964: Mailbag 12/20/24

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode 964 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog.

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The first question of the week is an email. It says, Hey JJ, so I took Kyler Murray and Marvin Harrison Jr and many of my fantasy leagues this year. I took my shot on the athletic ability of Marvin Harrison and saw how he could get a majority of target share in that offense. And Kyler Murray, when he's healthy, has put up great numbers in the past and had what I thought would be a safe floor due to his rushing ability. I even made the playoffs in all of those leagues despite Kyler and Marv feeling more like an obstacle to overcome. Can you break down from a statistical point of view what went wrong and why Kyler Murray and Marvin Harrison got me eliminated from my playoffs? Was I wrong to take my shot on these players from the start or is there something that is intangible for why this duo was by all accounts a bust for fantasy football? Hope this ranting email makes sense. Thanks for all the work you do, Eric. Now number one, you got eliminated from the playoffs because they had bad games in week 15 Sometimes that happens. A lot of people made the playoffs with Saquon Barkley or Derrick Henry this past week. They got eliminated. That's why bi-weeks are so important. But look, I talked about Marvin Harrison Jr. on the 10 Trends episode and how even though he's a rookie and our expectations are lower for rookies, based on how good he was as a prospect, his points per game numbers were expected to be higher. Like forget his ADP. Just look at his prospect profile. He should have been better this year. Now, I can't say that he was like a value during draft time. I took him at times, but he wasn't something I was actively targeting this year. I actually wrote a newsletter before the NFL draft, talking about how the difference between Marvin Harrison and Malik neighbor's ADP and early best ball drafts, it didn't make any sense because neighbors was just as good of a prospect. But to me, I think the bottom line is that they're not getting very creative with Marvin Harrison Jr. They don't move them around the formation much at all. You could very, very easily argue that no rookie-wide receiver this season has been asked to do more than Marvin Harrison Jr. But I think he's part of the blame too. He hasn't totally looked the part yet, and I stress the word yet. I still think it's in there. It just isn't in there during his 2024 campaign. Now, with Kyler, I was actively telling you to draft him this year, and that was an L. The statistic I kept going back to was about quarterbacks who averaged over 5 points per game with their legs via rushing. Those guys had really, really good hit rates historically, like really good. Kyler's right at the cusp of that mark. He's averaging 4.96 points per game with his legs this year. So he pretty much got there, albeit barely. But that was also the problem. That was misleading analysis. I made too many assumptions about what his improvement might look like from 2023 to 2024 on the ground. Like last year, coming off a bad knee injury, he averaged 5.3 points per game via rushing. Assuming he'd get there and get beyond that was a clear mistake. And when the player you're analyzing, when his numbers are sort of on the lower bound for some analysis that you're doing, you better hope that the assumption that you're making is correct, or else it can go south, which is exactly what happened with Kyler Murray. I then made the assumption that his passing numbers would be better because you know Marvin Harrison Jr. And his yards per attempt has actually increased year over year, but his touchdown rate has not gotten any better. It's just 3.5%. He hasn't been above the 4% touchdown rate mark since 2021 And that's a problem for fantasy purposes, because touchdowns drive quarterback scoring. Just look at Baker Mayfield. But let me be very clear here. At the quarterback position, we should be striving for high upside, high ceiling players. And I can argue all day long that Kyler was that kind of player entering the year. He'd given us rushing points per game numbers in his history that were well above that 5 mark. I mean, he scored 11 rushing touchdowns in 2020 On a points per game basis, Kyler had never finished outside of QB1 territory. Add in Marvin Harrison Jr, and there was an obvious ceiling. He just hasn't played well enough. The offense isn't nearly as good as I thought it would be. Or at least there was a chance that it was going to be really good. They're below average in total offensive touchdowns scored. They've got almost a 50% pass to rush touchdown rate too. So they not only have just underperformed in scoring touchdowns, but when they've scored, it's generally helped someone like James Connor more, not the pass catchers and not Kyler Murray. Those little things add up a lot. A slightly better touchdown rate, a couple more rushing touchdowns, and then all of a sudden, we're probably viewing this fantasy season from Kyler Murray a little bit differently. So I don't think the process was necessarily horrible for either guy, especially Kyler Murray. It obviously depends on where you drafted them, but there were reasons to like them, with an emphasis on Kyler here. The piece about making assumptions, at least on my end, is one that I can carry over into other seasons, though. And by the way, this kind of analysis, I'm going to be doing it in January when I talk about the things that I got wrong. You can't get better as a player or me as an analyst without holding yourself accountable and seeing if what you did wrong was actually bad process. I'll surely be talking about Kyler Murray again on that show, but I just wanted to let you know this is just the tip of the iceberg.