795: 10 Trends for Week 1

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacheras j Shake Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zacharyesin in this episode seven hundred and ninety five of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. This ten trend show is the quickest, simplest show of the week. I talk about ten data related trends that might help you make better decisions for your fantasy football team. It's that simple. There's really no more explanation needed. Now, before we get into those trends this week, I just want to let you know that with the season about to get underway, yes, the Late Round Draft guide not as relevant anymore. But I've got a patreon too. The Late Round Fantasy Football patreon has weekly in season rankings, rest of season rankings, live stream q and as with yours truly and more. You can find the patreon by simply going to Lateround dot com. Now let's get to some trends. Now. Clearly, the trends this week aren't based off of the twenty twenty three season because the twenty twenty three season hasn't started yet. But I still think that some of these are going to be interesting and helpful. Trend won this week is that the Steelers had just twelve passing touchdowns last year versus sixteen rushing touchdowns. Only thirteen teams since twenty eleven failed to get thirteen passing touchdowns. Pittsburgh's one of those teams, But that type of scoring ratio usually does not maintain. Teams who have more rushing touchdowns and passing touchdowns tend to regress to a mean where they start throwing for more of their touchdowns. In fact, of the twenty two teams with a pass to rush touchdown rate below fifty percent in twenty eleven, so the twenty two teams with next season data who had more rushing touchdowns than passing touchdowns the average increase in rate the following year six and a half percent. We should expect the Steelers to have more passing touchdowns than twenty twenty three, not only because the offense be better in general, but the way they score their touchdowns should skew more towards the pass than it did in twenty twenty two. With Cooper Cup banged up, the Rams don't have a whole lot going for them at wide receiver. I like Puka Nakua as a potential rookie breakout this year. Maybe I should have added him to the fifteen Transactions episode. But let's not pretend that this is a position that they're deep at without Cup that could lead to a lot of looks for Tyler Higbee. Don't forget that last season, Higby hit a career high twenty point four percent target share per game rate. Only Mark Andrews, Kyle Pitts, Travis Kelcey, and TJ. Hockinson had a better rate than that. Don't be surprised if Tyler Higby ends up being an extremely safe option, not just across the entire season, but specifically here when Cooper Cup might be sidelined. This next trend is actually one that was posted to the Late Round Fantasy Football instagram last week. You can go follow that Instagram account at Late Round FF. I haven't talked a lot about Trey Palmer on the show. I did during draft season a little bit, but not really over the summer. But my prospect model liked him, and I think that I should call that out. He broke out late and he didn't have amazing draft capital. It's not like he's some obvious breakout candidate, but he had a three point zero six best season yards per team pass attempt rate, which is predictive, and he had a fifty two point nine percent best season touchdown share. He's the only wide receiver in this year's class to hit a yards per team pass attempt of three to go along with a touchdown share of fifty percent or better. He's gonna get some opportunity in this Buccaneer's offense. He doesn't necessarily need to be on your roster right now today, at least in normal leagues and deeper leagues. Yeah, you should throw that dart, but he definitely is someone to be ready to jump on if the usage looks right. Early on. Fantasylife dot Com has some cool data tools that I'm going to be utilizing for this ten Trends episode throughout the season. One of them is a game script one that looks at how pass heavy teams are within certain scoring parameters. And this ties into the last trend that I just talked about with Trey Palmer. The Buccaneers have been really pass heavy over the last few years with Tom Brady. In fact, their overall pass rate they've ranked first, first and third. But something interesting on Fantasy Life was that when the team was trailing by nine to sixteen points last year, they not only had the highest pass rate in football compared to other teams when they were in those situations, but it was the highest by a lot. It was almost ninety percent when the team, and second, the Chargers were at about seventy seven and a half percent. Tom Brady not being there means that number is almost definitely gonna drop here in twenty twenty three, we could see a pretty big shift in overall pass volume in this Buccaneer's offense, even when you consider the fact that they could be facing a lot of negative game scripts. Think of it this way. Over the last two seasons, the Bucks have seen seven hundred and fifty one and seven hundred and thirty one pass attempts. Let's average that out to seven forty the average NFL team, the team who ranked sixteenth in pass attempts over the last two seasons, they've been at five hundred and seventy one pass attempts. That means that if the buckser roughly averaged this season in pass attempts, which could be realistic, they were looking at a drop of one hundred and sixty nine pass attempts year over year, that could have a really big impact on the players there. There was an article from The Athletic this week where beat writers from each team gave a fantasy football tidbit. For the Texans, it was about Damian Pierce in that backfield. Mike Jones wrote the following, He meaning Piers should still start, and the Texans would be smart to use the steady dose of the run to ease pressure on rookie CJ. Stroud. However, with it appearing as if Houston plans on going with the platoon, Pierces, your top back may be unwise. Second back sure thing. So Jones is essentially saying here that despite the preseason usage which looked great for Damian Pierce, we could see a platoon in Houston this year with Devin Singletary, and I think Singletary will be involved. Platoons exist in almost every NFL backfield these days. The big question mark is with Pierce's receiving usage, because if that's not there, it could be a rough season for him fantasy wise. Last year, Pierce finished with just a nine percent target chair per game rate, and that backfield had less competition than this year's backfield. He only had four games above a ten percent target chair. That's the thing that's gonna unlock Damian Pierce this year. I'm not overly bullish, and he's gonna get to like a fifteen percent target chair, but I do think the competition is still weak enough at receiver out of the backfield to where he could get to that ten percent mark. I'm just not sure that in an offense with a rookie quarterback if that's gonna cut it frohim to truly make a jump into being an RB one in fantasy. So Pierce, to me, he's gonna be a solid piece for you this year. But like a lot of dead zone running backs, the consistent