868: Mailbag 3/8/24

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

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

What's up everyone, it's JJ Zachariason in this episode 868 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting to this week's mailbag questions, I've got some pretty cool news to share. There's a new official partner of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, and that partner is Underdog Fantasy. As a lot of you know, Underdog is the easiest place to play fantasy sports. They've got fantasy football drafts live on their platform year round. It doesn't get much better than that. I'm sure you're wondering what this means for you, the listener, and I can confidently say that the answer to that is only good things. I'm going to be diving more into the best ball format this spring and summer, and I'll be sharing my experiences along the way. And that includes more episodes of this podcast, more to come on that. And then in season, we've got an opportunity to learn and get better with their Pick'em game. I couldn't be more excited to partner up with Underdog Fantasy this year. Now, if you're into all this and you want to go on this journey with me, make sure you're on Underdog Fantasy. Sign up with promo code LATEROUND when you're making an account, and when you do, they'll match your first deposit up to $100. So head to underdogfantasy.com or check out the app and sign up. And when you do, make sure to use promo code LATEROUND. I sincerely can't wait for what's to come. I hope you're as pumped as I am. Now let's get to some mailbag questions.

The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from The Wasted Picks. It says, is it just Draft Capital that has Zay Flowers ahead of Jayden Reed? So I don't know if this is in reference to me having Zay Flowers ahead of Jayden Reed in my dynasty rankings, or if it's in reference to the market having Zay Flowers ahead of Jayden Reed. Either way, consensus has Flowers ahead of Reed right now, so let's talk about it.

You guys all know that I love me some Jayden Reed. He was one of my favorites in last year's draft class. I liked him more than the masses did. So I don't want this at all to be taken as shade towards Reed. He's great. As a lot of you know, I've got my year two model that looks at second year players and tries to predict how well they're gonna do in year two and year three in their NFL career. It takes rookie season numbers alongside a player's prospect score, and there is still signal to that prospect score, and then it spits out a year two score.

Zay Flowers has a better year two score than Jayden Reed. Reed beat Flowers last year in yards per route run, and he was better in PPR points per game too. But other metrics like first downs, yards per team pass attempt, target share per game, they favored Flowers. And Flowers also entered the league with a prospect score that was about eight points higher than Reed's. That's out of a hundred.

Flowers now has a year two score of 96.8, Reed 94.2. In the grand scheme, that's not this uber significant difference. Like if someone wants to go with Reed over Flowers, I don't think that's egregious at all. But I do prefer Flowers, even if it's slightly. One of the big things with Reed last year, and that worries me a little bit, is how his target share really fluctuated when more competition was added to that offense.

I wrote about this in Reed's year two profile on the Prospect Guide, which by the way, that Prospect Guide drops on March 11th. And I'll probably be able to get it out to people Sunday night, so March 10th. But in Reed's year two profile, I wrote the following. Quote, we saw Reed's usage in production dip when competition was added to the offense. For instance, during last year's regular season, when Christian Watson was sidelined, Reed averaged a target share per game of 21.6%. When Watson was active, that number fell to just 14.6%. His PPR points per game average went from 16.5 without Watson to 11.3 with him. Now I get it, Reed was a rookie, so that's not necessarily a surprise. But the Packers did do a really good job last year at finding value in the NFL draft, which includes Reed. Dontavian Wicks, though, he had a really impressive yards per outrun rate too. Both tight ends look legit. And Christian Watson wasn't 100% throughout the year.

The Packers all of a sudden have pretty good weapons in that offense, and that means more distribution to other players. Now talent leads to opportunity, there's no doubt. But it's easier for a player to do well in fantasy on the volume front when there's less competition. And look, the Ravens could go out and they could add another pass catcher to the mix. But number one, it's not there right now. Number two, we don't know how good that pass catcher is gonna be. Dontavian Wicks has a year two score of 86 That's not that bad. Christian Watson's was above 90 last year. We know there's a lot of talent potential in Green Bay. And we know that those guys are going to be there with Reed for at least the next two years.