1128: Mailbag - Travis Etienne's Workload, Data That Matters, and More

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Grab some extra napkins and get going. Get them while they're literally hot at a participating McDonald's for a limited time. This is the Late Round Podcast with your host, J.J. Zacharysen. What's up, everyone? It's J.J. Zacharysen. In this episode, 1120, 28 of the Late Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thank you for tuning in. If you're interested in my weekly rankings, my rest-of-season rankings, a great Discord community, a weekly WaverWire livestream Q&A, and more, you should look into becoming a Late Round Fantasy Football member. It's a good time. To learn more, just head to lateround.com. Now, it's a mailbag episode. Let's get to these questions. The first one's from Twitter. It's from Atalego. It says, Hi, J.J. I've been a fan since 2021, and I love to see that you're always stepping it up. Thank you. I've always thought that week one is the perfect time to be aggressive and make trades, since there's still tons of uncertainty and people tend to overreact. What are your thoughts on this? Yes, absolutely yes. Average draft position is still far, far more predictive of what's going to happen week two onward than week one production is. I talked about this on the 10 Trends episode earlier this week. When we're looking at the correlation between week one performance and then week two to end of season performance, points per game is not that predictive at all, aka points scored in week one. It's more predictive at running back, and then it's least predictive at wide receiver. So maybe you'd want to lean into that week one production slightly more at running back, but you still want to be rational about things. Like, I think David Montgomery is going to be good this season, but we also can't expect three touchdowns every single week. Realistically, his snap share was far more split than you'd probably expect given that result. So just be rational about things. But when it comes to wide receivers like Jalen Waddell types, I would see if you could buy ultra low. It can't hurt to send a trade offer to someone who's really upset after that week one performance. Maybe Waddell doesn't live up to his draft costs this year, but we know factually that week one performances at wide receiver explain very little about their rest of season production. So my answer is yes. It's a good time to take advantage of the, the reactionary fantasy manager. This next question is from Jackson from the members hub. It says, I remember you weren't the biggest fan of Travis Achan. I'm curious if he might be a buy right now. Everyone seems to be low on him because he's part of a rotation. However, I see some things that I like. Number one, he's second in targets right now with nine. Only Bijan has more. Number two, I imagine that this Kellen Moore offense is the kind of offense that might continue this kind of passing volume. Number three, the vibes around him are bad. Number four, so it feels like people might let him go for very little. I do hear he struggles in past predictions. So maybe that's a concern, but do we really think that these other running backs are going to beat him out? This is after all an offensive coordinator who fed Saquon Barkley in 2024. Okay. Let's start with that last point. This is straight from coach speak index. You guys should check out if you're into hearing what coaches are saying about their players. This is what Kellen Moore said on Wednesday. Quote, I think it's important to rotate these guys. We got to rotate all these running backs and there will be different packages or responsibilities from week to week that are different. I think it's important. My one year in Philly is probably the only year I've ever been where a running back just kind of takes everything until he can't. Everywhere else, you're usually rotating these guys. So I really don't think that 2024 Saquon Barkley should really matter that much here. I also don't think that we should be looking at raw totals with the Saints offense from week one. And you guys know that I brought up Kellen Moore's pace of play the volume in his offense is like 30 times in the past, but they played extra time. The game script really favored a lot of plays. They're not going to run that many offensive plays each week. We should be focused on the rate stats though. And to be fair, HN snap share and his route share were not significantly far off from what we saw in Jacksonville last year. He had a 58% snap share versus a 60% one last season. His route share was 40% last year and week one, it was 36%. And like you said, he did see a lot of play. He did see a lot of targets. I'd be more concerned about target share than raw volume though, but he did see a 17% target share. If you look year over year though, with Travis HN, the biggest difference is that the Saints probably don't project to be as good as Jacksonville's offense, at least as a run game. And then the offense is a holder in the second half of the year. And I want to see him get more of that green zone work. But as someone who was lower than the market with HN this year, as you noted in the question after digging into this more, I'm not like totally turned off now and think that you need a panic cell. Most backfielders, backfields are split. I do think the idea of him being an RB one this season, probably not totally reasonable based on what Kellen Moore is thinking and what we saw in week one, especially when Alvin Kamara gets back. But I do definitely think that HN can be an RB too. The next question is from at good underscore ecosystem on Twitter. It says, would you drop high end handcuffs and ambiguous backfields to take a shot at a rookie wide receiver? If your team needs wide receivers more, for example, drop Rico Dowd, for Caleb Douglas or Antonio Williams, or would you wait for those players to start breaking out and pay the fab premium the week they blow up? Now look, we want to be one week ahead, right? I think that Caleb Douglas, Antonio Williams, I talked about him on the 10 trends episode. They both can be rostered right now. Absolutely. But in this particular example, in a vacuum, I would be keeping Rico Dowd. He led the Steelers backfield and snaps in week one. In most formats, even if that player is more of a flex play, you don't want to be dropping a running