1140: Mailbag - Trade Advice, Capturing Backfields, 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 1140 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. Before I get to the questions this week, I want to remind you guys to check out the brand new Datadump show over on The Late-Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel. Every Monday morning at 11 a.m. Eastern, Brandon Gidula and David Kitchen will be live on the channel talking about all the week's major injuries, usage trends and more. It's exclusively on YouTube, so make sure you subscribe youtube.com/atlateroundff.

Now let's get to these questions.

The first question this week is from Kyle. It says, can you speak on why you have Bryce Young further down the rankings with him currently being a top five quarterback? Some of the throws that he's making look like the former number one overall pick. I'm wondering if there are some useful peripherals for this situation to help me identify why there are other better quarterbacks I should be looking into. Thanks.

Look, I agree. I think Bryce Young has looked great this year. There's a clear philosophy shift going on with Brad Idzik as their offensive coordinator. As a resident of a suburb in Charlotte, it's really exciting. I'm right in line with the market right now though with Bryce Young. More as a high-end QB too, rather than a locked-in QB1.

You mentioned that he's a top-five quarterback, and yes, he's QB3 in points per game. But let's take a look at history and see exactly what this means. Historically, week 1 to 4 fantasy production at quarterback, when you compare that to week 5 onward, it explains about 20% of the variation in that production. So it's still not amazingly predictive, though it's definitely more predictive than like weeks 1 and 2 So from that perspective, you still don't want to totally overrate these numbers. They matter, but they probably don't matter as much as you think.

On top of that, when you look at top performers across the first month of the season like this, I hate to say it because people are probably going to roll their eyes, but mobile quarterbacks are the ones who stick around most, because rushing is a lot stickier in general and it's less volatile than passing numbers are. But when looking at top 6 quarterbacks since 2016, when comparing their week 1 to 4 production to week 5 onward, the quarterbacks who had more than 3 points per game via rushing stayed in the top 6 rest of season at twice the rate as players who didn't have that kind of rushing. Right now, Bryce Young is averaging under 2 points per game via rushing.

Typically, players in his bucket, his rushing bucket, have seen between a 4.5 and 5.5 point per game drop from now through the end of the year, after the first four weeks. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they just performed really, really well to start the season. That's why they're top 6 quarterbacks. I'm just saying it's really hard for those quarterbacks oftentimes to maintain that pace. Beyond the historical comparison, though, like I said, I agree that Bryce has looked good. But I also think that we should look at the opponents that he's faced. Week one, Bears. Huge negative game script, and the Bears defense is the sixth best opponent for quarterbacks right now by adjusted fantasy points allowed. Week two, you have the Falcons. Bryce looked good against them, and they're a tougher opponent by adjusted points allowed. But to be fair, they've also faced the highest pass rate ever expected defensively this year.

Week three, Cleveland. Actually a top ten opponent for quarterbacks this year by adjusted points allowed. And Bryce didn't have like a monster day. He was good, he was fine in fantasy, but it wasn't a crazy day. And then week four, Detroit. Obviously one of the best matchups for quarterbacks. Look, he's doing what he needs to do. I'm not trying to take anything away from what Bryce Young has done. Trust me. But we can feel both ways at the same time. That Bryce Young is killing it, and he's killing it against pretty easy opponents overall. At least from a fantasy perspective. And at quarterback, you don't really have to play it super aggressively. That's the thing. It's a position where you can almost find a usable piece every week on the waiver wire. Or you could roster multiple quarterbacks and play them by matchup. So when the quarterback isn't giving you crazy rushing production, it's hard for me to get overly excited and say, oh yeah, he's definitely a league winner. I mean, consider this. We've had 58 seasons since 2016, where a quarterback finished with 20 or more points per game. Standard fantasy points, minimum 8 games played. Of those 58 seasons, only 15 of them came from quarterbacks who had fewer than 2 rushing points per game. And on top of that, of those 15 seasons with quarterbacks who weren't as mobile, only Matthew Stafford in 2025, Dak Prescott in 2021, Tom Brady in 2021, and Joe Burrow in 2024 have come after the 2020 season.