686: 10 Trends for Week 5

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacheras J J. Zacher reson What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen in this episode six hundred and eighty six of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. The twenty twenty two NFL season is underway and Fandel and GMC are back to bring you the GMC Sierra Mountain Climber Pick Them, a free to play contest series. It gives you a chance to win a share of ten thousand dollars and FanDuel site credit every Sunday courtesy of GMC. Here's how it works. Every Sunday during the NFL season, you'll have a chance to answer questions based on the day's one PM and four twenty five PM games. The more questions you answer correctly, the higher up the mountain you'll move. If during any week you answer every question correctly for a perfect score, you'll reach the summit and when your share of ten thousand dollars in site credit. The contest series is now live, so head tofandle dot com Slash Free Slash Contest Slash GMC to start climbing the mountain. It's a ten trend show, Let's get to it. Someone I wish I would have talked about on the fifteen Transaction Show is Josh Jacobs because I did my rest of season rankings. They're available over in the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon, and when I do those rankings, I like to then compare them to how other analysts are ranking players. That way, I can give actionable advice about who I'm higher and lower on versus the market. Josh Jacobs was someone who I was higher on by a good bit too, And the reason for that is because over the last two weeks his usage has been awesome, especially last week. But if you look at weeks one and two, Jacobs saw fewer than three percent of Vegas's targets In each one of those games. He was seeing a lot of their running back rushes, but the receiving work, which is not there at all. During those two games, he ran routes on forty percent of Derek Carr's dropbacks. Over the last two weeks, those rush share numbers have basically remained the same. Technically, they've gotten a little bit better, but Jacobs has seen target shairs of fourteen percent and twenty percent, far better than weeks one and two, and when you dig further, his route participation has jumped from forty percent to fifty eight percent, so he is running more routes in that offense. Right now, he's playing like a true belcow back and looking at some rankings across the industry, I don't think that's being recognized. I think it's one of those situations where people with Josh Jacobs they probably see it, but if you don't have him, you might not have any idea. You might not see this happening. Now. There's definitely some risk here. The Raiders could just say, you know what, we don't want Josh Jacobs in this role. But this is a trend show and Josh Jacobs has been trending up. He'll be flirting with RB one status if this continues. If you want to buy into that chance, I don't think that's a horrible idea given how some people are viewing him right now. So there's an extra transaction for you this week. So over the last two weeks, Derek Henry, he's ranked second and eighth and weekly PPR scoring averaging twenty four and a half PPR points per game. We know Henry is good. We know that he can give us these monster weeks, and it's huge that Tennessee's been a lot better in those games because positive game scripts they benefit Derrick Henry probably more so than any other running back in Fantasy for our high end running back. But the crazy part for Henry the last two weeks is that he's seen a twenty three point one percent target chair and a twenty three point eight percent target chair in those two contests. They're targeting him more frequently through the air. Now, his peripheral numbers don't necessarily show this giant spike and routes run or anything, especially for that high of a target share, but it seems like they're trying to get him more involved in the passing game. That's really really good for his season long floor. Now. I still think there's some volatility there because if Tennessee does see a bad script, Henry could be in trouble. But it's great to see him not be fully dependent on rushing right now. And fortunately for Tennessee, they get beatable games aginst the Commanders, Colts, and Texans over their next three before facing the Chiefs, so Henry should be more than fine during that stretch. Damian Pierce is the only running back with multiple games this season of seeing one hundred percent of his team's running back rushes. I don't think that's necessarily super super surprising given the depth chart, but it's still pretty awesome. What we've needed with Pierce, though, is for him to see looks through the air. In Week four, we started to see that finally. The Texans targeted Pierce on seventeen point one percent of their targeted throws. He had a seventeen percent target chair. That's the highest of his season by a mile. His previous high was six and a half percent, and it wasn't fluky. It lined up completely with Pierce running more routes than Rex Burke had for the first time this season. This is a really good example of why it's important to be patient with rookies. We don't know for sure