1089: Revisiting the Rookie Edge in Redraft Leagues

**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, 1089 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. We're in the thick of it with the NFL Draft. We're talking prospects, and we're doing so from both a dynasty angle and a season long angle. With best ball especially, Redraft is becoming more and more of a year round game. Dynasty has always been that way, but it's becoming more evident in the season long game types too. So since we're talking rookies and dynasty, let's talk about rookies and Redraft as well. You might recall, but last summer, I did an episode on the rookie edge in Redraft leagues. It was actually episode 1000 of The Late-Round Podcast. There was a lot of chatter about rookies no longer being good Redraft bets because the market now rightfully understands that rookies can be valuable in Redraft. So I dug into the topic. What I generally found was that rookie-wide receivers, they were good bets across the board. We were also coming off a season where those rookie-wide receivers dominated. So that wasn't much of a surprise finding. And for the record, it's something I've written about in The Late-Round Draft Guide each year. For running backs, they were still okay enough picks, but it did appear as though the market was drafting them earlier than usual. And when that's the case, expectations change. They weren't players you needed to avoid, but they weren't players you needed to aggressively target either. Now, thanks to this past season, it seems like people have been mega turned off by the idea of rookies in Redraft. That's a big reason why I wanted to revisit this topic. Because the results last year were not fantastic. At Wide Receiver, you had Tetero, Macmillan, Travis Hunter, Ameca Ibuka, and Matthew Golden with relatively high ADPs. Only Ibuka was able to outperform his ADP expectation. More on all that in a second. At Running Back, you had Ash Njenty, Amarion Hampton, Travion Henderson, RJ Harvey, Caleb Johnson, Jacori Kroski-Merritt, Cam Scadaboo, Quinshot Judkins. They all had top 45 ranks at the position. The vast majority of them within what was considered an elite draft class, most of them failed to live up to the hype. And all year, all we heard was, this is why you don't draft rookies high in redraft. But should we really abide by that rule? Was last year just a blip? Today's episode is all about answering those questions. Now, before getting to things, I just want to send a quick reminder to check out the Late Round Prospect Guide. You get info on all the Zap models, player write-ups, rankings, bad dad jokes, and more, all for $19.99. It's over 170 pages of content. Learn more over on lateraound.com.
So the real question we're asking here is, is there value in drafting rookies in redraft leagues? The conclusions from last summer said that generally, yes, there is value. More so a wide receiver than at running back, but overall, there is some value. I want to expand on those results a little bit today because I think what was described on that episode was more tip of the iceberg than anything else. Being of value comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. If a rookie is drafted late and he plays just okay, he might still be of value because he was drafted late, but one drafted early with that same production, he's not of value. That cost side of the equation is just average draft position for fantasy football purposes, and overall, it does appear that we're drafting both rookie running backs and wide receivers earlier than we used to. This is a little bit easier to explain at wide receivers, so let's start there. My average draft position data, it's sourced from fantasy data, goes back to 2014 Since 2014, we've had just one top 12 wide receiver by ADP, and I'm looking only at positional ADP here, since overall ADP, it can shift more depending on the source and depending on the type of league that we're looking at. But that one top 12 wide receiver was Marvin Harrison Jr. Since 2014, we've had four top 24 wide receivers by ADP. Three of those four have come over the last two seasons. We've had 10 top 36 wide receivers by ADP. Four of those 10 have come over the last two seasons. I mean, just from that, you get the picture. We've been drafting wide receivers earlier over the last couple of years. Even top 42 wide outs. We've had 24 rookies draft in the top 42 wide receivers since 2014 Nine of them have come over the last two seasons. Now, it could be that the last two draft classes have just been really good. And while they haven't been bad, the ZAP model doesn't really see them as substantially better than some other seasons. Like, if you look at the top two categories in the ZAP model, legendary performers and elite producers, we've had five of them and four of them over the last two years. In the 10 years prior, we had 4.1 per season. So we're right at that average. The high end, the higher parts of the position, have been mostly the same from a ZAP model perspective. And that's not the end all, but it's at least telling us that it's not like these last couple of classes have been unbelievably great. Now, at running back, it's always kind of been common for rookie running backs to have better draft capital, to have better ADPs. Like, we've had eight of them drafted as RB1s within this data set, top 12 running backs. One of those was last year with Ashton Genti. We've had 22 of them drafted in the top 24 Four of those have come over the last two years. All four of them happening last season. What's kind of interesting is that last year tied for the most top 36 rookie running backs that we've seen since 2014 And it tied for the most top 42 rookie running backs too. And you might be saying, well, yeah, it was a good draft class. And yes, it was. But you could very easily argue that drafters were pushing rookie running backs up the draft board a little bit too much when you compare ZAP model scores to ADP. For instance, when looking at the top three ZAP score categories, which are legendary performer, elite producer, and weekly starter, we had five of those in last year's class. Yet we had seven top 36 running backs by ADP. That type of proportion is not normal. When we had seven top 36 running backs before, back in 2020, we had eight running backs in one of those top three categories. What I'm generally getting at here is that the market is behaving a little bit differently with rookies. The last couple of years has really seen wide receivers shoot up draft boards. And when you consider the quality of running back, I'd generally say that we're drafting running backs earlier as well. And for the record, I'm not talking tight ends on today's episode, just because there's not that much data to look at. And I think people are generally on the same page with rookie tight ends anyway. But look, what all this means is that in order for these players to live up to the hype, to live up to expectation, they need to be even better than they used to, because their cost is higher than it used to be. So now the question becomes, are these positions performing worse against expectation? Yes and no. Let's start at wide receiver first. We really don't have a large sample of wide receivers to work off of when looking at top 30 players of the position by ADP, so we'll focus solely on top 48 wide receivers by ADP here. I alluded to this earlier, but I calculate how players perform versus ADP expectation. Essentially, if a player is drafted 50th overall, then that player has some sort of expected PPR points per game number based on what we've seen historically from other players with that draft slot. So maybe a 50th overall wide receiver is expected to score 12.5 PPR points per game. But then what if he finishes with 13.5 PPR points per game? That means he ended up exceeding that expectation by one full PPR point per game.