998: Mailbag - Ashton Jeanty's Cost, the Miami Dolphins Offense, and More

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason and this episode 998 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast sponsored by DraftKings.

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Sponsored by DK. It's a Malbag episode. Let's get to these questions.

The first question this week is from Andrew Taylor on Patreon. It says, with so much uncertainty surrounding the Jags' backfield, I'm throwing dynasty darts wherever I can at LeQuint Allen. I don't hear any chatter about him outside of Duval. With his pass catching and blocking chops from college, is he on your 0RB radar in redraft? Does he have the rushing profile to be more than a passing down back if Tank and Tooten continue to have fumbling issues and ETN stumbles out of the gate? So in dynasty, I'm all for throwing the LeQuint Allen dart. He had a really impressive receiving profile coming out of Syracuse, and he was a pre-draft favorite of mine. Obviously, he went in the seventh round, so we have to adjust our priors a little bit. But Allen had a low-risk draft capital delta, which means the ZAP model liked him more than his draft capital. He had a best-season reception share of almost 20%, which is really ridiculous, and his breakout score was 86.5. Both are really good receiving numbers for him. The problem for re-draft is that there probably isn't that much of a need to draft him, aside from a last-round dart throw and best ball. Chances are, just based on what they have in ETN, Bigsby and Tooten, chances are Allen won't dress on game days to start the season, unless something changes with those three backs. He's probably going to need an injury to see the field. Anything is possible though. It's one of those situations where we can like the talent, we can be aware of the talent, and we can be ahead of the market by having them on speed dial for when anything shifts in that backfield. Because what if those things that you're referring to actually do happen? What if Bayshall Tooten isn't as good as advertised? What if Tank Bigsby or Travis Etienne stumble? Then there's an opening and we'll know to be aggressive in trying to get Allen. But for redraft purposes and 99% of redraft leagues, if not more, you don't need to be looking at Allen right now. I wish he was on a team where he at least was the confirmed number three running back on that team, on that depth chart. But that's just not the case right now in Jacksonville.