if this will continue, but rookies generally get more and more work as the season goes on. Pierce is looking great for fantasy purposes. Romeo Dobbs ran the most routes for the Packers in Week four, and he tied Allen Lazard with the most snaps played two He did a ninety six percent snap share. Dobbs now has back to back games with a twenty three percent target chair in an Aaron Rodgers led offense. Maybe Christian Watson works his way onto the field more, but Dobbs is looking like a very legit option moving forward. Trend five this week is that the Rams offense is completely miserable. Matthew Stafford is currently QB twenty eight on the season, and he's QB thirty three in points per game when you include all quarterbacks who have at least played one game. The Rams have faced the fourth toughest schedule by justin fantasy points allowed so far this year. But even still, the offensive line has been horrible. Stafford's been horrible. The only players from that offense you can reliably play are Cooper Cup and Tyler Higbee. And speaking of which, Tyler Higbee now has a twenty five and a half percent target chare on the season. Only Mark Andrews has a higher target share at tight end. Higgby's coming that safety net for Matthew Stafford, and it reminds me a lot of Dalton Schultz last year in the Cowboys offense. The offensive line is playing so poorly that nothing can develop, so Stafford looks to Higbee raising that target share number. For now, we have to just assume that that continues, especially in these tougher matchups like they saw against San Francisco, because that offensive line is not holding up. The Baltimore Ravens are more pass heavy this year than I expected. They're twenty fourth and overall pass rate and their thirteenth win in neutral game scripts, and I'm just defining that as when games are within six points. They've seen serious regression in the plays run department, though, which was to be expected. They ran an obscene number of plays last year and that number was bound to regress, but I'd argue it's gotten too far. It's gone too far in the other direction. They're currently twenty six in the league in pass attempts as a result, but given their pass rate numbers, I'd expect a slight bump in the coming weeks. We're never going to see a Lamar Jackson team be insanely pass heavy, but it's something to at least keep any on right now. Trend seven is that the Philadelphia Eagles currently have a pass to rush touchdown ratio of just zero point four. They have fourteen touchdowns on offense this year, and just four of them have come through the air. We should expect a team like Philly to probably skew more towards the run within a statistic like this, but this is a really low number. Since twenty eleven, the lowest ratio that we've seen has been point five to nine. That was from the twenty sixteen Buffalo Bills, so the Eagles are way below that. To put that another way, we should expect more touchdowns through the air for Jalen Hurts moving forward. Travis etn Out snapped James Robinson for the first time this year in Week four. He technically played the same number of snaps as Robinson in Week one, but this is basically what I talked about on the fifteen Transactions episode a couple of weeks ago when I called Robinson a cell. It could be an issue for Robinson if the Jags are in negative game scripts. They've used etn in that pass catching role this season, but fortunately, at least in the short term, they have some favorable matchups upcoming. They get the ten Exan's Colts and Giants over their next three that should allow Robinson to be relevant once again in Fantasy Austin Eckler had a big day in Week four, but he still isn't seeing the same kind of usage that he saw last year. Just from a snapshare standpoint, Ecklers hit sixty percent of LA's snaps in twenty five percent of his games this year. Last year he did that in seventy five percent of his games. He's at least seeing his typical high target year. That's great. I don't think he's a cell or anything. It just should be noted that he's playing slightly less than he did in twenty twenty one. The last trend this week is about Devin Singletary. In weeks one and two, Singletary played below sixty percent of Buffalo snaps. Over his last two games, he's been at seventy three percent and eighty seven percent. He scored thirty five point seven PPR points over his last two. During his first two, he scored a little over twelve. Everything's really gotten better for Devin Singletary. Yes, his snapshare is up, but so is his route participation. It's up by about eight percentage points. That's led to a seventeen percent target chair per game over his last two. During his first two that was closer to eight percent. I do think the Bills will eventually use more James Cook. They kind of need to, but this is obviously all very good news for Devin Singletary managers. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching forward pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and know for it to follow me on Twitter at LATEROUNDQB. Remember to check out Lateround dot com, join the free newsletter, join the Patreon, all that good stuff. Otherwise, I will talk to you tomorrow with the Weekly Sleeper Show