Fantasy Football Daily - School of Scott | Fantasy Football Clinic with JJ Zachariason

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

Welcome to School of Scott, the ultimate fantasy football masterclass hosted by Scott Barrett of FantasyPoints.com. In this episode, Scott welcomes JJ Zachariason for a fantasy football clinic. Where to find us: http://twitter.com/ScottbarrettDFB http://twitter.com/LateRoundQB Find Our Podcasts Here - https://www.fantasypoints.com/media/podcasts#/ Age Curves Article By Ryan Heath - https://www.fantasypoints.com/nfl/articles/2024/age-curves-when-nfl-players-break-out#/ Use promo code SCOREMORE for 10% off your subscription. Dynasty Video Playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-kupTuz42SeHflK6fqOqKTxwqB2s46M6 Subscribe to FantasyPoints for FREE - https://www.fantasypoints.com/plans#/ All our podcasts are here - https://www.fantasypoints.com/media/podcasts#/ FantasyPoints Website - https://www.fantasypoints.com NEW! Data Suite - https://data.fantasypoints.com Twitter - https://twitter.com/FantasyPts Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/FantasyPts Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/FantasyPts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, you are listening to the, or watching, the School of Scott, today we have a very special guest, the great JJ Zacharisen, quarterback expert, a kha, late round QB, has maybe the best fantasy podcast in the game, a recent best ball bro. And also, I tell the story every single time, JJ gave me my start in this industry. I started over at number fire for him back in the day. And he has a coaching tree that would rival better than Shanahan, I would say. You wouldn't have a grand barfield. You wouldn't have a Scott Barrett. You wouldn't have a Rich Rebar, plenty of other names. If it wasn't for JJ, JJ, how are you doing?

Good, man. Good. There's so many people that we could sit and name. It'd be like I remember these guys, you know, kind of back and forth. because some some have fallen and some don't uh are smartly not doing anything in the fantasy space anymore but it's great to chat with you man yeah yeah i know i tell this story every single time but um so i was not immediately good as a fantasy writer i was not one of the stars at number fire and for two years i just like struggle i just like wasn't clicking zero growth from maybe my first

article is good zero growth from then on and you were really heavy handed in edits like you you sat with me for hours trying to get it to a point where it's published, publishable. And then finally, I wrote this one Frank Gore article where he was like a value at like 43 years old. I think it was his last good year. And it all, it,

it, it felt good coming off of the, the club. And you were like, Scott, this is great. And then it was just, uh,

downhill from there. It was just, it was just easy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I remember,

very vividly, man. And you were doing some baseball content at the start, too. I remember you wrote like a Tanaka article at one point. Yeah, man, those were the days. Just a lot of, a lot of smart people coming through Numberfire that now have, you know, full-time gigs in the space. I mean, let's not forget like Chris Raybon either, who's doing more, uh, more on the betting side now. But, um, yeah, I remember that, I remember that very vividly of sending that email just being like, like I wanted to just like hold you and like shake you and just be like yes this is it like you clicked you figured it out but yeah man those were those were the days of uh really going hard with the with the editing stuff yeah I think about it all the time because you know like some people just have like

steady upward growth where you see the improvements like step by step like you're climbing stairs or whatever with me it was just like flatline and then just immediate jump and then yeah yeah crazy um anyway dude thanks so much for coming on I want to give a shout out to your draft guide, which is absolutely excellent. It's phenomenal. And it kind of mirrors my own draft guide, the one I've been doing for a few years, where I kind of just republish what I call upside wins championships every year. And you kind of started off your draft guide the same way, where it's outliers win championships.

And we're kind of just both talking about the same thing, which is just the importance of how a select few players really swing fantasy football leagues, the importance of upside when you're drafting, how you have that floor, the safety net of the waiver wire to fall back on, blah, blah, blah. Everyone kind of knows by now. And then you dive into positional value. Just sort of what I do in anatomy of a league, when I only wrote like a very abridged version of that this year, but talking about like historical macro trends and why it makes sense to maybe, let's say, devalue the quarterback position. And then also ways to historically find, you know, dead zone quarterbacks likely to beat their ADP or potential

outliers, et cetera. And then you give the people what they want, which is, you know, here are my favorite players to target. Here are my rankings. And so today I want to dive a little bit into positional value. I think no one does it better than you. I think you're the perfect person to talk to about that. And I want to start with the quarterback position. So when I was reading your draft guide, what really shocked me more than anything was your track record as a streamer. For the folks you don't know, you've had a long-stating podcast going back to 2015 called Living the Stream. You want to tell people what that podcast about? Yeah, we started at maybe 2013, end of 2012 season maybe, but we didn't start really tracking heavily, I think, until 2015-ish.

But yeah, what we do is, is that we go into a given week and we give recommendations at quarterback running back and quarterback tight end and defense, sorry. And we look at the waiver wire and find lower rostered players and we say, hey, based on these lower roster players, because in a single quarterback, single tight end league, normal formats, they're the onesie positions as we've dubbed them. And they're the positions that are in lower demand because you're only needing to start one of them. And when there's something that's lower in demand, that means there's,

going to be hypothetically an excess of supply of that position. And so, you know, in your home leagues, you guys have seen this through the years where you can go to the waiver wire and find a tight end that can match tight end X production or you can go to the waiver wire and find a quarterback to match QB nine, let's, whatever it is in a given week. There's a lot of like, math behind as to why like quarterback in particular, you know, it can work. The streaming stuff can work. But we've been tracking or I've been tracking our picks for about nine years now. And I do that for obvious reasons. I think it's, you know, we always kind of write in hypotheticals when we're doing our

breakdowns and stuff where we're like doing hindsight analysis a little bit. You know, we can look at things like start rate and stuff on these different platforms, but how reliable is that whenever you're talking about like teams that, you know, aren't necessarily as active or as like into fantasy as like we would be per se, right? And so if it's coming straight from us in our analysis, then we know, you know, that this is how we would be playing things. And so, yeah, through the years we've had some success streaming. I don't know what the baseline would be or like what other people could do.

But there's been years where we had like QB6 equivalent in points per game. There's been years where, you know, last few years has been more like QB11, QB12ish, you know, like lower end QB1 type production. The one thing I'll say too, though, is that with the streaming stuff, we don't have the benefit of, okay, we picked up CJ Stroud last year. We're just going to ride them through the end of the season or Brock Purdy. We streamed all, like we streamed CJ Stroud, we streamed Brock Purdy, we streamed Jordan Love, but eventually too many people have those three players.

And so you can no longer recommend them, you know, on the, on the show as streamers. So we're actually at a slight disadvantage with some of those numbers. You could argue that those numbers should be a little bit better. But overall, like we've been able to at least give you, you know, and I publish this in the guy, this is the first year I actually did publish it the way that I did. But like, you can sort of see what the baseline quarterback. would be if you're calculating forp or something because we're literally showing you what the baseline quarterback is by picking guys off of up off the waiver wire right so we can talk about why it may

you're the late round quarterback guy why it makes sense to sort of devalue the quarterback position in your drafts due to you know it's the least scarce of the positions it's the flattest it offers the most parity you have a great chart sort of highlighting that in your article um you can talk about like your ability to draft late round league winners at the quarterback position better than others, how ADP is least predictive at the quarterback position. But like this, this was like so mind-blowing to me. You have the numbers right here. So since 2015, going in order from 2015 to 2023, you've streamed the equivalent of the QB8, QB6, QB6, QB10, QB7, QB15, QB12, QB-B-13. So it's like, what's your floor?

If you literally draft zero quarterbacks, sounds like you're getting at like a mid to late QB1. And like that's amazing. And you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. So you could do even better than that. You could have just held on to CJ Shrap. You could have just held on to Purdy or Jordan Love and like maybe held on to two of them and then played the matchups between them and giving yourself, you know, QB4.

And so yeah, that was that was one of the most mind-blowing things to me. Yeah. the thing is like the numbers have gotten worse over the last handful of years over the last four years right it's been qb 15 cubb 12 cubb 9 cubi 13 and there's definitely reasons behind that uh those reasons being uh that quarterback has become more predictable within the market people are understanding what matters at quarterback it's really all started after lamar jackson's big MVP season people really just started to understand that mobility at the position matters and now we have these unicorns who can throw and run the ball really well. And so the reason why these numbers, I think, have been getting worse is because kind of a few

things are happening. Like the market itself, like through the waiver wire is getting sharper. That's one thing, right? So like, you're not as as easily able to find quarterbacks probably off the waiver wire. But then also what's going on is that the good quarterbacks are just being drafted earlier in fantasy football. There's charts within the guide, too, that show, you know, the R squared between ADP and postseason result. And at quarterback over the last four years, it's gotten stronger than what we saw like literally do like in 2015 and 2016 the the r squared between top 18 quarterbacks and points per game was literally zero there was one year where the bottom half of that group of 18 scored more fantasy points than the top half did because there was there the mobility wasn't there and number one like

to the degree it is now and so you're not getting that like baseline and that predictability passing numbers are really really volatile but also fantasy managers just sucked they were just not very good at understanding which quarterbacks were good. But now, you know, it's just, it's a totally different game. We're going to take a quick break and then I'm going to ask you if our listeners have permission to draft Josh Allen or Jalen Hertz. And if so, at what cost? When you're flying Emirates business class, enjoying a good night's rest in your lie flat seat, you'll see that your vacation isn't really over until your flight is over. Fly Emmeritz, fly better. All right, JJ, I feel like the people listening to us are like the Uber nerds, the super degenerates, hardcore fantasy players.

But if you're in a casual league, let's say you're in a 10 team league, you know, quarterbacks typically fly in your draft. Can you take a Josh Allen round two? Or what if you're on FFPC where quarterbacks are going really like Josh Allen is going round four? Do they have permission to draft one of these highest end quarterbacks? And here's the argument I'll say is that in like 11. of the last 12 years, you're always better off being one of the last people in your league to take a quarterback than one of the first. And two years ago was one of those outlier years where it was Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, all the way at the

top, Joe Burrow, all the way at the top. And you could argue that like they're putting up more points, more points relative to baseline quarterbacks. And then there's the prediction. predictability of that production. So where do you stand on high-end quarterbacks? I think the predictability part is what's most important. Like when you look at the way that I sort of do this analysis is that instead of looking at like QB1 versus QB12 and looking in hindsight and like finding Vorp that way or whatever baseline you want to use, I try to shy away from doing that because the QB1 could have an outlier

season pretty easily. You know, like we're going to probably see, you know, whether it's like Lamar's MVP, his first MVP season where he scores like 28 points per game or whatever it was something stupid like that. You know, I don't want to skew that data. So what I do is I look at QB1 to QB3 and I average their points per game average together. And I compare that to QB10 to QB12 and I average that together just to kind of look at a very quick VORP related way because I have plenty of reasons that I don't enjoy or like love VORP analysis.

