925: Mailbag 10/11/24

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, 925 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thank you for tuning in. Underdog is the best place to play fantasy sports. You can play Pick'em in champions mode, or if you're like me, you can join some snake drafts for each week's slate of games. During October, Underdog is running a different promo every single day with Boosttober. You can take advantage of those promos by signing up today. And if you sign up, you'll also get access to my rest of season rankings, which are updated in season every Tuesday. All you have to do is head to underdogfantasy.com or download the app. Sign up, and when you sign up, use promo code LATEROUND. That will get you access to these promos, a deposit bonus, and my rest of season rankings. Underdog is so much fun. Check it out now, promo code LATEROUND.

The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Lee. It says, Hey legend, with Nico Collins on IR, it feels like Tank Dell should be in line for a target bump. However, Dell is already running a lot of routes, but seems to be struggling to get separation and isn't earning targets. To what extent do you think Dell's upside is capped by what we seem to be seeing on tape? Dell was the biggest question that I got this week. And to be completely honest, I don't have a super concrete answer. From what I've seen, I do think he might be just recovering from all the stuff that's happened to him. He was hurt last year, as we know, but he was shot during the off season and he was hurt during the season. So I do think that all of that is playing a role here. Matt Harmon, who studies wide receivers more closely than I do, he's echoed that sentiment, that Dell just isn't exactly the same player right now that he was last year. But I think we should add the word yet to that, because players sometimes just need more reps. They need more opportunity. They need that before they get going again. Not only that, I know people don't want to hear this, but we also have a little bit of a sample size problem here. This time of year, we do need to react to what we're seeing. Absolutely. If you don't react throughout a fantasy season, you're going to lose. What's important, though, is not overreacting. Overreacting to smaller sample sizes. And it's easy to do that with Dell. But there was an instance earlier this season where he was an inch away from a huge touchdown. When small things like that end up happening, it changes our narrative completely about a player. And it's a player who, again, hasn't been healthy for the full five games this year, which means our sample size is even smaller for Tank Dell. So I'm cautiously optimistic here because of what we saw last year, which was an elite rookie season within the context of rookie seasons. And so far this year, he's still running routes on 86% or so of Houston's drop backs and healthy games. That's in an offense with a good offensive coordinator and a good quarterback. Combine that with what we saw a year ago, and you at least have upside. Regardless of what we've seen so far this year, they're still upside with Tank Dell. And without Nico Collins, opportunity should come. We just have to hope that he's healthy enough to take advantage. So right now, I don't think that I would sell Tank Dell. I don't think that I would take this information of Nico Collins being sidelined and assume that someone in my league is going to value Tank Dell a whole lot. Because look at what Tank Dell has done. Fantasy managers still operate off of production. And what players have done. And since Tank Dell hasn't given us that production, I can't imagine that the market is super bullish on Dell, even with this Nico Collins injury. So overall, right now, I just think Dell is a hold. This next question is from Twitter. It's from at CT Ulrich. It says, is there any projected impact to Jets players based on the head coach change in New York? So if you read the reports or even listen to just Aaron Rodgers talk about the situation, it was very clear that they know that they need to do something different offensively. And then on Thursday, they announced that Nathaniel Hackett will be turning play calling duties over to Todd Downing. Downing was the offensive coordinator in Tennessee in 2021 and 2022, where his teams were extremely run heavy. But that's not surprising because they had this guy named Derek Henry. When he was offensive coordinator for the Raiders in 2017, the opposite was true. They were actually pretty pass heavy, even in neutral situations. So, I think that at least might tell us that he'll cater his offense to his personnel. That's a good thing. But I'll be honest, I don't think there's anything in his history that suggests that he's some game changing offensive coordinator. He had a below average season for Vegas during the Carr era in terms of touchdowns per game. And we did see a drop in offensive production in Tennessee when Arthur Smith left and Downing took over. Maybe that would have happened with Smith, but it's certainly not a good thing for Downing. The thing is, I just don't think that things can get that much worse than what we've seen the last couple of weeks for New York, offensively. We