956: Mailbag 12/6/24

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacherathas J J. Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen in this episode nine and fifty six of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Before answering some mailbag questions this week, I want to remind you to check out Underdog. There are tons of snake drafts you can join right now over there for not just this week's slate of games either, 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. There's 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, where there's fifty thousand dollars in prizes. 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 get a nice deposit offer and my rest of season rankings with that promo code. That's Underdog Fantasy dot Com promo code late round. The first question this week is from Zach on Bluesky. It says, do you think that you should approach Week fourteen or whatever your last non playoff week is in a given league differently when you're already locked into a specific playoff seed. Yes, most definitely, as long as you're following the rules of your league, and that's key. If your league says you have to fill your entire starting roster, then you've got to fill your entire starting roster. But if nothing's gonna change for you, then you need to plan ahead. You of course want integrity. You want to field a solid lineup so the rest of your league isn't getting screwed over by you and how you're managing your Week fourteen team. But for example, you're gonna worry a whole lot less about Week fourteen players, specifically defenses. That's the easiest example. Like waivers are over right now, but if I knew that my seed was locked up, I wouldn't never use free agent budget or waiver wire priority on a defense for Week fourteen. There's no reason to just wait until waivers run. Or maybe you've just been streaming quarterbacks focus only on Week fifteen. If that's the case, or week sixteen if you have a buy, don't worry about fielding the best quarterback in week fourteen because week fourteen doesn't matter for you. You can use a quarterback, but use that week fifteen or week sixteen quarterback and your spot in week fourteen. So yeah, your management can definitely change. But make sure you're not being annoying and ignoring your league's rules. And if you do something like lose a game on purpose so that a certain team doesn't make the playoffs in your league that you don't want to face in the playoffs, just know that karma's gonna get you. In all seriousness, though, just know that we often overrate our ability to predict who's going to be good and who's not going to be good in a given week. That's all, but yes, overall, you should change your approach if you're locked into a specific seed. This nast question is also from Blue Skies from Tony Lung. It says who to trust from the Browns three wide receivers. Will Cedric Tillman retake the top spot or has Jerry Judy taken over? If Tilman is cleared to play, can we trust Elijah Moore. I think Winston can support two of them plus David and Joku love the show. Thanks, Thanks Tony. So I don't want to take anything away from Cedric Tillman when I say this, because he was playing really well when Amari Cooper was first traded, but his numbers, his usage didn't necessarily tell us that he was the number one wide receiver in Cleveland like the clear cut number one guy. From week seven through week eleven, says, four games before he had his concussion against Pittsburgh, Tillman was averaging a target share per game rate of twenty two percent. He had forty targets. Jerry Judy during that same timeframe had a twenty percent target share and thirty five targets. Elijah Moore was at thirty six targets. In other word, words, targets were being spread around that offense, not just to one guy, not just to Cedric Tillman. Now, Tilman was seeing slightly more valuable targets during this timeframe. According to PF's expected Fantasy points formula, Tilman had a fantasy points per game expectation of eighteen point four during that time. Jerry Judy was at sixteen point three Elijah Moore fifteen point two. But this wasn't some scenario where like Tilman was light years ahead of the other wide receivers in Cleveland and things were cooling off for him a bit after some really good games without Amari Cooper. Like if we were to throw in that Pittsburgh game as well, because he was concussed late in that game, then we wouldn't really see that much of a difference between a guy like Tilman and Jerry Judy at all. I think this is a scenario where the Browns are going to deploy their three wide receivers the same way they've been deploying them with a healthy Tilman, and matchups are going to dictate where some of those looks are gonna go to. Me though, it's tough to not be impressed with what Jerry Judy is doing right now. His first game without Amari Cooper was kind of rough, but since Week eight he's seen yardage shuttles of seventy nine, seventy three, one hundred and forty two, eighty five, and two hundred and thirty five. We've always just needed consistency with Jerry Judy, and I think having a quarterback who's not afraid to take some chances down the field is really helping him out. So to