But, you know, that's one way to just kind of get a general idea of like how big of an advantage that position was really giving you, you know, in that season or, or cross seasons, you know, whenever you're looking, you know, from like I look from 2014 to to 2022 or 2023, rather. And so, you know, looking at the last 10 years, the gap, whenever you do that calculation, the gap in points scored, you know, there'd be some years where there's like a bigger gap and then there's some years where it's a smaller gap. And overall, though, there's been a pretty flat trend where there's not necessarily this massive, massive advantage of, in terms of points, per game difference from what we saw last year, the year before, like the year before that was

pretty good. But, you know, what we see from the top quarterbacks versus a baseline, what we've seen in recent memory versus 2012, 2012, 2013, 2014, right? The difference, though, is the predictability aspect, because now we have these unicorns who are consistently being that dude, right? And they're consistently giving us rushing production. The question I always ask people, I mean, it's an insert quarterback here. But, you know, if we're looking at Kurt Cousins versus, you know, Kyler Murray and you say, hey, who's going to throw more passing touchdowns? Maybe people would favor Kurt Cousins at 60, 40 or something like that.

Maybe Cousins isn't even the best example. Let's just say Brock Purdy. Maybe people would say, yeah, Brock Purdy will throw more touchdowns of Kyler Murray. But there's a caveat of Kyler Murray can still throw more touchdowns than Brock Purdy this year. And no one would be like that shocked if something like that happens. Now, if you ask the same question and say, who's going to be. going to have more rushing production, Kyler Murray or Brock Purdy, 100 out of 100 people who know

ball will say Kyler Murray, right? And the reason for that is because rushing production is is stickier than passing production is. And so if all of these good quarterbacks are now being pushed up because of their rushing production, what that tells us is that they're going to be more predictable with their output and we're not going to see as many late round quarterbacks necessarily emerge. Like everyone points to like Jordan Love and Brock Purdy and CJ Stroud last year, which they had their moments. Like Jordan Love's second half of the season was great. Don't get me wrong. But across the entire season, they weren't that great. Like they weren't bad, but they were like 18 to 19 point per game quarterbacks, which is not that far off from what we got out of our

streamers throughout last season. Right. And so the bottom line is like we're trying to get to 20, 21, 22 points per game with our quarterbacks to have any sort of edge. And if we know that that predictability aspect is going to favor the mobile quarterbacks, we got to kind of pay up for the mobile quarterbacks because that's what the market is telling us to do, right? And so a guy like Josh Allen, a guy like Jalen Hertz, if you're getting into the third round, where historically round three in a 12 team league in a normal draft, that's where we're going to start to see like opportunity costs start to fall because hit rates at running back and wide receivers start to fall around then.

That's when I say, okay, and then you can look at my rankings. Like I have Jalen Hertz and Josh Allen in that like 28 and 30 range because once you get into that middle of the third round based on history and even if you look at the landscape this year. That's when we start to see that drop off. And that's when I'm like, okay, because with the predictability, because of their mobility, I'm okay with going after those guys in that range. So I was going to save this towards the end of the show, but I think it works better here. So what is like your preferred quarterback strategy in your own drafts? And is there one quarterback you're targeting far and above the rest? Yeah, I think that that, you know, before when I would go on shows

10 years ago, I'd just say, get your quarterback late and log out, right? Like, don't even worry about the quarterback. It doesn't matter. And then, you know, you'll see some, like, you know, analyst leagues where you can wait and wait and wait because you know that teams aren't going to take backups and stuff, and it's not that big of a deal. But if you're talking about, like, your home leagues or just a typical, like, even FFPC league, where you know that people are going to be taking backup quarterbacks because the rosters are so deep, you know, I just think there's pockets of quarterbacks, right? Like, there's areas of the draft where it's like, okay, this is where the elite quarterbacks are going to sit one of the big four let's say or if you want to say the big two and then the next two

or something like that and then there's some players that historically have been are part of an archetype that usually gets kind of destroyed like a cj stroud type a pocket passer that goes in the top six uh historically has been a very very bad bet in fantasy football like like a high end qb2 mobile quarterbacks over the last 10 years have been better bets to hit a ceiling than pocket passing top six quarterbacks, like period. They've been a better bet by far. And so, you know, a guy like C.J. Stroud, where he goes, you're just sitting there, you're like, I'm not going to get Stroud unless he falls because his outcome is not going to necessarily be that much more significantly different than other pocket passers or a mobile quarterback that I can

get a little bit later. So you're, you're kind of going through your draft and picking out these pockets. You know, you get then to this year, who I think is by far the best value on the board is Kyler Murray. And it's it to me, it's it's sort of, Kyler sort of has the Jalen Hertz before his breakout when he was like QB8 or whatever, uh, Josh Allen before his breakout whenever he, uh, really broke out. And, you know, not quite Lamar because his ADP isn't as low as what Lamar's was during his first MVP season. But man, Kyler looks like the most obvious pick, uh, at his ADP because I, you know, like when you look at what he did last year, he steps in, uh, you know, coming off this, this, this, crazy knee injury. He has no weapons in this offense that are like solidified, right? And he steps in,

and he gives us 18.3 points per game in a new offense coming off of this knee injury. And then, you know, you look at how he did it. He had a 3.7% touchdown rate, which is pretty putrid. He had a yards per attempt that was below seven. And you ask yourself, well, how did he do that? How did he score over 18 points per game? It was his legs. He scored over five points per game with his legs via rushing. Since he entered the league five years, he's been over. 4.9 points per game with his legs every single season. He's been over five and four of those five seasons. There's been 35 quarterbacks since 2011 who have hit 300 plus pass attempts that they were a starter for most of the season, who then also had five or more points per game with their legs.

20 of the 35, Scott, ended up scoring 20 or more points per game. So you're literally, I think that we would probably assume that Kyler Murray's going to throw for 300 attempts because he's a starter, right? He's hit five or more points per game basically every. year of his career and 20 of the 35 players who have done that since 2011 ended up giving us high-end QB-1 production. Like, Kyler Murray right now is being drafted at his floor for the most part if he's healthy, right? And if to me, honestly, I don't really see, and maybe this is kind of spicy, I don't see that dramatic of a difference between Kyler Murray and Anthony Richardson.

And maybe that's wrong to think that way. but I think there are reasons to be a little bit more bearish on Richardson than the market is generally being, even though I know rushing production matters so much, which is why I'm not going to sit here and tell anyone, don't draft Anthony Richardson. That would be kind of absurd, I think. But I do think I would say draft Kyler Murray at cost well over Anthony Richardson at cost. Yeah, I think that's a great call. QB10 on ESPN. Since 2020, he ranks third among all quarterbacks and fantasy points per game ahead of Lamar Jackson. Keep in mind, like you said, he was clearly hobbled last year, wasn't fully back from that ACL. And now a massive

upgrade to his supporting cast. So I think that's a great call. Moving on to the running back position, do you have any thoughts here? I typically say, you know, it's the most important position in fantasy, you know, generally the person who won your league is going to be the person who had the right quarterbacks in most cases. Obviously, that doesn't mean you need to take an RBRB approach, especially given the current landscape today. You see, you know, there's a dearth of Belkow running backs. Just about every backfield appears to be a committee. The talent, the pool of talent, has also changed for the worst where, you know, the Christian McCaffrey, Aaron Jones, Austin, all these guys.

That was an amazing draft class, Alvin Kamara, crazy injection of talent into the league. But they're all at near or after the age cliff today and recent draft classes have underwhelmed, especially relative to wide receivers. So it looks like things have changed. The landscape has shifted. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on the running back position. Look, I think every year is a good hero RB year. Like I just the data screams this at us every year that going with an anchor running back

approach is the right idea. And now, you know, like some years people, it's like the meta. Like some, some years people are really, really into it and they're, you know, shouting it from the rooftops. And other years, they're like, no, don't do that. Now we've inch closer and closer to mainstream strategies going towards zero RB for sure, right? We're seeing running backs going later and later in drafts and wide receivers getting pushed up and all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, you know, like if you,

if you're drafting on underdog or you're doing some sort of best ball draft, that's not really the way that I would draft my home league totally, but I also think there's a lot of elements to best ball and the way that people draft that are correct. And like I think that people, like when you look at, you take a step back and you look at the overall ADP of a place like underdog, where wide receivers are flying off the board. You're going to get the wide receiver like 40 when the running back 12 is drafted, right? Like, it's pretty wild. But what I will say about that is I think that the underdog drafters have gotten it right in terms of like pocketing the running backs properly and like pocketing. What I mean by that is like understanding what the running back dead zone is, the kind of archetypes of

running backs that we should and shouldn't target. And, you know, why a guy like Rashad White or a guy like, you know, Remandre Stevenson or even like Zamir White as you go down the draft board, why they should be falling behind a lot of these wide receivers because there's so much fragility to their profile based on what we've seen historically. And so what I'd say is overall, like high level strategy of running back is I would love to get an anchor. You know, people have asked me like, oh, well, where's the last hypothetical RB1 that you would take as your anchor? I'm like, I don't really think that way because, you know, you can make an argument for, you know, for a lot of guys that like it just depends on like how you're spending your capital early on

don't spend that kind of capital late at that position and vice versa right like you can go r b rb there's just less of a reason to then pile up running backs in the middle rounds or there's less of a reason to you know if you go in the other direction uh if you go wide receiver wide receiver wide receiver wide receiver to start your draft you probably don't need to invest in nine wide receivers on your team because you've already invested a lot of capital into the wide receiver position so i think that there's a balance with all of that. But I think the big thing this year is like how we attack what what is traditionally been dubbed the dead zone because the discourse around the dead zone has always been about the round that we're taking these guys, right? Like this guy's a third round,

you know, the dead zone starts in the middle of the third round and it goes through the sixth round. And I've written it that way in the past as well because I think it's easily consumable. But what we need to start to shift our thinking based on the fact that we have all these different platforms that have various ADPs and wildly different ADPs now is that we have to look at in within the position only like only look within the position and try to understand what that means for the for the dead zone and to me what it means is historically top 12 running backs like if you if you if you bucket them into high end RB ones low end RB ones high end RB2s low end by ADP uh yes by ADP if you if you bucket those guys up and then you look at how they perform in terms of hitting

14 plus points per game, 16 plus points per game, whatever, you can use any sort of threshold. Those are the ones that I use because it's generally like an RB2 and an RB1 season. But whenever you start to bucket that up, you start to see that there's big, big drop-offs within the position, regardless of opportunity costs, regardless of what round they go in. There have historically been pretty big drop-offs after RB-1s are off the board. And then high-end RB-2s are sort of in their own tier. And then there's a big drop-off into the low-end RB-2s. The low-end RB-2s don't have dramatically different outlooks than high-end RB-4s do, historically.

