1107: Catchable Targets

**Brandon Gdula** (0:02)
This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zachariason.

**JJ Zachariason** (0:11)
What's up everyone, it's JJ Zachariason, and this is episode 1107 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. I hired Brandon Gdula to be part of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Team back in January. Since then, he's helped with the Prospect Guide, specifically with tight ends. He's helped me in building out everything you're now seeing with Market Score, and nearly every week, he's sending out a newsletter to all Late-Round subscribers. That newsletter, by the way, totally free. If you're not subscribed, you're missing out, because Gdula's deep dives are really awesome and they're definitely worth your time.
One of his more recent newsletters had to do with catchable targets. I think a lot of times there are metrics out there that we assume regress in the exact same way, that a high rate one year means a lower rate the next year, or a lower rate means a higher one the next year. And while regression is almost always inevitable, it doesn't always work out that cleanly. So I sat down with Brandon for a quick chat about catchable targets, both from a receiver and quarterback perspective, because I wanted to see what we could take away from his research for drafts this year.
Now, before getting to my conversation with him, I want to remind you to check out the Late-Round Draft Guide. It's filled with game theory talk, ways to spot breakouts and busts, draft strategy for this season, players to target, players to avoid, and so much more. It'll be out on July 10th, and you can pre-order right now at a discount. Check it all out over on lateround.com. Now, here's my discussion with Brandon Gdula.
Brandon, you sent a newsletter blast out not long ago on catchable targets data. Can you describe what you were aiming to do with that?

**Brandon Gdula** (1:52)
Yeah, the goal, pretty simple. Just looking into catchable target data specifically for wide receivers at the time, in order to see if it was sticky year over year, or if it could tell us about regression of any kind, identify regression, not just for catchable target rate, but its impact on other related statistics. But regression, as we've talked about, just a big part of my process in the world of so much subjectivity, and guessing about roles, and how coaches will use certain players, it's really one of the few things that we can just test and say like, look, I'm not even accounting for quarterback changes or role changes. But if we see changes year over year that we can kind of somewhat predict when it comes to catchable target rate, that's really good information for me to use in my process. So the thing with catchable targets is, first of all, you'll find very different numbers based on your source. So just keep that in mind. I used fantasy pros. It was just really widely available, easy to see, and other people could use it if they want to. But could be a function of wide receivers, could be a function of quarterbacks. So I ended up looking a little bit into quarterbacks after the fact as well. But one of the things with receivers that I think is important, and it became as I got really down deep in the weeds with catchable target rate, it just kind of hit me that, yeah, we look at volume for a lot of these guys, but outside of the top tier receivers who get a ton of volume, what we're really kind of looking at is efficiency numbers for these sort of outside tier two, honestly, once you get into tier three, four, five, these types of wide receiver 30 and beyond type names, you're really looking for efficiency, whether that's per target, per route numbers. And so, if you look at two receivers, let's say, both average 10 yards of target, 100 total targets, but player A, let's say, gets 100 catchable targets, player B gets 75, that should matter. Let's just sort of say that player B did more with his catchable targets, but catchable target rate at the same time stays the same because of player archetype or quarterback infrastructure or whatever.
Then we also know that player A's catchable targets are going to be higher than player B's catchable targets. So, of course, it's not quite as simple as that, but just to answer your question directly, very clear aim, just to see what we can learn from a prior season catchable target rate as we project forward to the next year.

**JJ Zachariason** (4:28)
I think a lot of fantasy managers and especially even myself, to a degree, assume regression with catchable targets.