1040: 10 Trends for Week 8

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zacher Resa Jay Jake Zacher reson what's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode ten forty of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by DraftKings. Thanks for tuning in. There's no better way to get closer to the action than with DraftKings Daily Fantasy, the ultimate destination for football fans. New customers can play free for their share of millions and prizes with their first to positive five dollars or more. Download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app and enter promo code Late Round to play free for your share of millions. The crown is yours. Gambling problem called one hundred gambler In New York, call eight seven seven eight hope n Why In Connecticut call eighty eight seven eight nine seven seven seven seven eighteen plus most states. Eligibility restrictions apply. Ends December thirty First Sea Terms at DraftKings dot com Slash Promotions. It's a ten trends day, Let's get to it. Rashi Rice's Sea debut with the Chiefs couldn't have gone that much better for fantasy football managers. Rice only ran a round on forty eight percent of Kansas City's dropbacks. That's probably due to him not having played for a while, but also due to game script, they didn't need to use Rashi Rice. Despite that, he still saw ten targets. My friend Adam levitan Over had established the run tweeted this, but Rice on nineteen routes. He's now tied for eleventh in the entire NFL with four targets inside the ten yard line. There is so much touchdown potential for Rashi Rice. There's so much fantasy potential for him. If you were patient, he should pay off now. I didn't have the best read on Juwan Jennings a couple of weeks ago when I called him a sneaky by I mean I was mostly saying that you should be traded for bench assets, but it was still the wrong read. I didn't know how hurt he evidently was. The good news is that things are pointing up, or at least they're pointing up more than they were a week ago. In Week seven, Jennings the most routes for the forty nine ers. Only Christian McCaffrey had more targets. Jennings finished the day with a thirty percent target share. He got four of seven targets for thirty one yards. That's not great, but Brock Purty hopefully back soon. I'm more optimistic than pessimistic about Juwan Jennings having a usable second half of the season. I mean, I'm to the point where I probably want Jakobe Bursett to start for Arizona for fantasy purposes, more specifically, for Trey McBride purposes. Get this. Over the last two weeks, McBride has scored twenty one point two and twenty nine point four PPR points. He hit twenty one PPR points just four times last year, all obviously with Kyler Murray. More importantly, McBride has three receiving touchdowns over his last two games. He scored three touchdowns over his previous twenty one games with Kyler Murray. We joke about the touchdowns stuff with McBride, but I don't think this is all just a coincidence. McBride has seen five en zone targets over his last two games. He had two end zone targets over his first five In twenty twenty four, McBride only had two games with two or more end zone targets, and he had two end zone targets in both of those games. He's had two to three over his last two contests. It seems like this really is a Kyler Murray problem. I almost had Jackson Dart this week as a transaction as an ad just because pre waivers he was available in like sixty percent of Yahoo leagues. That should be zero percent or at least close to zero percent. Dart has now started four games. He's averaged twenty one point nine standard Fantasy points per game during those contests. The only quarterbacks who have been better than Jackson Dart on a point per game basis this season are Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, and Lamar Jackson. That's it, and get this. Dart has faced the Chargers, Saints, Eagles, and Broncos. The Chargers, Eagles, and Broncos are all bottom ten matchups for quarterbacks by justin fantasy points allowed. He's also faced tough matchups the schedule for the Giants and for Giants quarterbacks, it's below average in the short term, but long term it's not a bad schedule. Rest of season, they had the eleventh best schedule by justin points allowed. And don't forget they get the Raiders in the Fantasy Championship. I think you have to just keep starting Dart until he gives you a reason not to. The rushing production is there, and he's getting it done with his arm too. We have to talk about Travis Hunter's usage. Hunters started Week one with a really solid eighty two percent rout participation rate in a twenty nine percent target share. The production wasn't there, but there was hope that the Jags, which is used him a good bit on offense. That didn't happen. From weeks two through week five, so a four game stretch, Hunter saw route shares of sixty one percent, sixty one percent, seventy percent, and seventy four percent. But over Jacksonville's last two games, Hunter's been in an eighty six percent and eighty nine percent route share. He's been playing mostly as a full time wide receiver. That resulted in a twenty eight percent target chare in week seven. That's his highest since Week one. Now the Jags are on there by this week, but out of that bye, there's a chance that we're trusting Travis Hunter a lot more than we expected just a couple of weeks ago, especially if that Brian Thomas injury is something that we also have to deal with. Jalen Nole was almost a transaction this week. It was well past one am. I was in my office and I was contemplating making him a bonus transaction, but I decided against it because it's still more of a stash than anything else. I gave Jack Besh the edge because he's already running a lot of routes. But Nole saw season high fifteen percent targets here on Monday Night against the Seahawks. His routechhare was forty eight percent. That was also a season high. His previous high was a thirty eight percent route chair back in Week one. That was also when Christian Kirk was out, and that's the thing. Nol ran seventy eight percent of his route from the slot against the Seahawks, but that's Christian Kirk's position. And considering the Texans haven't been rotating in their rookies as much as we'd like this year in favor of some serious replacement level players, it's hard to get super super excited. Even though I loved Jalen Knowle as a prospect, so deep leagues feel free to stash him. But I do think it's going to be a slow rise, unfortunately for Jalen Nole sticking with the Texans before thereby, you have to remember we had that really weird game script against the Ravens and that led to a little bit more Nick