And so- Thank you so much for saying this, because I've been beating this drum for forever. Yeah. Like a low-end RB2 is basically worthless. And like, so my running back ranks cut off at 23. And then like people are mad. It's like, oh, like, and then I'll have, you know, like priority targets, like, you know, Tai J. Spears is awesome. Chase Brown is awesome, whatever.

but like it cuts off and it annoys some people and it's like why do you do that it's because like screw all of these running backs except for the select few i specifically mentioned by name because they're all just you know you get a low end rb two it doesn't really help your team win a championship it doesn't really move a needle um and you know the upside is severely diminished so uh yeah i love you saying that yeah i mean like at the end of the day what is like this is why i can't get behind zimir white this year. I don't, I can't understand why we're drafting a running back who doesn't have the necessarily have the talent profile, like we at least don't know, right, who is in what we would consider a bottom 10 offense entering the year without a quarterback. And so we can feel more

confident that it's going to be a bad offense because the quarterback position is so screwed up there, who doesn't catch passes and hasn't done that, not only in the NFL, even during his stretch last year, which is the reason people are drafting him is because of the last month of last season, he still had a sub 10% target share per game rate. Like, he still was not seeing massive amounts of volume through the air. And so, like, and I just, I don't want an early down back on a bad team, right? And there's a lot of that that goes on within the running back dead zone and in that low end RB2 range where we're drafting these guys or the markets drafting these guys based

on perceived volume and not on talent when we should really be leaning into talent because that's how high ceilings are actually hit. Zemir White could outperform ADP from the standpoint of he gets drafted at RB23 and he finishes at RB21. Like that's fine. I just don't care at all if that happens. It doesn't matter. That's a negative win rate player.

Like he beats ADP. He's not helping you win a championship. Right. Well, you're also in those situations, the other thing that people don't think about is that you're going to plug him into your lineup and you're going to suffer from him being in your lineup to your point of him being a negative win rate type player.

Like, I would rather have a player who I know is not going to do anything that I can then find a real solution than plugging Zemir White into my lineup, praying and crossing my fingers that he can find the end zone in a bad offense. You know what I mean? Like, it just to me doesn't make sense logically. Like, of course, anything can happen. Of course, Amir White could surprise us all and the Raiders could be a lot better than we think, but we're placing bets.

We're playing probability here at the end of the day. And like, like, I, this is why in my rankings, like, I have. the Cincinnati backs. I have the Tennessee backs. I have all of them ahead of Zameer White in my rankings because there's way more contingent upside for them. And there's standalone value that they can match Zemir White inherently. Right. So like I just I don't know and you're getting them a couple rounds later, especially like a Tajay Spears or whoever the RB2 is for either of those back fields by ADP. So yeah, I mean like like this is why you know in my research when I when I look at middle round running backs, the guys who are in that like, you know, RB3 range and the RB4 range,

when you look at middle round backs, those players that are in what I call ambiguous backfields where there are two of them from the same backfield being drafted in the middle rounds together, those guys outperform ADP expectation at a sensationally higher rate than the guys who are standalone in their backfields in the middle round. So, Zemir White, a standalone middle round running back who has teammates getting, getting drafted way, way later, will ask yourself, why is Zemir White being drafted there? And someone would respond, well, the situation is not that good because he's on the Raiders. And you know, Zemir White isn't like an elite talent. And it's like, exactly. That is exactly the point.

When you have two running backs going in the middle rounds, that's when we know the situation is probably pretty ripe. Like the not only could they have standalone value just naturally, but they're being drafted in the middle rounds together. Look at Cincinnati. Zach Moss and Chase Brown, middle round running backs this year. Why? Because it's the Bengals and there's a chance that one of them emerged just talent wise naturally and become a Belkow back in that backfield to some degree, right? Or there's an injury that happens to the other one and there's going to be a stretch of three or four games where that running back is projected each week as a top 15 back or top 12 back. And that just doesn't exist for the Zemir Whites of the world. You could argue to some degree. I think Zemir

is the easiest example. But I think that it starts to get cloudy when you're looking at like, Remondry Stevenson or you're looking at a Devon Singletary, right? Or like these, these guys who, like, I get it. Like from a projection standpoint, they look totally fine and they're fine, standalone to maybe outplay ADP by a little bit. But I think you have to ask the question, is this guy a true league winner? And to me, the guys I just named, the answer to that is probably not. Yeah, I'm with you. I think that was perfectly put. And I love how you just broke it down strictly by ADP, you know, not not diving into any of the peripherals of the individual player. Right.

I will say with with like a Devon Singletary sort of guy, like they can have value to your team. So like I'm all in on Jonathan Brooks this year. But if you're drafting him, you're taking an L like the first six weeks he's not going to play. Then maybe a valuable innings eater like a guy like that or Gus Edwards could be valuable. but on the whole, everything you just said was nail on the head. Something that's really interesting with Jonathan Brooks, because he's one of my target. Like, I love Jonathan Brooks. Like, I think you should be drafting him and taking the zeros for the start of the season,

whatever, especially whenever there's no by weeks, there's not as many injuries. Like, you can fill that spot a lot easier. One of the more interesting things that I found this year for the draft guide when researching was when I was looking at these ambiguous backfields, when we've had ambiguous backfields where there's been a veteran and a rookie together. So you're looking at, so the two examples this year where we have a rookie running back that we would hypothetically be drafting in the middle rounds is Trey Benson, who's fallen a little bit in ADP and Jonathan Brooks, right? Trey Benson having Jonathan Brooks is not in an ambiguous backfield, right? He's a standalone middle round running back, which historically we would actually not want those players.

But when it comes to rookies, it's actually the reverse that happens where a rookie running back. The sample size isn't massive. I think it's like 10 to 15. But when you have an ambiguous backfield in these middle rounds and you have a middle round rookie and a middle round veteran, the rookie underperforms versus expectation at a higher rate than a standalone rookie running back in the middle rounds. And I think the logic behind that is that a coach is sitting there saying, I have this veteran I can rely on.

So I'm going to give him the rock a little bit more. the one player that did work out was Kenneth Walker, actually, because Rashad Penny got hurt. And so I think that's telling us with Trey Benson that his path to relevancy more than likely is through a James Connor injury, which we know is almost likely at this point, just given his history. But that, you know, I think that's very, very important. And then like the opposite with the Jonathan Brooks, I think the reason why rookie running backs that are more standalone do well is because if you're a middle round rookie running back, you haven't stepped foot on a football field yet. But people are still drafting you as an RB3 in fantasy football. And the reason for that is

because you're likely pretty talented. And if you don't have competition in your backfield and you're talented, that means you're going to get a lot of work. And then you're going to be a good fantasy asset. So I think a guy like Jonathan Brooks and other, you know, stand alone rookie running backs that you could find there's not going to be that, you know, there's no more this year. That's why those guys, I think, end up doing pretty well. I'd like you to recite a stat for me just because it really surprised me when you said it. We were into DMs talking about Ramandre Stevenson, and you mentioned the track record on running backs with a rookie quarterback. Yeah. So, so historic, so what I do is I look at running backs versus ADP expectation. ADP expectation is simply looking at

history and plotting points per game versus average draft position and saying, okay, historically at this ADP, this is how many points per game players have scored. And I remove all players who played fewer than eight games just because we don't want injuries to dictate that kind of data, right? And so what I found was with any running back, like throughout the middle and late rounds, we have not seen, actually only might be middle round, but we have not seen a middle round running back who played with a rookie quarterback exceed ADP expectation by three or more PPR points per game since 2011, which is to say what would I call a moderate breakout, right? These are guys who like did well versus expectation.

About 20-ish percent of middle-round running backs will get there. And so we haven't seen a single running back with a rookie quarterback get to that point. It doesn't necessarily have to do with the fact that like the running backs are terrible or they're not getting enough volume. It just has everything to do with the fact that rookie quarterbacks are generally leading teams to fewer yards per play and fewer touchdown scored. That's what it comes down to. we usually inflate, you know, to some degree. The market's done a better job with like wide receivers and baking that into their cost a little bit. So what I tell people is you don't have to avoid these players on teams with rookies.

Just get them past their ADP or get them at ADP. Don't reach for a wide receiver or or what have you on teams with rookie quarterbacks. But you can, you can still draft them. Like I've still drafted Roma Dunez and stuff. Like I'm not, you know, and obviously Caleb Williams could end up being the exception to the rule. and just like CJ Stroud was last year. But they're really haven't, even at wide receiver, man, there's only been, if you look at the top 72 wide receivers that have been drafted,

so this excludes some guys like Tank Dell in the sample, but even still, the top 72 wide receivers drafted over the last 10 years. So we're looking at a sample of like 720 wide receivers. 159 of them hit 15 or more PPR points per game. Four of those 159 had a rookie quarterback, only four of them. Now, that number looks a lot more extreme than it actually is because not a lot of wide receivers are getting thrown the football from a rookie quarterback. But if you even look at the rate stats, there's a dramatic increase whenever you don't have a rookie quarterback versus when you do

in your rate of hitting certain thresholds and points per game. So in general, rookie quarterbacks are just not great for their personnel, but it's more so like, just don't reach for those guys. It's probably not smart to be like high on Andre Stevenson this year. It's like, I think there's reasons to just not even go after him heavily, but I would definitely not be high on the dude. One last question on running back before we segue to wide receiver. You were talking about the importance of Hero RB.

And I really agree with that. I really think that's important this year, just the value of a highest end running back. It's the most valuable commodity in football. Look at what Christian McCaffrey did. If you owned him in an ESPN league, you had 50, 9. 9% chance of making it to the finals. That was more than twice as much as Tyree Kiel or any other round one pick. I think that's so valuable.

We talked about the shifting landscape, how there's more committee backfields and more ambiguous backfields, which means upside and like players to target in the middle to late rounds of your draft. But that scarcity to me really jacks up. The running backs we know are going to be belcouse, or do you have that quote unquote legendary upside. So for me, in the vast majority of leagues, by the way, like I don't know if you know JJ,

but like ESPN Yahoo, 80% of all leagues are going to be two running back, two wide receiver, one flex, 10 or 12 teams. So I have it in my overall rankings. I have it one CMC, two Brees, three Bijan, and then I have a lull, and then one running back at the tail end of running back, and then a nice little lull and then like four running backs clustered together in early to to mid round two.

How do you see that shaking out, that sort of hero RB build and who those running backs might be? Yeah, I agree. I agree with what you're saying there. I mean, like, I think that, you know, if you start with a CMC, Bijon, Brees, whatever order, I think I've Brees and Bijon, that would be, you know, CMC would be in his own tier still, in my opinion, just because of what we saw last year. And then, you know, going with Brees or Bijon in a two, in a one two to one kind of format makes a lot of sense.

