970: Buy Candidates

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 970 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. I do this series of episodes each year, where I go through some of my favorite buy and sell candidates in dynasty. Buy candidates being players you might want to consider trading for, and sell candidates being players you might want to trade away. It's pretty straightforward. Now, as usual, my goal isn't just hand you a list of guys and just say, hey, go trade for these guys. I want to explain the why. I also don't think about my trade strictly from that kind of perspective. I've talked about this for years and years now, but getting a deal done in fantasy football involves looking at your trade partner and filling their needs with something that you have. It's not about having this really small consideration set of 7 or 8 players and saying, I won't trade unless it's for this particular guy. You'll never get a trade done that way. Nevertheless, I want to at least share a handful of players that I'll be scoping out in my leagues over the next handful of months. And since this is a buy candidates episode, a lot of these players, they're on the cheaper side. It's not that I'm against trading for a big name player, quite the opposite. It's just that if I'm trying to call out players who are most accessible for you to trade for, those guys are naturally going to be on the cheaper side. So some of the players on today's list, they are in dart throw territory. But often, those players can be the difference in winning and losing in dynasty. Anyway, enough with my rambling. We'll get to those buy candidates in just a second. First, the big game is this weekend, and Underdog has you covered. Underdog is celebrating the big game by giving everyone a no-sweat entry, which means you either cash in or you get your entry fee back in bonus credit. Join Underdog before the big game kicks off on Sunday by signing up with promo code LATEROUND to get up to $1,000 in bonus cash when you make your first deposit. And you get a free pick. And you get the no-sweat entry. Check it all out today, underdogfantasy.com. Also, remember that the Late-Round Prospect Guide is available for pre-order. There's some cool enhancements that I'm making to the guide this year, but aside from those, you get profiles of every running Mac and wide receiver who are going to be at the combine. You get year two profiles of all relevant NFL sophomores. You get to know what goes into these models and so much more. Head to lateraound.com right now and pre-order the guide for $14.99. When it launches on March 10th, that price will jump up by $5. And yes, you get an updated version of that guide within 24 hours of the NFL draft ending. I usually have that updated version out the night of the final day of the draft. Again, that's lateround.com. Pre-order the prospect guide and make sure it's the 2025 prospect guide today.

So the way I went about this was that I looked at my dynasty rankings, which I did update for February, and I compared those rankings to what we see over at keeptradecut.com. It's not perfect, but it at least tells me some players who I'm higher or lower on versus the market. And then from there, I chose a handful to talk about today. Now, I'm going to jump around from player to player on this episode, so the guys and I mention, they're in no particular order, just for the record. We'll kick things off with probably the least surprising player on this list, Jalen Waddle. The sentiment around Waddle, it's naturally pretty negative. He had a bad year. He was one of the worst picks at ADP this past year in redraft, and he can't ever seem to stay healthy. That's all driving his price down in my eyes. But I said it before, I'll say it again. Waddle is a very talented wide receiver, and it's not like he hasn't shown up in fantasy football. Prior to 2024, Waddle had back-to-back seasons with the yards per route run rate above 2.5. He was an elite prospect who had a really, really good rookie year. That led to a strong year two score. Now, the year two model, for anyone who's unaware, it's a model of mine that looks at a player's prospect score and his rookie season numbers, to try and predict how well he's going to perform in year two and year three of his NFL career. Now, I talked about Waddle on my Things I Got Wrong episode a couple of weeks back, and on that show, I mentioned how the Dolphins switch up their offense and force more looks to both John U Smith and Devon Aitchan. Waddle wasn't the one who benefited from Tua Tungabaya Loa's lower average depth of target this past year. But when Waddle and Tua were both healthy together, his PPR points per game, it was close to 13 That's not fantastic, but it's not nearly as bad as the 10 PPR points that he actually averaged per game. And that's after 3 years of 15.4, 15.3, and 14.2 PPR points per game. No one should be selling Waddle as a cornerstone piece in Dynasty, but he's had a really underrated start to his career. I'm not going to let this past season completely derail things, which is why I'm a few wide receiver spots ahead of the market with Jalen Waddle. I expect to bounce back in 2025, just given what we've seen from him through the first 4 years of his career. And that could look even better and be even easier if there's some unforeseen movement with Tyreek Hill. Which doesn't seem out of the question right now. There's kind of a similar story for Chris Alave. I'm also higher on Alave versus the market right now. Alave's had good peripherals to start his NFL career. Maybe he's not an Alpha, but he's a really good wide receiver. He just had trouble staying healthy in 2024 And let's be honest, guys, situationally, he hasn't been in the best spot in the world. I think those factors make him a more volatile pick on today's show than someone like Jalen Waddell. Alave has a concussion problem. That can obviously go south. That's risky. We should probably also feel better about Jalen Waddell's short-term potential than Chris Alave's, just given the situation. But I'm in the business of trying to accumulate talent in Dynasty. And to me, Chris Alave, very talented wide receiver. Did you know that Alave's never finished a season with a yards per route run rate below 2? Yards per route run is a pretty predictive metric. It's obviously not everything. I like to pair it up with like points per game to get a more comprehensive look at how good or bad a player was in a given year. I like to use the metric a lot, but of course it's not flawless. No metric is. But get this, over his first three years, Alave's had yards per route run rates according to PFF data of 2.42, 2.07, and 2.13. Some of you may have no idea what that means, but typically anything above 2 is a really strong yards per route run rate. And get this, among wide receivers who started their NFL career in 2011 onward, there's been just 13 to hit a yards per route run rate of 2 in each of their first three seasons. And that's with a minimum of 100 routes run each season. One of them is Chris Alave, like I just said. The others, though, are Randall Cobb, AJ Green, Julio Jones, Mike Evans, Odell Beckham, Tyreek Hill, Michael Thomas, Cooper Cup, Deebo Samuel, AJ Brown, Justin Jefferson, and Jamar Chase. Alave's prospect score was excellent. His year two score was excellent. He maybe hasn't given us a huge season yet. He's basically been like a low-end wide receiver too at best. But to me, the potential is still there. And I don't think the risk is that insane when the market is pricing him at wide receiver 23 But there is some risk given those concussions and given a situation in New Orleans. Some of you may not want to take that on, which is understandable. I'm just willing to.