858: Analyzing 2023's Biggest Misses

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zachariason.

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason in this episode 858 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in.

Did you miss me? I had a little time to recharge to get my data in order for the offseason, and I'm very excited that it's the offseason. Not because I dislike the weekly grind of the regular season. Obviously, that's the most important part of the fantasy football calendar. But during the winter and the spring months, I'm able to do deep dives. I'm able to study topics that I just can't get to during the regular season. And I'm able to do a little bit of reflecting.

I say it all the time, but during the fantasy season, I don't do a whole lot of analysis on why I was right or wrong about a certain preseason take. Or even an in-season take. I just don't really see the need to do that while the season is still going. My goal is to give you advice to keep your fantasy teams winning. Going through Ws and Ls doesn't achieve that goal. Instead, I just wait until the season is over. That way, I can thoughtfully look back at some of my preseason takes, or even my in-season takes, and I can evaluate them.

And I want to evaluate my approach to things because I want to be better. It's really that simple.

So, with that in mind, today's episode, it's the one where I make fun of myself. I walk through some of my worst takes from the season, but I'm not just stopping at, hey, look at me. I'm a moron. I want to know how big of a moron I actually was. Did I get a little unlucky, or was the wrong stance on a player situation completely avoidable? And if it was avoidable, how can I and you make sure the mistake doesn't happen again?

Next week, then I'll do the opposite and go through some of my biggest hits. That's always an easier show to do because I'm only human. I want to be right. But being wrong is okay. It's not a bad thing to be wrong. We're not going to get everything right in fantasy football. Being wrong can be good. It's the best way to learn and to grow. And I've definitely done a lot of that through the years because of this episode. Okay, I'll stop rambling. But before I get into things that didn't go my way in 2023, I wanted to let you know that the Late-Round Prospect Guide, the 2024 version, it's officially available for pre-order. This year's guide, it's going to be different. Not only are the prospect models improved with some new approaches, but you'll get tight end scores this year as well. Yes, the tight end model is being published. You can check it all out by heading to lateround.com. Now, let's take a look at the dumb things that I did in 2023

I think my biggest miss of the season was with Mike Evans. If you look back at last year's late round draft guide, you'll notice that Evans wasn't written up as a player to avoid. It was Chris Godwin instead, and that was because Godwin had the higher ADP versus Mike Evans. Godwin also had never really been an alpha receiver in the NFL when it came to target share. I was worried about him on that front.

That actually ended up being an okay enough call. Godwin played slightly below average draft position expectation. And for the record, I'll be referencing that throughout today's show. So let me explain what I mean when I say ADP expectation. Every player in a fantasy draft has some sort of ADP, right? Using historical numbers, we can figure out the number of points per game that we'd expect a player to score at that ADP. So Godwin in 2023, he had an ADP of about 54 according to My Fantasy League's redraft data. At that ADP, he'd be expected to score 12.6 PPR points per game. That's based on history. But he scored 12.3 points per game. So he was below expectation, albeit slightly.

Mike Evans definitely was not. Evans played 4.6 PPR points per game above ADP expectation. That was his best season versus expectation since his rookie year. He was a top eight value at wide receiver this year according to my numbers. So yeah, I'm an idiot for not being higher on him. I was about six spots lower and wide receiver rank with Mike Evans versus consensus.

Now, a few things went wrong here, and they're definitely things that I can fix in the future. Number one, I did what I tell people not to do, and that's draft off of consensus assumptions. The general assumption with this Tampa Bay offense was that the passing attack would take a serious step back. And to be fair, there were reasons to believe that they were going to throw the ball less and also run for more touchdowns this year than they did in 2022 I wrote about that in the team regression section of the draft guide. And guess what? Those two things happened. Year over year, Tampa Bay's passing volume, their pass attempts, dropped by almost 200 The team's receiving yards fell by over 700 Their percentage of touchdowns that came through the air in 2022 was 84 percent, and 2023, that number was 78 percent. The flaw in my analysis was that I looked too much at volume and not enough at what was going on with Tampa Bay at an even higher level last season, in 2022, that is.