943: 10 Trends for Week 11

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Speaker 1: This is the Lab Podcast with your host JJ Zachersa Jay Jake Zacher Reason, what's up everyone? It's JJ zacharyesin in this episode nine and forty three 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 remind you that even though you drafted your fantasy teams back in August, you can still do snake drafts right now over on Underdog. Just head to underdog Fantasy dot Com or download the Underdog app. In the draft section, click NFL and you'll see tons of drafts that you can participate in right now. And if you're new to Underdog, make sure to sign up with promo code Late Round. That'll get you a nice deposit bonus as ball as my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are updated for you every Tuesday once you get the link to them, but to get them you have to sign up, use promo code Late Round, make a deposit, and start playing. So Shane Waldron was fired by Chicago this week, and it's easy to see why the Bears haven't thrown a touchdown pass since Week six, when they faced Jacksonville only the Dolphins, who have played a backup quarterback for half the season, have fewer passing touchdowns. The average total offensive touchdowns this season through Week ten is twenty two point two, meaning the average team has about twenty two offensive touchdowns. Chicago, with all of their talent, is at eighteen now. Thomas Brown is now serving as offensive coordinator, and this tweet from my friend Connor Allen says a lot. It says Thomas Brown takes over as Bears offensive coordinator with Waldron fired. The Good worked under Sean mcvagh and the Rams for three years. The Bad Brown was the play caller for the Panthers periodically last season, including the final six games in that span. Number one, they scored nine or fewer points in four of their last six games. Number two, they were twenty ninth in EPA per play, Number three they were twenty eighth in success rate, and number four, they were thirty second in pass right over expectation. Things are about to get very, very interesting in Chicago. I did my rest of season rankings update this week, and the player that I'm highest on versus the market is Juwan Jennings. I have him like eighteen wide receiver spots above consensus, and it's because he's been really freaking good this year. Jennings has now played one game without Deebo Samuel this season, and one game without Brandon Ayuk. In that game without Debo, he saw forty percent target share and he casually scored almost forty seven PPR points. This past week, without Ayuk, he saw a thirty two percent target share and he scored sixteen PPR points. He got seven of eleven targets for ninety three yards. Among players with thirty targets this year, here are the leaders in yards per route run. This is according to PFF. Aj Brown is number one, Nico Collins is number two, Justin Jefferson is umber three, Jiwan Jennings is number four. And here's the other crazy thing about Jennings. In Week ten, he ran seventy two percent of his routes from out wide. He was more fifty to fifty with a slot in wide usage. From week one to week nine, He's lining up everywhere and he's been insanely efficient per route run. He was a fifteen transactions by last week, and I still think he's a bye. Another player in my ranking is like more than consensus is Chase Brown. He's now seen one hundred percent of Cincinnati's running back rushes and back to back games just to show you how crazy that usage is. We've only had ten games this season where running back saw every single running back rush. The only player on that list more than once other than Chase Brown is Jonathan Taylor. Brown's also coming off a game against Baltimore where he saw a twenty percent target chair. That's a season high. He's seen his two highest target shares of the season over the last two weeks without Zach Moss, and the reason for that is because they're letting him run more routes. He had a sixty three percent and seventy five percent route share over his last two Again, those are the two highest of his season. This Zach Moss injury has allowed Chase Brown to be a bellcal It may not keep up at quite this pace as Khalil Herbert learns the offense, but Brown is looking really good rest of season. The Eagles are currently last in targets per game. Those are the number of targets that wide receivers, tight ends and running backs see each game. They're under twenty five. Now, that's not the lowest that we've seen since twenty eleven, but it's actually close to it during that time for him. So since twenty eleven, only four teams have finished the season with fewer than twenty five targets per game. So why is this happening? Well, the Eagles had the lowest pass rate in football and it's a bottom ten to one in neutral gamescript environments. The Eagles had about thirty one to thirty targets per game over their last two seasons, so they're seeing six or seven fewer targets per game here in twenty twenty four. That hasn't impacted AJ Brown as much because his target shares have been so elite, but it's definitely hurt a player like DeVante Smith, which