990: The Gray Area of Fantasy Football

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 990 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. Every once in a while, I do episodes like this one where I kind of just go. I don't have the clearest goal in mind when I put together my little show sheet. But I know there's a general message that I'm trying to get across. And today's message is the following. We need to get away from this black and white thinking that's rampant in fantasy football. Maybe it's hot take culture taking over. Maybe it's the fact that clicks are more important than more genuine content. Whatever the reason, the fantasy football world seems to be losing the gray area, when that's the opposite of what actually should be happening. As we mature with this game, as this game becomes more and more popular, and we become more and more interested in it, you would think there would be more recognition to the fact that variance is everywhere within it. Like, I've been around for a while now. I've been doing this as my job for 12 years at this point. I sort of grew up in the fantasy football space starting when I was in my early 20s, childless, living in an apartment with my girlfriend who is now my wife, thinking I had the answers when I had none. And trust me, I know that 12 years from now, I'll be looking back at this exact moment, probably saying the exact same thing. But as I've watched the fantasy football space grow into the awesome community that it's become, I've seen aspiring fantasy analysts pop up and gain popularity. And something that I've noticed with those up and coming analysts is that the first year when that analyst gains a significant platform, when they're able to talk to thousands of people for the first time, that first year is always full of insane confidence. They fire takes out there like it's no one's business. But that first year humbles you, man. You realize that when you start to put yourself out there, that means you're putting yourself out there to be both right and wrong. And when there's more pressure to be right, and when you're then inevitably wrong, you realize on a much deeper level that this game of fantasy football that all of us love, it's impossible to bat a thousand, even if everything seemed to line up perfectly prior to the start of the season.

After that first year, you go from having more black and white takes to realizing that this game, it lives in the gray area. There's really no need to say this absolutely will not happen. You're not scoring fantasy points based on those bold outcomes. Instead, you start to add words like probably and likely to your everyday vocabulary. Your take goes from he's definitely going to finish as a top fantasy producer to he's probably going to finish as a top fantasy producer. Because you know that in this game, anything can happen, anything. Now, I bring all of this up because just a couple of weeks ago, less than a couple of weeks ago, I made a trade in one of my dynasty leagues. It's one that's filled with other analysts. It's a 14-teamer. There are deep rosters. It's a league for sickos. But in that league, it's a super flex league. My roster is loaded at wide receiver. It's fine enough at tight end. The quarterbacks are iffy. The running backs are super iffy. Now to anyone who's listened or consumed my content over the last week or so, you probably know where this is going. I brought it up on Perspectives with Jeff Bell last week. I wrote about it in my weekly newsletter, which by the way, totally free to subscribe over on lateraound.com. But going into that league's rookie draft, I had the 106 where I'd planned to take Trevion Henderson. A perfect addition to my roster. But I knew that I wanted to bulk up at running back because this draft class is filled with talented runners. So, I made the following move. I traded away Roma Dunze, and I received the 8th overall pick in the rookie draft, the 108 Now, I'm a believer that you guys generally don't care about my teams. But in this case, it's a slower part of the football calendar. And honestly, the conversation around this trade has been so incredibly interesting to me. It found its way to Reddit last week, and more people sided against the 108 than for it. By a pretty healthy margin. And by the way, shout out to Reddit. I really enjoyed the conversation that I have on there for the most part. Now, like I said, I also talked about this trade with Jeff Bell last week on perspectives. And naturally, I received some feedback. One comment on Spotify said, Roma Doonzee might be the most divisive stance JJ has ever taken. Another comment said, Come for rookie draft analysis. Stay for a half hour of Roma Doonzee talk with an eye roll emoji. They also spelled a Doonzee with an A. Then it said, Good job, with a note that they were being sarcastic. Needless to say, that person is gonna hate today's episode. Now, whether it's those comments on the podcast, emails, some comments on Blue Sky or Twitter or on Reddit, the conversation around this trade has really surprised me. Not in a bad way, just more in a really kind of way. Like, that