890: Taking Advantage of a Reactive Fantasy Football Market

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

You've had a three-week break from these early-week Late-Round Podcast episodes, and I'm so glad to be back in your ears. The Late-Round Draft Guide is out there. It's done. It launched on July 1st, and I know a lot of you have already read it and given me feedback, which I greatly appreciate. If you haven't gotten that draft guide, there's still plenty of time to do so. You can head to lateround.com and purchase it for $24.99. You get over 200 pages of information in it, and about 80% of that information is strategy and game theory focused. The remaining 20% gets updated each week. That 20% includes players to target, players to avoid, and late-round dart throws, as well as my rankings. And if you didn't take advantage of the Underdog offer before, you can still do that too. If you sign up on Underdog Fantasy with promo code LATEROUND and then make a deposit, Underdog will email you a copy of the guide. That's a $25 value to just play some best ball, or maybe a little pick-em. You get a nice deposit offer when you sign up too. So that's underdogfantasy.com promo code LATEROUND. Make a deposit and you'll get a draft guide for absolutely free via email, along with a deposit bonus. Now today's episode isn't about me just letting you know about these offers and where to get the draft guide. So let's shift our focus. I'm a big fan of analyzing market trends in fantasy football, the market being average draft position. Some people think it isn't a worthwhile thing to do, but I have the opposite belief. Not only can it shape the way you approach a draft strategically, but the wisdom of the crowd idea isn't wrong. It assumes that large crowds are collectively smarter than individual experts. A group's collective knowledge leads to better decision making and problem solving.

Now I don't think average draft position is flawless. I know it isn't. And I do think that you as an analyst, as a player, you can be better than ADP.

We see bad picks by ADP all the time. But at a baseline, ADP probably isn't as bad as you think, especially on certain platforms and on certain sites. And if you think that it's atrocious, if you think that we can't learn a thing from average draft position, then you may be overconfident in your own abilities.

Now regardless of all that, one of the reasons I like analyzing the market is because in a game where there's so much unpredictability, we need to find sources of predictable behavior. We need to find things that we can feel confident are going to happen year in and year out, and then we can work off of those things. For example, mobile quarterbacks. Quarterback has become a lot more predictable in fantasy football over the last five years, and it's largely because of rushing. Mobile quarterbacks are more predictable. We know who the mobile quarterbacks are going to be going into a given season. And since they're the ones scoring a lot of fantasy points now because they're good passers as well, we now have a better feeling about the quarterbacks at the top of our rankings, like Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson. Ten years ago, we didn't have that type of predictability. And knowing that information means that we can attack our drafts more accurately.

But predictability isn't just something that we need to worry about with players or with positions. We can also look at human behavior, our opponent's behavior, and extract value in our fantasy drafts that way. Year in and year out, fantasy drafts kind of go the same way, but not totally. We know that running backs and wide receivers will get drafted early based on supply and demand. And then we'll get some earlier round quarterbacks and some tight ends sprinkled in there too.

But there are small things that do shift from one year to the next. Maybe the first and second rounds will be a little bit more wide receiver heavy. Maybe the top couple of quarterbacks fall off boards in round four instead of round two. Stuff like that does fluctuate from one year to the next. And usually, when that kind of thing happens, it predictably happens.

2015 was a rough year at running back. When you look at the correlation between top 48, top 24, and top 12 running backs by ADP versus how many points they actually ended up scoring that year, they had the worst season of any year since 2014