1096: Analyzing Front Office Decision Making

**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 1096 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in.
I know a lot of you have rookie drafts going on, so I wanted to get this episode out as soon as I possibly could. My focus has been on The Late-Round Prospect Guide, which is available right now on lateround.com. It's all finished up. It has updated player write-ups and ZAP scores. But now that it's out the door, my focus has shifted to this episode, and I wanted to get it out ASAP.
I don't remember a draft where I was this excited to dig into the post-draft analysis, and that might seem backwards because post-draft, rookie drafts look probably the worst they've ever looked in my time of being a fantasy football analyst. But because this draft wasn't filled with obvious talent, it means there's more to break down. It's not as simple as, this guy's really good, so draft this player. We have to think more deeply about the player that we're analyzing. We have to think more deeply about the role that he might play. And that can give an edge to the people who are putting in the work. So let's put in that work. I do this episode after the draft each year, where instead of immediately going over my rookie rankings, which again, you can find those in the Late-Round Prospect Guide right now. But instead of going over those rankings, I take a step back and I try to analyze what we just watched.
We get free agency, sure. But free agency, that's not a period where teams are forced to make decisions. They're forced to do things in the draft. It gives us a chance to see what they might be thinking through their actions rather than through their words.
And we can get some help by analyzing those actions.
If we thought a team was going to heavily invest in a running back and they chose not to take one at all, that's information. If a team had what we thought was a good wide receiver room, but they took one early, that's information. My goal today is to go over what I think these front offices were thinking when they made specific moves in this year's draft. That way we can take that information and apply it to our fantasy football leagues. So with that, let's dig in.
Now before getting into some of the individual teams, I want to share some general thoughts.
We're all sitting here, we're staring at our late first-round rookie picks, and we're asking ourselves how this is even possible. But how we feel about rookie drafts right now, it actually makes plenty of sense. I said time and time again on this show that this year's running mat class was bad, and that this year's wide receiver class just had a lot of dudes, a lot of average profiles, and that we'd probably see some of them emerge just because there were enough of them out there that were going to get day two draft capital. I think that's exactly what we're seeing right now. Draft capital showed us that the NFL didn't like this running mat class. Meanwhile, we still got a ton of wide receivers selected in the top 100 In fact, there were 17 of them in this class. That's the highest that we've seen since at least 2011 Now, I definitely don't mind most of the first round wide receivers, but the majority of them on day two have pretty average to below average analytical profiles. In fact, there were 7 day-two wide receivers in this class who got tagged with a high-risk draft capital Delta. The most from any other season since 2011 has been 3 We had 7 this year.
By the way, I've gotten some questions about draft capital Delta this offseason. People seem to think that it has to do with pre-draft draft capital or projected draft capital versus actual draft capital. I just want to say it has nothing to do with projected draft capital. Draft capital Delta is basically how the model views a player versus how the NFL views the player. It says, okay, this guy's zap score is X. Typically, with this draft capital, a player at that position would score X minus 2 In that case, if he should be 2 points lower, then he'd have a positive draft capital Delta. The model likes him more than the NFL did. I then bucket those players into low risk, neutral, and high risk profiles. The low risk and high risk profiles are the extreme ones. So with high risk profiles, it's saying that the ZAP model likes those players a whole lot less than where they were actually drafted.