864: Running Back Prospects Who Produced Like Studs

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 864 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. I haven't done any sort of analysis on the show yet about this year's draft class. That changes today. This show is one that I do every single year. It's sort of a primer. For those of you who aren't familiar with my prospecting work, I look at the world through data. Shocking, I know. But I have models that help me predict how well a player is going to perform in fantasy football across his first three years when he enters the league. And those models are looking at data-driven factors, like age-adjusted production, for example. All of that stuff is laid out in my prospect guide, which you can currently pre-order on lateround.com for $11.99. If you're interested in exactly what goes into these models, if you want prospect scores, prospect profiles, and a whole lot more, you can check it out.

Today, we're gonna walk through a couple of metrics that go into those models, specifically a running back. But the point of today's exercise is in the look at things like projected draft capital, or to only talk about where a running back might get drafted. Today's exercise is about how these running backs produced in college. What did their numbers look like? And more importantly, how did those numbers stack up against successful running backs in the NFL?

Think of it this way. There are college production metrics out there that are useful for predicting fantasy football success at the next level. Since that's the case, that means that the running backs in the NFL who have been good in fantasy football, who have been successful, they likely share some production-related traits, right? If they didn't, then collegiate production wouldn't really matter. So what I'll be doing today is looking at a group of successful NFL running backs, and I'll be comparing their collegiate numbers to the numbers from players in this year's draft class. It's that simple. Now real quick before getting to that analysis, I just want to let you know that I'm selling some Late-Round Fantasy Football t-shirts and hoodies. They're pretty comfortable and they're cool. You can check them out by heading to lateround.com and clicking shop. That's lateround.com, and then select shop in the top navigation.

To kick things off, we need some definitions. How are we determining successful NFL running backs? Is it an RB one season? Is it someone who scored X number of fantasy points across the year? What makes a running back successful in fantasy football?

Now, this is a little arbitrary, which is fine, because this is just a high level look at the production profiles in this year's draft class. So it's okay to be a little arbitrary with our definitions. But I'll be defining successful NFL running back by players who scored 14 or more PPR points per game across multiple seasons since 2011

Why 14 or more PPR points per game? Because it's a relatively usable RB2-type season. We're not really striving for RB2 seasons, I get that. But if you were to raise that threshold, we wouldn't have a large enough sample size to work off of. When you do this, you get 42 individual running backs. So 42 running backs since 2011 have given us multiple seasons of 14 or more PPR points per game. And a running back needs to have played at least eight games for a particular season to count.

Some, like Aaron Jones and Christian McCaffrey, they've done it a lot of times. Many have done it just a couple of times. But it gives us a good list to work off of that includes the best running backs of the last decade plus.

Now, within my prospect model, I only analyze running backs who either went to the NFL combine or who were drafted. Sometimes you get players who weren't part of the combine who do get drafted, so I want to include all of them. That does leave out undrafted players, though, who weren't combine invites.

The model also dates back to 2011 So any player before that, the data I have for them isn't as robust. So we've got to eliminate those two groups from our successful NFL running back sample. And that leaves us with 28 running backs. There were a lot of older guys, like Jamal Charles, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, who are now not part of this sample. So let's just recap where we're at. We're trying to find out which running backs from this year's draft class produced like studs in college. To define studs to get our stud sample, I looked at successful running backs in fantasy football over the last 12 years, and there are 28 of them. The goal now is to look at what the group's production profiles generally looked like. And this is where we start to get a little bit nerdy. Now, I've hinted at this over the last month or so, but I have changed my prospect models a little bit. I also changed the name of them. They're now referred to as the ZAP model, which stands for Zachariason Adjusted Prospect Model. I know, it's such a cool name. It's so, so creative.