have plenty of evidence that Nathaniel Hackett, he's not it as a play caller. So I'm fine with this change and I think that we should feel okay about it. So not really the head coaching change, but that kind of change is what can impact this Jets offense, the players in fantasy football. But also guys, I know this isn't very analytical for me to say, but when a big change like that happens at the top, it can kind of be motivating on a lot of fronts. These are humans at the end of the day. These are human beings playing football. Robert Sala had been objectively not a good coach throughout his time in New York. I think a lot of us were surprised that he had his job for this long. There's enough talent on this offense to be optimistic about any sort of change. I really hope that this results in Breece Hall getting a lot more work as a receiver in space. They need to do that more often, even if Braylon Allen sees more work on the ground. They need to use Breece Hall more as a receiver. That could very easily happen this week because he has a very good match against Buffalo, who struggled against receiving backs. This next question is from Patreon. It's from Rob. It says, You mentioned on your Patreon livestream that a running back reception is some multiple greater than a carry. Can you expand on that more? Is it because they get more fantasy points per reception than per carry? Is it a PPR only stat? Thanks. So I talked about targets versus rush attempts on a Patreon livestream this past week. Historically, running back targets have been far more valuable than running back rush attempts in all formats. And when people talk about running back so often, like in Tank Bigsby's case, they're only referring to what the running back is doing on the ground. It's not that things can't change, like for Bigsby. It's that for whatever reason, the ground game work gets a lot more weight than the receiving work. But let's break this down by looking at 2024 data only, through week five. One could argue that this data is going to be more favorable for rushing numbers, just based on how things have gone down this year. But that just makes this whole argument even more convincing. And I'm recording this before the Thursday night game, so I won't have that data. Now, I'm going to remove fumbles from this data too, because fumbles can happen on any sort of play. We'll just look at how many points are being scored on rush attempts, and how many points are being scored via running back targets. So far this season, we've had over 3,300 running back rush attempts, almost 15,000 running back rushing yards, and well over 100 running back rushing touchdowns. Put that all together, and running backs are scoring.64 fantasy points per rush. Again, that's slightly more favorable than what we've seen throughout history. This is actually favoring the ground game argument a little bit more, not the target side of things. So.64 points per rush attempt. Now clearly, targets are going to be worth more in PPR formats than in standard leagues, where you don't get points per reception. In 2024, a running back target has been worth 1.6 PPR points. It's been worth 1.2 half PPR points, which is almost double from what you get from a rush attempt. And then it's been worth.78 standard fantasy points. So even when you're seeing zero points for a reception, targets are more valuable than rush attempts. Like we're going to have running backs out there, where a target for them is worth three times the value as a rush attempt in PPR formats, which is why I focus so heavily on the pass catching element in my analysis, but it matters for all formats, not just PPR ones. Now the obvious response here is that running backs see more work on the ground than they do through the air. That's 100% true. I'm not saying that rush attempts don't matter. A player like Derek Henry, he can be valuable because he's proven to be an outlier on the ground for years, not just in terms of efficiency, but he also sees a ton of work. I would love to have a running back who sees 50 rush attempts per game. He would be my RB1 in fantasy football. But if one player is going to see 15 to 17 rush attempts in zero targets, and then another one might see five fewer rush attempts per game, but three more targets, in a vacuum, I'm going to prefer the latter player, just as a baseline. This is why all the analysis in the draft guide shows that the best running back picks in fantasy football year in and year out, they're the ones who are seeing double digit percentage target shares, regardless of their ground game work. And the worst ones are the ones who aren't seeing that work through the air. So hopefully that answers your question. But at the end of the day, just think about what a rush attempt is. We see so many rush attempts go up the middle, go to the outside and they gain one or two yards. Very rarely are you going to see that off of a reception. And oftentimes, running backs are going to have greater than 50% catch rates, a lot higher than a 50% catch rate. What that means is when they're targeted, they're generally gaining a good chunk of yards. And then you add in the PPR element, and that's why we see the numbers that we see. So hopefully that helps answer your question.