884: Using Wide Receiver Prospect Scores In Season-Long Leagues

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

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

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason, and this is episode 884 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. Last week, you heard me talk about how you can use running back prospect scores in redraft leagues. You can listen back to that episode to hear the takeaways. On today's show, I'll be going through a similar process, but with wide receivers. I'll be looking at whether or not my prospect model, the ZAP model, can help us make better decisions in season-long leagues. We know it can be helpful in dynasty, but season-long is a different beast. But spoiler alert, it can still help us out. Before getting to the study, I wanted to send a reminder to check out what's going on over at Underdog. Underdog has best ball drafts going on constantly, and there are tons of contests to choose from, all at different price points. There's also their Pick'em game that you can try out too. I've been doing the Becoming a Best Ball Bro podcast to help us all learn and become better best ball players. So why not use that information to your advantage? Sign up on Underdog right now and make a deposit. When you do that, make sure to use promo code LATEROUND for a deposit offer along with a free Late-Round Draft Guide. That guide is available for pre-order right now over on lateround.com, but you'll get it for free when you sign up over on Underdog. It will be emailed to you on July 1st when it officially launches. So head to underdogfantasy.com or download the app. When you sign up and make a deposit, use promo code LATEROUND for a deposit offer and a free draft guide. And that's all one word, LATEROUND.

Now I know I talked about this last week, but I think it's important to quickly go over what the ZAP model is all about. The wide receiver ZAP model looks at all wideouts who were either drafted or at the NFL Combine since 2011 So there are a lot of players in the database, but there are some productive NFL players who aren't in there. It's not common at all, but every once in a while, we get an Adam Thielen. We get someone who was productive, but they weren't drafted and they didn't go to the NFL Combine. The ZAP model takes collegiate production inputs and uses draft capital to spit out a score that ranges from to 100 That score is helping me and us predict how well a player is going to perform during his first three years in the NFL. Because there are a lot of day three picks and undrafted players in that model's database, scores below 50 rarely produce good NFL players. Anything in the wide receiver ZAP model over 95 usually captures the elite players. The 90 to 95 range gives us some really good prospects who usually have a chance to be elite. Scores in the 80s are solid prospects, and then under 80, that's when things get a little shakier, just like the running back position.

There's also my year two model, which looks at a player's prospect score and it incorporates how he performed as a rookie in the NFL to spit out a year two score. That score is trying to forecast year two and year three performance.

Because that model is using actual NFL inputs, it's more accurate than the prospect score. Therefore, anything in the 95 to 100 range, that's still elite. Anything in the 90 to 95 range, that's still really good. But scores below 90 are when we start to see more wide receiver two ceilings instead of wide receiver one ceilings. I bring all this up because for this study, I broke things up by prospect score, and I'll be referencing those scores throughout today's show. Okay, so just like the Running Mac episode from last week, the first thing that I did with these wide receivers was bucket them by average draft position. That's season long redraft ADP. I grouped up wide receivers since 2014 using Fantasy Data's historical average draft position data. I looked at wide receiver ones or top 12 wide receivers by ADP, then wide receiver twos or wide outs ranked 13th to 24th. Wide receiver threes were the ones that were ranked in the 25 to 36 range, and then the wide receiver fours were in the 37 to 48 range. So we're looking at top 48 wide receivers here by ADP.

The question I'm asking is, can we use ZAP model scores in year two scores to help us pinpoint players to target and avoid in our season long leagues to help us increase our probability of hitting on these wide receivers?