444: 10 Trends for Week 10

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Speaker 1: This is the lad podcast with with your host JJ Zacher, Retha Jay, Jake Zacher Reason. What's up everyone? It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at Fandel and at number fire dot com in this episode four four to four of the Late Round podcast with the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thank you for tuning in. Fandel Sportsbook is giving users an opportunity to win big on this week's Thursday night football matchup between the Colts and the Titans. Right now, you have a chance to bet five dollars on either the Colts or the Titans at plus twenty five hundred odds and if you win, you'll make one hundred and twenty five dollars. You heard that correctly. Bet five dollars win one hundred and twenty five dollars. The offers for this Thursday's game only, So download the Fandel Sportsbook mobile apps, sign up and make your first deposit to see your enhanced odds today. Must be twenty one years or older, President of Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Colorado, West Virginia, Tennessee, or Indiana. New users only must wage your on designated boost market deposit required max bonus one hundred and twenty five dollars. See full terms at sportsbook dot fanda dot com. Gambling problem called one hundred gambler in Colorado, called one hundred five to two forty seven hundred in West Virginia visit one hundred gambler dot net in Indiana call one hundred nine with it, or in Tennessee called Tennessee redline at one eight hundred eighty eight nine ninety seven eighty nine. Let's get to these trends so we know the tight end position is obnoxiously bad in fantasy football. One of the players who people are probably trotting out week in and week out because the position is so mediocre is Hunter Henry. I feel like Henry has looked at more favorably than his production is actually telling us. Or I guess what I'm saying is in fantasy football is kind of overrated when looking at production only despite justin Herbert doing what he's doing, Henry has finished with just one top ten tight end performance this year. He's outside the top twelve or tight end one territory in PPR points per game. The thing is he's seeing decent volume with an eighteen percent target chair this year, and it's not like his other peripherals are totally horrendous. He's pretty average when it comes to average at the target, and he has five end zone targets this year that's tied for ninth across the league at the position, and according to Pro Football Focus, he's seventh in the NFL and routes run at the position. So I didn't least say that better days are ahead for Hunter Henry given the competition that he has at tight end. The injuries to Julian Edelman and Aikil Harry have allowed Jakobe Myers to absolutely break out. Listen to these target shairs that he's had over the last three weeks twenty seven point three percent, forty three point five percent, and forty one point one percent. He's been the wide receiver thirteen in PPR points per game over this time, but he hasn't found the end zone. Now. I didn't bring him up on yesterday's fifteen Transaction Show because I brought him up in the previous week show. I like to build off of each show, but he should be rostered in pretty much every single league. I can't imagine they send him back to the bench, even when Edelman and Harry are healthy. Speaking of the Patriots, their passing touchdown numbers just keep getting more and more depressing. I mentioned last week how they have a really low pass to rush touchdown ratio, but that got even lower after their performance against the Jets. It's now a point two to three ratio when the team and second. The team with the second lowest ratio it's Washington with the ratio of one, meaning they have the same number of passing touchdowns as rushing touchdowns. The Patriots have thrown just three passing touchdowns to thirteen rushing touchdowns this year. Since two thousand, only eight teams have thrown three or fewer passing touchdowns through Week nine, and the Patriots are one of them. I know I sound a little bit like a broken record here, but we can't assume that this keeps up. Even during Monday Night's game, you saw instances where the narrative could have been flipped, like when the mere Bird almost scored a touchdown. It's true that the Patriots are run heavy, It's true that they're gonna run cam when they're close to the end zone. But it's those instances those the mere Bird plays where you know, regression is a thing. Sometimes things go one way instead of the other. That's football trend FOURD is that over the last five games, Nelson Agiler has ranked worse than wide receiver thirty four and weekly scoring just once. Now. I do my weekly start sit show on Fandel's YouTube channel every Sunday at noon Eastern, and when doing it this past week, I got a whole lot of Nelson agilore questions. He came through with a decent thirteen and a half PPR point performance, but once again, he didn't see a ton of work. In fact, despite his usable performances over the last month, during this five game stretch, he's had a target share in the double digits just once. He's averaged a twelve point six percent share per game. He's just living off of touchdowns, and that's why it's so difficult for me to recommend that you add him or that you play him in a given