893: Regression Candidates

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, and this episode, 893 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. The term regression gets thrown around pretty loosely in the fantasy football space. If you've listened or read to fantasy content before, whether it's mine or not, you've likely heard the term.

Regression is a return to a former or less developed state. In statistics, if one sample of a random variable is extreme, the next sampling of the same random variable is likely to be closer to its mean or its average. It's like when you go and play some golf. You usually shoot 90, and one day, you shoot an 80, but you didn't do anything special that day. Maybe things just went your way. You should expect that number to regress back to your mean, which is 90, the next time you play some golf.

Regression is everywhere in fantasy football. This is a numbers-driven game. It's also a game of small sample sizes. Some crazy things can happen in a 17-game sample.

But we can use historical data to help us understand what's reasonably sustainable and what isn't. And that's what regression is all about in this game. It helps us understand if something is truly achievable, consistently achievable or not. And that's important because a lot of times you'll find that fantasy managers sort of take what happened the previous season and they assume those same things are going to happen in the current season. But regression can help us see if the market is accounting for statistical volatility or not.

So on today's show, I'll be talking through a handful of players from last year who should see some regression here in 2024 It's a show that I do each year, but it's a nice way to ease into drafts since a lot of you haven't really started your research yet. Now, before getting to the regression candidates, I just want to remind you that you can get a Late-Round Draft Guide for absolutely free. Here's how it works. If you're new to Underdog Fantasy, go to underdogfantasy.com and sign up. Use promo code LATEROUND when you do so and then make a deposit. After doing that, you'll get an email to your inbox from Underdog that has a link to the draft guide. That's a $25 value for absolutely free. You can save money by doing this, all while playing some best ball, which is obviously tons and tons of fun. The draft guide has everything you need to crush your drafts this year. About 80% of it is game theory driven, and the final 20% gets updated weekly. That 20% includes players to target, players to avoid, and late round dart throws. It also has my rankings and tiers, which now include auction values.

You can purchase the guide for $24.99 on lateraound.com, but you can get it for free, like I said, by heading to underdogfantasy.com and using promo code LATEROUND to sign up. That's promo code LATEROUND.

I want to start with the San Francisco 49ers offense just in general today. I remember talking about them entering last year and saying how they were almost definitely going to see a dip in touchdowns per game in 2023, at least compared to how they performed with Brock Purdy in the regular season in 2022 And they did see a dip, actually. With Purdy in the regular season when he took over in 2022, the Niners averaged 3.83 touchdowns per game. That fell to 3.53 touchdowns per game in 2023 But they were still the best team at scoring touchdowns. I thought that they would be a little bit worse, so props to them. But with that being said, last season we had three teams hit 3.3 touchdowns per game or higher. The 49ers, the Lions and the Dolphins. Over the last 12 years, there have been 26 teams with next season data to get to that 3.3 touchdowns per game mark. And of those 26, only one of them saw their touchdowns per game rate improve year over year. 11 of the 26 teams watched their touchdowns per game rate fall by a full touchdown. 20 of the 26 saw it drop by half of a touchdown. Half of a touchdown per game equates to 8.5 touchdowns across the season, which could be the difference in being a QB1 and a QB2 for a guy like Brock Purdy. So the 49ers have a very real chance to see fewer touchdowns this year. I still think they're going to be good, but I don't think we should assume complete and utter dominance. And that leads me to Brock Purdy.