996: A New Way to Spot Middle-Round Running Back Breakouts

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 996 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by DraftKings. Thanks for tuning in. Football season's right around the corner. There's no better way to lock in your fantasy dominance early than with Best Ball on DraftKings, where you draft once and ride your roster all season long. Right now, DraftKings is giving all customers a can't-miss offer. Draft one, get one. Enter a lineup in the $15 million Best Ball contest for just $20, and you'll score another Best Ball ticket to play free for a share of that $15 million, giving you a second shot to win big. It's easy. Just draft your dream team once, no weekly management required, and let your top scorers automatically start each week. Across the whole season, every breakout star, every clutch play, every touchdown will count towards your quest for a share of $15 million. As you know, I'm drafting over there, and I'm documenting things with becoming a Best Ball bro, so you can use the information from that show to help you out as well. Download the Draft Kings Daily Fantasy app now to draft your $20 Best Ball lineup to play for a share of $15 million, and get a second ticket to play free for a share of that $15 million. That's two chances to win big without ever setting your lineup again. Draft one, get one, only on Draft Kings. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. In New York, call 8778-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY to 467369 In Connecticut, help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-77777 or visit ccpg.org. 18 plus in most eligible states, but age varies by jurisdiction. Eligibility restrictions apply. Void wear prohibited. One per customer. Enter the Best Ball $15 million headliner contest by 9-425 to get one bonus entry. $20 entry fee required. Reward expires in 30 days. See terms at draftkings.com/nfldashbestdashball.

Sponsored by DK. I've always been fascinated with average draft position data. Like we can always do analysis and see the types of traits that certain league winning wide receivers or running back share and sort of do our analysis from there. Like if we know league winning running backs always come from good offenses, then we should probably focus on running backs and good offenses. If we knew that league winning wide receivers never had a teammate draft in the top 24 of the position, then we'd probably focus on line outs who had a lot of projected target share for themselves, that kind of stuff. But not all of that is always actionable. If the market is factoring in a lot of the discoveries that we make from that type of analysis, it's not bad to have that information in mind, but it's not as useful as we think, because a player's cost will already reflect all of those things. Like if we went to a farmer's market, you might find a fruit vendor that does a ton of business each week. They've got really good fruit, objectively, but it also costs a lot to get that fruit, so the cost benefit actually might not be there. Wouldn't you want to find the smaller fruit vendor who has better prices and may be able to offer up similar tasting fruit? That's why I look so much through the lens of ADP, because it's one way to ensure that we're finding value throughout our draft. Now, through the years, something that's always been obvious when doing my ADP analysis is that pass catching running backs will outperform expectation at a severely higher rate than the alternative. Like somehow the market still doesn't factor in pass catching enough at running back. But it's one thing to say, hey, draft running backs who catch passes. It's another to actually tell you what to look for when you're doing that. And I realized that mistake when writing this year's Late-Round Draft Guide, which by the way, the guide will be out on July 1st. Make sure you're pre-ordering right now. I've been working tirelessly on it. I'm confident that this is the best version of that guide yet. But I'm bringing up the draft guide because a big focus of that guide for me this year has centered around making things even more actionable for the reader. Like I can say, hey, running backs who are league winners, they usually look like X, when that X is some piece of information that we learn after the season. Going back to the quick example I shared earlier, running backs are league winners when they're in offenses that scored three or more touchdowns per game. Okay, let's say that's true. Let's say that's factual. Now, tell me which offenses will score three or more touchdowns per game. When it comes to receiving work, tell me which running backs are going to catch a lot of passes this year. Now, we can have a general idea of who will and who won't catch passes. Rashad White, remember his second year in the league? That was a big draft guide hit that year, largely because his receiving upside was there. We knew that he had a shot to play that kind of pass catching role. And we knew that he had a collegiate profile that really dictated that. But it was still a more subjective take. Now, rather than looking at that through some semi-subjective lens, I took things a step further this year to show you that one metric might be more predictive versus the market than you probably think at running back. And that metric is yards per route run. We've been working with yards per route run at Wide Receiver for years now. And while myself and other analysts will cite yards per route run at running back, I'm not sure we're citing it enough. Though to be fair, I'm not really listening to other fantasy podcasts, so maybe I'm wrong. In the draft guide this year, I break the running back position down into three buckets. Early-round players, middle-round running backs, and then late-round running backs. I split things up because each part of your draft actually dictates that you think about the position a little bit differently versus how the market has historically behaved. There are some interesting pass-catching trends with early-round running backs, but I'll save that for another day. What I really want to get to today is the middle-round area, which is defined as running backs ranked as RB19 to RB42. Now, there are reasons for those boundaries that I discussed in the guide, but that's also not that important of a topic for today's show. Just know that I've defined middle-round running backs as the ones who are ranked 19th to 42nd by average draft position. Since 2014, which is where my ADP data goes back to and shout out fantasy data for that data, but since 2014, there have been 233 middle-round running backs who played at least 8 games in their analyzed season. So minimum 8 games played and had an ADP of RB19 to RB42. 59 of those 233 middle-round running backs finished their season with a sub 5% target share per game rate. 104 of them were in the 5% to 10% range, and then 70 of those running backs had a 10% target share per game rate or better. Now get this, of the players with a sub 5% target share, only 1.7% of them outperform their average draft position expectation by 2 or more PPR points per game. Now average draft position expectation, it's exactly as it sounds. It's the number of points we'd expect a player to score at a certain ADP. That's all based on historical data. So if that player's actual points per game exceeded his expected points per game by 2 or more points, he'd be in that 1.7% bucket. But 1.7% is an insanely small number. For the backs who had target shares between 5% and 10%, that number jumps up to 21%. 21% of those players outperform ADP expectation by 2 or more points per game. For the guys with target shares above 10%, the rate of outperforming expectation by 2 or more points per game is 43%.