1094: Mailbag - Stacking, Drafting for Upside, 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, and this is episode 1094 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in.
So as you guys know, I published The Late-Round Prospect Guide last month. And if you read that guide, then you know that I changed up the ZAP score scaling. I even talked about that on a recent Mailbag episode. The new scale works a whole lot better to give you an idea of where gaps occur from prospect to prospect. However, I'm getting a lot of feedback from people about interpreting the scores from before and then now. As in, if a player has a score of 80 right now, what would that score have been in the older guides, in the ZAP 1 scoring? Because I get it, you want some comparison. It's interesting content. So I figured I'd put it out there at the top of this episode. In the post draft version of the guide, there's going to be a chart, a conversion chart. It's at the end of the guide and it shows you the approximate scores for each player in the ZAP 2 scoring system versus the old ZAP scoring system, which was based more on percentiles. So that's my way of letting you guys know that it's coming while also telling you to check out that prospect guide over on lateraound.com. Do that now. Alright, let's get to these questions.
The first question this week is from Cody. It says, you've spoken many times in the past about how we should be shooting for upside in fantasy football. How does that change with format, redraft, dynasty best ball and line up size, start seven versus start 12? Or does it change at all? Is there an instance where floor begins to matter more? Is that something dynasty managers should consider for rookie drafts or should those picks still be shooting mostly for upside? So this is something I try to talk about in The Late-Round Draft Guide each year, because it's fundamentally one of the most important things to know in fantasy football.
Your individual league, the size of your league, the number of starters that you have in your lineup at each position, it matters more than arguably anything else. It matters more than the different scoring changes that you might see from league to league. I care far more about the number of wide receivers or running backs that I'm starting, compared to whether it's full or half PPR. Because the number of players in your starting lineup completely shifts the supply and demand equation. Before I get into that though, I do want to take a second to talk about floor and ceiling. There are a lot of ways to interpret that. Someone's floor and ceiling or their range of outcomes can come in the form of how they score points, right? Like someone might look at Wondell Robinson and say that he's a floor player and not a ceiling player. This is just an example. Someone might look at Xavier Worthy and say that he's a ceiling player, that you're just looking for the big play with that archetype. Now, you can look at things that way, but I wouldn't go too far with that, because it forces you to put these players in these buckets, when only a handful of players should actually be placed in those buckets. Wondell Robinson can have big games. Xavier Worthy, even if you consider him a big play threat, can hypothetically give you consistency, even if it's bad consistency. Where I think about floor and ceiling is with the talent level of the player as a whole, and what we know about that player, the information that we have on that player. Someone who's been in the league for seven years, we generally know what kind of player that is. Terry McLaurin, we understand what McLaurin does on an NFL field. Compare that to a rookie, and there's an obvious difference.
What that means is that from a projection standpoint, from a forecasting standpoint, we can probably confidently project like the 10th percentile outcome to the 90th percentile outcome for a player like Terry McLaurin. Every once in a while, situation's great, the player beats regression, they fall out of that range. But Cardinal Tate in the NFL on some NFL team, we have less of an idea right now. We might be better at projecting just like the 40th to 60th percentile outcomes for someone like Cardinal Tate.
Ambiguity is often what's driving our floor and ceiling conversations. Archetype does too, and PlayStyle, all that stuff. But to me, so much of the discussion starts with how much information we have on this player.