1111: Market Score's Most Interesting 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 1111 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. I'm back from vacation, and just like that, we're firmly in draft season. The draft guides out. It had its first update. The Fantasy Football Expo is this weekend. It's a great time of year, and it's a time of year where I start flipping some of my content on this podcast to be a little bit more player-specific. Over the next handful of weeks, you're going to hear about schedule analysis, players to target, players to avoid, bold predictions, all of those admittedly pretty generic fantasy football topics. And today's topic is another player-specific one, and it's one that I'm going to throw into this rotation every year, now that we've established market score as a new late-round fantasy football metric. For those of you who are just joining and haven't been totally caught up, first off, welcome. But second, market score is a metric that we developed at Late-Round Fantasy this offseason that assigns a score to a player based on his ADP alongside previous season inputs. In essence, it's like the ZAP model, except instead of draft capital, we're looking at ADP. ADP, of course, can be predictive, but we want to create a metric that utilize that market value alongside other metrics to be even more predictive than ADP itself. And that's what market score is. It's more predictive than ADP.
If you were to simply draft off of the market score sheet, you'd have a better time than if you drafted via ADP.
Now, the draft guide has those values, and we're working on getting them on the lateround.com website too. You can learn more about market score in episode 1105 To be clear, I don't blindly agree with everything market score says. To me, it's simply another tool to use when you're evaluating players, similar to any other metric. I take market score into consideration, and it makes me think twice about some players. It's not my sole evaluation process. That, to me, would be bad process. But it's really helpful. And one way that it can be really helpful, aside from the raw score that it produces, is through comps. We've talked about this before, but I can find the closest historical comparables for players in the current season via market score. I look at their market score, their ADP, and their career year to get a list of players, all ranked by similarity. So the most similar player gets ranked up top. I can then see how that player performed in their season to give us an idea of how the player we're analyzing might perform this year. So just for example, Zay Flowers this year. One of his top comps is Jackson Smith and Jigba's 2025 season. Pretty awesome. That's a great comp, obviously, for Zay Flowers.
Now, I've shared some of this with you already, and there are more insights from it in the draft guide, which you can order right now on lateraound.com. It's updated weekly for you. But I took all of this one step further. I looked at all of the running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, and quarterbacks who currently have market scores. For running backs and wide outs, it means that their top 120 picks are picked in the top 10 rounds of a 12-team league. For tight ends and quarterbacks, we're looking at the top 180
From there, I found the top 10 comps for each player. And from there, I found the average points per game from those 10 players, how those comps actually performed, and I weighed those point per game outputs by how similar that player scored to the one that we're analyzing. Now, since this entire episode is based on this concept, let me run through an example. Let's go back to Zay Flowers. You get JSN 2025 as a comp forum, where JSN scored 21.6 PPR points per game, and that's in relevant games. I took out the final week of the season, and I'll be doing that for everyone on today's show. But you also get a high similarity score for Cooper Cups 2020, where Cup was at about 14 PPR points per game. When you look at Flowers' top 10 comps, you get a weighted average about 15.4 PPR points per game, which is really, really good. And it's one of the reasons that I like Zay Flowers this year. Now, to be clear, this is not what Market Score is. Market Score is just one of the inputs to get those comps. Market Score grades a player from to 100 But this is giving us a weighted point per game average based on historical comps. It's like a next level look at what Market Score can do.