980: The Truth About Day 3 NFL Draft Selections

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, 980 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. We're in the middle of NFL Draft season. You're reading prospect profiles, you're listening to me talk about my model. For some of you, it might be a little overwhelming. There are a lot of things to remember. Well, we're going to talk about a brand new topic today, just to fill your brain up with more information. But hopefully, it'll actually alleviate some of the cramming that you're doing pre-draft. Now, you often hear myself and others talk about day one, day two, and day three picks in the draft. Day one being the first round or night one of the draft. Day two is round two and three. And then day three is the remaining part of the draft. Every pick is unique and it holds its own individual value. Let's first get that out of the way. When I'm generalizing and I'm saying this guy is going to be a day two pick, I don't mean that a player getting drafted 35th overall is the same as a player getting drafted 80th overall. Both of those guys are day two selections, but the 35th overall player has much better draft capital. When we get to day three though, things generally do shift. The picks that we're talking about hold less value. Teams are going to be more willing to swing for the fences or do things that they otherwise wouldn't do. They're not as afraid of missing on those picks because the value of those picks aren't as high. It's no different than how you feel at the end of your fantasy drafts. You have a sure why not kind of attitude. Now, an NFL team obviously wants to hit on every pick they make. Don't get me wrong, but the quality of player drafted on day three is clearly going to be worse. And there's not as much anxiety for a front office to get those picks totally right. For all of those reasons, those picks perform a lot worse in fantasy football. I'm just not sure people realize how much worse. Like, what's the actual probability of finding a gem in fantasy football who was drafted day three? How should that change your approach in rookie drafts? I'm going to talk about that today. I'm going to give you guys the truth about day three NFL draft selections. Now, before digging in, I just want to send another reminder about the Late-Round Prospect Guide. The guide includes 160 pages of information on my prospect and year two models. There's 80 prospect profiles. There's about 40 year two profile write-ups. There's rankings and more. And if you purchase the pre-draft version, you get the post-draft version as well. That post-draft version will have updated write-ups and it will be sent to you the final night of the NFL Draft. That way you're ready for your rookie drafts immediately. Learn more about it and get yourself a copy by heading to lateraound.com. And if you're on the site, subscribe to the free newsletter too. You can get content straight to your inbox from yours truly. And like I've been saying, it's an easy way to support Late-Round Fantasy Football. But that's all on lateraound.com.

So, the focus today is only going to be on Running Max and Wide Receivers, because those are the positions that we're focused on most in Fantasy Football. And we'll kick things off at Running Back. Now, my prospect model only looks at overall draft pick, not specific day that the player was drafted. So on today's episode, I'm going to refer to Day 3 as any player who was selected after Pick 100 There's technically going to be some Day 2 players that I talk about here, but I'll specifically call them out if need be. Now, the Zat model dates back to 2011, so I have every Running Mac and Wide Receiver in the model since 2011 who either went to the NFL Combine or who was drafted. Usually there's a massive amount of overlap here. We don't typically get a ton of draft selections from players who weren't at the NFL Combine. Now, we don't have a massive sample of first-round Running Macs in the database because teams just don't spend up at the position in the NFL Draft, not like they do at Wide Receiver. We've had 18 first-round Running Macs since 2011 Then with Day 2 selections, our players drafted from pick 33 through pick 100, we have 75, and there are 190 of them when looking at pick 100 through the end of the draft. Now, when I do my prospect analysis, I'm often looking at how players performed across the first three years of their career. We can't really just look at rookie season numbers and draw conclusions. We don't know everything about a player after one year, even though we do learn a lot. So I'm going to do that again here today. We'll shrink our sample down from every player since 2011 to all players drafted through 2022 That's going to allow every player to be eligible to play three or more years in the league. Again, the whole goal of today's show is just lay out some facts and some stats about day three players. To get that analysis, we need to see how these players performed across some time frame. But also, the only way that we can have context for all of this is by looking at day one and day two players as well. So how about this? Among the running mags drafted after PIC 100 from 2011 through 2022, 20 of them were able to score 12 or more PPR points per game in either year one, year two, or year three. Minimum eight games played for that season to count. 15 of those day three picks hit 14 or more PPR points per game. That's usually around an RB2 season. And then five of them scored 16 or more PPR points per game. That's essentially an RB1 season. That means that we're roughly going to get one, one and a half running mags on day three every year who end up giving us an RB2 season in either year one, year two, or year three. But what does that really mean when compared to other running mags who are drafted earlier? Well, day one running mags have had fewer players get to 12 or 14 PPR points per game than day three ones during our time frame. But that's obviously because the denominator is greater for day three running mags. More players are drafted late. There's a higher chance for some hits. When you look at the rate in which these players are hitting different points per game thresholds, it becomes clear that getting something of substance from a day three running mag is pretty rare. Round one running mags across their first three years, they'll get to 14 or more PPR points per game at a 69% rate. For day two guys, it's a 35% rate. For day three running mags, it's just 9.2%.