821: Mailbag 10/20/23

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is the Late Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zacharissa.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason, and this episode, 821 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting this week's mail back questions, I wanted to remind you to check out The Late-Round Fantasy Football Patreon. With The Patreon, you get weekly waiver-wire Q&As with yours truly. There's rest of season rankings and tiers, weekly rankings and tiers, and there's a fantastic Discord community. You can learn more about it by heading to lateraound.com. Let's get to these questions.

The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Bad Books. It says, Did we go too far with the rookies and year twos are always undervalued narrative this season? A team with Thielen, Mostert, Kelsey, Evans, Keenan Allen would be dominating. Obviously, rookies are better during the second half, so the jury is still out on whether JSN, Addison and Flowers are league winners. But I think it's safe to say you're playing from behind if you've been holding or playing these guys over over the hill proven players.

There's a lot to unpack here. There's so much to unpack. The first sentence kind of says it all to me. Did we go too far with the rookies and year twos are always undervalued narrative this season? Let's stop right there. As someone who studied over a decade of ADP data to draw conclusions that rookies and year two players are generally undervalued in redraft leagues, I think there's an insane generalization going on here. That generalization being that if you're targeting those types of players, then you're not targeting older players. At least with the stuff that I've researched, that couldn't be further from the truth. And then on top of that, you use the word always. Year two players, rookies, they're not always undervalued. And anyone selling it that way, they're completely wrong. There's also a really big selection bias going on here. Maybe even a confirmation bias. Like, let's use your individual examples that you threw out there in this question. If you're going to throw a late round dart like Adam Thielen into this discussion, then what about Pooka Nakua? Nakua is a rookie. Raheem Mostert saw a perfect storm hit right before the season started. Jeff Wilson was randomly thrown to IR. People weren't aware that was going to happen. And then Devon Achan had that preseason injury. And then when Achan returned, he dominated. And Achan's a rookie. He's a rookie running back. He just unfortunately got hurt. Now, I don't really understand the Travis Kelce and Keenan Allen examples. No one was drafting a rookie-wide receiver over Keenan Allen.

Maybe some people were drafting Jameer Gibbs over him. But that wasn't common either. And the only rookie being selected before Allen was B. John Robinson, who's a top 10 fantasy asset right now. Have the first-year wide receivers panned out? Not to some insane degree, no. JSN, Quinton Johnston, they've basically been zeros.

Addison and Flowers have been decent though. And both of those players are likely to outperform ADP expectation this year.

Having a 50% hit rate with middle-round rookie-wide receivers is fine. If your expectation was that they always will work out, then yeah, you're disappointed. But that's a crazy expectation to have. We can sit here all day long, and we can say, if you drafted Adam Thielen, if you drafted Kenan Allen, Travis Kelce, Mike Evans, you're dominating right now.

But what if you drafted B. John Robinson, Sam Laporta, Pukka Nakua and Devon Aitchin? And those guys ADPs, they were later than the ones that you listed. They were later than the veterans that you threw out in this question. Now look, I haven't run the numbers to see which players and which age groups outperformed expectation most of the season. I'll do all of that during the offseason to help discover trends. But I can confidently tell you that this is not the way that you should draw conclusions about this kind of thing.

Those types of trends are just that, they're trends. They're not factual things that happen no matter what. I go back to you using the word always as part of this question. Nothing in fantasy football is always. There are old players who break out all the time, especially in the later rounds. There are rookies who break out all the time. We're playing a game of probability. We're not playing a game of always.

The next question is from Twitter. It's from at with Parks. It says, how are you viewing Tony Pollard moving forward? Seen a lot of concerns with his explosiveness, and the Cowboys offense seems tough to project any kind of consistency.