week. The Miami Dolphins have finished as a top six defense in five of their last six games. The only game where they didn't was against Seattle. This hasn't only been the result of touchdowns either. The Dolphins are aver almost three sacks per game. During this timeframe, and they're now top half in the league in both sacks and pressure rate. It's also not just due to opponent. During this stretch, they faced the Rams and the Cardinals. But I will say I do think in terms of fantasy scoring, which is what we're looking at here, the perfect storm has kind of hit. Miami had a defensive touchdown this past week. They wouldn't have been nearly as impactful against Arizona without that score, and they faced the Jets and the forty nine ers in between these games as well. So while it hasn't only been touchdowns and only been opponent, they've scored touchdowns against their tough opponents, and they've done well against their bad opponents. But let's give them some credit. They deserve some credit. They've been an awesome defense over the last month and a half. I don't think they're a plug and play defense in fantasy, but they've been great over the last three weeks. Curtis Samuel has averaged a twenty point six percent target chair per game while also running the ball seven times. During the same time period, DJ Morris target shair per game has been sixteen point one percent. Samuel also leads the team in red zone targets. During this time, he's being used more, and he's being used more in creative ways. He's definitely someone to roster, and he's still available in almost seventy percent of Yahoo leagues. You could easily argue that he's part of the reason that DJ Moore has been suffering too. So I send a chart out on Twitter every week that shows the positional target shairs by team. This week, I decided to look at the target shares for each team from weeks one through four and then from weeks five through nine, and then from there I found the difference. So, in other words, the new chart shows how much of a target share change each team has seen by position over the last five weeks of football. One of the glaring results in doing that was seeing how from weeks one through four versus weeks five through nine, Minnesota's really started to target their tight ends more. They've seen an increase in tight end target share in this split of almost ten percent, and this past week both IRV Smith and Kyle Rudolph had twenty percent target chairs Now digging deeper into this Earth has now run eleven more routes than Kyle Rudolph over this time from weeks five through nine. From weeks one through four, the difference was just one. So we're seeing a slight change and not only how the Vikings are using IRV Smith, but also how frequently they're targeting tight ends. In general. I'd argue this is more regression than anything else, because they really weren't targeting their tight ends at a high rate to start the year. But it's something to understand for when you're streaming tight ends. Something else that I wanted to point out from that chart was how much more Washington is targeting their running backs. From weeks one through four, their running back target share was just under twenty one percent. From weeks five through nine, that shot up to over thirty five percent. That's insane. Alex Smith targeted JD McKissick at a super high rate on Sunday, which is something I talked about on yesterday's show. But keep in mind too that in Alex Smith's debut back in week five, Antonio Gibson and jdmchissick in that game combined for a forty six percent target share. There's absolutely some noise to this gamescript probably is impacting the dump off numbers, but I don't think that it's completely meaningless. It's why McKissick was featured as an ad this week. Drew Lock hasn't had a single game this season where he threw the ball fifteen plus air yards at a rate lower than fifteen percent, So a fifteen percent deep ball rate has been his minimum this season. That's the highest minimum among relevant quarterbacks, and on the season, Ryan Tannehill, Drew Brees, Daniel Jones, and Cam Newton they have a deep ball rate under that fifteen percent mark, so their average across the season is lower than Drew Lock's single game minimum. This obviously doesn't make or break a quarterback as being good or bad in fantasy football, but like we saw last week inst Atlanta, when Denver's in a plus matchup, it can do good things, not just for Locke as a streamer, but his pass catchers too, even if a lot of production comes from garbage time. The last trend this week is something that I briefly mentioned on yesterday's fifteen Transactions episode, but Antonio Brown led the Buccaneers in air yards against the Saints. He also had just one fewer target than Mike Evans and Chris Godwin despite running seven fewer routes than Godwin and five fewer routes than Evans, and keep in mind this was obviously his first game back. Now, I think Brown has the most potential of the three wide receivers on that team moving forward by potential and talking upside, but there's clearly tons of risk, and I think straight up Godwin is the safest choice with the best expected value because of that risk. But like I said yesterday, given the way that the market probably views things, AB might be the best buy among the group that's gonna do it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly matchup show.