958: 10 Trends for Week 15

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zacherthay, Jake Zacher Reef. What's up everyone. It's JJ zachar esin in this episode nine and fifty eight of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Before we get into the trends this week, I want to just remind you that even though you drafted your fantasy teams all the way back in August, you can still do snake drafts right now over on Underdog just as an Underdog Fantasy dot Com or download the Underdog app. In the draft sections click NFL. You'll see tons of drafts that you can participate in right now. And if you're new to Underdog, make sure you sign up with promo code Late Round. That'll get your nice deposit bonus as well as my rest of season rankings. If you're still needing those, that's Underdog Fantasy dot Com. You can also download the app promo code Late Round. The first trend this week is about Tyrone Tracy. He saw a nice uptick in usage in Week fourteen. Tracy played eighty three percent of New York's offensive snaps, which was just a second time this year that he's been above the eighty percent mark. He ran a route on seventy one percent in the Giants dropbacks that was a season high. His twenty one point seven percent target share a season high, and his eighty nine percent running back rush share was the second highest of a season. The Giants are a dumpster fire, but they're at least feeding Tyrone Tracy. With Derek Carr's health up in the air, I figured this next trend might be useful. Carmissed Week six seven to eight earlier this year. Alvin Kamara averaged fourteen point seven PPR points per game in those three contests, and that includes his only PPR performance this year with fewer than ten points. That average is lower than a season long average outside of those games, which is over twenty. The thing is, though, Kamara's already been trending in the wrong direction. He's averaging just fourteen point four PPR points per game over his last four and now Hendry Miller's back, and in Week fourteen, Kamara had a fifty seven percent running back rush year that was his third lowest mark of the year. Basically, I think we all need to accept that Alvin Kamara is not going to likely perform like he did earlier this season down the stretch, which is unfortunate because of the most important part of the fantasy season. The Eagles have been running the ball a lot. I've talked about it before on this ten Trends episode, but it's really starting to hurt aj Brown First, though Jalen hurts. He averaged thirty three pass attempts from weeks one to four. Since then, he's been at twenty one point four. He hasn't had thirty pass attempts in a game since that four week stretch ended. Aj Brown during his first three games this year. Remember he did miss some time earlier this season, but during his first three games he was averaging twenty two point one PPR points per game. Since then, he's been at twelve point seven. It's pretty wild because I thought the Eagles might go in the other direction this year with Kellen Moore. Huge miss by me, but this is their identity and it's ruined their pass catchers for fantasy purposes. David and Joku has been bawling out. He has target shares of thirty percent and thirty five percent. Over his last two games, he scored twenty six and seventeen PPR points in those contests. Since Amari Cooper left town, and Joku's averaged almost a twenty four percent target share per game rate. And since Jameis Winston took over and Joku's averaging over fifteen PPR points per game. He's a full blown higher end tight end one right now. The Rams haven't had Pukinakua and Cooper Cup all season as we know. Even still as it stands today, their wide receiver target share is almost seventy seven percent, meaning seventy seven percent of their total targets have gone to wideouts going back to twenty eleven. That's the highest of any team. It's higher than the twenty fifteen Jets, who had Eric Decker and Brandon Marshall combined for over three hundred targets. Sean mcvay's offenses just don't target running backs at a very high rate, and the tight ends they're not good enough to command high target chairs. That's what creates a situation like this, and it's great for Pukinakua and Cooper Cup. The Arizona Cardinals defense has been low key good against quarterbacks since the early parts of the season. It's not to say the Cardinals defense is awesome, but they've definitely limited quarterbacks to start the year. Across their first six games, they allowed three top five performances Josh Allen, Jayden Daniels, and Jordan Love. They all got there against Arizona. Since then, not a single quarterback has finished higher than QB twelve. They're now, according to justin Fantasy Points Allowed, they're a fringe bottom five matchup. Only one quarterback during this stretch has thrown more than one touchdown against them. It's pretty wild since I think a lot of people may not see it this way, but props to the Cardinals. Now, speaking of the Cardinals, James Connor, he's seen a nice little uptick and running back rushare over the last couple of weeks. He had three weeks where his share was just fifty three percent per game, but over his last two he's been at seventy