898: Mailbag 8/16/24

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host JJ Zachariason.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 898 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting to the mailbag questions this week, I wanted to send a reminder that if you're planning on buying the Late-Round Draft Guide to help you out with your drafts this year, make sure you're taking advantage of my Underdog offer, because it can quite literally save you money. Instead of buying that guide, new Underdog users can sign up on underdogfantasy.com with promo code LATEROUND and get the guide sent to them for absolutely free. Just go and sign up, use promo code LATEROUND, make it a deposit, and Underdog will email you a link to the guide. It's that easy. Of course, you can still buy the guide over on lateround.com, and you'll get everything you need to wrap your head around the fantasy football landscape this year. But I have to bring up that offer because you can get a discount on the guide by doing it. So you get to play some best ball and you also get the Late-Round Draft Guide. So check that all out, underdogfantasy.com. Sign up, make it a deposit, and use promo code LATEROUND.

The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Justin. It says, why is Javonte Williams being ignored by the fantasy community? He seems like a strong late-round target at cost. Another year removed from a knee injury, could be a workhorse back. He catches and has the raw talent, albeit on a likely subpar offense. However, Breeze Hall did just fine last year in a bad offense, no? Plus maybe Sean Payton surprises. Just seems like a flyer being overlooked. The first thing I want to touch on here is the bad offense thing. There's definitely a connection between offensive environment and success at the running back position in fantasy football, especially when a team is very bad offensively. I wrote about this in my draft guide. Since 2014, just 1% of running backs in offenses that scored fewer than 30 touchdowns end up as true breakouts. That means that they outscore their average draft position expectation by six or more PPR points per game. That number is 10 times greater when looking at running backs in offenses that had 40 or more touchdowns. Just because Breece Hall did okay in a bad offense doesn't mean that any running back can be okay in a bad offense. Breece Hall is just special. We also have evidence suggesting that we don't typically see monster seasons from running backs on teams with rookie quarterbacks. So that's bad news for the Denver backs as well. With all that being said, I've been on the record multiple times talking about Jaleel McLaughlin is a great value. And while I don't think that Williams is as good of a value, I do think that he's a pretty good pick. I've gotten him plenty in drafts. One of the reasons for that is what I've said all off season about Sean Payton's offenses. He loves to target running backs. His teams own eight of the top 17 running back target share seasons since 2011 He wasn't even coaching every year during that stretch. They were top in the league in running back target share last year, and both Javonte Williams and Jaleel McLaughlin can take advantage of that this year. McLaughlin is more of a player who can just beat ADP, like he's a great value bet. Williams is the guy who has a shot to really beat ADP. The downside is that last year wasn't just due to injury, and he really has taken a step back as a player, because he was worst on the team in almost any imaginable metric. Gaining positive yards, gaining 10 or more yards, yards per carry, success rate, and so on. But yeah, fantasy pros' rankers have Williams behind guys like Bryan Robinson and DeAndre Swift. I disagree with that. I would take Williams over Zamir White, too. The only thing that I'll say is that I like to throw darts at some of those ambiguous backfields in that same range, like Cincinnati or Tennessee. So oftentimes, I'm going to get a Tony Pollard or a Tajay Spears or a Chase Brown over someone like Javonte Williams. But yeah, overall, I think he's fine to draft this year. This next question is also from Patreon. It's from Al. It says, Who is your lowest ranked running back that you would feel comfortable drafting as a hero slash anchor running back? So I get this question all the time. I figured I'd finally answer it. I think we need to recognize that labeling a team as zero RB or hero RB, it's honestly meaningless. It doesn't matter what your individual team is or how we're labeling it. The reason we talk about zero RB and hero RB and the reason analysts like myself are labeling these strategies, it's so we have a quick way of referencing them. There's not a point in the draft where you necessarily say, this is a zero RB build or this is a hero RB build. It also just doesn't really matter. Labeling your team isn't really relevant. It's just a way for fantasy analysts to describe what a certain strategy is. The idea behind zero RB and hero RB, that's what's important. Hero RB being the fact that there's typically a big gap from RB1s to RB2s and RB3s. So there's no point in reaching for a lot of those RB2 types in drafts. With zero RB, it plays into the fragility of the position and how running backs get hurt, and any time there's an injury, it's benefiting your zero RB team. Now, I've seen content on Twitter, on TikTok, where they draft someone like Rashad White in round four, and they say, this is a zero RB team. But someone else could walk away and say, no, that's actually a hero RB team, because you didn't get your RB2 until round nine. You see what I mean? It may seem like I'm getting into semantics here, but I think it's really, really important. What a team gets labeled as doesn't really matter. Understanding why a team is going with a certain approach, that's what's important. Now, I generally consider hero RB builds as builds where you get a running back early, let's say the first couple of rounds, and then you punt the position until like round seven, eight or nine. That's in a regular 12-team home league. You've got this giant gap between running back picks. And if I'm going that direction, if I were to answer your question more directly, and less annoyingly, I think you probably could consider someone like Kyron Williams or Derrick Henry as the lowest RB one that we'd consider in a Hero RB build. But honestly, like I could consider Isaiah Pacheco one of those running backs too. As I'm saying, I don't think that this is a really clear-cut answer. I don't think it really matters either. What matters is really wrapping your head around why Hero RB and Zero RB are strategies that you can implement. And understanding that there are some leagues where it's more beneficial to go with those strategies.