592: 10 Trends for Week 14

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zacher Retha Jay Jake Zacher reson What's up everyone? It's JJ zacharieson the editor in chief at fandle and at Number five dot com in this episode five hundred and ninety two of the Late Round podcast. So many shows that are part of the fandel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. What better way to gear up for the weekend than to spice up your thirsty Thursday Night Football with FANDL and Captain Morgan Introducing Captain Morgan's Thursday Night Pick Them, a completely free to play contest series that gives you four chances to win a share of ten thousand dollars. Here's how it works. Fandelfans will have the chance to answer ten questions center around both Captain Morgan and that Thursday's NFL matchup. Fans who answer the most questions correctly will be eligible to earn their share of the week's ten thousand dollars cash prize. Thursday Night Football will kick off before you know it, so head tofandle dot com, slash Captain Morgan NFL and spice up your game day. Today. Must be twenty one years or older to participate. For more details at fandle dot com or download the FANDLE Fantasy app. Eligibility restrictions apply, and don't forget to spice up your game day with Captain Morgan. We saw Sony Michelle as the Rams belcal this past week. We'll have to see how things play out in that backfield. Whoever is getting the most touches, though, could see some favorable regression heading their way on the season. No team has a higher pass to rush touchdown ratio than the Rams do. Their three point seventy five ratio is by far the highest of the Sean McVay era. The previous high over the last four years was one point sixty five. Now, to be fair, their current ratio isn't some crazy crazy outlier, but it does rank in the ninety seventh percentile when looking at how teams have scored their touchdowns since twenty eleven, so I think it's fair to expect it to drop at least a little bit, which favors the rushing attack. I mentioned on last week's fifteen Transaction Show how David Montgomery was seeing high snap shares and he was getting a lot of work, but the product just wasn't there. I more specifically talked about the fact that he hadn't seen good target share numbers, but he was still running a lot of routes for Chicago. The team just hadn't been targeting their running backs. In Week thirteen, we saw the impact that peripherals can have on output. The Bears targeted Montgomery on twenty two point five percent of their targeted attempts. That gave him his highest target share of the entire season. Now, we shouldn't expect that to happen every week, and that's not what I was predicting to happen. Don't think that this is me just trying to victory lap that recommendation. I'm just trying to point out that things like routes run, they can help us spot these things. When we're talking a three game sample of not a whole lot of targets. If a player is still out there running and getting a lot of work, that's still really important. And David Montgomery showed us why in Week thirteen. T Higgins has now had back to back games with at least a thirty three percent target chair for Cincinnati, and in those two games, he's been a top five option at wide receiver in weekly scoring across the season, in games laid by Higgins, he's actually out targeted Jamar Chase eighty two to seventy six. Now, I'm not sure that we can take the last two weeks as anything but positive variance for T. Higgins because he's had such high target shairs that's not going to continue. But I do think he's a better fantasy football asset than how he'd been performing across his first eight games before this two game stretch, So expect something more in the middle of those two outputs moving forward. At the very least stops sleeping on T Higgins. Offensive situation matters in fantasy football. We should be striving for volume and players seeing good workloads can still be fine in bad offenses, but it sure helps when your fantasy assets are tied to good offenses. And speaking of which, let's talk about the Buccaneers. I talked about them last week a little bit too. On the season, Tampa Bay has scored forty six total touchdowns. That's four more than the second place Colts. It's also twenty eight touchdowns more than both Houston and the Giants. That means that Texans and Giants combine to have ten fewer touchdowns in ten BA Bay this year. Is it a surprise that Tampa Bay has three fantasy relevant pass catchers without another one who would be fantasy relevant if he was playing in a running back who's an RB one, while the Texas and Giants have next to nothing. Of course, not because offensive situation matters. I just found those touchdown numbers to be kind of shocking, so I had to share Without DeAndre Swift. On Sunday, Jamal Williams handled seventy point eight percent of Detroit's running back rushes. That's a pretty decent number, but it was down from the previous week when DeAndre Swift got hurt. Williams