answer your question, I think all of them are in play in their own ways. I'd rank them Judy than Tilman, then Elijah Moore rest of season, and I put More last because the other two wide receivers are probably gonna see down the field targets a little bit more. They'll probably be used a little bit more in the red zone too, But there are gonna probably be weeks where Tilman outscores Judy and vice versa. The important thing is that there can still be a decent floor for the guy who gets outscored, because there's enough passing volume in this Browns offense. So if Jerry Judy outscores Cedric Tillman, Tilman's not automatically a zero and vice versa. And look, if you look at their schedule, it's not great on paper. They get Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Cincinnati, and Miami to close out the fantasy season. Typically i'd be really afraid about using these wide receivers. But what all those teams have in common is that they could force Cleveland into a negative game script, and that's not necessarily a terrible thing for this Brown's offense, because they'll push the ball down the field and they'll throw it a lot in that environment. Now, i'd rather the schedule be a cakewalk, of course, but at least they have a quarterback and an offensive environment now where things aren't total dust when they're facing a tough matchup. So I think Winston can support all of them in their own different way. It's just that they're not gonna all go off each week, and I don't think there's gonna be the same odd man out week in and week out. It's not gonna be that clean. This last question is from Twitter's from at Fantasy Trolls. It says better deep stash Patrick Taylor or Sean Tucker. So to me, this is Sean Tucker. Patrick Taylor has actually been around the league since twenty twenty one. He's on his second team and he hasn't gotten a ton of run for that team because he hasn't dressed for them week in and week out. Now, of course, there are some good backs ahead of him on the depth chart, but it does signal a talent problem to some degree, and you could argue that he has more of an opening right now than Sean Tucker does, yes, But do we think there's a tremendous amount of upside with Patrick Taylor? I'm not so sure. With Tucker, we've seen the upside. The Buccaneers also have a better schedule than the forty nine Ers rest of season, and there are multiple injury outs with Sean Tucker right now. Like I said on the fifteen Transactions episode, So Taylor may project better because he has more of a role right now than Sean Tucker, But what is that projection actually getting you? And that role isn't even set in stone right now. But Tucker's the upside play and we're stashing players here and we're looking for upside. Also, I wasn't able to talk about it in the fifteen Transactions episode because it happened after everything was published. But Patrick Taylor now has a chance to not even be the clear cut RB two in that offense. The forty nine Ers signed Izzy Abanacanada, and I actually think that Izzy could fit really well in this offense. He's a bigger bodied guy who has a lot of speed for his size, and that speed is an element that Kyle Shanahan knows how to take advantage of. He loves that in his running backs, so keep Izzy in mind here too, and also hil to Pit. The next question is from Twitter. It says, can we talk JSN going forward and beyond? He seems to be emerging, but there isn't a lot of chatter. Yeah. Look, Jsn's doing his thing and it's great to see because my prospect model really loved him. Now, there are a couple of things happening. First, he's just seeing more work. Last week was a lower point for him, which is a fourteen percent target share, but since week eight he's averaged a twenty eight percent target share per game rate. Now, DK Metcalf missed a couple of games in there, and he may not even be one hundred percent right now, but JSN is still at a twenty five percent target share per game rate over his last three The big question we should be asking though, is what really changed? Why was he kind of disappointing in more of a floor play to start the year, but it all switched during the second half. Well, that target share changed. Sometimes there's a little bit of variance with how teams are targeting their wide receivers, and the Seahawks have definitely targeted JSN more to start the season is target share per game rate, which is nineteen percent. So it's been like six to nine percentage points higher over his last five games, depending on if DK metcalf is enter out of the lineup. So he's just being targeted at a higher rate. That's a signal for talent. Now from a deployment perspective, he's still running the slot. Eighty three percent of his routes have come from that area of the field over his last three games. The number is actually eighty five percent since Week eight, so this isn't like a DK Metcalf is inner out kind of thing to start the year. From Week one to seven, he was at eighty six percent. So he's playing the slot pretty similarly. But one big difference is his average depth of target. It's risen by almost two yards from the first seven games to his last five and then all the while, his catchable target rate is eighty five