329: 10 Trends for Week 15

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ zacher Resa jj zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharesen, the editor in chief at fandel and at number fire dot com. And this is episode three hundred and twenty nine of the Late Round podcast of the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. Before get into this week's trends, I wanted to send another reminder about odds Fire. You guys need to check it out. You can easily watch line movement, you can shop for the best lines in each market, and you can even see which side is getting the most bets and money. It's the premiere odds comparison experience across major bookmakers in the regulated US market. It's all in one place at oddsfire dot com. Check it out. Gambling problem called one eight hundred gambler. So the first trend this week is one that I actually tweeted out, but it's a fun one, so I wanted to mention it. Over the last five weeks. Here are the leaders in fantasy points per game at quarterback, Lamar Jackson. No surprise there. Ryan Tannehill is second. Jamis Winston is third, Josh Allen is fourth, and Mitch Trubisky is fifth. I've gotten a lot of questions on Twitter over the last couple of weeks about players like Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers and what to do with them, and my advice is this, there are very few studs at the quarterback position in fantasy football. Very few. Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson are not must start players. Rogers has been totally boom or bust and Wilson's been mediocre over the second half of the season. And the list of top five players over the last five weeks shows this. It shows us how replaceable the quarterback position really is. Over the last two weeks, Odell Beckham has averaged a nineteen percent target share per game. During his first eleven games this season, that number was twenty seven percent. Maybe this has to do with the sports hernia injury that was reported last week, but regardless, it's not a good trend for one of the biggest busts of the fantasy football season. And speaking of OBJ, he's only scored two touchdowns this year. He's scoring on every fifty four targets over his career before becoming a Cleveland Brown. He scored on every fourteen targets. Everyone pokes fun at the Cardinals for being awful at covering the tight end, and it's true they suck at defending tight ends, but when adjusted for strength of opponent this season, Seattle really isn't that far behind. Arizona's allowed six and a half points above expectation a team tight ends this year. When Arizona's at five point six, then the third worst team, Oakland, is at two point six, so a good way off from the other two teams. That's good news for Ian Thomas This week. For trend four, let's talk about the Rams wide receivers. Cooper Cup played just twenty eight point six percent of the Rams snaps this past week. He's now had about a thirteen and a half percent target share over his last two games. When asked about this, Sean McVay said, quote, I think a lot of it is what do we think is the best way to have a little bit of balance on some of the early downs. What do we think is the best way in some instances to run the football? And then he added it is also predicated on all, right, what does this defense do and what does that mean? In terms of some of the matchups that you want to create. This isn't very good news for Cooper Cup because it means that he's much more volatile than we originally thought. I don't mind him this week, but it's still a downgrade on his overall outlook. And then there's Robert Woods. While Kup's been struggling to see volume, Bobby Woods has averaged a thirty seven percent target share over his last two games, and he finally found the end zone last week too. All of this means is that the team is going to be less predictable moving forward. Now. I talk about touchdown rates a lot on this show and how they tend to regress, how Patrick Mahomes this huge touchdown rate last year wasn't going to be repeated, or it likely wasn't going to be repeated. And even though I'm the biggest Lamar Jackson fan out there, and even though I touted Lamar Jackson like crazy this offseason, I think it's important to point out that he's someone who's also due for some regression in the passing game. So far this season, based on his yardage total, he's thrown eleven point four more touchdowns than a quarterback typically would have over the last five years. That's based on passing yards, just the passing yards to touchdown conversion. Even if we cut that number in half because the Ravens offense is so dynamic and Jackson's dual threat ability helps him be more efficient and see softer coverage. Even if we cut it in half, then he's still out performing in the passing touchdown colin by quite a bit. And his touchdown rate shows this too. It's eight point one percent. It may not regress this season, but we shouldn't expect an eight percent rate year over year. It's just something to think about. Trend six is that Devin Singletary has now ranked as the RB sixteen, nine, and thirteen over the last three weeks, and in Week fourteen, he saw an eighty one percent running back rush share in a twenty two percent target share. Those are elite numbers at the running back position. He's now played at least seventy one percent of Buffalo snaps in each of his last four games, and his usage continues to climb. Even though he's got a really, really tough matchup against Pittsburgh this week. I think most teams should still plan because we know that running back alternatives in fantasy football right now suck. His usage is what's most important, and it's been there. Over the last five weeks, the Carolina Panthers have allowed running backs to rush for seven hundred and twenty seven rushing yards. That's by far the most in the league, even more than Jacksonville. I'll talk about this probably more in my matchup show, but this scares the hell out of me for Russell Wilson this week. In the passing offense, we know Seattle loves to run, so they could really limit his volume against the worst rush defense at football. On the season, Jamis Winston has thrown at fifteen or more air yards one hundred and seventeen times. That's fourteen more times than the quarterback ranks second on the list, which is Philip Rivers. And at his current pace, Winston could come close to hitting the high and deep ball attempts since twenty eleven. That's one hundred and fifty one from Andrew Luck and Matthew Stafford back in twenty twelve. This is why I think that you should take shots in the waiver wire with guys like Brashad Perriman and maybe even Justin Watson, especially given the Buccaneers final two matchups in the fantasy football season. As we know, Jamis Winston just doesn't give up. It wouldn't be a ten Trends episode without a little Green Bay backfield talk. Aaron Jones had a big day on Sunday, and that came with strong peripheral numbers. He ended the game with a twenty six percent target share, which is nuts, and then a seventy percent running back rush share. His target share was a season high in a single game, and the running back rush share was the highest mark that he'd seen since Week nine. So things are trending in the right direction, but as we've seen in the past with his backfield, it can swing in Jamal Williams favor very quickly and easily. The last trend today is about quarterbacks. More quarterback trends. But we've seen some really interesting first half versus second half of the season splits the season at the quarterback position, especially with Tom Brady, Matt Ryan, and Russell Wilson. For Brady, if you look at his first six games, which are largely against easy opponents, he was averaging over twenty points per game, and that includes one performance where he only scored three point seven points. Brady had five top twelve performances over his first six games this year. Since then, he's been in the top twelve and weekly scoring just once. Since Week six, Brady's averaged fourteen fantasy points. I get that this is an arbitrary split, but of the quarterback since week six, with at least five games played, there have been twenty nine of them. Of those twenty nine quarterbacks, Tom Brady is twenty sixth in Fantasy points per game. Matt Ryan ranks twenty seventh. He's been awful after averaging twenty three points per game across his first six games. And then there's Russell Wilson. Through week six, he was averaging almost twenty six points per game. Since then, it's down to seventeen and a half, and that includes a huge thirty nine point performance. I don't know what happened after Week six for these guys, except for the fact that Ryan Tannehill became starter for the Titans in Week seven and then everything just got weird. That's gonna do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at late round QB. And as always, guys, if you listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, do me a huge favor and leave a rating and review. Thanks everyone. Talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Matchup Show.