And I would be going that direction as well. I have in my rankings, I have three wide receivers. So I three wider receiver set up. So I do have Tyreek and C.D. Lamb in that same like in that area with Brizon. But yeah, that's the direction that you probably should go in because of the scarcity aspect, as you're saying. And then sort of like in the late first, you get into into the second. you get into like the Jonathan Taylor type player and maybe you can throw Sake one in there.

And then, you know, I'm pretty high on like an A-chan just because of his upside and what we saw last year, you know, in that second round range. And then I think there's like a cluster, the final cluster of like if you, you know, you can make the argument for a Derek Henry. You can make an argument for a Kairn Williams. I'm starting to just push Isaiah Pacheco even further up in my, because they haven't done running back. And it's like, we saw what he did last year as a bell cow.

towards the end of the season. I have my worries and concerns about, like, Kiron and I have concerns, obviously. Everyone should at least have a concern about Derek Henry. Like, if you're not walking into the season without like a concern, you're like, yeah, sure, this 30 year old bruising running back will be totally fine no matter what, you know, like, but we obviously understand like the upside and what that could look like.

But I think those are mostly the dudes. And then you get into sort of maybe you throw ETN in there, but you, you then get into this new cluster, which is where I think it's not quite the running back dead zone, but there's definitely like you feel a little bit more fearful about their profiles, which is like the Jacobs, Rashad White, Joe Mixin, you know, we could talk Kenneth Walker, who I now have in that tier after, you know, hours of discussion back and forth with you over the last month. We'll save that for the end.

Yeah, yeah. I think that that's like that last tier of like you can feel. And that's really like what history has shown us, because that's, that's, where like RB ones turn into RB2s, right? And that's sort of after that is where the dead zone really begins and where you start to want to target these certain archetypes of being past catchers, you know, being an ambiguous backfields and ignoring some of the other guys who are not necessarily much pass catchers in these bad offenses. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then talk wide receivers. So okay. So if the running back landscape is shifting for the

worse. Obviously, it should push wide receivers up. And I mean, just, just look at the wide receivers today. Tyreek, Justin Jefferson, Jamar Chase, C.D. Lamb, Amon Ross St. Brown, A. G. Brown. What if Devante and Cooper Cup can be anything close to who they were two years ago? Like, has the NFL ever been this stacked with wide receiver talent? It's also, we just had a rich rebar in the previous pod talk about how offensive coordinators are being more creative and scheming these players open. getting them optimal looks. And so obviously, if we're devaluing running back a little bit, it's worth pushing wide receivers up.

But to give you some context to just how high we're pushing these wide receivers up, this is from Mike Clay. Five years ago, 10 of the first 12 picks were running backs. In 2024, only four of the first 12 picks were running back. Or it could be 14 of the top 25 years ago versus 10. of the top 36 today. So clearly you see price in the market, shifting landscape. But what I keep coming back to, and you mentioned this before, where it's like, well, if you go a wide receiver, wide receiver, wide receiver start, obviously you don't really need to draft another wide receiver

for a while. But I see a lot of value. I still see a lot like, this is what I've been arguing this offseason is like the micro is the macro. And every season is its own unique special snowflake. And so it's like, do you go zero RB? Well, it's like if my RB3 is going in round 10 and let's say Jonathan Brooks is my RB7 and he's going round 11, then yeah, zero RB is so optimal. So that really goes a long way. But wide receiver, you know, I wrote the running back section and I'm like, wow, I'm seeing a ton of value.

But then I wrote the wide receiver position. I was like, I'm saying a ton of value. Like there's so many guys in the middle to late rounds who I want to be all in. on. They're must draft players for me. And even at the top, there's, there's players I have wide receivers I've given a round two grade two who are going round four, round six on Yahoo, ESPN, Super Soft. And I know you're on the same guy as JJ. But yeah, so what are your thoughts on wide receiver from a macro perspective? And then maybe also how you're looking at it today in 2024. Yeah, I think that we have to recognize like to Rich's point, these guys are getting schemed. These guys are, we're seeing

more like 11 personnel, we've always seen that. We're seeing just more wide receivers on the field in general being able to get volume. And I think that turns people into saying, oh, there's wide receivers everywhere as a result of that. But really, it's similar to the running back position where what that does is it creates the unicorn wide receivers who are going to see a 28% target share in their offense, who are going to, you know, see bonkers numbers because they're being hyper-targeted within their offense. So, like that's why from a projectable standpoint, the CD Lamb, Tyree killed and into Jamar Chase,

Justin Jefferson, Aminara St. Brown, even into AJ Brown. That's why those guys are as valuable as they are is because projectable production of them being like elite is there. And then you have this giant cluster of guys who have a chance to get there, right? Have this opportunity to maybe take a step forward. Maybe you really like Marvin Harrison or Drake London or Nico Collins or,

Nico Collins or one of the old guys and Mike Evans, Navante Adams or Cooper Cup comes back from the dead. Like there are so many players who you can then envision being that clear, giving you an edge wide receiver one in fantasy football. But we're trying to throw darts at those players, right? Because we know that that's very, very important, even if it's subconscious within this wide receiver landscape. Because at the end of the day, you're not wrong. Like it's, it's a very deep position at face value. But we say that a lot. And then the wide receiver position ends up not being nearly as deep from a week to

week standpoint from a having this guy in my lineup every week standpoint sort of thing. Right. Like there's there's still a lot of volatility that occurs at that position. But I will say this. Like if we're if we're if we're in agreement that running back is top heavy and wide receiver hypothetically based on what I'm saying is top heavy, right? Because there's just a large number of guys who were hoping. can become elite wide receiver ones,

but there's like six or seven that are elite wide receiver ones, right? What does that mean? Well, it means that from a game theory perspective, well, what are all our alternatives? Like, what are we going to go after? And this is why I, part of the reason why I've been touting an elite quote unquote tight end strategy this year.

It's because not only are those guys then going in an area of your draft where it's convenient because that's where the drop off occurs, both at running back and wide receiver, but also this is a market at the tight end position where people are being reactive based on what happened last year where last year the elite tight ends were really bad from an ADP to postseason result perspective. We had a bunch of guys come out of nowhere like a Trey McBride, Jake Ferguson, Sam LaPorta. We had guys coming out of the late rounds or even undrafted who became something. And so we're seeing across the board decreased tight end ADPs. Like when you look at the

tight end one versus the tight end one historically, the tight end two versus the tight end. the tight end two historically all the way down the line top 10 top 12 tight ends are being drafted later than they typically have been drafted over the last 10 years and so to me what that tells me is sure I'm going to get that anchor running back I'm going to throw my wide receiver one darts you know in the first three rounds with the with this running back and then yeah I'm going to be looking at like a mark andrews type more than likely I'm going to be looking at one of these elite tight ends who I know have a legit shot to give me round two production but they're being drafted two rounds later based on what happened last year. So to me, like, yes, the widerseer position is

deep. I think it becomes extremely flat when you get into like the Zay Flowersish range. It's like, what's the true difference between Zay Flowers and Deontay Johnson or Zay Flowers and the upside case for some of the rookie wide receivers? You know what I mean? Like there's really not that significant of a delta there. And so there's not as much of a reason or a need to like hyperfixate. and go after that kind of player. And oh, what do you know in that range? I can maybe get an elite quarterback or an elite tight end. It's really, really convenient, which is why, you know,

I think that that drafts are sort of shaping up to be relatively obvious. Get an anchor running back. If you can get an anchor running back, if you can't, then go wide receiver heavy for the first few rounds and then look at one of the onesie positions and then maybe throw a dart at that cluster that we talked about with like Josh Jacobs and stuff like that if they're still there. If not, feel free to go zero RB. and get your wide receivers for a couple more rounds, then you're going zero RB.

Like it's a, it seems pretty formulaic at this point based on what you're asking. I know that we went to like other positions and stuff, but it really stems from that question of why is the wide receiver position the way that it is. And because it is as top heavy as running back, it means that you have to go down these other paths in order to have what I think is a more optimal lineup. All right. Let's use this as an opportunity to segue to tight end. You just said you favor an elite tight end strategy.

I think me and Reeves on the last podcast sort of disagreed with you, but not entirely because the way I wrote it up in my article is like, what you do is you plot out your perfect draft. You know the draft spot you have. So let's say you have the 102. Then you know you're drafting second overall, 23rd overall, 26th overall. And then you just go down the list, look at the quarterback. available, try and do a perfect draft, plot that out, and then also, you know, make some tweaks to it, see what happens if you get sniped on a guy, whatever. But find the place where, like,

there's a running back or a wide receiver who isn't as exciting to you, isn't as extreme of value, and then just slot the tight end there. And so, like, that's what I'm kind of doing in my own draft, which means, you know, I do have a lot of Kyle Pitts, a lot of Trey McBride, a lot of Mark Andrews, which maybe you would classify that as elite tight end. But from the macro perspective, what I've been saying, I think Ben Gretch was the first one to really hammer out, you know, the importance of quote unquote elite tight end this year grabbing one of the top seven tight ends.

And to me, my thing was, I know we're calling it elite tight end, but I don't know that there is an elite tight end. Like Travis Kelsey was an elite tight end, putting up mid-range wide receiver one numbers, outscoring the tight end three by 40% in terms of fantasy points per game. Like that is an elite. Now we might possibly, and I'm open to being wrong, we might possibly just have a really deep upper class.

And so like Gretch caps it at tight end seven, which, you know, could be fair. But you look at over the last seven games that every tight end played, it was David and Joku, who was putting up mid wide receiver one numbers. it was Evan Ingram who was putting up, you know, outlapping everyone else. It was Jake Ferguson, tight end three. And then, you know, another small distance. And then you get to Leporta and Kelsey. And even Trey McBride only like 13.5 fantasy points per game in the second half last year.

And so it's like maybe this is actually 10 deep or maybe 11. You want to include Brock Bowers who's supposed to be, and I think he is, the greatest tight end prospect ever. And so to me, it also feels deeper than ever. So my conclusion is kind of just whatever. You know, it's the least important. It's the least impactful position. You know, in a world without Travis Kelsey, I think tight end is less important and impactful than quarterback.

It's you don't have the same floor from the waiver wire that you do, but you historically have a great ceiling. Because we get tight ends wrong. There's always like a late round guy who or a UDFA who skyrockets. But anyway, I'm posing this question to you and I just rambled for a bit. So why don't you cape up for elite tight end? Yeah. So here's the thing. So historically, middle round tight ends, guys who are in 12 team leagues, round six to round nine, let's say.

