281: 15 Transactions for Week 3

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Speaker 1: This is the labor of podcast with your host JJ zachersa j J zacher reson. What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at FanDuel and at number five dot com and this is episode two hundred and eighty one of the Late Round podcast, one of the many shows that are part of the Fan Duel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. It was an unfortunate week in fantasy football. There were lots and lots of injuries, and there were injuries to key quarterbacks like Drew Brees and Ben Roethlisberger, and that has a big domino effect on the rest of the players on those rosters. So now you, like a lot of us, are scrambling and that feeling sucks. But I assure you it's going to be okay, not only because it's just fantasy football, but because we have a process and we have a way to make our rosters better through that process. That's what this fifteen Transactions episode is about. Each week, I'll give you a handful of players to buy, sell, ad and drop, but I'll also give you the reasoning behind it, and then you guys can take that logic and apply it. However, you want. You may find other gems out there to buy that I don't talk about on this show because it's not like I'm covering every single player in the league. But just take a deep breath and know that it's going to be okay. Your fantasy rosters are not dead. You're not done. We've still got a lot of football left to play. Before getting into this week's transactions, though, I wanted to let you guys know about odds Fire whether you're playing DFS or just betting on sports. Odds Fire is a key tool to your research. Shop for the best lines in each market and see which side is getting the most bets and money. Odds Fire is the premier odds comparison experience across major book makers in the regulated US market. Never settle, always get the best odds. Check out the experience for free now on number fire or at oddsfire dot com. Gambling problem call one eight hundred gambler sell Josh Jacobs. So after week one, it looked like Josh Jacobs is going to be a work worse for Oakland, but as we know, they were also in a positive game script. Throughout that entire game, they ran zero offensive snaps while trailing. Week two against Kansas City was obviously different. Oakland ran forty three offensive snaps while trailing, and that turned into just twelve rush attempts for Josh Jacobs and unfortunately, zero targets. Now, this is kind of surprising because Josh Jacobs came out of school as a good pass catcher. He really should be on the field in negative game scripts, but the Raiders opted to use DeAndre Washington and Jalen Richard instead. They combined for five targets against Kansas City and now, according to Pro Football Focus, Jacobs has run just twenty one routes this season. Not only is that outside the top forty at running back, but that's the same number as Jalen Richard. So what does this mean. It means that Josh Jacobs is a better bet in positive game scripts. But we know that Oakland isn't very good. They're gonna face a lot of negative game scripts this year, and if they're not gonna deploy Josh Jacobs as a pass catching running back, that's not good news. That's not good news for Jacobs at all. An upcoming for the Raiders or matchups against the Vikings, Colts Bears, Packers and Texans. That doesn't exactly scream positive game script. So right now, I think is the time to sell Josh Jacobs by Christian Kirk. I talked about Christian Kirk on last week's ten Trend Show and how he was going to be a buy candidate in this week's fifteen Transactions episode. I just didn't expect Christian Kirk to have one hundred and fourteen yards against that Baltimore secondary, But even still, I think that he's a buye. You know, in fantasy football and really anything, the whole idea is really buy low and sell high. That's what I talk about each week on this show. But sometimes you have to buy a little bit higher than you would like to buy, and I think that's the case with Christian Kirk. Through two games, Kirk has a twenty two and a half percent target share in this Cardinals offense. That's a top thirty rate and wide receiver right now. And the difference between what Christian Kirk gets from a target share perspective and what someone in like San Francisco gets is that the pie in Arizona is a lot larger. No team through two weeks has more pass attempts than Arizona has, and if you remove that overtime period against Detroit, they still rank seventh and it's all because of their pace. So far, Arizona leads the league in seconds per play by over two seconds. That means the target share for any of these pass catchers in this offense is coming from a larger pie. There's more volume to go around, and the fact that he has a top thirty target share right now is really good for what's to come. I think that you can buy Christian Kirk right now, and I'm fine if you want to buy any other pieces in this Arizona Cardinals offense that includes Larry Fitzgerald ad DeMarcus Robinson. So I talked about Mikole Hardman last week on this show. Because of Tyreek Hill's injury. He went out. He had four catches for sixty one yards in a touchdown and that line actually could have been better if Leshaw McCoy wasn't called for a holding penalty on a seventy two yard touchdown to Hardman. But the thing is Hardman played the third most snaps at wide receiver on Sunday. It was Sammy Walkkin's and then it was DeMarcus Robinson and then Mikol Hardman. Winston had the same number of targets as Hardman on Sunday, but he was able to do a lot more with him finishing the game with one hundred and seventy two receiving yards and a pair of touchdowns. So if he's the number two wide receiver in this offense from a volume perspective and from a snapshare perspective, he needs to be rostered. Drop Dante Moncreef. Now, I've talked about this on the show before, but drops are usually an overrated statistic in football because in order to drop the ball, a receiver has to get open and targeted. And if a receiver's open, that means that he ran a good route, and if he's running good routes consistently, then drops aren't that big of a deal. Not only that, though, but the difference