Chubb than us Woody Marx managers would have liked. Well. On Monday night, we saw what happens in a more neutral to negative game script for Houston, and it was great for Woody Marx. He saw season high sixty one percent snap share and he saw two thirds of the team's running back rushes. That was also a season high. He's now hit a seventeen point nine percent and a ten point nine percent target share and two of his last three for As discouraging as that game was for the Texans offense, at least we got some decent usage for Woody marks. This next one goes out to late round Fantasy football coo David Kitchen, who's a big Titans fan. Sorry Kitchen, but the Titans offense is really really, really really bad, like really bad. The Titans have six offensive touchdowns through seven games. I know not all of us love math, but that's less than one touchdown per game Offensively. That hasn't happened since at least twenty eleven, which is where my data goes back to, and they have seven total touchdowns counting a return that paces them for seventeen touchdowns this year. Since nineteen eighty, only twenty teams have scored fewer than eighteen touchdowns in a season, and back then they weren't playing seventeen games. Maybe this will put it into perspective. The Titans have six offensive touchdowns this year. The Lions in Week two alone had seven touchdowns. This isn't just bad for Tennessee, you guys, it's historically bad. We haven't seen Braylan Allen since Week four. The Jets have had three games without him. During that stretch, Breece Hall has dominated running back rushes no surprise, He's seen running back rush shares of ninety three percent, ninety two percent, and eighty five percent. But interestingly enough, Hall has just a seven percent target share during this time, Isaiah Davis is at ten percent. Davis has actually run essentially the same number of routes. He's played more long down and distance snaps and more two minute snaps. We knew that was likely going to happen, but there's more to target shair than just that. Now, if you want some hope for Hall's target share to rise, He's seen a similar route share pre impost Allen injury. It's just that he had a higher targets per oute run rate during the Allen weeks that led to a sixteen percent target share when Braylan Allen was healthy. I'd expect Breece Hall's target share to rise a bit in the coming weeks as long as he's still in New York JET. But it's an interesting trend. Nonetheless, Isaiah Davis is out targeting Breeze Hall since Braylan Allen's injury. What a world for this final trend. Let's talk about Saquon Barkley. Barkley hasn't reached one hundred total yards in a game this year. Last year he did that in all but three contests. He's averaging seventy two total yards per game this season. Last season he was at one hundred and forty three. I mean, Saquon Barkley has been a very mediocre fantasy asset, especially given where you drafted him. So what's going on here? Well, year over year, Barkley's peripherals aren't that much different. He has an eighty six percent running back rush share per game this year, when it was eighty two percent last year. He has a twelve point eight percent target share this season. It was twelve percent last season. Those numbers are higher, they're better this year. The problem is that he's averaging sixteen point one rush attempts per game. That was almost twenty two last season. His targets are at three point three per game. That was at two point seven last season. But volume has been somewhat of a problem now. Clearly, if his shares are better, he's seeing better running back rush shares, better target shaars, but the volume overall is lower. And this is likely a team thing that's going on, and it is. The Eagles have run about fifty seven plays per game this year. They're at fifty seven point three. Last year with Kellen Moore, they were at sixty five point five. That's a huge year over year difference, and it leads to less volume, and it's an offense that's just not as good. Their yards per play was five point six last year. This year it's five point zero. And they're specifically just not as good at running the football for a number of reasons. For instance, the offensive line isn't getting as much push. My friend Ian Harts tweeted this out and saved me some time. But Philly from twenty twenty one through twenty twenty four, so four seasons they ranked in the top five and running back rush yards before contact per carry each season. They were first in three of those four seasons. This year they're twenty first, and bark just hasn't been as explosive. Nine point seven percent of his rushes have gone ten or more yards. Last year that number was thirteen point three percent. And Barkley also hasn't faced the same type of defensive fronts. Last season, according to Next Gen Stats, just twenty point six percent of his rushes were against stack boxes. This year, that numbers almost thirty three percent. Now, that's not just that defenses don't fear Jalen Hurts thing. That's a scheme thing too. The Eagles are running fewer RPOs, there's less play action. They're not doing as much of the line with this offensive coordinator change, and that could be playing a huge role on how defenses are playing against them. Now, this all seems pretty bad, and it is kind of bad. Regression was inevitable for Barkley on the volume front. I did a study on that in a newsletter this offseason. He wasn't going to maintain his same pace of volume or efficiency. But this has gone a little bit too far. Unfortunately. There's some reasons for it. The line isn't playing as well, the offense isn't running as many plays. Barkley is an as explosive. I don't think those things are just gonna disappear, But if you want some hope, the Eagles do have, according to my numbers, the top rank schedule from here on out for running backs. It's not the easiest and the short term, but long term it's looking pretty good. If you have Barkley, he's probably just a hold given these recent performances. But I'd be open to both sides here, both buy and sell sides, depending on what the market is saying. My rest of season rankings they have him as like a mid to late second round pick if we were drafting today. Right now, he's the RB nine. That's partially because of the state of the position, but also this has a chance to still turn around a little bit, especially with that schedule. So that's where things are at right now with Saquon Barkley. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you had subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are bestwarting for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll be back in your ears tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper Show.