Hello everyone! I’m at the beach until next Friday, so I hope you will forgive me, I won’t be writing as much as usual. Next week’s newsletter will be shorter, much like this one today, but I will also quickly go into some of my in-season content that I’m transitioning to. Don’t worry, I have ideas for some in-season studies, so I won’t completely abandon them. 😉

Much like last week, I am recapping studies from this offseason so we can get the big picture of things before our regular redraft leagues kick off. I can’t go into every detail of every study as I have in the past given this type of review, but I will mention the findings and applications, and provide links to the relevant articles so you can see them in their full context.

A TLDR of last week:

In Ballout or Fallout, we discussed when second-half breakouts end up maintaining momentum.

In our review of QB improvement, we saw how rookies are advantageous in the second half of seasons for streaming purposes.

🔎 We took a peek at the impacts of draft capital for quarterbacks and running backs.

Rookie wide receivers need to be viewed as your WR2 at best, but preferably as your WR3+. Even though they can finish much higher, setting expectations is important.

Running backs who are coming off of highly efficient seasons typically suffer a massive falloff in efficiency the following season, especially in scoring rate.

It wasn’t great. But the interesting thing was you actually had around the same amount of Zero-RB targets hitting as in previous years, but they weren’t reaching their ceiling like they had in years past. That, combined with the top-end running backs faring better than in seasons prior, results in a bad Zero-RB season.

Positional scarcity has to do with the opportunity cost of drafting a player over another one. What do you give up when you draft player X vs player Y? We examined the falloffs of every position, from elite down to the next tier, to the next, and the next.

There’s a lot of nuance to attacking scarcity. You have to give up something in order to do something else. Unless you’re in a league that is full of people cool with you building a super team, you likely won’t draft stars with every pick. Go give that article a look, as it discusses different approaches to the major positions that matter for fantasy.

Regression hits just about everyone, even at the team level. When looking at the top and bottom six scoring offenses since 2019, we found some interesting trends. Our study needed next-season data (and 2024 acts as a NS for 2023 as well as a potential forecast for 2025), so it’s a total of five years, 30 teams in each group.

Top-6 teams see -0.4 TD/Gm drop in scoring Y-o-Y, while Bottom-6 teams see an increase of 0.38 TD/Gm Y-o-Y. Taking things a step further, 23% of Top-6 teams did remained stable or saw an increase of production, but another 23% saw their scoring drop by at least a touchdown a game! 💀

77% of Bottom-6 offenses saw their scoring go up in the following year. And 70% of that group saw increases between 0.5-1.3 TD/Gm.

One fun thing we explored is when it’s appropriate to call our shots in fantasy drafts. Keep in mind, I’m not talking about taking someone in Round 10 when you could get them in Round 14. That’s not the point. It’s about when you can start to stray from ADP a little and gain some wiggle room, so you can reach for the guys you want?

The first few rounds, sticking close to ADP is a good strategy. Those players are usually drafted first for a reason. But after Round 7 in regular drafts, the hit rate of drafting fantasy starter-level players starts to fall off. So you experience more freedom in Round 8 and beyond.

But RB/WR2 hit rate, oddly enough, tails off later. Round 9 and before, you have around a 49% chance of hitting on a player who will finish as an RB2 or WR2. After Round 9? It’s only 10%.

There’s also a quick lesson about how the way data is presented to you can impact your perception of it. That alone is well worth checking out.

That is going to do it for the second part of our offseason review. There is so much more to explore on the site, with a full article on each of the subjects we’ve discussed here in brief. Go to the RotoBanter webpage and surf to your heart’s content!

Also, please feel free to join the free RotoBanter Discord server! I’d love to see you there!

And heads up, next week may also feature a Saturday newsletter. Since I’m at the beach with family, we will see how things shake out. But, I will say that our next newsletter is going to be quarterback-focused. 😎 We’ll talk about Jayden Daniels, spotting potential elite QBs, regression, and some of my sleepers and fades based on what we’ve learned.

See you next time!