954: 10 Trends for Week 14

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J Zacher reson what's up everyone, It's JJ Zachary saying in this episode nine hundred and fifty four of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog, thanks for tuning in. There are tons of snake traps you can join right now over on Underdog for not just this week's slate of games, but for the playoffs as well. That's right. Playoff best Ball is here, and there's one contest, the Gauntlet that's a twenty five dollars entry with two million dollars in prizes. Now, if that's too high of an entry point for you, you can also join the three dollars per entry Little Mitten. There's fifty thousand dollars in prizes in that one. There's always something an Underdog that will fit what you're looking for. If you've never played over there, make sure you sign up right now with promo code Late Round. You can get a nice deposit offer. With that promo code, you also get access to my rest of season rankings. That's Underdog Fantasy dot Com promo code Late Round. I said a tweet and I posted on Blue Sky the other day about how I was having this discussion on the late Round Fantasy Football discord about this year's wide receiver draft class, the twenty twenty four class, and how honestly it's kind of been a disappointment. And that tweet was met by a lot of people saying that this year isn't any different than other years, and that's just an overreaction by me. So I want to first say that I'm just looking at this descriptively right now. Generally, yes, how a rookie performs during his first year, it's predictive of future years. But we still have a month to go. There's still a month left in the season, and rookies tend to do better during this portion of the year. With that being said, thus far, things have been pretty underwhelming for this rookie class, and I want to provide some data to show you what I mean. This year's class has eleven wide receivers who are drafting the first and second round. That's on the high higher end compared to all draft classes since twenty eleven. Now, as of right now, thirty six percent of those players are averaging ten plus PPR points per game since twenty eleven. That's a totally average number. Now, when looking at players getting to twelve plus PPR points per game, it's twenty seven percent in this year's class. Since twenty eleven, that number's typically been around twenty four percent, so again pretty much average. And then only Maleiak Neighbors has gotten over fourteen plus PPR points per game. The lad Mconuchy and Brian Thomas have a shot at that. So basically, when looking at the top part of the draft, these wide receivers are performing pretty typically. But that doesn't even account for the fact that three of the wide receivers were selected in the top ten. I'm not even giving the other classes that benefit of the doubt. I'm not weighing draft capital here. A second rounder is the same thing as a first rounder when looking at things this way. Meanwhile, there really haven't been any big hits outside the first two rounds among the wide receivers who are either drafted or at the NFL combine since twenty eleven. So the wide receivers in the ZAP model of those who went after round two, we typically see point seven of them give us a season of twelve or more PPR points per game As a rookie so point seven of them per season, So those are basically third rounders and Day two players, and then some undrafted players too. This year we don't have any. We don't have any who are really that close. We have some guys who have been nice surprises, like Devon vele or Jalen Kocher, but those players are not giving us like a pookin Akua type season or even close to that. We don't have that kind of player in this draft class. We don't even really have half of pukin Akua. My tweet wasn't to say that this class is bad and there's way more analysis to be done. This is just an initial look. But my tweet was to say that compared to expectation where a lot of these guys were drafted early, they've been disappointing overall. And as you guys might remember, I talked about over the off season how this year's class it had poor analytical profiles versus their actual draft capital. Now. I don't think we can confirm things one way or another right now, but I do think we're at least trending to a more disappointing class than a SUPERB one. Aside from the handful of studs that it did give us. Now, that was a different type of trend than usual. To kick off today's show, Let's go back to some of the more standard trends. We saw Isaiah Pachecko back in action against the Raiders, and it was a total split backfield for the Chiefs. Kareem Hunt played one more snap than Pachecko and he ran double the number of routes. I'm not sure it was all surprising, but it's clear that they may not go all in on Pachecko being a workhorse right away coming off that injury. That's something that doctor Jeff Mueller, he talked about that on Late Round Perspectives about a month or so ago. I would anticipate Pachecko getting more and more work as the season moves on. Though. Let's talk about the Chargers backfield without JK. Dobbins. It was kind of as expected. Gus Edwards had a fifty two percent snapshare. Kamani Videll he was half of that at twenty six percent, and then Hassan Haskins was at fifteen percent. Meanwhile, Edwards led that backfill with twelve routes run. According to PFF, Videll was at six Haskins at three. Now, I think a lot of people might be surprised by the routes run here, but the Chargers didn't face a bad game script. Those aren't a lot of routes in total, so I would imagine if they do face a bad game script, we'll see more Kamani Videll on the field. But it's definitely a messy situation overall. I also want to talk about the Panthers backfield because