Middle round tight ends have been the worst bet that you can possibly make in fantasy football. Because in the early rounds, you've been getting the gronks, the Kelsey's, the guys who are going to give you this elite production. And that is more predictable than what you're going to get. get elsewhere, right? And then late round tight ends are matching middle round tight ends. This is based on history at a very, very frequent rate, right? Like we're seeing guys get to that same level. Like the middle round tight ends just aren't giving you enough of a ceiling. They're floor picks. They've been floor picks historically. Now, what you're describing is based on like the flatness, I think is driven pretty largely by what happened last season. You know, you're mentioning like the David and Joku thing,

which is definitely not wrong. But here's what I would say. If you, you look at what I talked about earlier, where you take like the top three at the position and compare it to the bottom three of a baseline. So you're looking at tight end one to tight end three, averaging their points per game. And then you're looking at tight end 10 to tight end 12. You're averaging their points per game. And you're finding the delta between the two. Last season, the delta between the top three in points per game versus the bottom three in points per game, the bottom three starters, right, in a 12 team league was 4.4 p.pr points per game. That was the second lowest rate that we've seen since 2016.

2016, it was 2.3 points per game. What happened in 2017, that jumped back up to 6.4 points per game. 2018, 8.1 points per game, right? So the previous two seasons, 2021 and 2022, that Delta was 5.7 points per game. It was greater than what we saw in 2023. Now, you can make the argument, okay, well, we have better tight ends because of last year's class because we have Dalton Kincaid, Sam Leport, Now, Trey McBride's up there after breaking out.

That's fine. That's true. My argument would be I'm not expecting every single elite tight end or, you know, quote unquote elite. Like we don't have a top two round tight end this year. I'm not expecting the big seven tight ends to all hit and to all become the truly elite difference makers in fantasy football. What I am saying is I think based on probability and based on what we've seen historically,

one or two of them will become that player. right so from a projection standpoint i do think that that's where i would line up with you and say yeah that's that's probably the correct stance is that this is flatter than what we've generally seen historically but i think from an outcome stance and just from a variance stance we could easily see a mark andrews score 15 plus points per game out of quote nowhere right or kelsey having a good season or tray mcbride continuing his high target share numbers and uh or maybe don't Kincaid has whatever like one of these guys might end up being that and i think that if you're going to place a bet i would much rather place that bet on those types of players as opposed to that

following tier where you're going to get more of the arbitrage type plays of like Evan ingram to jake ferguson who might be an arbitrage off of dalton cancade's median outcome right like that's when i that's where i think like from an like when we talk arbitrage because i know rebs is very into it like him and i talk about this all the time but the one thing about arbitrage is is that a lot of times we're speaking on that about median outcomes. So when we say that, and I'm not even like super high on Dalton Kincaid, this is just the example because I think that he's the guy that you can point to to say that like Evan Ingram and Jake Ferguson or arbitrage plays off of Dalton Kincaid.

But we're also looking at that from the standpoint of a median outcome for Dalton Kincaid, whereas that's sort of a little bit more of a higher end outcome for a Ferguson or for a Evan Ingram, you know, versus Kincaid, whereas Kincaid still has more of a ceiling. Like, there's still further north that he can go. But if you're into like a, you know, randomly spotting these tight ends that are being drafted in lower end tight end two range, like a David and Djoku, and you're saying to yourself, oh, why really like his profile and I like this and I like what he did towards the end of the year, all that. I think that's different because that's like a, that's like a player avow argument, you know, like that's an individual player

stance. Whereas I think from a macro level, the guys who are most likely to end up giving you a semi outlier giving you a huge edge season or the tight ends that are going to be drafted higher. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I will just say, you know, since we're on this topic of like ADP trends and historical data, last year, the tight end won by fantasy points per game was Travis Kelsey actually tied with T.J. Hawkinson at 14.7. Sam Laporte was was right behind them 14.1, even though he's going tight end one on some, some sites. But yeah, you look at 14.7 fantasy points per game, and that's historically worse than what the tight end three averages. What I've always said is like the tight end position is one with one to two oligarchs ruling over a vast swath of peasant.

So like tight end three is historically not been a player you wanted to draft, even if you knew they would get that sort of production. And yeah, and so now Travis Kelsey is being load managed. Mark Andrews, I like Andrews and I'm buying Andrews, but it's, you know, all these reports that Isaiah likely, this is actually the year he's really going to be used a ton. And, you know, it's not the Greg Roman offense. We did see his usage slip a bit. And so all this is concerning to me from a macro stance. But it's also, you know, Don Kincaid, Trey McBride. These are all young ascending studs. Rich was talking about how defenses are leaving the middle of the field open more, which is great for. for tight ends. There's the new hip drop tackle rule. But this has just been my sort of internal struggle over the last few months. But I think what you're saying is super valid. Like it's very real. But I also think that that's why we're seeing the prices where they are, you know, with these tight ends. Like if they did what they did last year and they didn't move an ADP, that would be an issue, you know, but we are seeing them at pretty dramatically different ADPs.

When you're talking early round tight ends and they're being and they're dropping by 10 plus spots, Like that's pretty dramatic and overall ADP. And you mentioned like historically we've had these oligarchs of, of, you know, Travis Kelsey, Rob Grankowski. I'm willing to say that there are going to be more of those that can emerge pretty easily. And so I'm fine with throwing that dart in a round where running back and wide receivers seems to take a hit and become flattered.

Right. So because like, like, let me ask you this. If you drafted a fourth round tight end, and that tight end ended up scoring 16 points ppr points per game, you would be thrilled with that pick, right? Like you would be absolutely thrilled. And so to me, based on the way drafts shape up this year in particular, I'm willing to make a bet on one of those tight ends to give me a baseline of maybe 13, 14

PPR points per game, sure. Like that might even be their median outcome. But if they hit that high end outcome, which is still possible and in their range of outcomes, the loss in them not getting it, the opportunity cost, isn't as significant because of the flatness at running back and wide receiver in those ranges. Like if I were paying a second round pick for that outcome, I would not do that at all, especially in this environment, right? But because the environment is the way that it is and there is that flat like, I mean, even on like an underdog, you're taking, you're looking at guys like

Keenan Allen and Terry McLaurin versus Mark Andrews. And to me, it's an easy answer because you can get Keenan Allen, Terry McLaurin production more than likely two rounds later. in that, well, maybe an underdog, maybe just a round later, but, you know, you're able to get that production just a little bit later, whereas it's not as glaring and obvious at the tight end position. All right. We're going to take one last final ad break and we'll be right back. All right.

Let me just say you just crushed that entire segment. That might have been the greatest, I don't know, 45 minutes in the history of me ever doing a podcast, nonstop fire. Great job. All right. So we're going to go back to what I had on the document. I'm supposed to ask you now, what's one topic you can't stop thinking about, one you've written about, or perhaps one you haven't, maybe something crucially important or something you think

might be flying under the radar that people need to know about. I can't wait to hear your answer. And then I have one. I can't wait to pick your brain on. But you go first. I was going to talk maybe about the running back dead zone. We already talked about the dead zone. So I'll shift focus on handcuffs.

and the idea that, you know, back in my number fire days, like, I'm talking like early, probably when you were there. I remember writing an article and doing a study. It was a really like, you know, you look back at it now and you're always just like, oh man, that's the way I perform that study was really stupid. But it actually, looking back, it's like, okay, this is at least logical. But, you know, I had written a lot of content about like why handcuffing is bad because it's a wasted pick for the most part from a managed season long perspective.

but we're in an environment where, you know, the definition of handcuff is just varies so dramatically from analyst to analyst. And like, like, you know, people might say David Montgomery is a handcuff. It's like no. So like it seems like it's sort of changed to contingent upside as being like the phrase instead of a handcuff, right? And so, you know, what I have struggled with a little bit is with the guys who might end up being pure handcuffs, without any standalone flex appeal, like a Blake quorum, like a Zach Charbonnet, like those players who, if they did have flex appeal, they would be great picks. And I've still drafted them in best ball

because of that aspect. But if they don't have any flex appeal in a managed season long league, I think best ball's a little bit different, in a managed season long league where you have to hold onto that asset, it becomes a really difficult thing for me to sort of grasp and to figure out what to do with.

Like is it is the answer to simply say in deeper formats you go after Blake quorum and in shorter formats you don't, you know, like is it that simple or is there something more to that? That's that's been something that's been on my brain. Honestly, for more than just this year. It's been a thing for a while just because there's no there's no straightforward definition of what a handcuff is to begin with. Yeah. So I'm historically very anti-handcuff in my own drafts just because I never feel the need to get one where it's like, Tyrone Tracy, I think, has massive upside and he's free or Kendrae Miller is mega free. So that's just like personally what I do. I think it does depend on the format though, like an FFPC league. You really need that upside that, you know, hey, Kyra Williams tears his ACL tomorrow. Blake Corum is now being drafted round four or whatever.

But for the most part in your manage leagues, you can get someone with comparable upside really late in your drafts. And you're seeing guys like a Tyler Algier being way overdraft. Oh, Braylon Allen is an amazing handcuff going super cheap. And so it's like, why would you ever take a Tyler Algear going all these rounds later when he gives you really zero standalone upside? You're never going to feel comfortable starting. Right. And even, yeah, it goes back to our conversation about like what a low end RB2 production looks like and high end RB3 production looks like. It's like, okay, even if you get that out of Tyler Algier, that's not really helping you.

Again, this is not a best ball take. think it's totally different in best ball. Right. You might be able to get the, yeah, the spiked weeks and stuff. But like you're not going to know number one when to really play Algier, more than likely. You're only going to play them if there's an injury. And so if that's the case, then why not, like you said, just get Braylin Allen with the last pick in your home league draft and play that game that way when he would arguably

have more upside with an injury than a guy like Alger would arguably. I don't know if you'd qualify these guys as handcuffs. you, I guess you probably wouldn't, but like, Rico Daudill is going free in home leagues. And like, you get your answer on him right away where he's like going to, like, let's say he has a 40% snap share versus Zeech's 60%. And even if Zee gets all the goal line work, let's say Dowdell had 4.3 yards per carry. Zeek was at 2.8. And it's like, oh, no, this might just be a valuable player. He might even beat Zique outright.

