1124: Mailbag - Jadarian Price's Debut, Michael Mayer's Outlook, 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 1124 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in.

Before getting to the mailbag questions this week, I want to remind you guys to check out LATEROUNDCOM. We've got brand new offerings this year for members. A much better interface for the weekly and rest of season rankings, new metrics in the data dump, and so much more. You can learn more about becoming a member by heading to LATEROUNDCOM.

The first question this week is from Chris from the Members Hub. It says, JJ, now that we got to see Jadarian Price play an NFL game, what are your thoughts about his fantasy outlook moving forward? Seemed to me that he looked really good. So yeah, usually on this mailbag episode, I'm not able to talk about games that were just played. I record this show every week on Thursday. That way it can be in your podcast feed on Friday morning. So I try to avoid talking about Thursday Night Football. I get my Thursday Night Football takes out there on The Late-Round Show, which is recorded at 1 PM Eastern every Friday on YouTube. But we had a Wednesday game this week, so I can talk about Jadarian Price. And I'm sure aside from the injuries from that game, this is probably the number one talking point. I honestly walked away from that game thinking that my projection for Price was pretty good overall.

I had talked about this on shows over the summer. We can sit here and say, oh it doesn't make any sense to use George Helani or some other running back when they spent a 30 second overall pick on Price.

And to you and to me, it really doesn't make any sense. But don't forget, we're all sitting in mom and dad's basement. We're not in the front office. We're not with this coaching staff. The Seahawks are coming off a season where they played what we all thought was the superior running back in a limiting role. I mean, it's a reason that Kenneth Walker left Seattle this offseason. And the Seahawks were rewarded in the end. That can't be lost here. They won the freaking Super Bowl last year. And the player who won Super Bowl MVP was that running back who they didn't give that bell cow workload to.

Don't you think that kind of confirms to them that what they did last year was smart and correct?

That's why I didn't think that we could just totally dismiss all that noise during the offseason about George Helani playing a role in that backfield. But even from a prospecting perspective, Jadarian Price had a limited production profile for obvious reasons. He played behind Jeremiah Love. But there were real concerns about his pass catching and his pass protection. So there was always a chance that maybe Price would be limited as a pass catcher at least to start the season. And the question was, what about the goal line? What would they do in short yardage situations? Well, a lot of reports said that Emmanuel Wilson or George Helani might play that role too.

So there was always this chance that Price, despite being the most explosive back in that backfield, would lose out on the most important touches for fantasy football purposes. It didn't mean that he was some egregious pick. It just meant that we had to weigh the negatives with the positives. It's why I ended up just being one running back spot below consensus with Jadarian Price. He wasn't a fade for me, but he wasn't a target for me. The upside was evident. And there are market related trends that I talked about in the draft guide that actually did favor Price. But there was also downside, which was a cap ceiling because Seattle would do Seattle things. And those Seattle things led to a Super Bowl win last year. Now look, week one is just week one. A workload that we see this week is not necessarily the workload that we're going to see in week eight or week nine or something. But I do think the workload that we saw for Jadarian Price is not really the workload that we want from our fantasy football running backs.

Price ended up playing half of Seattle's offensive snaps, and they were all on first and second down. He did see two-thirds of those types of snaps, but he didn't play on third down at all. That resulted in a slightly lower route share than we'd ideally want. It was 41 percent. But let's give these numbers some context. Price had a 50 percent offensive snap rate among running backs with eight or more games played last year that would have ranked 33rd in the league. Price's rush share, his rush attempts divided by the team's rush attempts, set at 45.5 percent. That would have ranked 20th among the same running backs last year. And it's pretty interesting because Kenneth Walker was right in that range in 2025