981: Mailbag - Favorite Late-Round Rookie Picks, Omarion Hampton's Ranking, 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, 981 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast.

Thanks for tuning in. Before getting to the mailbag questions this week, I want to send another reminder about The Late-Round Prospect Guide. The Guide is 160 pages of nerdy prospect information. You get to know what goes into my prospect and year two models. You'll get write-ups on 80 running Mac and wide receiver prospects. There's about 40 year two profile write-ups too. There's rankings and tiers and so much more. Best of all, it's updated after the draft, like immediately after the NFL draft. You'll have new write-ups for relevant players. You get tight end zap scores. You get updated rankings and more on the final day of the NFL draft. It'll be all finished that night. That way, you'll be all set to dominate your rookie drafts right away. Learn more about it and get a copy by heading to lateraound.com. And if you're on the site, subscribe to the free newsletter too. You get content straight to your inbox with that newsletter. Plus, it's just an easy way to support Late-Round Fantasy Football. But check all of that out, lateround.com.

The first question this week is from Twitter's from atff underscore rebel. It says, JJ, given your last podcast and findings on Day 3 players, curious about what you think we should be doing with our third and fourth round rookie draft picks. Thanks. Always appreciate the insights. Thank you. So I got questions like this a lot after that episode, which isn't that surprising. When you hear that Day 3 picks generally aren't that good, you start to wonder, why am I even holding these rookie picks if we know that a lot of those guys are going to be drafted in round 3 and round 4 of our rookie drafts? Now, there are a lot of different directions that I could go with this question, but I think the first thing to remember is sort of the thing that I always go back to when I talk about Dynasty. There are two big categories that a player is going to fall into in Dynasty. One of those categories is production. How is that player actually producing? The other is value, as in, how is the market valuing that player? Your goal in Dynasty is not just to build the most productive roster. You can do that by buying into veteran players immediately competing. It's to also build the most valuable roster, because that way you have a shot to be competitive year in and year out. Younger players who haven't had their big breakout are players who hold a lot of value, but they don't have as much production. But Derek Henry, I mean, we know he's likely going to be productive next year, but that doesn't match his value because he's 31 years old. Now, with the study that I did earlier in the week, I only looked at the production side of things. Even if a player doesn't hit a high production ceiling, you can still gain value with that player. Like, look at Jalen McMillan. McMillan was a day two pick, sure, but he was a round three player in rookie drafts. He was wide receiver 30 earlier this off season when I shouted him out on this podcast as a sell candidate. I mean, according to Keep Trade Cut, you can still trade Jalen McMillan for Devante Adams straight up. He's being valued that way strictly due to the fact that there's potential with his profile. The odds of Jalen McMillan actually hitting 14 or more PPR points per game this year or next year, even if you're bullish, those odds aren't amazing. It's obviously possible, but it's not necessarily likely. Even still, you can flip them for a potential wide receiver one here in 2025 And the only reason you can do that is because you took a third-round draft pick, you selected a player who performed well but not great, and you watched his value rise. McMillan gave us a stretch of strong performances last year, but he still hasn't given fantasy managers some huge season yet, right? What I'm getting at is, fantasy football is just as much about the micro actions as it is the macro ones. You can still extract value from round three and round four rookie picks if you're a decent evaluator who knows what to look for. Now, of course, a lot of those picks are going to inevitably fail, but the market knows that, and that brings up another key point here, which is probably the biggest point. You're not going to get a super great contributor for a third or fourth round pick. Like, right now, a mid-third round pick, according to Keep Trade Cut, is getting you Demario Douglas or Josh Palmer. Neither one of those guys is likely going to win you a fantasy championship. Their odds of getting to 12-14 PPR points per game, it's arguably worse than the odds that I talked about earlier this week. It's just that people think in terms of safety as opposed to upside. In other words, your median outcome for a third or fourth round pick in a rookie draft, it might be worse than Josh Palmer. But the ceiling is still better than Josh Palmer. Because remember, we still have players emerging from those rounds, even if they're emerging at a really low rate. To me, the stuff that I talked about earlier this week was more so about how you're valuing players within a particular rookie draft. To make sure that you're grounded with your evaluations. To not fall in love with a guy, see him go on day three, and not change your evaluation. Because draft capital matters. And when it comes to these day three picks, the difference in draft capital from one player to the next has been mostly meaningless. As I said earlier this week, and I wrote about this in the newsletter this week too, when looking at day three picks, and when looking