1144: Mailbag - Chase Brown's Usage, Mobile Quarterbacks, 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 1144 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. Before getting to the questions this week, I want to remind you guys about becoming a Late-Round Fantasy Football member. As a member, you get weekly rankings, which include my top 100 flex rankings, there's a live stream Q&A with yours truly for over an hour every Tuesday night, there's rest of season rankings, monthly dynasty rankings updates, an incredibly awesome and active Discord community, and more. To learn more about becoming a Late-Round member, just head to lateraound.com.

The first question this week is actually just from the Late-Round Discord. I was chatting with people the other day, they wanted me to look at Ashton Jeanty comps. Instead of reading a question, I'll just shout out that Discord and let's dig into some comps.

I looked at a handful of things with Jeanty to find these comps. I use Snapshare, Rushshare, Routeshare, Targetshare, Current Points Per Game, all the volume related things that we're always concerned about. But then I wanted to include some of the efficiency and effectiveness things too, because that's been a problem for people with Ashton Jeanty. So with some of the efficiency stuff, I looked at 10 plus yard run rate, yards after contact per attempt, yards per carry, and success rate. Essentially, I wanted to find players in the past since 2016 who through weeks 1-5 had similar usage, similar production, and similar efficiency as Jeanty. The results aren't like terrible to be honest. I won't go through every single comp, but like Breeze Hall in 2024 was his top comp. Then Joe Mixon in 2022 was his next one. Both of those running backs actually saw their running back rank change in a positive direction. Joe Mixon pretty dramatically from weeks 1 to 5 versus week 6 through the end of the year. In total, when looking at the top 10 comps for Jeanty, something kind of interesting happens. 9 out of the 10 saw their 10 plus yard run rate get better during the remaining parts of the season, or after week 5

7 of the 10 saw their yards per carry get better. 7 of the 10 also saw their yards after contact per attempt get better. But many of them saw the volume stuff drop. In total, the group saw their point per game average drop after week 5 by about 0.8 points per game. What I think is going on here is basic regression. Number 1, it's hard to maintain a really high backfield share all season long. Jeanty currently ranks in the top 10 in snap share, rush share, top 5 in target share, he's top 5 in route share. Those numbers might drop a little bit as the season goes on. It's just hard to maintain them. Now, there's a chance that they drop because the team sees the lack of effectiveness, they slightly change his workload, and then that helps the effectiveness. That's certainly one reason as to why we're seeing the numbers that we're seeing with these comps. But overall, I try not to get too concerned about efficiency numbers when we're dealing with a player like Ashton Jeanty, where the franchise seems to be pointing in a direction where they clearly want him to be the centerpiece of their offense, or one of the centerpieces.

The injury stuff could definitely come in to play with him, but volume is volume, and volume predicts future volume, generally speaking.

So maybe we project a slight dip in points per game for Ashton Jeanty moving forward, and maybe he doesn't end up being the stud that you drafted him to be, or that you wanted him to be. But if a round two running back ends up scoring over 15 PPR points per game, and right now he's closer to 17, so I'm being generous. But if he's over 15 into that 16 PPR points per game range, that's actually not a bad result at all. So right now with Ashton Jeanty, I'm just holding.

We'll go from one inefficient running back to the next. This one's from Marcel, and it says, Hey JJ, what should we do with Chase Brown in redraft leagues? I'm getting tempted to move on from him and trade him for someone like Bashall Tutin. Would you hold on to Chase Brown, or would you try to sell? So look, overall in a vacuum, I'm not ready to sell Chase Brown. I think there are some people out there who are going a little bit overboard with what happened in week five. I've seen articles, and I've seen some of the quotes from Dan Pitcher about his backfield. That's their offensive coordinator, saying that they're re-evaluating things, that they went more with Samajay Perrine because he fit what they wanted to do more in week five. There are reasons to agree with that. I'll get to that in a second. But there are also reasons to say that those quotes are absolute BS.