1101: Insights From Building Projections

**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 1101 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in.
I don't care about projections as much as others do in the fantasy football space. I know that probably seems backwards because of my approach to fantasy football being so analytics heavy. But it's true. I think projections are often overrated. And the reason I feel that way is because they don't capture range of outcomes that well, generally speaking. And they don't capture draft strategy. If you're in round eight of your fantasy draft, are you looking for median outcomes or high end outcomes? Are you looking at what's most likely to happen for a player or what could happen if things break a certain way? This isn't to say that you can't project for range of outcomes. You can do a degree. And this isn't me throwing shade to the people who build awesome projections. They're doing great work and it's not easy work to do. I'm just saying that I think people rely on projections a little bit too much in the fantasy football world. The application is where I really disagree. But that certainly doesn't make them worthless. I do projections every single year. I don't maintain them throughout the summer and into the season as well as I probably should, because that can often just be like a full time job. But I have them. I build them out. And I've been doing that for years and years. And this year, I got some help with them from Late-Round Zone brand in Gidula. That was nice to get some relief with that process. So props to Gidula for helping me out. I've always said, though, that building projections, it's not always about that end number, that final fantasy point projection. For me, it's always been about understanding the fantasy football landscape on a deeper level. When you're sorting through target shares, when you're sorting through efficiency metrics, and when you're projecting team-level production, you start to see some things that you might not have otherwise seen. And that's what this episode is about each year. I'm not going to sit here and show you where late rounds projections differ from the market. That's not how I operate. You'll learn about my players to target and avoid throughout the summer. Instead, I want to talk through some of the more interesting insights that I thought about and discovered while we built projections this season. So without further ado, let's dig in.
I want to start today's episode by talking about the Raiders. Because really, is there anything more thrilling than talking about an offense that has Jalen Naylor and Trey Tucker as starting wide receivers?
The Raiders have a brand new coaching staff, though, with Clint Kubiak in town, and he's obviously going to influence what they do in a major way. First off, Vegas ran very few plays last year. That obviously had to do with the combination of their style, but also their efficiency. It was not a good offense. They ran the fewest plays per game last year, though, at 55.8. Teams who have run fewer than 58 plays per game since 2011 have seen that number increase by over five the following year on average. So just purely from a regression perspective, we should see more plays from Vegas. Now, with that being said, Clint Kubiak has now coordinated three NFL offenses, the 2021 Vikings, the 2024 Saints, and the 2025 Seahawks. At each stop, his teams have had well below zero pass rate over expected rates. Last year for Seattle was nearly minus seven percent. As we know, they leaned heavily on the run. That's led to slightly lower paces and slightly fewer plays per game for Kubiak's offenses. So while I do expect Vegas to improve on plays per game, I think we should realize that Kubiak's offenses aren't like, I don't know, Kellen Moore's. They can run slower. What I do think we're going to see from his offense, though, is more efficiency. Over his last two stops, we've seen his offenses improve in yards per play year over year by about.2 and.4 yards per play. And he's done this through a heavier use of 12 personnel. In 2024, the Saints' year over year use in 12 personnel rose by over 6 percentage points. For the Seahawks from 2024 to 2025, theirs rose by almost 13 percentage points. And the way this team is structured, that makes a lot of sense. They don't have super strong wide receivers as I talked about at the top. But they have a good running back and elite tight end and a great second tight end in Michael Mayer. The Raiders are going to want to pound the rock, but then also have the versatility to throw out of those heavier sets. Which means Brock Bowers and Ashton Gentey could eat in this offense. But also I wouldn't be surprised if Michael Mayer is involved a little bit more this year too. The fantasy friendliness of this offense is really going to come down to efficiency. But Kubiak has at least shown us that he can bring that to the table. And I think there's a chance that we see a really big season from Brock Bowers. Which is why he's my tight end one right now.