So he's not just a handcuff. And then Jaliel McLaughlin, like. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Okay. I don't know if he's a handcuff, but like, I don't, I think he's a rich man's Samajai P. Ryan as a worst case scenario. And this was the most productive runner in college football history. I know he's sort of being used in that P. Ryan Sproles role, but like there's upside for more if certainly if there's a Javante injury. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I, I look at guys like that. That's not quite what I define as like an ambiguous backfield because I'm, I'm speaking more with ambiguous backfields is like, round backs because the backfields are so ripe for fantasy production. But like, you know, it was actually funny. I was having a conversation. I don't know if you know Scott Connor or not, but having a conversation with him at the Fantasy Football Expo a couple weeks ago. He's really, really smart dude, sharp dude. And I was telling him that I have a lot of Taj Spears in my best ball portfolio, right? And then he's like, you know, he didn't disagree with it, but he was like,

I always go after. He was like, why get Tajay Spears if you can just get Austin Eccler a couple rounds later? Then I was like, well, why get Austin Echler if you can get Julele McLaughlin a couple ones, right? Like, it's just this arbitrage play after arbitrage play after arbitrage play. But I think the difference is that like the the situation in Denver in particular is great. I mean, I don't want to give you the McLaughlin player take. We all know the McLaughlin player take. But I think that like backfields like that are not so much handcuffy. Like to me, defining handcuff is just this guy has no standalone value unless an injury occurs. Whereas I got like Dowdle, I got like McLaughlin.

a guy even like Tyrone Tracy eventually might have standalone value just through talent emergence, you know, as opposed to Braylon Allen. Braylon Allen is not going to have enough. If Reese Hall is healthy, Braylin Allen is not going to be a viable fantasy option more than likely, right? Tyler Algier is more than likely not going to be a viable fantasy option. Those guys are strictly in that handcuff bucket, but that's not the way that everybody looks at this stuff and like, think, like they might say, say that Tajay Spears is a handcuff.

because he goes around later than Tony Pollard does. And it's like, no, that's silly. It doesn't make any sense. All right. I get to get out the question. So my answer to my own question has been driving me crazy is what to do with Jonathan Brooks, Nick Chubb, Justin Fields, T.J. Hawkinson. And right now it's making me think of like the Mark Spitznagle roundabout strategy, which is like

a reference zero people are going to understand. But that's what it makes me think about. It also makes me think about the Abraham Lincoln quote. Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe where it looks like this perceived L after L after L for X amount of weeks. And then there's this tremendous edge. And I know there's opportunity cost in this where you are like obviously you can't get all four of these guys.

The opportunity cost where what is the most, you mentioned before how. you know, taking the L doesn't hurt you so much in terms of bi-weeks, but like the dead space on your roster does hurt you because like that's the most valuable time to be adding and dropping guys off waivers. But they're going to be the right formats where these guys are amazing picks. Like Nick, Nick Chubb in a half-PPR keeper league with two IR spots, amazing pick, Hands down, awesome pick. Jonathan Brooks, every single format. Awesome pick.

Justin Fields in a super flex. Awesome, awesome pick. T.J. Hawkinson, FFPC, number one, must draft player. That's also a deep-beds format. It's also tight-end premium. But yeah, I keep thinking about these guys, and where do you stand on them? And where do you stand on, you know, the drawbacks and upside? Because, you know, I, Chubs may be harder to argue for it, because there are injury experts who say,

like he's never the same again. There's others who say he should be back late September and like could be 100% come playoff time. But like Hawkinson, I think is a good one where it's right now they're saying he's going to miss the first three to seven weeks, but he's really ahead of schedule. So don't be surprised if it's it's well before Halloween and that buy week. And so then let's say he comes back. You bake in three weeks, three to five weeks, even of him.

being at 80% and then 85% and then 90% and then just what if he's back 100% come playoff time. And so in an FFPC league, he is so cheap. He's like tight end 15 by 80P. Tyler Conklin is free. Zach Ertz is free. Are you really trying to tell me that like Tyler Conklin plus Hawkinson doesn't score more fantasy points than like a bunch of guys being drafted ahead of them? And then in the playoff leagues, which is you're chasing that.

that $1 million grand prize, you have this tremendous edge over your opponent. So what are your thoughts on these four guys in particular? Yeah, I mean, I think it just is a, it's a format by format situation, right? Like if you're in a league that has deep benches, those are the leagues that you should be targeting these guys. Like I was in the King's Classic draft at the Fantasy Football Expo where 14 teams, really, really deep starting lineups. I'm talking like three wide receivers and three flex.

and then deep benches too. So it's like literally everyone's rostered. In both leagues, I got Justin Fields. Because at this point, too, you have to also think about the information that we have right now. I think Fields is interesting in particular because he might just get the gig to start. Like, I don't think he's going to necessarily start week one, but like, let's be real. Like things have been trending his direction for well over a month now, basically, right?

Like, it's not to say that it's going to happen, but you might have that information sooner than you think. And if push comes a shove, you know that he can be a guy that you eventually drop if he's not getting that starting gig, sure. And then if he does get the gig,

then you can just be aggressive off the waiver wire. But the guys who are injured are more difficult for me. Like I, like difficult for me to like truly give that answer. Like I think Fields, you can just do it because there's a chance that he, there's a chance that he plays week one. Like a chance.

I'm not saying that it's likely, but then there's a chance that if Russ does, poorly in a good matchup that Fields is in their week too. And we're going to get the rumblings of that going on. I think we're going to know, we could know relatively quickly, like if Russ does play like garbage to start the year, right? Whereas the other guys, it's obviously injury related and we're just going to have to follow and see what's going on there, you know, with their individual injuries. But if you have IR spots, if you have deep benches, go for it. Like, just do it. I think it's easiest to go after a Jonathan Brooks because we know

that younger, number one, we know that running back matters most, like more than what Hawkinson will provide. Even if Hawkinson, even if Jonathan Brooks is, like, let's say Jonathan Brooks and Hawkinson come back at the same time. And Hawkinson is a top three or four tight end. And Jonathan Brooks is a top 20 running back or top 15 running back. Let's say Jonathan Brooks is a better, like, he's a better asset for your fantasy squad, more than likely, just because the position he plays in the scarcity that you get from the running back position. So I'm going to be more inclined to draft him even at cost because I think that he will come back before Hawkinson will just from an age perspective and stuff and what we see with those injuries.

But yeah, I mean, like I've, I was pretty hesitant to draft both Chubb and Hawkinson in like May and June. And then I was like, no, I should be going after them a little bit more than I am. Like Chub is kind of a freak who we've seen already do things that other humans can't do and haven't done. And Hawkinson, we know, could be a target hog. and he probably will be, you know, when he comes back. So I'm fine with drafting them at this point, but it does depend.

If I'm in like a, I have like four bench spots, I'm probably not going to be aggressive. But if I have six or seven and an IR spot, sure, go for it. Right. All right. Perfectly put. Well said. JJ, just give me your number one must draft player that either we haven't talked about or we only briefly glossed over.

And if you, if you want to throw in a few more, you can too. Yeah, I could go with like, I feel like, I feel like I feel like I go with a lot. So I talked about Kyler. That's cool at quarterback. I'll go to wide receiver and I'm going to, I'll say, I'll give two a wide receiver because I think wide receiver is the most fun too. The first one I'll go with is Jalen Waddle. And the reason I like Waddle so much is number one, a lot of people get turned off by team

wide receiver twos. So, you know, Devante Smith, Jalen Waddle, guys who have wide receiver ones that get drafted before them on their same team. But historically, I know last year, those guys sucked, but historically, team wide receiver two's drafted in wide receiver two range have performed better than team wide receiver one's being drafted in wide receiver two range. Now, it doesn't mean that you should seek them out, but it means you definitely shouldn't avoid them.

So I'm not concerned about that aspect. And you ask yourself, why? Like, why would that be the case? Well, they're probably pretty talented to be team wide receiver two's and still being drafted as a top 24 wide receiver. so that's good, but also the contention upside factor. Like if Tyreek Hill goes down, knock on wood, if he goes down,

Jalen Waddle is a weekly, projectable top 10 wide receiver in fantasy football. Like he's going to see 28, 29% of the team's targets because he's very good at the game. Like that's why he's being drafted where he's being drafted. And you look at last year, he was 94th percentile in yards per route run still, 92nd percentile in targets per out run.

We know this offense is strong. So all of that put together, the contention upside. it's really hard for me to not kind of go after him in that especially because, you know, there's that range that's there in the second round. A lot of times, you know, people are drafting him at the bottom of that range when I think that you can make the argument that Waddle, like it's so flat. Like you can make the argument that Waddle should be drafted over a Drake London.

Like you make the argument that Waddle should go over a lot of those guys. So I like him a lot. The other one is one that he's actually my highest exposed wide receiver. on underdog is Brian Thomas. Now, I know, I think you have some qualms about his prospect profile and such, which is fair, because we only saw one-year production from him. So I understand that there's volatility to this kind of profile. But hear me out, all right.

Brian Thomas is going to go in like the wide receiver 48 to wide receiver 50-ish range in your home leagues, maybe a little bit earlier in, you know, a little bit sharper leagues. let's say wide receiver 45 in my prospect model the zap model he had a score of 94.5 which uh is a really strong number you know it's not as good as roma it's like two points away from roma dunzae and then the two others malik neighbors and Marvin harrison were in not in the 99 i mean they were absurd right they were top five prospects of database has ever seen so he was at least closeish to roma dunzae since 2014, there's been 23 rookie wide receivers to get selected in the wide receiver 40 to wide receiver 60 range who had prospect scores above 90. So that's pretty well below even where

Brian Thomas was at. Those players on average outperformed ADP expectation by 1.4 ppros per game and 39% a little over 39% of them finished as what I talked about earlier as moderate breakouts, guys who outperform ADP expectation by three or more points per game. And remember, and I know you've done a lot of research on this too, rookies perform a lot better during the second half of the season versus the first, which is where we want these guys to hypothetically perform. And then on top of that, like he's running in two wide sets right now. You know, and I think that's logical to do that.

He's seemingly looked good. I watched his preseason tape. He looked like what they drafted him for. Again, it's the preseason. Take that with a grain of salt. But if he plays the Calvin Ridley role, which I think is very feasible given his archetype and his profile and how they're going to deploy him, Ridley was wide receiver 14 or so, depending on your expected points model. I don't know what yours says. He was wide receiver 10 for us. Yeah, exactly,

exactly. So obviously he finishes like wide receiver 18 or something in PPR points per game, but we know he saw so many end zone targets. We know he had a good area a good areaage profile. imagine a world where you get a talented young guy playing in a similar situation who doesn't get unlucky the way that Calvin Ridley did last year. To me, getting that and you're not paying the price like we did with Calvin Ridley a year ago. Part of the narrative with Ridley definitely has to do with the fact that people spent a wide receiver one price tag to get them last year, right? You're spending a wide receiver four to wide receiver five price tag, and especially in home leagues to get Brian Thomas. So I'm, I understand his prospect profile.

has a lot of volatility to it, but I'm more than willing to buy into that in a redraft format. Yeah. So let me let me just make my stance clear on BTJ is I am now in. I'm in on Ryan Tommy. I had concerns with his prospect. Yeah, I did too. We all should have. Yeah.