percent during that time according to PFF data. That was seventy six percent to start the year. So's just paint this picture. I know I threw a lot at you just now. To start this season, before he started running hot, JSN had a nineteen percent target share, his average depth of target was lower than what he's seen recently, and his catchable target rate was also lower. All of those things have risen, some of them pretty dramatically. That's why we're seeing more production from JSN. Not to be clear, JSN has still played over expectation over this five game stretch that I keep referencing. According to PFFS Expected Fantasy Points formula, JSN is thirteenth in expected Fantasy points per game during this time, but he's been fourth in actual points per game. He's outperforming expectation, and you have to wonder if DK Metcalf will eventually turn things around a little bit. But at the very least, I don't think we're bound to go back to early twenty twenty four Jackson Smith and Jigba. He's looking like a very, very legit slot player, and we know, based on his pedigree that he can do more than that, So we should be optimistic. Just don't expect twenty points per game from here on out. The last question this week is from at B Towart twenty on Twitter. It says, who are a couple of players you think will either be championship drivers or killers? So I'm taking this question to basically mean which players are going to help you win a championship and which players who might seem reliable could hurt your chances of winning a championship. So let's have some fun here. I've got two underperformers and then one over performer. I feel like we can go on and on with a list like this, but I'd rather keep things more succinct. Talked about it before, but two running backs have some tough matchups in the fantasy playoffs. DeAndre Swift is one. The Bears get the Vikings and the Lions in weeks fifteen and sixteen, and Swift has had moments over the last few weeks where his snapchare has fallen to below fifty five percent. He also hasn't had a target share add or above ten percent since Week nine, and he's played Minnesota in Detroit over his last two games. He's failed to score ten PPR points in both of those games, so he's a little bit scary. Naji Harris is the other one. Now, I had Nausey as a target my draft guy this year, but I called him out as a cell a handful of weeks ago because of two things number one, Jalen Warren was getting healthier. Number two. He had tough playoff matchups. Now, over his last four games, Harris has been pretty mediocre in three of them, even with a touchdown against the Commanders. He scored just eleven point three PPR points. But he dominated the Bengals, so that may be changing people's perceptions a little bit. But he gets Philly, Baltimore and Kansas City and the Fantasy playoffs. The Eagles are a bottom five matchup for running max by justin points allowed. The Ravens are a bottom ten matchup. The Chiefs are the absolute toughest matchup. Now, I think that he can still see volume and be like fine, but I'm worried about the ceiling outcomes here. That's what the discussion with him is all about in the first place. Now, on the flip side, I'm not gonna say someone like Bucky Irving, who's pretty obvious at this point and who I already talked about a couple of weeks ago, because you have to remember a lot of these guys I've talked about on the fifteen Transactions episode. That's what that episode is about. Every single week, Like Tony Pollard, this past week already shouted him out. But there's one player that I want to bring up again who I've talked about plenty, but who still is not getting the love that he deserves and who I think could be really, really productive down the stretch. It's Jacoby Myers. Myers continues to be someone that I'm much much higher on versus consensus. Like I'm talking ten wide receiver spots higher in my rest of season rankings because I think he might crush the month of December. And the reason for that is simple. He's seeing a lot of volume, He's a good wide receiver, and the Raiders have a cake walk schedule from here on out. Myers rings fifteenth in the NFL and expected Fantasy points per game since DeVante Adams left Vegas. His target share per game rate is almost thirty percent during that timeframe. In the Fantasy playoffs, he gets the Falcons, the Jags, and the Saints. Those are two top five opponents for wide receivers by justin points allowed, and then the Saints they rank the e eleventh best opponent. Things are set up very very well for Jacoby Myers, and honestly, it starts this week because they get the Buccaneers. I just don't think that people realize how strong he can be in fantasy football. So swift and nausey for the guys who may not have high enough of a ceiling, and then Myers as my lower key league winner this year. 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 best rooting for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. You can find me on Blue Sky as well, same exact handle. Thanks for listening everyone. There's a Late Round Perspective episode that drops in just a couple of hours. Hope you give that a listen. Otherwise, best of luck in week fourteen. I'll talk to you next week.