1100: Mailbag - Kaelon Black, Model Discrepancies, 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, 1100 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast.
Thanks for tuning in.
You guys know it by now, but The Late-Round Prospect Guide is still available to purchase on lateraound.com. It's got everything you need to crush your rookie drafts, and it's very much analytically driven. In the guide, you can learn about what goes into the ZAP models. You get ZAP scores for these prospects. You get my rankings. There's year two profiles. Let's not forget about those and so much more. Check it all out over on lateraound.com. Now, let's get to these mailbag questions.
The first question this week is for my friend, Joey Wright, at the Joey Wright on Twitter. He says, What is your process on Kaelon Black?
Now, without a doubt, Joey's asking this question because there's a really strange interaction this week on Twitter between myself and someone else. And that interaction had to do with Kaelon Black. And on this show, in this podcast feed Since the Draft, I don't think I've really broken down Kaelon Black, the prospect. I've mostly talked about San Francisco reaching for him based on mock draft data. So objectively, from an analytical perspective, with the things that I look at, what do we have with Kaelon Black? Well, first off, I think overall, there's a lot of red flags to his profile. Not being an NFL combine invite was a little bit weird, but I won't even hold that against him. What I will hold against him is the fact that he's already 24 and a half years old. Now, this isn't to say that I care about his age from the perspective of having him through a second contract, or that I'm worried about him breaking down quickly in the NFL. It's that generally, younger running back prospects are better than older ones. There's more room for growth, and if they enter the league at a younger age, that signals to us that they're talented. They were able to do that at a younger age, oftentimes leaving college early. Now, I'm coming off of an episode where I talked about the impact of this current college landscape with NIL and transfer rules, all that stuff, and how that's driving prospect age up. But it's generally driving the age up for undrafted players in later round picks, not day two once. Though we're bound to see some of this happening a little bit more, where we get a 24-year-old player getting drafted on day two, just because there's more of them entering the NFL right now. That doesn't mean that we ignore the age signal though. We admittedly don't have a lot of data of top 100 running backs who were past their 24th birthday when they were drafted. In fact, the only other top 100 pick at this age since 2011, in the ZAP model database, is RJ Harvey. I think we'd all agree that right now, today, Harvey was overvalued as a dynasty asset, largely due to landing spot. It's not to say that things can't turn around. I'm just saying right now versus where we were a year ago, RJ Harvey's value isn't looking amazing. We know that age matters even in this NIL era. Honestly, we can even ignore that raw age if you want to, and just look at age-adjusted production. Like if Kaelon Black is 24.5 years old, but he produced right away, he had a sweet production profile when you adjust for when that production happened, then we might be more forgiving about his overall age. But according to my numbers, that's not really the case.
I will say this, Black didn't even get a high-risk draft capital Delta tag within the Zat model, which means the model has seen plenty of worst picks, which is kind of surprising. He's got pretty good size and even his Pro Day adjusted speed score, it's solid enough.
Meanwhile, he had a best-season reception share around 10%. That's a 47th percentile number. He had an adjusted yards per team pass attempt, adjusted for age and strength of schedule of 0.6. That's in his best season. That's also a 47th percentile number. But that's percentile among all prospects in the Zat model database. All prospects, meaning the guys who were drafted, or the guys who went to the combine since 2011 When we look solely at picks 33 through 100, so day 2 picks, we're removing the round 1 guys here, it's closer to a 31st percentile number. And that's for adjusted receiving yards per team pass attempt. Now look, one number doesn't make or break a prospect. We've seen hits from players with an adjusted yards per team pass attempt this low.