back. Who's leading the game. He's leading his team in snaps. Like, is there an outcome where one of those rookie wide receivers ends up being better than Rico Dowd? Of course, but I wouldn't be doing my job. If I said to drop Rico Dowd for someone like Antonio Williams, who's still relatively unknown. And that's coming from someone who ranked Williams pretty high as a rookie. I think he has a really fun profile. We just have to recognize that they still have Terry McLaurin and Stefan Diggs. It might be more of a slow burn until Antonio Williams gets legit playing time. And look, Caleb Douglas, very, very interesting. If you can get them off the waiver wire, you should. I talked about him in the 15 transactions episode, but again, I would rather be dropping some other piece of my team as opposed to dropping a guy like Rico Dowd, who has legitimate standalone value. And remember both Pittsburgh running backs and backs from ambiguous backfields in general, they have upside. They have contingent upside with the other running back getting hurt. Now, if you're talking like Emmett Johnson, another player I like a lot versus a Caleb Douglas or Antonio Williams, that makes a little bit more sense. That's a little bit different. The standalone value piece with Johnson, probably going to be tough to predict. And he's most relevant with a Kenneth Walker injury. So he's more of that traditional high-end handcuff. In that case, if you need the wide receiver production, that makes way more sense. But with Dowdell in particular, I can't get behind it. He was 19th in running back snap share in week one. I still think Jalen Warren has more upside, but in 99% of leagues, Rico Dowdell should be rostered. This next question is also from Twitter's from at know the good life. It says rest of season Ferguson or Sadiq and full PPR. So the funny part of this question is I don't think it matters which Ferguson you're talking about. I do like Jake Ferguson this week against Washington. Like I said on the sleeper show, but he's just not someone who has a super high fantasy ceiling week in and week out without an injury to either George Pickens or CD lamb. I think he has a decent enough median outcome, but the ceiling outcome week in and week out just is not that good. And then we've got to wait and see what happens with Terrence Ferguson. After one week, I'm not amazingly optimistic. So I'm back to what I've been saying this summer about Kenyon Sadiq. I find it so strange that trends in fantasy football have leaned more and more towards the more unknown younger players, right? And yet no one in fantasy football during draft season. And even right now, after he had a decent week one, no one wants Kenyon Sadiq. He was a player I had as a late round dart throw. And anyone who listens to Kenyon Sadiq, listen to becoming a best ball, bro, you know that I have a lot of Sadiq and best ball. So yeah, maybe there is some bias here. And this certainly isn't a week one victory lap. I mean, he had a sub 50% route share with players like Sadiq. We're going to be wrong far more often than we're going to be right for sure. But I don't really care about being wrong here because his cost is so low. The very simple take with Sadiq is that he's one of the most athletic tight ends that we've ever seen. He's still only 21 years old and he was a middle of the first round pick. And he's playing in an offense that likes to utilize tight ends. There's been this narrative. all summer long that Sadiq had a bad collegiate production profile. I see it everywhere. I just personally don't see that to be true. Not only did he have tough competition in college, but we use breakout score as a metric in our tight end model. Breakout score looks at receiving yards per team pass attempt and it adjusts it for age. Sadiq's breakout score is well past the 80th percentile. I think the reason people are down on Sadiq is because we've been spoiled with prospects like Colston Loveland and Brock Bowers, which yes, I agree. He's not Colston Loveland or Brock Bowers, but I don't want to place these guys into two boxes that they're either Brock Bowers where they're breaking reception records or they're just not important. There's certainly a gray area here. So to me, Sadiq is one of those players that I'm going to take a chance on strictly for upside purposes. Maybe it doesn't work out, but I do think it makes plenty of sense from a process standpoint. We already saw him get manufactured touches in week one. I don't think he's going to be a good player. I don't think he's going to be a good And I'd assume that route share, it only gets better as the season moves forward. This next question is from Eric. It says, Hi, JJ. In the data dump that you sent out, there's a lot of route share and target share discrepancies. For example, player A ran the most routes on his team by a long shot, but player B on the same team received many more targets. Which metrics should we lean into more when determining who to add or buy? Route share shows how the team wants to utilize the player, but target share could be an indicator of talent. Curious for your thoughts on this. So I ran some analysis on this because I want to be precise with this question. I don't want to just sit here and say both of them matter. Both of them do matter, but there is some more detail that I want to talk through. I think we need to first recognize that route share is going to correlate to target share. A player who has a high route share, he's going to have more opportunity to see a lot of targets. This question is probably referring to someone like Antonio Williams this past week, where Williams had a 14% target share, despite only having a 26% route share. Just to be clear, those types of numbers don't happen super frequently across a larger sample. And actually, from my count, that's only happened 26 times since 2020. Out of thousands of games where a wide receiver had a sub 30% route share, but a target share of 14%. Antonio Williams was technically at 13.8%. And we've seen 34 instances where a wide out had a 13.5% target share and a route share below that 30% mark. So it doesn't happen that much at all. But route share and target share, they matter at different levels depending on the position that you're analyzing and depending on the part of the season that you're actually in. Since we're in the early parts of the season, let's just focus on