in drop rate from one receiver to the next is not likely to be very significant. The delta between one player to the next isn't that big of a deal unless you're Dante Moncreeve. Moncreef now has five drops on eleven targets this season, and his big Week two drop, which resulted in an interception. It also resulted in him being benched. Juju Smith, Schuster, James Washington, and Deontay Johnson all played more snaps than Dante Moncreef in Week two, and now there's no more Ben Roethlisberger, who's out for the year. Moncreef is rostered in about half of Yahoo leagues, which is why I'm talking about him today. So in honor of Dante Moncreef, feel free to drop him by Mike Evans. I talked about Evans last week on this show, and he turned in a four catch, sixty one yard performance on Thursday Night Football. That's not great. He now doesn't have a touchdown through two games, and he's been outplayed and outproduced by his teammate Chris Godwin. But here's the thing. According to airyards dot Com, Mike Evans has fifty five more air yards than Chris Godwin has and Evans is an eighteen average depth of target that's the fourth highest in the league among all ten plus target pass catchers. Those are all very positive signs for Mike Evans, and he only has two fewer targets than Godwin so far. And don't forget he was sick in week one, like physically ill. I won't talk about Evans for the rest of the year. I promise that I'm done, but I do think that he's a good bye right now and he should be fine for the rest of the season. Add Darwin Thompson. So Lashaw McCoy had an MRI on his ankle on Monday, and Damian Williams left their game against Oakland early with a knee injury. Both of those players could end up missing time. We don't know at the time of this recording, but to me, it's always smart to be aggressive with running back ads off the waiver wire. So getting Darwin Thompson makes a lot of sense. He's next in the pecking order, and to this point, do the same thing with Jalen Samuels if he's out there, because James Connor also is dealing with a knee injury, though he seems to be fine. Add Deebo Samuel. So I was tilting at the snap distribution for San Francisco in week two because in week one, Deebo Samuel led the team in snapshare with the share above eighty eight percent, and as we know, Dante Pettis had two snaps and then on Sunday things looked a lot different. Marquis Goodwin led the team with a fifty one point four percent snap share and that was followed by Pettis at forty eight point six percent. Samuel was the most productive forty nine ers wide receiver on Sunday, but he was fourth on the team at wide receiver in snaps. So really, what I'm doing with Deebo Samuel right now is I'm just buying into the player and buying into the talent who looks to be the best of the position on his team. Deebo Samuel is a rookie, so the hope is that his snapshare continues to climb as this talent emerges. And it doesn't hurt that he has a nineteen percent target share through two games. Sell Sony Michelle, So over the offseason, you might remember, but there was a little bit of hype surrounding Sony Michell's potential as a pass catcher in this New England Patriots offense. So far through two games, he has zero targets. Now, it's true that New England hasn't had any sort of negative game script through these two games. They've dominated and that type of environment is good for Michelle. He's going to see a lot of work on the ground when New England's leading, and that's what we saw on Sunday. But the Patriots, as usual, are still targeting their running backs in the passing game a lot. Despite these positive game scripts. We've seen over thirty two percent of their targets go to running backs. That's the second highest mark in the league, and technically they should rank first. But Tarik Cohen is being credited as a running back even though he is a slot receiver in Week one, So technically New England's throwing to their running backs at a higher rate than any other team in football right now, and Sony Michelle has zero targets, So I don't really buy this argument that Michelle hasn't been involved as a receiver because of game script. In a negative game script, Sony Michell might not even be on the field. And we also know that New England's arguably the best team in the league, so how often are they going to be in a negative game script? So that means that Sony Michelle is back to just being this touchdown dependent, low floor option each week. Of course, the scoring upside is there. This offense could be amazing this year. So of course he's going to find the end zone. But I just worry about the week to week volatility, especially in PPR formats add Golden Tate, so you might forget. But Golden Tate's currently serving a four game suspension for violating the NFL policy on Performance enhancing substances. But we're approaching week three now, so he's close to returning, and the Giants could really use Golden Tate because Sterling Shepherd is currently dealing with a concussion and they really have no one else at wide receiver. They've had three wide receiver instances of seven plus targets so far this season, so Golden Tate's is gonna walk into some volume once he's off the suspension. Right now, he's rostered in just thirty five percent of Yahoo leagues. You should get him this week rather than waiting for when everyone else is going to try to get him. By Robert Woods. In week one, the odd man out among all Rams pass catchers was basically Brandon Cooks, so he was a bye on this show last week on Sunday and ended up being Robert Woods. He only had two targets. He had thirteen in Week one, so it makes sense to buy Bobby Woods right now. He still has a near twenty three percent target share in that LA offense through two games, and as I mentioned with Cooks last week, the Rams have a very favorable schedule for their passing attack moving forward. They won't see a tough secondary in defense until their Week eleven game against the Bears, and then they face the Bears and then the Ravens and back to back weeks. Until that point, though, things are looking good for Jared Goff and his wide receiver so by Bobby woodos hold carry On Johnson so entering the season, for carry On Johnson to hit his ceiling