919: 10 Trends for Week 5

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zacheratha Jay Jake zacher Reeth. What's up everyone, It's JJ zacharyesin in this episode nine nineteen of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure checking out what's going on over at Underdog Fantasy Football. Draft season might be over, but it's not over. On Underdog. You can draft teams each week over there based on the slate of games, and those drafts are for all sorts of price points in all different sizes. There's also pick them and Champions Mode that you can dig into as well. If you want to get in on the action, just head to Underdog Fantasy dot Com and go sign up. When you sign up, use promo code late Round. That'll get you a free pick, a nice deposit offer, and you'll also get my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are emailed to you from Underdog after you sign up, and they're updated every Tuesday, and you get those updates. That's Underdog Fantasy dot Com promo code Late Round. There's been a lot of chatter about Tyler Algear and his role for the Falcons in Week four. If you missed it. Bijon Robinson saw fewer than half of Atlanta's running back carries this past weekend, and Tyler Aljear looks good getting the work that he got, and Algier is a good player. Don't take this the wrong way. I'm just admittedly growing a little bit tired of the this backup running back is better than his starter takes. We're seeing those fly out there continuously. Not only are we dealing with small sample sizes here, and not only is there more to the running back position than just running the football. But Aljier has not seen the same situations that Robinson has on the season. According to next Gen Stats, Robinson has faced stack boxes at an eighteen percent rate this year. Eighteen percent of his rushes were against stack boxes. Tyler Aljear is at three point seven percent. No relevant running back in football has faced stack boxes at a lower rate than Tyler Algier. That's not everything, of course, but it does give us some context to his numbers. Now. I was gonna have Bijon Robinson as a potential by candidate this week on the fifteen Transaction Show, but he popped up on the injury report. I didn't want to force it, but my stance is that Robinson is still one of the best assets in fantasy football. Algiers a really good backup. He should still be rostered everywhere, but Bijon Robinson is still very, very good. Trey McBride was out this past week, but I do want to call out that Michael Wilson has had some decent target shaars over his last two games. In Week three, we saw Wilson hit a twenty six and a half percent target chair against the Lions. In Week four, it was thirty one point eight percent against Washington. He hasn't been massively productive, but it's something to monitor and take note of. Now. Speaking of Arizona, Kyler Murray had an unbelievably disappointing outing in Week four against Washington. Not only did he not throw the ball as well as we'd hope for, but he only had one rush attempt. He had five rush attempts in all three of his other contests this season. Murray should see more rush attempts moving forward, but he also, unfortunately has the third toughest schedule among fantasy quarterbacks. Over the next month plus, they get matchups against the forty nine Ers, Packers, Chargers, Dolphins, Bears and Jets. They've got a bottom ten quarterback schedule from here on out, so keep that in mind as you evaluate him. I was high on Jordan Whittington after Cooper Cup went down in Week two, and then in Week three, he didn't show us a ton of promise, at least from a usage standpoint. Week four, though, was a totally different story. Whittington ran a route on ninety seven percent of LA's dropbacks that was a team high, and he didn't play the slot either. According to PFF, just twenty nine percent of his routes were out of the slot. They were rotating their wide receivers all over the field. That resulted in Whittington getting a thirty percent target shair. Meanwhile, two to Atwell has been the consistent piece in that offense ever since that Cooper Cup injury. He's seen route participation rates of eighty three percent ninety one percent over his last two games. His target shairs have been over twenty percent in each contest. So I think at Well's the safer investment in the short term, but Whittington's got a bad look in deeper formats. You guys know that I like looking at a justin fantasy points allowed to help with upcoming matchups, but I also like looking at it in hindsight to see the kind of schedule that a player or team has had thus far. One thing that's kind of interesting is that Seattle, despite looking pretty good offensively this year, they face kind of a brutal schedule across the board. They've seen the second toughest one for quarterbacks, the toughest one for running backs, and a bottom five schedule for wide receivers. That's after facing Denver, who's been really strong defensively this year, then New England, Miami, and Detroit. I think you could argue that this entire unit is kind of a buye. Ryan Grubb has been a really strong addition to this offense. The team is fifth in yards per play and eleventh in EPA per play, and that's despite facing some tougher matchups. Calvin Ridley's kind of been disappointing to start the season. He's running around on eighty five percent of Tennessee's dropbacks, but he's seemed just seventeen percent of the team's targets. He does, fortunately rank the top fifteen and air yard chair across the league. That's good at least now. Part of the reason for that is schedule. I'll mention it again. When I did my schedule analysis a couple of months ago, I called out Tennessee as having a brutal schedule to start the season, and we've seen that so far. Their quarterbacks, by justin fantasy points allowed, have seen the toughest schedule. Their wide receivers have seen the third toughest schedule. Fortunately, from now through the end of the year, everything flips. Tennessee's wideouts have the second best schedule, their quarterbacks rank first. That's especially going to hit during the second half of the year. The short terms not amazing, but I'm still expecting better numbers from the offense during the second half of the season. Make sure you're not letting an anchoring bias dictate how you feel about this offense. Part of the reason for Mark Andrews' poor performance to start this season is that the Ravens have targeted their running backs a lot. They have a twenty five percent running back target share so far this year. That's one of the highest in the league, but it's also way way higher than what we've typically seen from a Lamar Jackson led offense during the Jackson era, the Ravens have topped out at a sixteen point six percent running back target share. They're basically almost ten percentage points higher this year than their previous high with Lamar Jackson. I don't think things will continue at this current pace. It doesn't take away from their pass catchers and the unpredictability of those pass catchers are going to bring. But it's one of the only positives that you can look at if you do have one of those pass catchers. The Rashid rice injury could be exactly what Travis Kelcey needed to see production. The two of them occupy a similar area of the field, and the Chiefs were opting to go with a rice heavy approach. It's no coincidence that Travis Kelcey saw his target share skyrocket in Week four. It was thirty two percent. In his three games prior, he hadn't reached half of that mark. So if you have Kelsey, the rice injury is going to be a big boost. Wide receivers are scoring a touchdown this year for about every one hundred and sixty four receiving yards, So when a wide outets about one hundred and sixty four yards, he generally scores a touchdown. Now, obviously there's more to it, but yards to touchdowns is a very easy way to spot regression. Right now, the wide receiver with the most yards who hasn't scored is George Pickens. He has two hundred and eighty four receiving yards without a touchdown. You can consider him a regression candidate and a possible buy candidate. The last trend this week is that Chase Brown saw his highest running back rush share of the season against Carolina. He had a total fifty to fifty split with Zach Moss on the Now, Moss was still more involved in the passing game, but as I've said, with Brown, you have to just be patient. Nothing may come of it. But Brown has been really good on the ground this year. He currently leads the NFL in success rate at sixty five and a half percent. That's according to Next Gen Stats, and among all running backs across the league, he's best, and expected points added per rush For some comparison, Moss has a thirty five percent success rate. Remember, Chase Brown is at sixty five and a half percent. Moss's EPA per rush is minus point zero nine Chase Brown plus point two five. If the Bengals just trust him a little bit more in pass protection, Brown could go nuts in fantasy football. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you yet subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB and make sure you subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel YouTube dot comah at Late Round FF. Thanks for listening to everyone. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper Show.