that. At wide receiver, generally speaking, early on, there's a pretty similar predictive nature between route share and target share. And actually, they're both more predictive than actual points scored after week one, which is why I always tell people to not get so focused on production early on. But almost immediately as we get into week two, target share becomes the more predictive factor. So I would say at wide receiver, if a player after a couple of weeks isn't seeing a high route share, but is seeing a high target share, maybe there's some concern, but the target share piece is going to be a little bit more important. Right now, it's about even. What's interesting is what happens at the other positions. After the first couple of weeks of the target share is. Once we get past the first few weeks, target share starts to become a little bit more stable and we'll see it become a more predictive piece. But we're feeling things out at tight end right now. We're seeing usage and there's going to be some volatility with how these guys are targeted. It's why when I sent that tweet out last week about Terrence Ferguson, it actually did matter. Week one route share at tight end is more predictive than both week one points scored and week one target share. Unfortunately for Ferguson, that route share dropped in the second half. This is very good news for Colson Loveland, given that he didn't score a point last week, but he had an elite route share. And by the way, route share is a much better predictor for future tight end success than simple snap share. I see that all the time. People are referencing snaps at tight end. It doesn't matter. I care far, far more about routes run at tight end because obviously with snaps, you're seeing when they're out there blocking, not just running routes. Running back is actually even more extreme than tight end. Route share is very consistently more important than target share at running back. Like when a running back is a random one game dip in target share, it's really not that massive of a deal when it comes to rest of season fantasy production. When he dips in route share, it's actually a bigger deal. That's actually not the case at wide receiver. If a wide receiver keeps his route share, but sees a dip in target share, they tend to then start to perform worse moving forward. Now I'm not saying it's the end of the world. I'm just saying that target share is going to have a more profound impact at wide receiver than it is going to be at running back. When it comes to predictiveness. So the TLDR here early on in the season, we probably should care more about target share for wide receivers than for running backs and tight ends. But then for those two positions, we should care a little bit more about route share. And it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? The primary function for a wide receiver is to catch the freaking football with tight ends and running backs. They have different jobs. So there's going to be more volatility to their actual receiving work week to week. But if they're out there, if they're running routes and they're being deployed in that way, you can expect things to eventually normalize. So with this last one, we can kind of use what I was just talking about and apply it to a real life example. This one's from Brandon. It says, Hey JJ, I've been listening to two years and you helped me win my first championship last year. So thanks for the great advice. That's awesome. With Cam Scadaboo coming back and getting zero targets while Singletary got four, are you at all concerned about Scadaboo's receiving work this season? So naturally, as we just talked about, Scadaboo is going to be the one that's going to be the one that's going to target share is not going to be quite as important in week one as route share for running backs. But in this case, you're comparing a running back target total to another running back target total on the exact same team, which should definitely make you curious about route share. If Singletary was getting more looks through the air than Scadaboo, there's probably a chance that he had a better route share. And we know that route share it's important for running back production. And that was the case in week one. Singletary had a 53% route share. Scadaboo, 27%. If we assume that that continues, yes, that's a very, very big problem. But like anything that I do on this show or that we all do collectively with data, context is necessary. We should never pretend that one data point after one week predicts everything for everyone. And we also just need to understand ball. Cam Scadaboo is coming off a serious injury. There is a chance that the Giants just didn't want to give him a full-blown bell cow workload right away. We've got to be very open to the possibility. But at face value, I don't think that we should walk away from that game and say, man, Cam Scadaboo is a league winner. He's going to see the same workload that he did last year, because that's just objectively not true. His receiving usage was a lot worse. And that's something that we need to be aware of, especially because we know route share does matter at running back early on. That's it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you had subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football Podcast, make sure you are by searching for it. Pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found. And don't forget to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. I'll have a Late Round Perspectives episode for you guys later this morning. And then at 1 p.m. Eastern, myself, David Kitchen, will be live with the Late Round Fantasy Football Show. That'll then hit your podcast feeds tomorrow morning. Otherwise, everyone, have a great weekend and enjoy week two. Football is a game of ands, offense and defense, run and pass, block and tackle, home and away, glory and heartbreak. It's like how Nationwide is both a great insurance company and financial services company. And they have a pretty sweet jingle, too. For your insurance and financial needs, Nationwide is on your side. Nationwide Investment Services Corporation, member FINRA, Columbus, Ohio. Lowe's knows Sundays are for football. So tackle your home improvement projects by Saturday. And earn your Sunday with great deals on LG and Bosch appliances. 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