I think people are making a lot of assumptions about what's going on there. Given Touba Hubbard's Week thirteen performance, I think there's some reason to be concerned about Hubbard moving forward, But depends on where your expectations are at. Because if you think that he's toast just base on Week thirteen, I'd chill out for a minute. But if you think Week thirteen was a nothing burger he just had a down performance, I think there's more to it than that. Hubbard did see a sixty seven percent running back rush are his lowest since Week two. He didn't see a single target. Those are both not great. What's also not great is that Jonathan Brooks had more expected Fantasy points than Chewba Hubbard did. That's according to PFF's model, meaning where the two were seeing touches, Brooks got the edge. He was supposed to score more Fantasy points despite less work on the ground, but a lot of that's going to be driven by receiving work. Like I said, Hubbard didn't see a target, Jonathan Brooks saw three. But here's the thing we want to look at, how predictive that is. If we see the exact same usage week over week, chances are Choopa Hubbard's going to see more targets than Jonathan Brooks. Because against the Buccaneers, Hubbard had thirty routes and Brooks only had six, and Hubbard played forty more snaps. That's why I don't think that you need to go overboard and think that Hubbard is some bench player now. But we should still be aware that Brooks can and probably will continue to see more work in this backfield. I haven't really talked about t Higgins on the show this season, Like even in the preseason. He was just kind of there. I was at market with him, and that's where I ranked him. I wasn't too high, I wasn't too low. But Higgins is having a really good season when he's been healthy. He's currently averaging a thirty one percent target share per game rate. He's averaging over eighteen pper points per game. Who knows that that's going to keep up, But those are by far the best numbers that he's seen in his career. He knows that he's about to get paid this offseason. I didn't have Jalil McLoughlin on the fifteen Transaction Show this week, but I probably could have mentioned him in hindsight. McLoughlin saw season high sixty four percent running back rush Yere against the Browns. Now a snap share was still just thirty six percent. His rale participation still pretty low at fourteen percent, but I do think that he's someone to watch out of their buy in Week fourteen. Another player I chose not to bring up in the fifteen Transaction Show was Sincere McCormick. We can't just assume that Alexander Madison is a mere White are going to be sidelined for the rest of the season, and Amir Abdullah is still getting a lot of work with those two out. But we did see a slight shift in usage in week thirteen with that Raiders backfield McCormick went from an eleven percent snapshare to a thirty eight percent share. His rale participation goes from three percent to eighteen percent week over week. Now, neither of those numbers are overly impressive, but maybe there's a chance of the Raiders decide that they want to see more of him down the stretch. So he's fine to stash. I just wanted to fire off some other takes on the show this week, but this is a trend. Nonetheless, we've had a lot of good early round running back hit this year. We've had a lot of good running back hits in general, but Jonathan Taylor, he's been disappointing. He's averaging just a little over fourteen PPR points per game, and while he did find the end zone this past week through the air, those receiving numbers have not been there this year, especially with Anthony Richardson. In games where Joe Flacco's thrown at twenty five or more times this year, Taylor has seen a target share per game rate of fourteen point seven percent. With Anthony Richardson that's been five and a half percent. We do tend to see a slight bump down in target share for running backs with mobile quarterbacks. But this is like next level and it's unfortunately, really really hurting Jonathan Taylor's fantasy value. Baltimore's secondary has been playing better over the last few weeks. Russell Wilson didn't do anything against them from a fantasy perspective. Justin Herbert was the QB eleven against them, and then Jalen Hurts was the QB sixteen. That's brought Baltimore's adjusted passing yards allowed to forty two point six. Just a handful of weeks ago, that number was over seventy. So now we're looking at a defense that's allowed, on average, about forty three more passing yards to be thrown on them versus their opponent's season long averages. They're no longer the worst team within that metric. Jacksonville is, and actually Tampa Bay they're now worse than Baltimore too. I talked about this year's rookie wide receiver class at the start of the show. I'm gonna talk about one of those rookies to end the show, and that's Rooky Pearsall. He's one of those disappointments. Now. I don't know if expectations were like sky high for Pearsall after the Brandon Ayuk injury, but whatever your expectations, he certainly hasn't met them. He's run sixty three routes over his last three games, he hasn't caught a single pass during that time. On the season, Piersall has a yards per rout run rate of point eight nine. We don't see many hits from rookie wideouts at all who finish year one with a yards per rout run rate below one, so let's hope that he can turn things around over the final month of the season. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by starting for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't fit to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. I'm also on Blue Sky you can look up the exact same handle. Thanks for listening everyone, I'll talk to you tomorrow with the Weekly Sleepers episode.