also saw a two point six percent target share. That was one of his lower marks of the season, and unfortunately, unlike the David Montgomery stuff from earlier, this was definitely usage based. Jamal Williams only ran nine routes against the Vikings. Godwin iguay Buque led the backfield with twenty five routes run. That's gonna limit williams upside as long as DeAndre Swift is out. There was a chance he would be an RB one without DeAndre swift, but we're looking at an RB two with limited upside from a projection standpoint. Now, that's as long as this receiving usage continues. Tevin Coleman saw an even bigger backfield chair without Michael Carter. This past week. He handled almost eighty five percent of New York's running back rushes, and for a second straight week, he saw at least an eleven percent target shair. He's now averaged thirteen and a half rushes and three and a half targets per game without Carter, and last week was big because his running back rushair went from about fifty two percent up to that eighty five percent mark. He's absolutely the Jets running back that you won until Michael Carter comes back. Of course, I'm still of the belief that better days are ahead for DK Metcalf, and I'm not just talking about next season or throughout his career. I mean in twenty twenty one, since Russell Wilson returned, Metcalf has averages six and a half PPR points per game, but he's seen eight targets in three of those four games, and his target shair per game is about twenty two percent. Now that's lower than his target shair and his eight games prior, which was twenty seven percent. But in terms of raw volume, Metcalf was averaging just seven targets per game during his first eight That's exactly what he's averaging right now, or since Russell Wilson has returned, he's even averaging almost identical fifteen plus air yard targets per game numbers two. I'm not saying he should be doing what he did earlier this season. I'm just saying that if you trust Dk Metcalf is a player, which you should, and you believe that Russell Wilson can be better, which you probably should, then Metcalf will get better and their remaining schedule isn't bad either. You can usually tell what a team wants to do offensively when the team is in a neutral game script, or wheen they're running an offensive play with the game within six points. That's how I typically define neutral gamescript. When you compare a team's overall pass rate to their pass rate in that neutral gamescript situation, you can see if the team is generally doing what they want to do, and with the Jets this year, that hasn't been the case. Overall, they have the second highest pass rate in the league, but in neutral game scripts when games are close, they actually she ranked twentieth. Their difference in pass rate in those two scenarios is the largest in the league, and that has to do with the fact that they lead the league and plays run while trailing, And they also lead the league and plays run while trailing by ten or more points. When you can't hold a lead, you're bound to throw the ball more. Things were looking good for Patrick Mahomes after the first month of the season. He was averaging almost twenty eight standard Fantasy points per game, which was the most in the league. Since that point in time, Mahomes has given us just two top ten performances. He's averaged sixteen point three points per game, and he's been a high end QB two. I'm not going to give up on Patrick Mahomes because it's Patrick Mahomes. He also has zero passing touchdowns over the last two weeks, which we just shouldn't assume holds. But it wouldn't be right to say that he's the same old Patrick Mahomes that he's automatically going to bounce back. There are very clearly a handful of quarterbacks across fantasy that we should want more from here on out. But let's hope that he can get things right against Vegas this week. It unfortunately may not happen for Ashod Bateman in year one. He saw just two point seven percent of Baltimore's targets against Pittsburgh this past week, and he now has three straight performances where he scored single digit PPR points. According to Pro Football Focus, in Week thirteen, he ran the fourth most routes at wide receiver for Baltimore. He was second in week twelve, and he was first in week eleven when Markus Brown was out. Hopefully this was just a little blip, but I'm not sure that it is. On Monday, Jamison Hensley of ESPN tweeted quote John Harbaugh on if he wants to see wide receiver Rashod Bateman one target on Sunday more involved in the offense. Quote, we like it when a number of guys are targeted. It doesn't always work out that way. You can't create that. When you start chasing that, that's when problems happen. There was a lot of potential for a shot Bateman to step up this year, but it just hasn't happened. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get to subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found. It'll follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper Show.