upside is worrisome. Speaking of rookie quarterbacks, I did episodes on how rookie quarterbacks aren't good for the skill players on their team for fantasy purposes, largely because teams with rookie quarterbacks are number one, more run heavy than the average team, but number two, they just don't score them many touchdowns. Anthony Richardson, he's a rookie quarterback, so the pass catchers on that team are gonna take a hit compared to a team with a decent veteran. With that being said, I don't know if people realize how bad the Colts offense was last year. They became just the fifteenth team since twenty eleven to score fewer than one and a half touchdowns per game. Now, fortunately, the average increase in touchdowns per game year over year for those teams has been point six, so we could see over half a touchdown more per game for the Colts this year, which across seventeen games, could end up being ten or more touchdowns. That's not nothing. The Colts also scored a touchdown on every two hundred and twenty nine offensive yards. That was the eighth highest value over the last twelve years, meaning they were getting a lot of yards and they weren't scoring touchdowns on those yards. When yards correlate to touchdowns, that's also a number that's bound to regress. Basically, Richardson and his mobility and his rookie status, that might not be great for the playmakers in that offense, but keep in mind that this season is probably not going to be worse than it was last season for the Colts offensively. Now, the passing volume might not be there, but the offensive efficiency, the offensive effectiveness that should be better. Alexander Madison has been a controversial player all off season long. I think my Perspective's episode with Sigmund Bloom shed a lot of light on the positives with Madison. So I listened to that episode if you haven't already, especially if you're down on him, I know that I walked away from that episode with a somewhat different outlook. Now. I've mostly been at market with Madison this year, recognizing that he does have a lot of the signs of being this standard dead zone running back. But I also think that the community has sometimes gone too far in the opposite direction, basically just to make a stand so for him in particular, I'm in the middle now. With that being said, Madison has played eleven NFL games where he carried the ball ten or more times. In those contests, he's averaged a pretty impressive fifteen point seven Pper points per game. It's not like he's been totally incapable of scoring Fantasy points in the past. Again, I'm in the middle here because it's very easy to see both sides. A lot of the stuff that I research says that he's kind of destined to fail. But as Bloom pointed out, there are reasons to still be bullish despite those historical trends, and his performance when getting volume should make you feel at least a little bit more comfortable. A lot of you weren't around during prospect season, So I want to talk a little bit about Jamiir Gibbs. Jamiir Gibbs, the prospect. It's true that running back weight matters. I mentioned that with Devon ah Chan on yesterday's show, and Gibbs does not have an insane amount of size. Now, I'm not looking at this from the perspective of he didn't weigh over two hundred pounds, therefore he's going to be bad. Really, what we've historically seen is that around two hundred and ten pounds, that's where good fantasy backs have come from. But everything works together. We shouldn't look at this stuff in such a binary way. There are good and bad to each prospect. The fortunate thing with Gibbs is that his draft capital tells us that he's not like the standard smaller running back. He's different. In fact, when he got selected in Round one, he became just the third running back since twenty eleven to get selected in the first round with a best season reception chair above seventeen percent. You know who the other two backs were, Oh, these guys named Christian McCaffrey and Saquon Barkley. After going as high as he did, Gibbs immediately then comped more favorably to a Christian McCaffrey type than a Giovanni Bernard type. I'm ready for him to catch a ton of passes here in twenty twenty three. Trend nine is that in twenty twenty two, teams averaged just two point twenty seven offensive touchdowns per game. That was the lowest mark that we'd seen since twenty seventeen, and it likely had to do with the gap that we saw in quarterback play, which led to what we saw in quarterback scoring and fantasy. The elite quarterbacks like Mahomes, Allen, and Hurtz really separated themselves, And not only did they do that because they were playing well, but the mid tier qb ones were just flat out bad. Last year, we saw the biggest delta between the top three quarterbacks to the rest of the position that we've seen since at least twenty eleven. Now, I did an episode earlier this offseason on the rise of the early round quarterback. And as I said on that show, episode seven hundred and seventy two, there are some formats in league types where I'd get one of the big three this year. But I do expect regression to hit not only with the top three quarterbacks, but with the rest of the position, and that's gonna have a domino effect. More touchdowns could end up being scored, and that's going to bring more fantasy relevancy to players across the league. The quarterback position has that kind of impact. The last trend this week is really just about my fantasy football philosophy. I've talked a lot this offseason about buying into talent and letting the situational pieces just sort of fall into place. I think Drake London is the perfect example of that. I'm gonna use a snippet of the Late Round Draft guide for this trend. With Drake London, I wrote he's currently getting drafted as a low end wide receiver, two around wide receiver twenty two, or wide receiver twenty three. Since twenty eleven, we've seen twenty five second year wide receivers get drafted as wide receiver thirteen to wide receiver thirty while playing eight games that season. That's wide receiver two to middle of the road wide receiver three range. Of those twenty five, there were four who had a rookie season yards per route run rate so their previous season above two point zero. Each of those players ended up playing at least two point seven PPR points per game above ADP expectation. They were almost all moderate breakouts. Drake London will join that group this season. How about this. Among those twenty five second year wide receivers, ten had a target chare per game rate of twenty percent or more during their previous season. Their rookie year, only two of those players twenty percent of them played below expectation. Six of them were moderate breakouts, which is when a player plays three or more PPR points per game above expectation. Drake London will join that group this season. There are so many things pointing to Drake London being a really good player and pointed to him being a good bet at ADP. Maybe the situation does end up screwing him, which is entirely possible, But I want to bet on players who I think might end up being elite 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 for to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper Show