859: Mailbag 1/26/24

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, and this episode 859 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel.

Thanks for tuning in.

As a reminder, the Late-Round Prospect Guide is available for pre-order. This year's guide is going to be a little different than what you've gotten over the last two years, which is when I started publishing the guide. I revamped the prospect models, and this year, I'll be sharing my tight end model. On top of that, you get scores for every relevant prospect at running back wide receiver and tight end, and there's an entire section on the year two model for running back some wide receivers. And if you're a nerd, I lay out what goes into these models. I'm trying to be as transparent as possible with my process. You can pre-order it right now for $11.99 over on lateraound.com. When the guide publishes in March, that price is going to rise to $14.99.

Now, today's a mailbag show, and I'll be honest, I didn't get a ton of questions that were relevant for the show. But this is also why I love the offseason, because I can take questions and I can do deep dives on those questions. There are just three of them this week, but it's the length of a normal mailbag episode because I can dig deep. So let's do it.

The first question this week is from Twitter, is from at MTN Garrett. It says, Jayden Reed looked the part, and he produced when he had a leading role. With everyone healthy, it seemed he had a smaller role as they spread the ball out more. Would you consider him as a sell high at this point?

So this isn't wrong, especially when Christian Watson was active. In games with Christian Watson during the regular season, Reed averaged a 14.6% target share per game rate. That rose 7 full percentage points when Watson was inactive. And his PPR points per game in this split was 11.3 versus 16.5. That's just one example of Reed's numbers being influenced by others in that offense, and it was no different in the playoffs.

But here's the thing, and this is something that I'm always going to bring up when we're talking about buying and selling players. When you buy and sell a guy, it depends entirely on the market. If Jayden Reed was being valued as the second best wide receiver in dynasty, then yes, he'd be an obvious sell. If he was being valued as the 60th best wide out in dynasty, then he'd be an obvious buy.

If you look at keeptradecut.com, he's currently being valued at wide receiver 24 He's one spot ahead of Deebo Samuel, he's one behind DK Metcalf. Someone like Rashee Rice, Zay Flowers, other rookies from this class, they're ranked at wide receiver 18 and wide receiver 19 Which is a relatively decent margin when you're talking about higher end wide receivers.

Now, do I think that's a fair ranking? Technically, that's about where I had Jayden Reed in my most recent dynasty rankings update. I do dynasty rankings updates on the Patreon at the beginning of every month. Which means I'm right in line with the market. Which means I'm not looking necessarily to buy or sell.

Now, anyone who listened to my prospecting advice last year knows that I'm a big fan of Jayden Reed's. And he had a very good season as a rookie. His year two score and the year two model did change slightly year over year. But his year two score, it sits at 94.4. That's out of 100 A score of 94.4 is really good. And it tells us that he's likely going to be a really solid contributor, but maybe not be a completely elite asset. Puka Nakua, for instance, has a 99 score. I think most of us would agree with that. And for the record, the year two model, it's looking to project how well a player is going to perform in year two and year three of his NFL career. It's based off of his prospect score, along with some rookie season numbers. All of that's going to be in the prospect guide. Now, when you look at his peripherals last year, they were great. He had a yards-per-route run rate of 2.05, which among rookie wide outs since 2011 to have run 300 or more routes, that was the 17th best number. And you can check out the Late-Round Fantasy Football Instagram page, by the way, at LateRoundFF for that top 20 list. To be on that list, to be top 20 as a rookie and yards-per-route run since 2011, that's impressive. It's filled with very good wide receivers.