877: Pre-Draft Rookie Rankings

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

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

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 877 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog Fantasy, thanks for tuning in. I'm not the biggest rankings guy in the world. I know people want them. I know I have to do them. But I think fantasy football is far more than just a set of rankings. There's so much detail that gets missed with rankings. I always tier mine up to give them a little bit more context. But even still, rankings aren't explaining range of outcomes. They're not explaining the type of player that you're analyzing. They're not really explaining strategy and roster construction. As long as we're on the same page with that, with that stuff, then I'm down to talk about rankings. Because they can give you a general idea of where my head's at or where another analyst's head's at. There's nothing wrong with that. Now, as all of you know, the NFL Draft kicks off on Thursday. And as I do each year, I'm going to talk through my pre-draft rookie rankings, at least through the first round of non-Superflex rookie drafts. This is sort of a primer for the higher-end players in the class, so that you know how I'm feeling about them before we officially learn draft capital and landing spots. I'll then do an episode with my post-draft top 12, and that'll happen a couple weeks after the draft. Now I know you might want my rankings before that point in time, and you can get them in a couple of places. I'll have them posted on the Late-Round Fantasy Football Patreon soon after the draft, and they'll be in the updated prospect guide too. The guide's updates will be released Saturday night after the draft is over, so you'll have information ready to go for your rookie drafts. You can check out the guide over on lateround.com.

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I'll be separating things out by tier today, just so everyone's on the same page. This is the first tier of my first round. My 101 in non-SuperFlex leagues is Marvin Harrison Jr. I think you could make the argument for him in SuperFlex formats too, but I do have Caleb Williams ahead of him there, albeit in the same tier. That's mostly because of how the market acts towards quarterbacks, and how quarterbacks retain value from year one to year two. That's something I talked about in episode 872 Now to be clear, I don't think Harrison is at risk of losing a ton of value from year one to year two though either. The market loves him and for good reason. He's got some of the best marks that you're going to find in the ZAP model, which is my prospect model. And it's the thing that I'm going to be referencing a lot on today's show. One of the key production metrics of wide receiver in the ZAP model is what I call breakout score. It looks at different thresholds within yards per team pass attempt, which is a pretty predictive metric at wide receiver, and it associates a player's age when hitting a ton of different thresholds. Now I don't love thresholds, but mostly when we're talking about things in a binary way. This is a metric that has a lot of them, so it's capturing more of that gray area.

It's really just a way of looking at age-adjusted production in the form of yards per team pass attempt, and it's adjusted for a player's strength of program too. So someone playing at Alabama or LSU gets more love than someone playing at Central Michigan. Predictably, Marvin Harrison Jr. has a really good breakout score. It's 97.1. That's the second best mark in the class behind only Malik neighbors.

Now, neighbors admittedly has a slightly higher projected ZAP score than Marvin Harrison does. I say projected because we don't have official draft capital right now, but his score is slightly, and I mean slightly better. The reason I'm subjectively putting Harrison ahead of neighbors is because we've seen him do it for multiple seasons with multiple quarterbacks. Neighbors has the best individual campaign of any wide out in this class that happened last year, but Harrison's probably the safer bet. Just don't mistake that for neighbors being unsafe. He's in this same tier as Marvin Harrison Jr. He's got a little bit better of a breakout score, they both have a great teammate score, and neighbors has the better yards after the catch profile. You can go either way with these two players. They're both elite prospects. And when I say elite, I'm talking like Jamar Chase level players. Players who comfortably deserve to go in the top 10 So that's your top tier, my top tier in single quarterback leagues.