960: Mailbag 12/13/24

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason, and this is episode 960 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting to the mailbag questions this week, I want to remind you to check out Underdog. Right now over on Underdog, you can enter into Snake Drass for this week's slate of games, but there are playoff contests available for you too. If you think that you have a better grasp on the league's playoff picture than others right now, then you can have a serious edge in those contests. To check them out and more, head to underdogfantasy.com or download the Underdog app, and when you sign up, of course, use promo code LATEROUND. That will get you a really nice deposit offer, as well as my rest of season rankings if you still want those. Again, underdogfantasy.com, promo code LATEROUND.

The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Isaac. It says, Can you speak more about Jayden Reed? Was this a one-game wonder with zero catches, or is this past week showing in line with the peripherals? Moving forward, can someone trust him in their lineup, especially after the team put up 31 points and didn't use Reed? So I got a couple of questions about Jayden Reed and his goose egg. Let's talk about him. I've brought up Reed's peripherals multiple times on the show over the last couple of months. How there seems to be an anchoring bias going on with him given how hot he started the season. But make no mistake, he has not been that strong of a fantasy asset. Reed's averaging 10 PPR points per game since Week 4 He's seen more than 6 targets in a game just once. Because the Packers have found their run game, they've been way below zero in pass rate over expected over their last 6 games, every single game. According to Fantasy Life Data, they've been above average in pass rate over expected just 3 times this year. So that's playing a role. But so is their deployment of Reed. The hope was that he'd get more run after starting the season off so strong, but he hasn't. They like to use him in the slot. He's run over 77% of his routes from the slot this year according to PFF. Meanwhile, Green Bay's 12th in the NFL and 11th personnel usage. So they're not using Jayden Reed on every down like they would a perimeter receiver. And we saw that in week 14 Against the Lions where they went pretty run heavy overall, Christian Watson ran a route on 22 of a possible 24 drop backs. Jayden Reed was at 15 of a possible 24 So there are 2 things that are coming together here for Reed. Number 1, the Packers are run heavy. Only 2 teams have a lower pass rate than the Packers this year, the Steelers and the Eagles. Green Bay has actually been dead last in pass rate in neutral game script environments. Other pass rate over expected formulas have the Packers easily in the bottom 5 They are a run heavy team. That obviously means that fewer targets are going to go around. But then you layer on the fact that Reed isn't a full time player because they use them in the slot. You've got a recipe for really inconsistent production. This isn't new though. The zero that he took in a very good match up for slot receivers, that was kind of new and that was pretty bad. But Reed has been largely big play and touchdown dependent all year long. Which can make him still viable because he's a really good player, and good players can make those things happen more often, but it also makes him extremely volatile. This is why I went from being higher than the market on Reed around weeks 3 or 4, and then I've been way lower than the market ever since. Because they didn't change his usage, and the Packers started to really make it clear that they wanted to run the ball this year. It's torpedo Jayden Reed's fantasy value. He's definitely tough to trust. I do expect them to use him a little bit more this week. They'll probably force the issue a little bit too. But overall, Jayden Reed is not a must start in fantasy football. It's been that way for a while.

The next question is from Twitter. It's from at Billy Scrimshot says, How did Sincere McCormick look in your prospect model both pre and post draft? I thought he was going to be a good dynasty sleeper, but didn't expect it to take quite so long for him to get a shot. Your thoughts for 2025 and beyond? So when Sincere McCormick started to get more work, I think it was easy to brush it off as nothing of significance. But looking at my prospect model in more detail, he went undrafted, so that hurts his score, but he had some really good marks. Now, some of that's because he went to a smaller program. His production at that program is going to naturally be better than someone who played at like Ohio State. But I've also found that draft capital largely captures that side of things. We don't need to heavily adjust. The problem, though, McCormick didn't get draft capital. That makes it a tougher situation to navigate. But as you guys know, I introduced breakout score this past year in the model. And McCormick had a 94.5 breakout score. That's really, really good. His top season in yards per team play was over 2 He had a top pro rated reception chair season of 11.3%. Now the nice part about having my prospect guides is I can now look back and see how I felt about a prospect when they were coming out. Because McCormick wasn't drafted, I didn't have any sort of post draft update with him. But I did profile him in the guide pre-draft because he did go to the NFL Combine. And his profile is really brief because he wasn't a high-end player. But this is from the prospect guide. This is the first prospect guide that I ever produced. It says, McCormick is another smaller school back who had solid production marks in the Z-Prospect model, which is now the ZAP model. The one spot to knock him may be on the athleticism side, since he turned in a speed score of just 91.6. That's awfully close to not hitting the model's threshold of 90 Which, by the way, I don't calculate it the exact same way these days. And then the blurb finishes by saying, but he got there, and the model likes him at least compared to projected draft capital as a result. So my numbers actually liked McCormick. It's just that him not doing anything until 2024 made it kind of difficult to be overly bullish. But we and I, because I didn't talk about this until now, we should have been more excited than the market when McCormick started to see a little bit more work, and that's my bad. That's on me. Regardless, I actually think he's a decent player.