So I one of the stats was like he had 50% of his yards last year just on the go route, which is like insane is the most we've seen except since, uh, D.K Metcalf, had 65% of his yards just on two routes. And so what I said is this probably means he's raw. You know, he probably might take him a few years to develop. But the thing is, I said the exact same thing about Rishi Rice. I said the exact same thing about D.K. Metcalf. And so there's a counter argument to that where it's just like, well, what if he was just

used stupidly in college, which happens all the time? Or what if he learns like two other routes he could be sick at and then he's a monster? Or it's like if he could do all that just on two routes, just watch him with an NFL coaching staff. And so you look at what every single beat writer said, what personal sources have said, he looks amazing. He's out of control. Also, another sources thing I heard after I published my article was that part of the target distribution was Malik Navors was like a really selfish sort of me first diva. And BTJ was like more of a team player. So that could have played in a role to their splits where, you know, neighbors out outfit him or

whatever. But yeah, I'm with you. And you've been beating the strum for, I don't know how long, just like the inherent upside to rookies. And we see this every year where it's like, oh, rookies are always undervalued. Rookies have tremendous upside. And then preseason happens. And it's like, oh, you know, Jalen Polk isn't starting with the ones in week one of preseason. and you got to bump him down your rankings. And it's like, no, yeah, it's second half upside is what really matters. And Jalen Waddle, I'll just piggyback on that. I think that's a great call.

He ranks second among all players in XFP per route run. The route share wasn't high. Why? Because he dealt with like the worst injury luck. He kept coming out of games with injuries or coming out and then returning and obviously still not looking quite right. Just for the folks at home and a chance to plug the fantasy points Data Suite. I had this stat today, which I thought was like really sick. So if you look at the top

wide receivers by yards per route run against each coverage type, cover one, Tyreek Hill leads, cover two, Tyreek, cover three, Tyreek, cover four, Jalen Waddle, 5.3,4 yards for route run, cover six, Tyreek. So I knew this last year, Waddle made me 25K in DFS because they played him against the Jets, you ran a cover four heavy scheme. But if you're an underdog or if you're an FFPC with this bonus rounds, weeks 14 through 18 faces a defense ranking top four in rate of cover four every single week. That's just like a cherry on top. That's fun.

For Jalen model, yeah. So that's going to be nice. But yeah, love that. I think those are great calls. Do you want to sneak in one more? Should we move on to the final question? I mean, yeah, I think at running back, you know, we talked about Tajay Spears a little bit he's one we talked about Jaliel mclaughlin he's another one we

also talked about mark andrews who would be my tight end call i'm gonna throw out chase brown too uh as someone that i've really bought into over the last month or so but i was a big zach moss guy to start and i've totally changed my tune on that yeah i mean the thing with with brown like i i i was above market you know in in uh may and june but then i just really got on board in july i'm i'm probably you know he's probably top four or five for me now in terms of exposure in best ball um because i am a best ball bro these days but yeah so so with brown you know his explosiveness has never been in question uh we saw that in college i think that people sort of assume that he's like a smaller back for whatever reason but he's really not i mean he's not like huge but he's like what 209 or something like not

uh he can carry a workload look at what he did during his final collegiate season he carried it and he touched the ball like 350 times um so i think that he could hypothetically carry the workload. And, you know, just, just with coach speak stuff, I pay attention a lot more at running back than I do wide receiver because coaches are dictating volume a lot more at running back than they are at wide receiver. And so that, you know, this is why we can talk about Kenneth Walker a little bit. But that's why, you know, I've changed my tune a little bit on, on Walker even as well. But, you know, with Chase Brown, we're seeing this consistent drumbeat of him being the pass catching back in that backfield, which I'm always going to lean pass catcher over goal line,

quote unquote goal line back, mostly because we will get the goal line back wrong, but also a guy who's a pass catcher who's still getting early down work can still score touchdowns and still see some goal line work. So, you know, and as we know, targets are just so much more valuable than any other rush attempt that we're going to see. So Chase Brown playing that role is big. The fear obviously is that he barely played on third down last year. and if they don't buy into his past protection, that could be somewhat of a problem.

But as of now, I don't know why they'd go in a different direction necessarily. You know, I've seen people cite that Zach Moss was better in pass pro or really good in past pro, especially last year. But it's like, okay, you know, Chase Brown was a rookie. You got to give him some time. He's definitely the explosive one of the two. He had crazy, crazy explosive related numbers. I mean, like his success rate numbers were not that strong.

but when you look at things like, like because of small sample sizes, like his yard per route run was like 4.3 or something last year because of the big plays that he was able to create. So yeah, I'm just leaning into that a little bit more because we know that, you know, with Joe Mixing gone, he's always been, I'm assuming he's been an expected fantasy points machine within your model through the years. And just underperformed year in and year out. But now imagine mixing with a little bit more explosion, hypothetically.

You can see the upside being. form there. I think the median outcome is still a split backfield, but the upside is very evident for a guy like Chase Brown. Yeah, I think you nailed it perfectly where the most likely outcome is the split backfield, but there's some upside here that's certainly not being priced in. But I'm worried you're about to be talking out of both sides of your mouth in a second because so here's a stat. Chase Brown last year ranked dead last of 77 qualifying running backs in success rate. Yeah, he sucked. All right. Zach Moss ranked behind only Christian McCaffrey and James Connor in rushing yards over expectation per carry. That stat is according to next gen stats.

So I don't know what goes into their expectation model. So I don't know because by like fantasy points data, you look at like the advanced efficiency metrics for Zach Moss. They were pretty mid at best. So I don't know what happened there. But so yeah, horrible success rate. The question I'm going to ask you now is final question in the show. Who is, and I know the answer, who is the player keeping you up at night? Yeah, we're going to talk Kenneth Walker here, man.

We got to, we got to talk a little Kenneth Walker. I, you know, best ball is a different story. I'll say that again because obviously his big playability has always been evident. My beef with Kenneth Walker has consistently been that how he's produced and how he's done thus far in the NFL and what he looked like as a prospect to me has been overvalued. And I only say that because of the past catching element of his game, right? I think, you know, philosophically, I don't think that there's a big, big delta between an above average pass catcher at running back and a below average pass catcher at running

back, right? Like, I don't think that you're going to see, you know, you'll obviously get the Christian McCaffrey's on one end and then like the Miles Sanders on the other end, right? where you know that there's a consistent theme of a guy like Sanders being so inefficient since his rookie season through the air and then CMC just being a monster from a volume and efficiency standpoint as a receiver. And then there's just a bunch of dudes sort of in the middle that some are below average, some are above average, and there's probably not that much stickiness year over year with what those metrics and how they actually perform and what that

looks like. Some dudes are like Aaron Jones to me is one of the best receiving backs that we've seen in the last 15 years in the league, right? But you don't get a lot of those types of players. So I'll preface with that. With that being said, Kenneth Walker, my biggest calm with him, like he still looked good in my prospect model, but he didn't have good receiving numbers in college. Like, they just weren't good. They weren't there. And whether you're looking at volume or per route efficiency was not strong throughout his tenure at both schools that he played at. And then he gets the NFL. And what's been going on in the NFL? Well, he's been taken off the field and passing down situations pretty frequently. He hasn't hit more than an 8%

target share per game rate at the NFL level. We typically see, not typically, we'll almost always see 10% plus target shares for RB1s and fantasy. And lo and behold, Kenneth Walker's been an RB2. He's been, he's been like a quintessential RB2 and fantasy football since entering the NFL, right? And so now we get into this new season where at the beginning of the off season, I'm like, okay, beginning of, let's just say May, like when I started really ramping up like the, the best ball stuff, I'm like, okay, Kenneth Walker, we know has not been much of a pass catcher. Zach Charbonnet played that role both in college and last year, you know, from a ratio standpoint, the ratio of downs that he was playing and the kind of work he was seeing, it was, it leaned more pass heavy.

Zach Sharbonnet could be just a better value than Kenneth Walker straight up because this new coaching staff might say, hey, we don't want the home run hitting running back who has a poor success rate, but who's this explosive back and Kenneth Walker, we want more of the grinder that's like James Connor, who is Zach Charbonnet, right? And so obviously the coaching staff has come out and they've gone in the opposite direction. And like I said, from a coach speak standpoint, you can't ignore what a coaching staff is saying about a running back because there's only one of them on the field typically at one time. And that's dictated by the coaching staff. So I care about what they're saying.

Now, the problem is then taking that to too far of a degree and saying that Kenneth Walker is going to see a 15% target share this year because the coaching staff said that he's going to catch more passes. To me, it's more so saying, okay, an 8% target share projection, now the median projection might be 10%, might be 11%, and that small bump makes him jump up a tier, in my opinion. Like, that makes him become, you know, more in that like Aaron Jones tier, let's say, or like Alvin Camara tier and half PPR, it jumps him up into the Josh Jacobs and

Joe Mixon tier because we know the ground game upside is there for Kenneth Walker. Like, we've seen that. We just have not seen it. And there's a lot of evidence that he's just not this massive pass catcher. But hey, if they want to throw some swing passes his way, if that's part of the game plan, and we know that Ryan Grubb has openly talked about using his running backs in the passing game, I think it's valid to move him up. Now, there's really strong competition in Seattle at wide receiver.

There's only 100% target share to go around in an offense. You've got three good wide receivers. You know, you get an ascending talent in JSN. You know, I think Tyler Lockett might take a step back this year, but regardless, he's still fine. And then DK Metcalfs in Alpha. So you have at least those three and no offense on a bad pass catching tight end. So I just don't know where the absolute ceiling is for Kenneth Walker to like be a top

five running back in fantasy, but I'm not so ignorant to just ignore what they're talking about about that backfield. And Walker may be seeing a higher target share than what was originally projected. Yeah. So we already had this debate a couple of weeks ago. And I've been high on Kenneth Walker all offseason. I said like a month ago or two months ago, like I could see him being the bell cow of this offense. I don't think that's priced in. And the reason why I was saying that was like largely due to my prospect model, which said, uh, Zach Charbonnet, I thought was mid to submit over drafted. Kenneth Walker, I loved. I thought he was elite on the ground. Like you look at, you look at Michigan State before and after he was with the team,

with the exact same coaching staff, the same quarterback, the same offensive line, 40% win percentage, 3.2 yards per carry nearly or maybe just a little bit less than 100, rushing yards per game. And then with Kenneth Walker, 83% win percentage, over five yards per carry, 187 rushing yards per game. He should have won the Heisman that year, in my opinion. And so I just loved the player. And I know your critique on him was that, you know, he didn't catch passes in college, and that's pretty sticky. And I argue the opposite. I argued, well, no, you look at Darren Sproles, you look at Ledani and Tominson, you look at Levian, on Bell, you look at Jaliel McLaughlin, none of those guys caught passes in college.

Your argument to me was like, no, no, your samples too wide. If you look just back over the last seven years or 10 years, you don't see that. And like, I think that was a fair point. I honestly think you were probably right. But that, that's what I was arguing at the time was that being an elite runner is more predictive of future targets in the NFL than college receiving production. But anyway, and you also said, like, he's only ever been an RB2. It's like true, but he also had like a 55 versus 45 committee last year. And, you know, again, it just stuck to my priors and sharps being being mid. The problem is like, it's really hard to argue that analytically.