four percent and ninety percent. That ninety percent running back rush share that he saw this past week that was a top four number for him on the year. Arizona's got a pretty favorable playoff schedule for running backs, so he's trending to be a very, very valuable piece for fantasy teams and make sure you've got Trey Benson. He'd take out a lot of work if James Connor were to get hurt, though I'm not convinced that he'd be a full blown bellcut. Zach Moss went on ir in Week nine. So we played five games or the Bengals have played five games with Chase Brown as their lead back. Brown has ranked as a top ten fantasy back in all five of those games. He's averaging a running back rush share per game rate of ninety six percent. His target share per game is fifteen percent. He scored over twenty two PPR points per game. There's no reason to think that Chase Brown is not an elite right back from here on out. He's a league winning player this year. Now, there's a pretty good chance that George Pickens is not back for the Steelers this week. If that's the case, unfortunately, it's going to be tough to trust any of the wide receivers there. It's a tough matchup. But even if it wasn't they really split things up in Week fourteen, like we were interested to see if Mike Williams would get more run without George Pickens and what we saw was that no Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver had higher than a seventy two percent route participation rate, and it wasn't even Mike Williams. Now, Williams did see more work. He saw a forty five percent route share and a twenty percent target chair. Those were both season highs for the Steelers, but that route share just isn't very strong, and it would be tough to bank on that from a forecasting standpoint in the Fantasy playoffs, even if the Steelers do end up using Mike Williams Moore this week. So while I do think that's in the range of outcomes here, I think they could use Williams more given the fact he had an elite targets per out run R last week. I still think it would be really tough to trust here in the Fantasy playoffs, given how they used him against the Browns. Now, I've got one more trend for you this week. It's about DK Metcalf. Metcalf hasn't posted a wide receiver two performance are better in four straight games. He's averaging ten point nine PPR points per game during that timeframe. For as well as jsn's playing DK Metcalf it's a complete opposite, and many are probably wondering why. Well, I can tell you that he unfortunately isn't really playing too far below expectation. According to PFFS Expected Fantasy Points formula. During this four game stretch, his expected fantasy points is around twelve and a half PPR points per game. Again, he's at ten point nine, So yeah, he's playing below expectation, but not severely below expectation. The truth is a lot of his peripherals look the exact same as they did to start the year. Before this stretch, he had a twenty three percent target share. It's been twenty six percent. He's actually had a better catchable target rate. He's seen slightly fewer end zone targets, and his average at the target it's fallen by over a yard. Those are things that can impact his output, but not this dramatically. I mean, he went from averaging fifteen point one pper points per game to ten point nine over his last four I'd argue a lot of this comes down to two things, though one is just straight up variance. While he was averaging a lot more points earlier this year, he also was playing above expectation back then. His expected points per game was about a point lower than his actual points per game, and now the opposite is kind of happening. But there's a two point gap between his expected points per game earlier this season to now. Some of that can be explained by the end zone targets in the A dot right, he's seeing fewer end zone targets, his average at the target not quite as high. But it's also that Seattle just isn't getting as many opportunities in the passing game. The Seahawks have played slower over their last three games. They've also had a pass rate over expected below zero according to Fantasy Life data in four of their last six. During their first seven games of the year, which is when DK Metcalf was playing in his good split, the Seahawks had a below average pass rate over expected just once they were throwing the ball a lot. You see, Metcalf has this twenty six percent target share over his last four games. That's higher than his target share during his first seven, but he's performing worse. But in those first seven he averaged eight point seven targets per game. Recently that number seven point three. So all of these small things, along with the lack of touchdowns they're adding up. I think he might be a little bit banged up, sure, but this is a classic case where the situation has changed and it looks a lot worse because of some statistical variants. Now, I don't know if we're gonna see him perform like he did to start the year, but I don't think the DK metcalf is just fully broken right now. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football 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 and Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper Show.