983: NFL Draft - An Elite Running Back Class

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, 983 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you missed it last week, I sat down with Jim Sonnis to talk about this year's quarterback class. We've still got running back and wide receiver episodes to go. And today's episode is all about the running back. You guys have heard a lot of my takes on this class already. How I believe that this is the best group since 2017 How we could really see a ton of backfield turnover across the league because this class is so talented. But I want you guys to get takes from more than just me. So I brought on my friend Jagger May, formerly a football guys, he's now doing work for FastDraft, to talk about this insanely good draft class. Jagger and I talked about his prospecting process, and then we go through and analyze most of the top backs in the class. It's a great primer for any of you who aren't totally prepared for what's to come at the end of the month. Now, before getting to the interview, I do want to mention that the Late-Round Prospect Guide is ready to be consumed. You can head to lateround.com right now and purchase it for $19.99. The guide has a breakdown of what goes into my prospect and year two models. You get 80 prospect profile write-ups, you get scores for all relevant prospects, there's year two profiles and more. It's 160 pages of information. Check it out now at lateround.com. And if you purchase before the draft, you'll automatically get the post-draft version of the guide as well. I do my best to get that post-draft version out to you the night of the last day of the draft. That way you're ready to crush your rookie drafts. That's all on lateround.com. Okay, now let's hear Jagger's take on this year's running back class. All right, Jagger, before we get into this running back class and the individual players in it, how would you just simply describe your overall process with prospecting? I don't love to throw this out because I think there's a lot more nuance to it, but if you were to sort of like bucket things in terms of film versus analytics, what's your mix with those two things?

Jagger May (2:14)

I'm a strong film guy, but what I've tried to do is emulate my own version of what Matt Harmon does. Or like Lance Zerline will do that as well, where I have a film grade, but I try to weight and balance that in a spreadsheet to where it's as objective as possible. So I'm breaking down a prospect down to their parts, and then I'm looking at the sum of those parts. Whereas like with my running back, can they catch passes? Do they break have breakaway speed, contact balance, all these things to try to get a composite score. I know Dynasty Nerds does that as well, but not the two-mile-and-horn. I feel like I've gotten away. I've got I understand film in a way that I kind of know what's important, but I will say since we're talking running backs, I do have to make some adjustments because the NFL adjusts. So that's another reason why I have something that can quantify, and I can go in the spreadsheet and weight things differently based on what the NFL is doing. The increase of pass catchers when we used to love bruisers so much.

JJ Zachariason (3:16)

Right, right. I think that's really important. One of the things that I really, really love about the modeling aspect of prospecting and just really is that you can very easily test, you can very easily go back and kind of look at things and say, okay, this is not correct or this is working, this isn't working. And I think it's important to do that from, like you're saying, from a film perspective to be able to at least like have something to go back and look at as opposed to just saying, yeah, I think this dude's good, you know, because if you're just doing that, you can be right and you can be, and you can have a great eye for it and you can be really, really good at it. But if it's a simple, like, you know, sort of more subjective way of doing that, I feel like and maybe you would disagree, but I feel like it's just a lot easier to then go back and sort of refine what you're doing and get better at what you're doing by having those benchmarks essentially listed there for you to remember and jog your memory and go back and look.