1099: The NIL Impact on Prospect Evaluation

**JJ Zachariason** (0:11)
What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode 1099 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. We're just about wrapped up with the NFL draft season, but there's one thing I wanted to research before fully turning the page. As you all know, I've got prospect models. I use the various ZAP models to help me project how well a player is going to perform in fantasy football at the NFL level. And as you all know, the college football landscape has changed dramatically over the last five or six years. We had a pandemic, and that COVID season simply didn't count for players. A player could dismiss it completely as if it didn't happen from an eligibility standpoint. And some players at smaller programs didn't even play. That meant it became more common over this time period for players to stick around for an additional year before declaring for the draft. Meanwhile, name, image, and likeness rules passed, which allowed athletes to get paid. That meant in order to get a whole lot of money, some players didn't have to only try to make it to the NFL. They could do it in college too. There's also transfer rules. They changed during this time frame. Players could more freely move from one school to another without having to sit out, which meant more movement in order to find the right spot to showcase their talent. If a running back was behind a stud on the depth chart, the backup could simply transfer to another school in order to get more playing time.
All three of these factors can change the way that we prospect, or I should say the way that I prospect. But how big of a deal are these changes? Does it actually matter? That's what I'll be digging into on today's show. Before that analysis though, I did want to send another reminder about the Late-Round Prospect Guide. If you want to know more about the ZAP model, if you want to read write-ups about prospects who went to the NFL Combine, you can do so in the guide. You get those write-ups, you get ZAP scores, rankings, and more. You can learn more about it and purchase the guide over on lateround.com. It'll help with your dynasty leagues obviously, but I think this class in particular, there's a big redraft element to it as well. But again, lateround.com.
So we have the pandemic season, NIL, and transfer rules all shifting this college football landscape. And that could change things from a modeling perspective for sure.
For one, we'd imagine players will be older coming out of school. Age is a factor that I'm always looking at in the ZAP model. Older players tend to be worse producers since better players will declare earlier for the draft. But there's another layer to the age equation that goes beyond raw age. If players are sticking around school more, then hypothetically speaking, competition in college might be tougher. Because the players who are playing college football, they're older and more experienced. If you're a true freshman running back and you're on a team with a 5th year, 23 year old running back, there's a 5 year age gap between the two of you. That player may have had experience in multiple systems, at multiple schools, with a wide variety of competition. That experience could hypothetically be more difficult for that freshman to overcome. Which means it's not just age that's a potential problem. It's age adjusted production. We might be seeing later breakouts and less true freshman production in this era. Which would definitely change the way that the model is viewing players in totality, at least when you compare current classes to the ones that happened 10 years ago. So let's dig into this idea a little bit more. Is age shifting enough to make a dent in how I'm evaluating prospects, or does it not matter? Let's start with running backs. The ZAP model database includes all players who are either drafted or at the NFL Combine since 2011 And I have ZAP models for running back, wide receiver, and tight end. So in all, there are a lot of players and a lot of classes to sift through.
With running back, when you look at each class in some, so the players who were drafted, but also the players who went to the NFL Combine, but who weren't drafted. We have been getting older. In 2026, this year's draft class, the average age of a running back was 23.2 years old. The median age was 22.8. Those were the two highest values that we've seen from any class since 2011
Meanwhile, since the 2021 time frame, we've seen the average running back age among this group jump up by 0.3, so almost half a year. Over the last three draft classes, that's more or less the same.