this year, two things had to happen. First, he needed to see goal line work. Last year, those goal line touches went to Lagarrett Blunt and not carry On Johnson. Johnson had two goal line rushes. The second thing that needed to happen is that he needed to see an uptick and receiving work. We knew that he wasn't likely to be a two hundred and fifty plus carry running back this year, but we also knew that he had the opportunity to see a lot of work in the passing game. So far, neither of those things have really happened. Now at the surface level, what's most concerning about Johnson is his usage as a receiver. He did have a nice receiving touchdown in Week two. He looks great as a receiver, but he has a seven percent target share that currently ranks outside the top thirty at the running back position. Now, on top of that, he's now carried just fifty three point nine percent of the Lions running back rushes. That's outside the top twenty in the league. He did miss a big chunk of Sunday's fourth quarter with an injury, but the Lions only ran ten plays with Al Johnson. On those plays, CJ Anderson had four rushes. One of those plays is also a quarterback Neal. Even if you remove those CJ Anderson runs from the equation, Johnson still has a running back rushing share outside the top twenty. The big question mark is the goal line work. That's still up in the air. Because Detroit hasn't run a single play from within their opponent's five yard line this season, we don't know how that backfield distribution is going to look when they're about to score so overall, it makes sense if you want to sell Johnson given this usage. If it continues, he's likely to not live up to his draft day cost. But I think it's more advantageous to hold right now. Not only is he the best running back in that backfield objectively, but our sample sizes are small enough to where target shaars can't be volatile. It's not like they're not using him in the passing game like we're seeing with Sony Michelle. This is a different kind of situation. A couple of more targets could drastically change the target share equation. And if Johnson does indeed get the team's goal line work, then he should be just fine. AD Frank Gore. So we're another year older and Frank Gore is still an AD off the waiver wire. This happens every single season in one way or another. But really he's an AD this week because Devin Singletary is dealing with a hamstring injury. I don't know the severity of that injury, but again, you're just gonna add a running back who could have the chance to walk into some volume. And that's the case for Frank Gore. And not only that, but Gore's already handled over seventy three percent of the Bills running back rush attempts this season. He's already sort of been the primary early down back for that team. So I would get Gore this week because maybe Singletary misses some time by Leonard Fournette. You guys probably know this, but generally speaking, I don't like getting running backs who are in bad offenses. It's not the best idea strategically, but right now where we're at in fantasy footballs, there are so few running backs who are true bell cows, and Leonard Fournette is that. Only Christian McCaffrey has seen a higher percentage of his team's running back carries so far this season than Leonard Fournette has. Meanwhile, while Fournette six that running back and target share, now, he hasn't been all that productive with one hundred and thirteen yards on twenty eight carries, but he also hasn't found the end zone yet, and that's helpful for him being a by low candidate. So I think that Fournette's going to provide a nice floor week in and week out, and if Gardner Minshew develops as a passer, then all of a sudden. Fournette has a higher ceiling than we expected to add Jimmy Garoppolo, So depending on your league, Garoppolo might be available, and if he is, he makes her a pretty good streaming choice. This week, he gets Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh's secondary has been pretty bad through the first two weeks of the season. They've allowed an eight point three net yards per attempt, which is a top five number in the league. Now, I understand they faced Tom Brady and Russell Wilson, but the secondary is a weakness in that Pittsburgh defense. Jimmy g looked a lot better in Week two versus Week one. He's at home, they're big favorites. It's a good spot for him. Add the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defense. I can't believe that I'm talking about the Buccaneers defense as a streaming option, but Todd Bowle has done a really good job so far through these two games as their new defensive coordinator. They rank in the top five in yards per play against. Now, they haven't really been able to get to the quarterback. But they get Eli Manning and the Giants this week, and they're at home and their six and a half point favorites. That's exactly what you look for in a streaming defense choice. The sixteenth transaction that you can't get in my fifteen transactions column over on number fire dot com this week is to add Devin Smith. Michael Gallup is going to be sidelined for at least a couple of weeks and that brings an opportunity for another Cowboys pass catcher to produce since this Cowboys offense has opened things up this year, and that person could be Devin Smith. Randall Cobb has primarily played in the slot this year, which is not a surprise, but he is an eighty seven percent snap rate from the slot, so Smith becomes the outside replacement for Michael Gallup. Smith had a great preseason and in Week two we cut three of three targets for seventy four yards in a touchdown. So if you're in a deeper format, Smith is an interesting ad this week, especially in a cake matchup against the Dolphins. And don't tell me that Smith isn't available in your league. He's got a zero percent ownership percentage in Yahoo leagues right now. That's gonna do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening as always, if you've got subscribe to the Late Round 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 at Late Round QB. I try to answer fantasy questions on there whenever I get the time. Appreciate you, guys. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly ten Trends episode