at their rookie draft ADPs from 2017 to 2022, there's been zero correlation between where a player was drafted in a rookie draft and how well that player performed during his first three years of his career. Now, if you want to apply this more directly to your rookie drafts and sort of the strategy in your rookie drafts, I would say that taking like a late third round pick, where you know there's only going to be day three choices, turning that late third into two fourths, that increases your odds of hitting on that one special day three player that year. In other words, we know that there's not much correlation between how we're drafting these day three players and how they perform. So if someone in your league is just really wanting a day three player, and they want to trade up into round three, they want to get that player, and they're willing to give you multiple fourth rounders. As long as your rosters are deep, as long as you can hold on to those players, you should consider that. Because the odds of a fourth rounder hitting versus a late third rounder hitting, it's not that different. And so, if you're getting multiple stabs at a day three pick, you're increasing your odds of getting a hit. That's how I would look at this. I'm not trading away all of my third and fourth round picks because the hit rates are low. Because hit rates are going to be low for anything that I get in return. I'm just recognizing that we're usually not great as a consensus at figuring out who that day three hit is going to be. This next question is from Twitter. It's from at ffandbrews. It says, listening to McShea, there are 18 draft grade running backs this year, and it's the best class possibly ever. Should the focus turn from draft capital to landing spot for running backs this year? I think it's being compared to the 2017 draft, and Aaron Jones went to Green Bay in the late fifth. Yeah, look, I sent a newsletter out about this a few weeks ago, about how this class doesn't just look like the 2017 class because it's loaded. It looks like the 2017 class because that class had a lot of good marks in the ZAP model, just like this one does. And we didn't see anything super funky with that class when it came to day one and day two picks. Like, we didn't see an amazing amount of day two selections that year. We've had other classes over the last 15 years with more day one and day two picks at running back, more than 2017 And right now, today, via nflmockdraftdatabase.com, it's looking very similar with projected draft capital for these guys, versus what we saw in 2017 But regarding your question and turning our focus from draft capital to landing spot, I don't know exactly what that means, but my answer is probably don't do that. Draft capital is more important than landing spot. Obviously, a second rounder is better than a fifth rounder. If you're in a position where you're staring at two day-three picks, when one has a good landing spot, the other one doesn't, even if the player with the bad landing spot has the better zap score, I might lean with the lower zap score if that landing spot's a little bit better. Look at everything I've talked about on the show over the last week about day-three picks. We know there's a lot of volatility there. So sure, lean into the better landing spot, but like anything else, don't use landing spot to dictate where you're drafting these guys completely. That's arguably one of the biggest reasons that we see the things that we see in rookie draft ADP. All the stuff that I said earlier this week, because people get way too excited about the destination without looking at the talent level of the player himself. I mean, even Aaron Jones, it's actually funny that you bring up Aaron Jones in this question. Anyone who's been following my work for years, you know that I was an Aaron Jones truther when he came out of college. And this was before the ZAP model, before I started modeling prospects. He just had a crazy good production profile. I actually remember tweeting when he started getting more work in the Packers offense. I think it was a primetime game, maybe a Thursday night game. And I was sitting there tweeting with excitement because I liked him as a prospect. He finally was getting his opportunity. And like I said, that was before the ZAP model. In the ZAP model now, Jones has one of the best day three profiles that you're going to find. But the reason I say that it's funny that you bring him up with this particular question is that he was third on his depth chart entering the season that year. The Packers drafted Jamal Williams ahead of Aaron Jones in the exact same draft. And Ty Montgomery was on that team too. Jones was third on the depth chart. Sure, there wasn't a stud there. But it's not like Jones was seen as someone who had this fantastic landing spot. I really don't think that looking at one single hit on day three from a deep class tells you anything at all. In fact, if you look at that draft, the other big day three hit was Chris Carson. Not only did he come from nowhere, which again plays into what I said earlier this week about day three picks, but Chris Carson was not walking into an obvious situation for immediate production. We had a lot of hits from that class, but it wasn't just landing spot driven. In fact, I'd argue that none of it was obviously landing spot driven. I mean, James Connor was picked to a team that had Le'Veon Bell on it. You should always consider landing spot with any player. I don't think this class being loaded though means you should consider it more. Lead with talent, lead with your talent evaluation. And that should include draft capital. And then go from there, as you do any other year.