878: Utilizing Front Office Decision-Making

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 878 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in.

Rather than just spewing my rankings at you after the NFL Draft, I like to take a step back and take in what just unfolded. The Draft is one of the rare times each year where we get to see, through actions, how a team might be thinking. You can find my rankings and my thoughts on every relevant rookie from a fantasy football perspective by checking out The Late-Round Prospect Guide. The post-draft version was published on Saturday night, and a lot of my thoughts are in there. Next week on the show, I'll walk through my post-draft rankings in more detail. You can find the guide over on lateround.com.

Right now, today, I want to do what this episode's title says. I want to analyze the front office decision making that we just witnessed. What does Dallas' lack of running back selection actually mean? Why did the Bears go after Roma Dunze when they had DJ Moore and Keenan Allen already on the roster? Why did Troy Franklin fall in the draft? Those are the questions that I'm trying to answer today. Not how many fantasy points is Marvin Harrison Jr. going to score this year. We've got all summer to talk about that. Today we'll be looking at the actions that these teams took, and why they acted the way they did. Doing so can often help us in fantasy football. Before getting to things, I hope you heard the news within the podcast feed yesterday. There's a new show coming this summer, and that show is all about best ball. I'll be talking to some of the smartest best ball players on planet earth this summer as I max enter Underdog's Best Ball Mania 5 contest. As I learn some of the details about the game, I want you guys to learn too. That contest started on Monday and it runs all summer long. But Underdog has way more to offer than just that. There are different best ball leagues that you can join, and you can play things like champions mode as well. Check it all out at underdogfantasy.com or download the Underdog app. And if you're new to Underdog, when you sign up use promo code LATEROUND for a $100 deposit match. That's promo code LATEROUND.

I don't have a super strong take on the Falcons taking Michael Pennex. At first, I was in the camp that it was stupid. It was a dumb move. The more I've thought about it though, the more I kind of understand why they did what they did, which was falling in love with a quarterback prospect and not wanting to lose him. They didn't necessarily know that they could get Pennex when they signed cousins that $100 million guaranteed contract. Now I think it's still questionable when you consider they did sign cousins, but I at least can see both sides. I also don't want to talk about that real football move all that much because it's not as big of a deal in fantasy. I'll take Pennex in Superflex leagues where he slides and I'm not having to select him over a legit stud at other positions. That's where I'm at. Rome Adunze going to Chicago is a lot more fun to talk about. As a top 10 pick, Adunze looks good in the Zap model. He ended up having a score of 96, which was the third best in the class. But it was a decent bit behind Marvin Harrison and Malik Nabors. He's not in their tier, in my opinion, of course. The thing to dissect here is the fit and what Chicago may have been thinking when they made that pick. And I think it's a fairly straightforward answer. The Bears know that surrounding a young quarterback with weapons is a smart thing to do. They added Keenan Allen over the offseason already. They just went through a tough situation with Justin Fields, even if that was largely the last regime. You surround young quarterbacks on rookie contracts with weapons, allow them to get better and build confidence and hope that translates to Ws. But Keenan Allen's also a free agent next year and he's 32 years old. This is a move about the future just as much as it's a move about 2024 And I know what you and a lot of fantasy managers are currently thinking. Isn't this the exact same thing that we saw with Jackson Smith and Jigba last year? He went to a team that already had DK Metcalf and Tyler Lockett, and we saw how that ended in fantasy football, which was not great. It's the same in that Adunze isn't walking into a situation where he's the clear alpha. From a projection standpoint, yeah, we're gonna project DJ Moore and Keenan Allen to see more looks this year than Roma Adunze. But it's not the same when you look at the type of receivers that we're analyzing. Adunze can play all over the field. When JSN came out last year, we all knew that talent was there, or we thought it was there. But JSN had a lot of slot work in college. During his big sophomore season at Ohio State, he ran 89% of his routes from the slot. And we knew that would likely be his role in year one. Now for the record, I'm not trying to approach this with hindsight bias. I know I like JSN as a prospect. I thought he was fine to grab in the middle rounds of redraft leagues last year. I even thought that there was a chance that he could just develop into the top receiver in Seattle. I mean, I guess to be fair, that's still a possibility, but this isn't some sort of revisionist history.