comment about Roma Dunze being the most divisive stance I've ever taken? Brother or sister, if that's my most divisive take, then I'm not doing a very good job of explaining myself in this podcast. So let's take today and walk through this, because I think it's a situation that perfectly describes how I view fantasy football. It's a scenario where you might have that aha moment, where you realize exactly what I'm trying to say when I say this game has a lot of variance, and that you should be living in the gray area. I'll make you realize that this is not a divisive stance about Roma Dunze at all. In fact, I actually like Roma Dunze. My thought process in trading a Dunze for the 108, and I've stated this several times now, but it was that at worst with that 108 pick, I was looking at a Mecha Gbuca, at worst. At best, someone like Quinshawn Judkins would fall, which gave me the perfect need for my team. Now, some may say that's silly, that I should never give up on a player like a Dunze for a player like Gbuca. Not only was a Dunze a better prospect, but Gbuca is buried on his depth chart in Tampa Bay. I'm just delaying this exact same scenario happening next year, right? Because as we know, a Dunze competed with good pass catchers in 2024 His situation was not that desirable. But to me, there are a lot of assumptions being baked into Roma Dunze's overall valuation, and the majority of those assumptions are favorable ones. When I approach my own evaluation of a player, my goal is not just look at data that favors some narrative that I'm trying to drive home. I want to see the pros and the cons. I do the same thing with some of my more robust fantasy football analysis too. As I'm writing it, as I'm putting it together, I'm actively thinking, how can someone poke a hole in this argument that I'm building here? No player is flawless, and if you approach a player assuming that he's flawless, you're going to have a hard time doing well in any fantasy format, especially in dynasty. Now, for Roma Dunze, the current pros, the good parts of his profile, or that he was a good prospect, we can excuse some of his underwhelming year one numbers when you give them offensive context, and when you combine some of those rookie season numbers with his overall situation, there are some players who he compares favorably to. One of them, for example, is DeAndre Hopkins. That's something I wrote about extensively in the Prospect Guide. I even brought it up on the show a few months ago. There's a path for Roma Dunze to be a DeAndre Hopkins-like wide receiver. Even knowing that, I traded a Dunze away, because there are cons to his profile too. We can make excuses for his rookie season numbers, and we should, to some degree. But his rookie season numbers were also pretty bad. He had a yards-per-route run rate of 1.18. Yards-per-route run is a pretty predictive metric, especially for rookie wide receivers. In my year 2 model database, there were over 150 wide receivers who ran 50 or more routes as rookies with first-year yards-per-route run rates below 1.3. So that's a number that's a good bit higher than where a Dunze is at. Just five of those wide outs ended up giving fantasy managers a season of 15 or more PPR points per game in either year 2 or year 3 Yes, situationally, things were not good. When people heard or read about this trade, they would say, but don't you realize that you played in such a horrific situation? Of course. You've got to at least give me the benefit of the doubt here and know by now that I'm not going to make decisions or think about players without any sort of context. But yeah, that's why we can explain some of this away. But how much? That's the real question. A situation can't just cancel out everything that Aduinze did in year one, right? Like we can't just assume that season never happened. That wouldn't be a very fair way to do analysis. Because if we do that for Aduinze, wouldn't we then have to do that for every other wide receiver who may have stepped into a situation that wasn't ideal as a rookie? There are tons of instances where that's been the case. Maybe they haven't been identical to Aduinze's circumstances, but where do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line and say, we don't have to worry about that rookie season whatsoever? My point is that there's a mix here. We need to recognize that his numbers were pretty poor. His peripheral numbers were not great. Historically, wide receivers usually don't become stars after that kind of rookie season. But we can then also recognize that Caleb Williams had really bad accuracy when he targeted Aduinze. That he had tough competition. That his coaching sucked. Like trust me guys, I get all of that. I'm just saying that we can't let that overshadow the actual production that we know has some predictive value. Actually a lot of predictive value. What I'm doing here is living in the gray area. I recognize the range of outcomes for Roma Dunze. I fully see a scenario where he's great. I also see a scenario where he was just an overvalued prospect, and it didn't totally, totally work out. He didn't become a star. I