 50 wide receivers. And a lot of them, they won't be relevant in the NFL. We're just talking about a handful of cases for the most part, in the grand scheme of college football. And as usual, guys, the model isn't there to just give you answers. It's to keep you level-headed and to guide you, to help you know when to deviate from draft capital. And I think it still does a great job of doing that, despite the changes across college football.