This says question is from at redditFF on blue sky. It's Jeremy, a mod of the Fantasy Football subreddit. Jeremy asks, how can redraft players best use best ball ADP and analysis as they start their season long prep? Now, I've talked about this before on the show, but it's an important topic to bring up each summer. Best ball ADP is not going to be the same as your season long ADP. I talked about that a lot with John Dagle on last week's perspectives episode. Your regular season long drafts will be more running back heavy. Quarterbacks, they might go in different spots. It's just not totally the same game. But where you can get practice in is just understanding how the markets are valuing players within their positions. Sure, you'll have some better and best ball type players out there, but generally speaking, you can look at positional ADP to get a grasp on how that position might look in your redraft league. So my advice would be to focus more on the positions and where players rank within those positions, as opposed to really focusing on draft strategy. Because draft strategy, that's what's going to shift most from best ball to season long. But leaning in and focusing on the positional stuff, you'll start to get a rhythm for where there are drop-offs and where there's depth. That'll help you a ton during your season long drafts. And it's why I think anyone who's serious about fantasy football should probably be doing best ball drafts right now. This next question is from Michael on Patreon. It says, Hey, JJ, I've seen several analysts say that this year, the train comes off the tracks in Miami. Do you agree? Do you want any part of that offense? I feel like waddle could be a value. Thoughts? So I don't see it as much as this is the year the train comes off the tracks, as much as I see this as a make or break year for that team and that coaching staff. I'm not making the assumption that they're going to be terrible. I think that's in their range of outcomes though. I think people were kind of taking last year's results and kind of go into the extreme with them. Tua Tongavaioloa missed a lot of time. He missed six games. In those six games, Miami only averaged 1.2 offensive touchdowns per game. That is egregiously bad. And we knew it was bad because we watched them play. It was horrific football. But with Tua, they had 2.45 touchdowns per game. If you assume that they were able to just maintain that throughout the season, they would have ranked just outside the top 10 in touchdowns per game last year. Now, do I think what they did offensively is necessarily sustainable? No. I'm fearful of the lower A-dot offense that they ran with Tua last year, and the impact that that made on their wide receivers. Tua's average depth of target was 6.1 yards last year. That's why we saw guys like John New Smith and Devon Achan thrive. While Jalen Waddle and Tyreek Hill had their worst statistical seasons of their career, basically. Because instead of looking down the field, the offense was totally content with checking it down. I just see last year, though, as a clear outlier year. I mean, maybe the offensive line combined with Tua's head injury, maybe that'll keep them in this low A-dot offense. But Tua's average depth of targets throughout his entire career have been 8, 7.4, 10.1, 8.2, and then 6.1. Like spot the outlier, it's clearly last season. To be totally truthful, though, I'm having a hard time saying Jalen Waddle is an obvious value, and Tyreek Hill too. Because there's still a chance that Miami doesn't change things up. It's not like the coaching staff changed. I feel better about those types of shifts when the coaching staff is revamped, like in Jacksonville. But we don't have that in Miami. That gives it a higher chance that things remain the same. And to be honest, a lot of the middle-round wide receiver trends that I talk about in the draft guide, they don't favor Jalen Waddle. I like Waddle. I think Waddle is a very talented wide receiver. And trends are not foolproof. I'm just noting that this is not an obvious situation to buy Waddle. I think it's just properly rated at the moment. So to me, this is less about this offense definitely going off the rails. It's more about it being a make or break season. I think Miami has to get their wide receivers more involved this year down the field. That's if they want to have a shot at winning anything. Maybe the coaching staff doesn't see it that way, but that's when I think that we could see some issues. This next question is an email from Henry. It says, Hi JJ, this is a two part question. Everyone always talks about a player who can beat ADP. How do you determine how many total points or points per game a player needs at a given ADP? And, once you have that metric, what are you using to determine if that player will outperform that points per game? Seems to me like people call players values at ADP without really knowing what type of projection that draft position bakes in. Love the work you do, and I can't wait for the draft guide. Cheers, Henry. So, this is something that's littered throughout the draft guide every single year, and it's no different this year. I look at things through the lens of average draft position expectation, and the reason I do that is because we often look at all these metrics and all these numbers and things that correlate to next season success in fantasy football, but we don't factor in ADP when we do that. Like, for instance, let's say previous season points per game correlates to next season points per game at running back. If you were to layer on average draft position, that might already be accounted for. As in, the market is already baking in previous season points per game, and sometimes the market is doing that too much. So we can't just say, okay, this matters for next season production when there's a cost component to all of this. So what I do is I look at ADP expectation. I take average draft position data courtesy of fantasydata.com, and I see how players have performed at different ADPs through the years. I can then take a trend line and create a formula that shows me what a player is expected to score at a particular ADP in points per game. To make this data cleaner, I only look at players who played eight or more games in their given season, and it's all based on PPR points per game. I'm not really concerned with players just hitting expectation though, especially in the middle and the late rounds. Like a running back who's going 70th overall he's going to have a relatively low expected points per game rate, or not a super usable rate, I should say. I want him to outperform that by two, by four, by six PPR points per game. So that's the lens that I look through. Now to your second question of once you have that metric, expected fantasy points per game, what are you using to determine if that player will outperform that points per game mark? That's what the draft guide is all about. There are trends for every position at every area of your draft. What we look for in the middle rounds at running back isn't necessarily the same thing that we should be looking for in the early rounds. And that's based on how the market has behaved historically. There are tons of metrics and tons of situations that we should value and devalue based on where you're drafting. But that's how ADP expectation works. And for the record, I think a lot of people get this wrong. I see analysis saying this player didn't live up to his ADP because he was ranked as the RB6 and he finishes the RB8. Well, that's probably not the case. He probably did live up to ADP expectation. I wrote a newsletter about this earlier this week. Like an RB6 has historically been drafted 10th to 11th overall. His expected points per game average is 16, 16.2 PPR points per game, somewhere in there. If he finishes the RB8 based on history, he probably would have scored close to 17 PPR points per game. So he actually did outplay expectation even if his finishing ranking was lower than his ADP. And that leads me to the next question. This next question is from Patreon. It's from Dino Miz. It says, Hey JJ, huge fan of your work. Thanks. I want to challenge Ashton Jeanty's current ADP and see what you think here. While I do think it's possible for him to get there, I see this more like Marvin Harrison Jr. from last year, where his draft ADP was his ceiling, which he unfortunately did not hit. It also doesn't give me a ton of confidence that the Raiders offensive line is poorly rated, and Jeanty had over 300 carries his last college season. I personally think he should be ranked a little lower in both Redraft and Dynasty startups for those reasons. What are your thoughts on this? So in Dynasty, I'm just going to disagree. He's a generational talent according to my Prospect model. I don't want to dismiss that. I completely understand why he's ranked where he's ranked in Dynasty. But I do think there's a real conversation to be had in Redraft. First off, I wouldn't be overly concerned about his collegiate work. I haven't found a study that shows that previous season workload in college has any meaning or matters with current season workload or injury for rookie running backs. But second, let's just look at history here. I know Marvin Harrison Jr. burned many of you last year, but he was also just an outlier. He had by far the earliest ADP of any rookie wide receiver since at least 2014 And I'd imagine well beyond that too. According to Fantasy Data's ADP, Harrison Jr. went 15th overall last year. The next closest rookie wide out since 2014 was 40th overall. I know, not in your league, I'm just going by what ADP says. But Harrison Jr. was definitely an outlier from that perspective. Ashton Jeanty, he's not. At least not nearly as much. We've had seven rookie running backs get drafted in the first two rounds of Fantasy Draft since 2014 Four of those running backs, Bijan Robinson, Clyde-Edwards Allaire, Sequon Barkley and Ezekiel Elliott, ranked in the top six of their position. Elliott and Barkley crushed their ADP expectation. Robinson and CEH played below expectation. So we've been 50-50 with the super highly ranked rookie running backs. The next step down to round off those seven, you get Najee Harris as a rookie, Kareem Hunt as a rookie and Christian McCaffrey as a rookie. Najee Harris and Kareem Hunt were both great against expectation. Meanwhile, CMC played 0.6 points per game below expected. So for being completely objective here, early round rookie running backs have actually been decent through the years. I don't want to say they've been amazing, but they've been better than average. So when you say that Jeanty is being drafted at a ceiling, I mean, sure, maybe that's the case. Maybe this is his ceiling. But you can make that argument for almost any running back in that range, because the expectation is really, really high. But I also don't really buy into this logic. I'm definitely not saying that Ashton Jeanty is a target. There's offensive environment trends that scare me with Jeanty. But why are we assuming this is his ceiling? His expectation at that ADP, as I alluded to with the previous question, is like 16 to 16 and a half PPR points per game. He can get above that. That's definitely in his range of outcomes. Now, I'm not someone who's going to be actively targeting Jeanty, especially because I like Christian McCaffrey more. And that's not how consensus has it in season long at the moment. But I don't think his ADP is that egregious. It seems like a reasonable spot to have Ashton Jeanty, a generational talent, at least within the running back rankings.