think it's healthy to see that this can go in two very different directions. Now going back to that trade, remember, I was kind of hoping to get a running back in that 108 spot, with Iqbuqa being sort of a worst-case scenario. But I also had the flexibility to get like RJ Harvey if I wanted to. And for the record, Iqbuqa wasn't even the player that I ended up getting. I moved up one spot in the 107 and I got Quinchon Judkins. So this wasn't even an adunze for Iqbuqa trade. But I do think strictly looking at Iqbuqa is a really, really interesting exercise, and it's one that people who read my newsletter last week really ran with. There's this idea out there that a mecha Iqbuqa is just going to be in Roma Adunze's situation next year. That how we view adunze right now, that's how we're going to view Iqbuqa. Which I understand the logic. Good prospect, but in a crowded situation in year one, leads to less opportunity, which leads to worse fantasy production, which leads to us questioning Iqbuqa's true long-term viability. At least to some degree. And I think the general consensus liked adunze as a prospect more than Iqbuqa. So Iqbuqa will get even less of a benefit of the doubt compared to adunze right now. But when we focus on that sole comparison, we're losing sight of the various outcomes that could really occur here. For one, what if Iqbuqa does have some sort of down year production-wise, like from a points per game perspective, but his peripherals are really strong? You don't think fantasy analysts are going to tout him into year two? You don't think that's going to raise his overall value in dynasty? Or what if the Buccaneers really do let Mike Evans walk next year? Or what if Chris Godwin doesn't get back to his old self after sustaining a really gruesome injury last season? Now, of course, there's an out here where Iqbuqa is back with a healthy Evans and a healthy Godwin in 2026, and that could cap his upside for yet another season. But is that not kind of what's happening with Roma Dunze right now? At least to some degree? I mean, it's not an apples to apples comparison. But something that just keeps getting lost in this discussion with a Dunze is the fact that this new Bears coaching staff used their first two picks in this year's draft on pass catchers. They got Colston Loveland and Luther Burden. Is it not possible that Roma Dunze actually has tougher competition this year than he had last year? I mean, he was playing alongside Keenan Allen last year. Allen still hasn't signed with a team. He's 33 years old, inching towards the end of his career. That's the thing. When I see people tell me that Iqbuqa is just going to be the 2026 version of Roma Dunze, that he'll be right in this spot that a Dunze is in right now, I just don't see how we're so confident in that one singular outcome. I don't see why we're thinking about this in such a binary black and white way. You mean to tell me that it's likely, that it's probable, that we see Iqbuqa have a bad season on the peripherals front, that his yards per out run will be well below average for a star wide receiver, and then we watch his team the Buccaneers draft pass catchers with their first two round picks? That's probable? Like part of the reason, if not a huge chunk of the reason, that Roma Dunze is less attractive today than he was a month ago, is because more competition was added to that team. And yet, we really haven't seen his overall price tag change that much. Over on Keep Trade Cut, Adunze stole the wide receiver 20 in dynasty. Now one common pushback, and I saw this so many times, but something that people kept telling me is, well, what about Jackson Smith and Jigba? Because as we know, JSN was drafted in round one. He had really tough competition on his team at wide receiver, and then he had a pretty poor rookie season. It's a whole lot like the Roma-Dunze situation. And it's a whole lot like a Mech Igbuka. I've even made that comparison with Igbuka. But when we look at Jackson Smith and Jigba as the sole comparison, we're losing sight of the greater picture. Yes, guys, there's a scenario where Roma-Dunze sees a rise like JSN did last year. That's in his range of outcomes. Remember, I've comped a Dunze to Deandre Hopkins this offseason. But not only did the Zap model just like JSN more as a prospect, but the Seahawks didn't go out and draft a tight end 10th overall and a wide receiver 39th overall the following season. And not only that, and this is most important, but JSN didn't have the same type of value in the dynasty market the following season after his rookie year. I just told you that Roma-Dunze is the wide receiver 20 over on Keep Trade Cut, despite a down rookie season, despite his team drafting two pass catchers with their first two picks. Despite all of that, he's still the wide receiver 20 He dropped just five wide receiver spots since the NFL draft ended. Last year at this time, Jaxon Smith and Jigbo was the wide receiver 25 According to Dynasty League Football's ADP, he was the wide receiver 35 And there was a point in the summer on Keep Trade Cut last year where JSM was closer to wide receiver 30