1128: Mailbag - Travis Etienne's Workload, Data That Matters, 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 1128 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thank you for tuning in.

If you're interested in my weekly rankings, my rest of season rankings, a great Discord community, a weekly WaverWire livestream Q&A and more, you should look into becoming a Late-Round Fantasy Football member. It's a good time. To learn more, just head to lateraound.com. Now it's a mailbag episode. Let's get to these questions.

The first one is from Twitter. It's from at ALEGO. It says, hi JJ, I've been a fan since 2021 and I love to see that you're always stepping it up. Thank you. I've always thought that week one is the perfect time to be aggressive and make trades since there's still tons of uncertainty and people tend to overreact. What are your thoughts on this?

Yes, absolutely yes. Average draft position is still far, far more predictive of what's going to happen week two onward than week one production is.

I talked about this on the 10 Trends episode earlier this week. When we're looking at the correlation between week one performance and then week two to end of season performance, points per game is not that predictive at all, aka points scored in week one. It's more predictive at running back and then it's least predictive at wide receiver.

So maybe you'd want to lean in to that week one production slightly more at running back. But you still want to be rational about things. Like I think David Montgomery is going to be good this season. But we also can't expect three touchdowns every single week. Realistically his snap share was far more split than you'd probably expect given that result, so just be rational about things. But when it comes to wide receivers like Jalen Waddell types, I would see if you could buy ultra low. It can't hurt to send a trade offer to someone who's really upset after that week one performance. Maybe Waddell doesn't live up to his draft cost this year, but we know factually that week one performances at wide receiver explain very little about their rest of season production.

So my answer is yes, it's a good time to take advantage of the reactionary fantasy manager.

This next question is from Jackson from the Members Hub. It says, I remember you weren't the biggest fan of Travis Etienne. I'm curious if he might be a buy right now. Everyone seems to be low on him because he's part of a rotation. However, I see some things that I like. Number one, he's second in targets right now with nine. Only Bijan has more. Number two, I imagine that this Kellen Moore offense is the kind of offense that might continue this kind of passing volume. Number three, the vibes around him are bad. So it feels like people might let him go for very little. I do hear he struggles in pass protection. So maybe that's a concern. But do we really think that these other running backs are going to beat him out? This is, after all, an offensive coordinator who fed Saquon Barkley in 2024

OK, let's start with that last point. This is straight from CoachSpeakIndex, who you guys should check out if you're into hearing what coaches are saying about their players. This is what Kellen Moore said on Wednesday. Quote, I think it's important to rotate these guys. We got to rotate all these running backs, and there will be different packages or responsibilities from week to week that are different. I think it's important. My one year in Philly is probably the only year I've ever been where a running back just kind of takes everything until he can't. Everywhere else, you're usually rotating these guys. So I really don't think that 2024's Saquon Barkley should really matter that much here. I also don't think that we should be looking at raw totals with the Saints offense from week one. And you guys know that I brought up Kellen Moore's pace of play, the volume in his offense is like 30 times in the past. But they played extra time. The game script really favored a lot of plays. They're not going to run that many offensive plays each week. We should be focused on the rate stats though. And to be fair, Etienne's snap share and his route share were not significantly far off from what we saw in Jacksonville last year. He had a 58% snap share versus a 60% one last season. His route share was 40% last year. In week one, it was 36%.

And like you said, he did see a lot of targets. I'd be more concerned about target share than raw volume though, but he did see a 17% target share.