Fantasy Football Today - Ja'Marr Chase Profile: The Best WR in Fantasy? (07/09 Fantasy Football Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 What does possible sound like for your business? It's having the spend to power your scale with no preset spending limit. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. Jamar Chase is the third wide receiver off the board. What is his potential in year two?

Starting point is 00:00:24 Let's talk to Jacob Gibbs right now on Fantasy Football Today in five. All right, Jacob Gibbs. I am very excited about Jamar Chase. I am tempted to make him my number one wide receiver. Not going to do it in PPR for sure, but what can you tell us about Jamar Chase? Give us the starting points here.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Yeah, it's hard not to be excited after what we saw from Jamar as a rookie. So just the first thing is over the past 10 seasons, we've had nine rookie wide receivers top 1,000 yards. Of that group, seven of the nine have increased their yardage output in year two. And the group averaged a 6% increase from year one to year two. So these are the best performing rookie receivers. And they're still like increasing that the next year. It's not been very often that it's been a fluke for a

Starting point is 00:01:12 receiver to really pop off in the way that Jamar did. And only three of these rookies, Justin Jefferson, Odell Beckham, and Michael Thomas topped 1,100 yards. So really they're having, it's hard to find comparables for Jamar because he had freaking 1400 yards rookie and really Justin Jackson, Odell Beckham, the only ones even close to that. But the three I just mentioned increase their yardage output by 13% from year one to year two.

Starting point is 00:01:35 So a six to 13% increase from Jamar would put him in the 1542 to 1644 yard range, which would obviously be excellent. Only two 22-year-old receivers have ever got that, Josh Gordon and Justin Jefferson, over the past 20 seasons. So I don't know if it's fair to extrapolate it like that, but that's the type of, if we're just looking at just a normal increase from other receivers

Starting point is 00:01:59 who have been as exceptional as Jamar was as a rookie, that's what we're looking at. And if you add that type of an increase, we're really looking at possibly leading the league in receiving as a second-year player. Yeah, I think the reason why I won't make him number one in full PPR is he's going to be such a high yards per catch guy, I think, that he probably won't have the catches that a Cooper Cup would have

Starting point is 00:02:22 or something like that. A little bit like Tyreek Hill, better in a half PPR setting than a full PPR. But anyway, there is probably some regression coming in some way, right? I mean, I think he had five touchdown catches of more than 50 yards last year. So what kind of regression can we see and how much would it hurt him? I'm glad you brought up Tyreek Hill because he's really the only guy who Jamar could follow a similar trajectory and it makes sense. Really, there's no one else like Tyreek Hill who's been able to score long touchdowns consistently. So no player has had as many touchdowns of 30 plus yards over the past 20 seasons as Jamar did in 2021.

Starting point is 00:03:03 As a rookie, he had more 30 plus yard touchdowns than any player over the past 20 seasons as jamar did in 2021 as a rookie he had more 30 plus yard touchdowns than any player over the past 20 years 62 percent of his 30 plus yard catches resulted in a touchdown the nfl average is 27 percent um and then really the only two players um that even come close to him in terms of um multiple seasons with you know the numbers that he did of 30-plus, 40-plus, 50-plus yard touchdowns are Jordy Nelson and Tyreek Hill. So Nelson has seasons with six and seven touchdowns of 40-plus yards, but he never had another one with more than two. And he had pretty substantial careers.

Starting point is 00:03:38 That just goes to show how unlikely it is to ever repeat the type of things that we saw from Jamar, who had six 40-plus yard touchdowns as a rookie. And then, yeah, Hill really is the only one who's done it consistently. He had zero 40-plus yard scores as a rookie, and then he went six, four, four, and five over the next four seasons. And then last year he only had two. So, like, if Jamar isn't able to keep scoring long touchdowns at the same rate, that is a little bit concerning because he was out-targeted by T. Higgins in the red zone.

Starting point is 00:04:09 And he really, that's not, he was only targeting 20% of his routes in the red zone. That wasn't somewhere he was used heavily. So, like, he needs the touchdowns to come on these long plays. And really, Tyreek is the only person who's ever been able to do it at such a high rate consistently. Randy Moss, as a rookie, actually had five touchdown catches of 50 plus yards, same as Jamar Chase, and he followed it up with four more in his second year. I think if you look at Randy Moss,

Starting point is 00:04:32 there was some regression. He went from 17 touchdowns to 11 touchdowns from 1998 as a rookie to 1999, but he had 100 more yards. He had 11 more catches. He had 13 more targets. Even if you lose the touchdowns, hopefully you can make up for it in other ways. And finally his splits with T Higgins

Starting point is 00:04:49 on the field, you did mention the red zone aspect of it, but what else can you tell us about when chase and Higgins were on the field together? Yeah. So Higgins out targeted chase 108 to 93. He had 1300 area arts to chase his 1200 and Higgins straight up outscored him in PPR formats when both players were on the field, which is a pretty large sample size, 469 routes. Um, chase's target per route run rate fell from 32% with Higgins off the field to 20% with Higgins on the field, which is a pretty substantial drop. His yard per hour run rate was down from 3.5 to 2.3. Um, and then another way to look at it, Chase ran 579 routes on the year. If you extrapolate his rates from the 469 routes with T. Higgins also on the field,

Starting point is 00:05:32 he would have scored 258 PPR points rather than 305, which would have ranked him as the wide receiver eight, just behind Deontay Johnson and just ahead of Keenan Allen. So this isn't, you know, to say that, you know, T. Higgins is clearly the wide receiver one or that Jamar Chase is not as good as T. Higgins or anything like that. But T. Higgins definitely did impact Jamar when he was on the field. And if he is healthy for a full season, if last year's numbers are an indication, Jamar might be more of a wide receiver 6, 7, 8 type of guy

Starting point is 00:05:59 than the top three receivers he's been drafted as. All right. Well, thank you, Jacob Gibbs. Question from Dustin in the chat. Is Jacob Gibbs going to be on a full-length show? Yes, he is. That will be coming up in the next couple of weeks. Until then, you'll hear him on the Sunday edition of Fantasy Football Today in 5,

Starting point is 00:06:15 where we talk about T. Higgins. We'll talk to you then.

Fantasy Football Today - Ja'Marr Chase Profile: The Best WR in Fantasy? (07/09 Fantasy Football Podcast)

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