825: Mailbag 10/27/23

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

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

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 825 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel.

Thanks for tuning in. One of the most frequent questions that I got this week surrounded selling Bijan Robinson, trading him away. One person even told me that they were aggressively trying to trade him away after his three-yard performance in week seven. By now, we know why Robinson only had three yards this past week. We didn't know it before the game started, but he was dealing with a headache. And as someone who suffered with migraines for parts of my life, I totally feel that. No one should be bashing Robinson for feeling ill. That's silly. I'm just not sure why this would be the week that you'd want to trade away Bijan Robinson. I've been trying to think about the logic behind this. I think the only reason you might want to bail right now is because Arthur Smith openly just doesn't care about having a bell cow back. He doesn't not want a bell cow back, but he's clearly not gonna force the issue. But didn't we already know that? Given what we saw from week one through week six, the reason Robinson is so attractive in fantasy, and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but it's because he's still a productive fantasy asset that has plenty of room for growth on the volume front.

Like you could look at someone like Josh Jacobs, who's a regression candidate to be clear, but someone like Jacobs, his upside has to come from that regression hitting, which is very possible. This is not an anti-Josh Jacobs take. It's just an example. But Jacobs is basically maxed out on the volume front. He's not gonna see more volume in his offense. That's nearly impossible for him to do. Robinson was averaging 15.8 PPR points per game prior to week seven. On the season, only 10 running backs have averaged more points per contest. And that was on just a 52% running back rush share per game rate. Meaning he was barely seeing over half of his team's running back rushes. And he was still averaging 15.8 PPR points per game. Compared to the other players on that top 10 list, Robinson's backfield share was by far the lowest.

In other words, there's upside. There's potential for the Falcons to give him more work. And that gives him a legit top three running back ceiling. All that changed from that stance to where we are today is that he had a headache and he didn't play.

Now maybe Arthur Smith's attitude is turning you off. But I don't anticipate Robinson's workload to get worse compared to what it was between weeks one through six. Unless the headache thing is chronic. But it doesn't sound like that's the case. Now I wanted to kick off the show with that because I got a lot of questions surrounding Robinson. I'm still relatively high on him rest of season, despite the way that the Falcons are divvying up that workload. Like I get it, trust me, I get it. Last week was beyond frustrating. Arthur Smith's comments since then also frustrating. But assuming Robinson's healthy, that frustration really doesn't have anything to do with what's gonna happen from now through the end of the fantasy season. It's all done. We can't assume that we're gonna have a situation like that happen again. So I'd hold on to Robinson right now, not trade him away.

Now before getting to the other mailbag questions this week, I'm just gonna send another reminder to check out The Late-Round Fantasy Football Patreon. You get weekly rankings and tiers, rest of season rankings and tiers, live stream Q&A's, data dumps and more. Head to lateraound.com to learn more.

The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Daniel. It says, how do we value Devonta Smith, Tee Higgins and Jaylen Waddle rest of season? I drafted them at what I felt was a discount, but my worst fears came true. These three seem like they're in similar situations being talented, but not getting wide receiver one looks slash volume. Do we still hold? Flip them for an RB2 like Madison or Ramandre? So I also got a lot of questions about these guys this week, so let's discuss it.

First off, a very quick and easy way to see if players are over or underperforming versus expectation is by looking at expected fantasy points. I personally don't have an expected points formula of my own, but other spots do, like Pro Football Focus. PFF's expected points model shows that Devonta Smith is the wide receiver 26 in overall expected points of wide receiver, and he's underperformed versus that expectation.