975: Mailbag - Travis Hunter's Analytical Profile, Rome Odunze's Outlook, and More

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, 975 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog.

Thanks for tuning in. Before we get into the mailbag questions this week, remember that The Late-Round Prospect Guide is available for pre-order right now, and you should check it out. This year's guide is even more information than ever before. You get info on everything that goes in my prospect and year two models. You get profiles for every running back and wide receiver at this year's combine. You get year two profiles for about 40 second year running backs and wide receivers. I've added what I'm calling categories of the model this year that help categorize players in different buckets depending on their overall scores in both the ZAP model and the year two model. I think you guys are really going to enjoy the Prospect Guide. You can order it right now on lateround.com for $14.99. On March 10th, when it launches, that price is going to go up by $5. And then also, even though the fantasy football season is over, it's not actually over. Over on Underdog right now, you can enter drafts for the 2025 season. If you know prospects really well, if you have a good grasp on free agency, you can have an edge on your competition and win some of those contests. If you want to check it out, head to underdogfantasy.com and sign up. When you do, use promo code LATEROUND to get up to $1,000 in bonus credits. Again, that's underdogfantasy.com, promo code LATEROUND.

The first question this week is from Twitter. It's one that I'm going to spend some time on, but it's from at steven0128. It says, what are you doing with Travis Hunter? So, I'm just going to be completely up front before I start this deep dive into my process and my general thoughts on Hunter as a player. I really have no idea. Hunter is actually a tough evaluation for me. I hinted at this on Tuesday's episode, but his analytical profile, it's not nearly as good as I thought it was going to be. Because there are some really, really smart people like Matt Harmon over at Reception Perception saying that Travis Hunter is unbelievably legit at wide receiver. But the stuff that I look at analytically doesn't fully agree. Now, I think this is a good time to say that for the record, I don't look only at my prospect model and say, this is definitely the way that it's going to be. Someone like Matt, a friend of mine who I have on this show each year, he's brilliant at what he does. I really respect his work. So part of the reason the Hunter evaluation is really tough is because I respect his work that much and others throughout the space. But let's just look at this analytically. In the ZAP model, Hunter has a breakout score of 66.9. Now that's not a death sentence, but it's also not nearly as high as the other high-end wide outs in this class. And it's not close to a lot of the wide receivers from last year's class. So the question is, why is the breakout score so low? Well breakout score is driven by receiving yards per team pass attempt, and that's age adjusted. Some players can increase their breakout score even with a later breakout, as long as that later breakout is unbelievably good. A good example of that, Trey Harris. When Travis Hunter was at Jackson State, we didn't get that much out of him as a freshman. Nothing there counted towards his breakout score. Then in 2023, he had a receiving yards per team pass attempt rate of 2.03 when prorated for games missed. That was bumped up to 2.13 when adjusted for strength of opponent. That's what breakout score does. So that 2.13 number is what's being used for his sophomore season. And then last year happened, his monster season, his Heisman winning season. And last year, his yards per team pass attempt was 2.61. That dropped slightly to 2.48 when adjusted for strength of opponent. Now, you heard it earlier this week, but with stud-wide receivers in the NFL, their average best season receiving yards per team pass attempt rates are over 3 Plenty of them were below that mark, and I wouldn't call Hunter's number bad. I'm just saying that versus the hype, his number in that category is not as good as I expected. Maybe my expectations were just too high. That's just how I feel. Now, a question I had was, well, maybe this is like a Pukka Nakua, a Lad McConkey situation. Were their receiving yards per team pass attempt rates? They were low, but their yards per route run numbers were really high. Nakua and McConkey had awesome per route run numbers, even though their receiving yards per team pass attempt numbers weren't that strong. Basically, their teams weren't giving them enough routes. That's not really the case for Hunter. It is when you look and see that he was third in routes run by a decent margin for Colorado as a sophomore. He trailed Xavier Weaver and Jimmy Horn by almost 200 routes run that year. That will impact his receiving yards per team pass attempt numbers. But his career yards per route run, according to PFF, it's ninth best in this class. His best season yards per route run, which came last year, 29th out of the 49 wide receivers of this year's NFL Combine. Among qualified FBS wide receivers last year, according to PFF, Hunter was 87th in yards per route run against Man, 42nd against Zone. Now going back to breakout score from 2011 to 2022, so we're giving wide receivers at least three years of NFL experience here. But from 2011 to 2022, we had 43 wide receivers get drafted in the first two rounds with a breakout score below 80 Remember, Hunter's at 66, so he's a decent bit below that mark. We've had some hits in there. Cortland Sutton, Debo Samuel, T Higgins. Again, I'm not trying to sell Hunter as a bad prospect, but of those 43, only eight of them gave us 14 or more PPR points per game in one of their first three years in the league. That's a rate of 18.6%. When look at the alternate group of players with breakout scores above 80, that rises to almost 45%.