921: Mailbag 10/4/24

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, 921 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. And thanks for tuning in. Underdog is the best place to play fantasy sports, and during October, Underdog is running a different promo every single day with Boosttober. If you sign up now, you not only get access to those promos, but you'll also get a deposit bonus and a free copy of my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are updated every Tuesday through the end of the fantasy season. And with the link that Underdog provides when you sign up, you get access to those updates. All you have to do is head to underdogfantasy.com and sign up with promo code LATEROUND. You can also download the app. Then make a deposit and start to play. And then you're good to go. That's promo code LATEROUND. The first question this week is from Twitter. It's from at P2WFantasy. It says, which current team RB2 not in a true split committee has the best chance to take over their backfield? Now, I won't mention guys like Nick Chubb or Jonathan Brooks because that would be cheating. We'll just go with natural takeovers. With a question like this, you just have to look at starters who don't have studley profiles. And you mention not in a true split committee. So we're looking at players who maybe have seen like a quarter of the team's running back rushes so far. I think the easy answer here is Tyrone Tracy. Devon Singletary is a fine player, but he's not a special running back. And the Giants are a team that may not be ultra competitive this year. So there's a chance that we see more and more Tyrone Tracy, who's got a lot more burst than Singletary. Tracy does things that Singletary doesn't, and Eric Gray for that matter. He was an older prospect, which knocked him down a little bit in my ZAP model, but he also had a good receiving profile because he played wide receiver in college. He can do a lot out of that backfield. Again, he brings a different element to that backfield. So I think there's a chance that we see a much bigger split between these two running backs as the season unfolds. It might start as soon as this weekend because Devon Singletary's banged up. This next question is from Patreon, it's from Colin. It says, is there any player or players this year that you aren't giving up on even if they had a very rough start? I still see some diehard believers in Mark Andrews or Justin Herbert, even though they haven't produced well for fantasy for the first four weeks. Now, I'm not that into those guys, but yeah, I think there are a lot of players who should be better than where they currently stand. Now, I wasn't massively high on Calvin Ridley this year, per se, but I did like the Titans offense overall. I thought that was an offense we should be targeting in general. They had an opportunity to be a surprise offense, and that's been wrong so far. The ambiguous backfield there has largely been okay. Tony Pollard has emerged, Tajay Spears is coming back from that injury, and he could be useful though too. We saw some usability from him last week. That backfield has been okay enough, but the passing attack has been a huge problem. But like I said on the 10 Trends episode, they've had it bad. Will Levis has faced the toughest quarterback schedule in the league by just a fantasy points allowed. And the White Outs has seen a bottom three receiver schedule. Not only that, but they're still going slow with DeAndre Hopkins. He's seen route participation rates of just 51%, 50%, and 57% over his last three. Like I know this sounds insane, but I think buying into the passing attack for bench players right now, like guys on your bench, especially with the Titans on by, that's not the dumbest thing in the world to do. Worst case, they don't turn things around. But I'm telling you, the schedule during the second half of the season is so much better than the first half of the season. And maybe we can create this narrative that there's just been growing pains with the new coaching staff. Now obviously, Will Levis has not been that good, but better matchups might help him out a little bit, as will experience. So Calvin Ridley, DeAndre Hopkins, I wouldn't totally give up on those guys just yet. Now I've also seen a lot of people wanting to give up on players who are injured. I don't agree with that. Jalen Warren is one of them who comes to mind. Like, Najee Harris has not been very good this year. He's bottom 10 in success rate, that's according to NextGen stats. His EPA per rush isn't very good. His rushing yards over expected per attempt, that's also bottom 10 I know we have Arthur Smith memes to deal with, but Pittsburgh's a competitive team who needs to use their best players. And if you look at that offense, the only real dynamic player consistently dynamic player is George Pickens. We've seen Jaylen Warren give us that juice in the past. If Jaylen Warren is fully healthy, this backfield could look a lot different. And if you look solely at PPR points per game at just production, you're probably not very pleased with Lad McConkie's output. He's wide receiver 42 right now in points per game, nothing special. He hasn't had a very good year production wise, but his peripherals have been really good, especially for a rookie wide receiver, and they're trending in the right direction. His route participation has been above 85% over his last two games. His target shares have consistently been good pretty much all year long, but the last two weeks, they've been at 32% and 27%. He's also top 20 across the league and yards per route run. We know that rookies typically perform better during the second half of the season. So, I would not be getting rid of Lad McConkey. He might even be a buy candidate on next week's 15 transactions episode. And that's pretty much true of any rookie at this point. You have to be patient with a lot of them. But there are a lot of players who fall into this bucket, but I wanted to give you three kind of different examples. One of them is due to schedule, one of them is due to injury, and then one of them due to experience.