941: Mailbag 11/8/24

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone, it's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 941 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Before I get to these mailbag questions, I want to remind you to check out Underdog. Over on Underdog, you can play Pick'em and Champions mode, and of course, you can do snake drafts each week. Just looking at the lobby, there are literally over 20 drafts you can join right now for this week's slate. To check it all out, head to underdogfantasy.com and sign up with promo code LATEROUND. That will get you a deposit offer. It's also going to get you a link to my rest of season rankings. Those are updated for you every Tuesday. That's only if you sign up with promo code LATEROUND, make a deposit and start playing. Now, let's get to these mailbag questions.

The first question this week is from Twitter. It's from at tberg underscore tray for it says, when talking trades and selling players high, I often hear fantasy analysts say, wait until next week because they have a good matchup this week. Shouldn't you be using this good matchup as a case to help you sell the player? Thanks for tuning in to my question. So I said it before. I'll say it again. Calling a player a buy or a sell, it's not as easy as it sounds, because everyone's going to have a different feel for how that player is valued within the market. We unfortunately don't have some generally accepted cost for each player during the season, like we do at the beginning of one, which at the beginning of one, it's average draft position. We kind of have that with rest of season rankings, but it's just not as readily available as ADP data is. Now with that in mind, I think you can really approach this in both ways. The reason I like to throw the caveat of he has a good or bad matchup this week, so be aware of that, is because people are reactionary. So if a player is a cell high and that player has another good matchup upcoming, after that next week, people might end up liking him that much more. And that's not always pushed into his cost if you're just saying, oh, hey, look, he has a good matchup this week too. Like, if a running back is a cell but he's facing the Panthers this week, I'm probably going to hesitate calling him a cell because we know that matchups against the Panthers tend to be great news for running backs. We're playing probability. We know that running backs, when they face Carolina, they perform better than their season-long average. Now, you can tell your league mate, hey, this back gets Carolina this week too. And maybe that's going to help your case. If that happens, then okay, sell him. But in my experience, fantasy football managers want to see production. They don't want to buy with the intent to forecast that production. It's why buys and sells are almost always based on production itself. We're trying to find players who are over or underperforming, usually based on their underlying metrics. So you can do this. I just think that when you're talking about every league out there, when we're giving advice to tons and tons of people, people won't give schedule enough thought. They won't care enough about that upcoming matchup. They just want to see production.

The next question is also from Twitter's from at Big E underscore Houston. All it says is Xavier Legette thoughts. So when we look at the metrics, I think it's kind of a mixed bag for Xavier Legette. PFF right now has him with a pretty mediocre grade. His yards per route run this season, it's only 1.16. When you look at rookie wide receivers since 2011, who have yards per route run rates below that 1.2 mark, you're not looking at many hits. Devontae Adams is the go-to with this kind of analysis. I actually talked about him earlier this week when doing similar analysis with Cedric Tillman. But outside of Devontae Adams, it's really only like Darnell Mooney. Now the season's not over, that number can improve. He's also working with not-so-great quarterback play. But you can also compare his number to other players on the team. And it's not better than other players on the team. And then on top of that, there were some flaws to his prospect profile. Usually in these circumstances, if the prospect was really good, it's easier to sort of excuse a down rookie season, or poor production, or poor efficiency marks. And I don't want to say that Legette was like a bad, bad prospect. He wasn't terrible, but he definitely had some issues. That's all outlined in the Late-Round Prospect Guide. I mean, I talked about that on this show. So my thoughts on Legette is that he should be rostered in Redraft. I mean, obviously he should be rostered in Dynasty too. It's still early in his career. It's still early in this season to really definitively go one way or another here. But I'll just say this. He's not trending in the right direction.