It's really hard to argue that like Walker was legitimately better than him last year. I know he dealt with some injuries or even the year before that. And like you said, the success rate, I kind of just don't think it's that important. I think like NFL coaches maybe just care more about YARR. it's for carry or maybe in today's day and age they care more about explosive rate but yeah um or big play potential but like again honestly like i have it's so hard to argue against that it's really just me stuck to my priors and i think i just i just ran out good because for whatever reason coaching staff loves him they're every single beat writer uh jeremy thallor dan graziano

know, Albert Breers, Bell cow, focal point of the offense. Rich Rebar had a great counter argument on the show last week, too. It's like, why would you ever target him when you have those three wide receivers and Noah fan as well? So I'm worried here because, like, I was already there. And now I, am I double counting it? Am I triple counting it? Yeah.

So he's a player I like, but I'm with you. He's also a player I'm somewhat losing sleepover. Yeah. I mean, I also think, you know, with the prospect stuff, it depends on like, what you're looking at in particular with receiving stuff. Like I've gotten a lot of signal combining a lot of metrics, not a lot actually, just a handful of metrics together,

but with straight up best season reception share and using that as sort of a proxy to whether or not this guy is going to be able to catch passes at the NFL level. And usually a 10% mark in a top season in college does correlate to having success as a receiver in the NFL. So like, you know, even like a Levi-on-Bel or like, whenever you give them some of that team context a little bit more, they get over that mark. Kenneth Walker just wasn't there. And the argument against that as a statistic, not look, again, Walker didn't even grade out poorly in my prospect model. Like he graded out pretty similarly to like a Jonathan Brooks this year. Not to say that they're the same running back, but I'm saying like, or the same type of running back. I'm just saying like from a score perspective.

So like he still looked fine. Like it's, it's just that he didn't have that extra juice or that extra edge because of that last. of receiving and he still hasn't like to this day right now as we're talking about this he still hasn't shown us he's a high volume receiver like we're we're now going off of what these beats are saying and i'm okay with changing a prior that i had in may about about uh walker what i'm not going to do is think that he's going to become a belcow to the degree of some of the elite guys in the league right from a receiving perspective because i think not only does team not necessarily allow for that, but also we just, it would be an outlier for Kenneth Walker to see a 13, 14% target share in year three after not doing that in year one and year two.

I actually looked it up. There's not, there's over the last 12 years, we haven't seen anyone jump, make the jump. It was, I had some parameters and stuff. So, uh, someone might be able to find somebody, but there was some threshold. I talked about in my podcast, some threshold of like number of attempts. that these guys would hit. But we haven't seen a guy go from year one, year two of a sub 10% target share and then go and far exceed that moving forward.

It's just a really difficult. Like I think Aaron Jones was one who kind of got there or who did get there, but his thresholds and the stuff that I was looking at wasn't as a lopsided from a rushing to receiving perspective as Kenneth Walker's has been. Yeah, I mean, well, even there's Derek Henry who, you know, doubled his, his targets. couple years back. I know it's probably from like, right, but it's still, I'm speaking, I'm speaking like like Kenneth Walker could be a not quite Derek Henry, like on the ground and what we've seen from Henry, but like seeing more volume through the air than

Henry, but still being more of like a ground game guy who's unbelievably explosive and efficient on the ground and therefore can end up giving us an RB one season. I think that can happen. That's what I'm saying is that if he gets that slight slight uptick and target share, like he needs that 3 to 4% bump in target share to really have the ceiling that I feel like some people, especially in like dynasty, have already kind of baked in and given him, right? Because he hasn't, he hasn't been that guy yet. Like he's just been an RB2 in fantasy. And I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm just saying that that is still a predictor to some degree of what's to come. But again, going back to like what coaches want, we don't know. Like we don't know what an individual coaching staff is

going to want. And it's very clear that this coaching staff wants to use him. And that's why we should adjust. Whereas another coaching staff, like the Cardinals, they might be totally fine, which is using James Connor a lot, even though we know that James Conner's upside is not like something absolutely insane. Yeah, I just think Charbonnet, one of the reasons why I was love around him was just the Chip Kelly component who does target running backs at an at a typically high raid who never do anything. And then not for nothing, but Walker had 50 more receiving yards than Zach Charbonnet on three fewer targets last year. So who knows, but I'm with you. I think I again, really hard to argue with just about anything you said. You probably have them ranked pretty similar. I would assume like,

at this point, like I think I have Walker like RB 15ish like something around there, which is a little, I think one or two spots above market at this point with Walker. Yeah, I've got him RB12. Um, Same tier probably too, though. Probably, yeah. Okay, I'll give you my player that I'm struggling with, like losing sleepover just the last two nights. And I really don't have anything to add to this. I just want to hear your thoughts and then we'll wrap up the show with that. The only player to jump a tier in my draft guide since it launched two weeks ago,

Nico Collins, what are your thoughts? I'm a little bit scared. I won't lie. Because- Where do you have them? Do you know? Yeah, my rankings right here. I can pull them up. Right now I have Nico at wide receiver 13. So I actually have him like relatively, you know, probably in line with market, but I also have a giant tier there. Like I think that right. Same. You could argue Cooper Cup over Nico. You could argue a lot of guys over. Bro. How much does that tier suck? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like that's why this that's why if you get like the one 12 in a best ball draft, it's just like, yeah. You're just done. I did that earlier today on a live year. It's horrible. So yeah. But with Nico, uh, but with Nico. But with Nico, that's why this. That's why. That's why. It's why. It's like, yeah. Uh, but with my fear is there is a lot of regression that's going to come and come his way. Like he ended up,

I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but his yards per route run was over three. That's a number that we don't see guys repeat unless you're like Tyreek Hill. You know, his target share per game also wasn't that strong. Like it wasn't elite and that's a little bit fearful. So you really went off of efficiency last year with Collins. And now you could argue that, you know, with Stefan Diggs, is he really going to see an uptick in target share? He might be able to see a slight uptick if they just move some of those targets, you know, like the wide receiver threes we're seeing in that offense, like to, you know, like a Noah Brown and stuff.

And like they don't target their tight ends as much this year. You know, you could see maybe a slight uptick to like a 23, 24%. But the way I've kind of managed Nico is I've gotten my exposure in bestball and where the contention upside's obviously there. And I know this is kind of a cop. out. But the contingency upside is there if digs or tankdale go down. Also, there's a chance that we just see kind of a roller coaster of, you know, like a George Kittal-esque type season with some of these Texans wideouts where they blow up one week and then they're, you know, four for 50 the next

week. And we just don't love that production. And in a best ball environment, when they give you those four for 50 weeks, you're able to slot in another wide receiver from your team to fill that role. whereas in a managed league, it's just a little bit more difficult to do that and to bank on that. So again, I have him in that tier, having my wide receiver 13, because I'm okay with betting on the upside play,

which is he has multiple outs with injury with Tankdell and Stefan Diggs. And he also is coming off a season that was honestly, like historically good, like from an efficiency standpoint. It was one of the best seasons that we've seen a really long time. You can put like IUC up there too last season, the way that he performed. But both guys to me,

it's going to be almost impossible. for them to match their yards per target and yards per route run that they had last year. Yeah, I'm with you. This like better, better in bestball archetype is like, do I just get my exposure to Houston and bestball and green bay in bestball? That's, I kind of had Nico more buried in my, my redraft rankings. Now he's up to wide receiver 15 and I'll just, I'll just tell you why. So last year, so we have this new stat that's launching soon on fantasy points data. It's called ass. average separation score. And we also have a route win rate.

And so it just measures every wide receiver on every single play, how good the are at gaining separation. And Tank Dell was number one. And best separated in the league last year. And if you look at the games that Tank and Nico both started and finished, Tank Dell 78% route share. Nico Collins 71. Yeah.

Couldn't believe that. Targets roughly the same, but in Tank Dell's favor, Fantasy points per game, 16.3 to 15.5 in Tankdell's favor. And so I was I was keeping up. I'm a tanked L guy. Yeah. And then you look at you look at preseason usage, tankedale 60% route share. Nico Collins, 93%. That is a massive leap from the 78% I just I just cited, or 66, actually, in all games played. And so if he had this route share last year based on his yards for route run, which isn't perfect, but still good enough. He would have led the league in yards per game with 121.3 instead of 86.5.

He just got this massive contract. I think it makes sense. They view him as the wide receiver one. And so I have a wide receiver 15, but that tier, like you said, is tough. So he keeps moving up and down, but it's, he's a tricky one. Yeah. No, it makes total sense. I mean, we're going to see, it seems very clear based on preseason usage that they're

two wide package is Colin. and digs. And, you know, at the end of the day, there's going to be a lot of run running plays and rushing plays. Like I try to explain that to like patrons and on a live stream the other day of like, okay, the routes run difference per game hypothetically might end up being like tank del sees three fewer routes run. Like it might not be that significant because they're probably going to run a lot of 11 in general. But it still might add up over time and it makes tank Dell to me like the clear three of the group in terms of just like pecking order. But obviously the efficiency can be there for Dell.

And I still like Dell. That's not really, this is not an anti-Dell argument. But it makes you feel more comfortable with a guy like Nico as a result of how they're, you know, using them in the preseason. Right. JJ, let me just say, amazing. This might have been the best podcast I've ever done ever. You absolutely crushed it. Thank you.

And folks at home, this is why you need to listen to JJ's podcast. Favorite podcasts. I love the ringer fantasy podcast. I think that's the most entertaining podcast, but if you want to be a smart fantasy football player, best analysis, far and away, JJ, no one does this better than him when it comes to like elite analysis, elite game theory, but then you just distill it in the most easily digestible way possible. Like every time I read it, one of your articles, I just like read it in your voice so perfectly in my head. So 100% listen to the late round QB podcast.

Yeah, late round fantasy football podcast. Late round fantasy football podcast. Also, if you're going to buy any draft guide that's not my own, I would put JJ's above anyone else's phenomenal work. This is my ideological father, my mentor in this space. And so JJ, thank you so much for coming on. Anything else you want to plug or did I just do it for you? No, man, you did a great job.

I appreciate it. I'm proud of you for everything that you're doing as well. I've been waiting years to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, look, I did a podcast with Jacob Sanderson yesterday and, and he said that at the end of it, he was like, all right, I waited until a minute 55 to say this, but you know, I've always looked up to your content, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he was like, I've been listening to you since I was younger. And I'm like, man, I've never felt older in my entire life. Like he's not even that much younger than me. But yeah, look, I've been around here. I've been on these streets for a while now. And I appreciate the kind words. And I'm, again, proud of what you and both you and Graham have been able to do. And you guys are just crushing it at fantasy points.

Yeah. And what's your site for people who want to buy the draft guide? You also do a phenomenal prospect guide, too. Same thing. I do my own prospect guide. But if you're going to buy any other, I would recommend JJ above anyone else. Yeah, thank you. Yeah.

It's all late round.com. Right now, the draft guide is the thing that I'm, you know, updating and stuff. And then once the winter hits is when the prospect guide will end up dropping. Boom. All right. JJ, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, man.