is really unfortunate. Now. I do expect things to regress a little bit rest of season, but it's something at the team level to understand and think about. The splits for Travis Kelcey without Rashid Rice have just been insane. With Rice this season, his target share per game rate which is fourteen point three percent. Those are in games where Rice played a significant number of snaps. Without Rice, Kelsey has averaged a target share per game rate of almost thirty one percent during his three weeks. Now since they traded for DeAndre Hopkins, he scored twenty five twenty two to twenty PPR points. Since Rice's injury, Kelsey's had just one outing out of six games where he ranked outside the top five of the position. So yeah, he's turning towards the tight end one once again. Bijon Robinson has been a monster in fantasy football. His usage really hasn't changed. He's seen between fifty percent and eighty percent of Atlanta's running back rushes most weeks, and his target shairs they've spiked at times, but he's usually in that ten to twenty percent range. But he's now scored twenty one and a half PPR points are more in each of his last five games. Over his first five, he averaged thirteen and a half PPR points per game. Over his last five twenty four point seven. Now, a few things are happening here. Number one, he's finding the end zone more. During his first five games, he had one touchdown. Over his last five, he has six. That's the biggest thing. But he's also been more efficient on the ground, and Atlanta's also faced an easier schedule. During their first five games, their average opponent ranked about twentieth and adjusted points allowed to running backs. They've been ninth to ninth best opponent over their last five. Their rest of season schedule isn't as attractive, but the playoff schedule is, so don't go selling high. George Pickens has been a completely different fantasy receiver with Russell Wilson. In his three games with Wilson, he's averaged eighteen PPR points per game. With justin Fields, he was at nine point nine. Now what's changed is not his target share. His target share per game with Russ is twenty six point six percent. It was almost twenty nine percent with Justin Fields. He's averaging point three fewer targets per game with Russell Wilson, but he's seeing targets down the field more. This is something I've been talking about on this show, and he's seeing catchable targets. His average depth of targets with Russell Wilson have been seventeen point nine, twelve point four, and eighteen. His aid dot has increased by well over four yards with a quarterback change, and according to PFF data, his catchable target rates have been one hundred percent and eighty six percent over his last two games. Those are the two highest rates of the season. This is why Mike Tomlin is well compensated. So DeVante Adams had a thirty nine percent target share on Sunday that was a season high. He only caught six of his thirteen targets though for thirty one yards. It was the first time in his career where he saw thirty five percent target share better while failing to score ten or more PPR points. Now, this is going to sound annoying to some people, but it's honestly probably not a bad time to try to buy someone like Adams and fantasy football. Of course, this could burn you because of the way the Jets offense is performing. But he's seen a thirty four percent target share in a thirty nine percent target share over his last two games. He saw seventy five percent of the team's end zone targets this past week. He's had air yard shares of fifty three percent and forty three percent over his last two like those are really really good peripheral numbers. So while the production was bad this past week, the secondary numbers do tell a different story. Kyan Williams has failed to score a touchdown in each of his last two. Prior to that, he scored in every single game this season. Now, his backfield share numbers is target share numbers. They're fine, but I do think we have to recognize that the Rams over their last two games have had a pretty positive dropbacks over expected rate. According to Fantasy Life, they've been at plus four percent and plus five percent. The only other week where their dropbacks over expected rate was positive was back in Week one. Now, a slightly past heavy year approach means there's a chance that they're throwing it a little bit more in the red zone and at the goal line. And we've seen that from weeks one to eight, the Rams had a pass rate of forty eight percent within their opponent's ten yard line. That's been seventy eight percent over their last two now, game script and all sorts of things are at play here. This isn't to say that Kyroen is a cell either. I actually have him ranked higher than consensus right now. They've got a great running back schedule rest of season. It's just something to think about with his production. The last trend this week has to do with the Miami Dolphins. Now I talked about this on a Mailbag episode recently, but the Dolphins are divvying up their target share completely differently than how they have historically under Mike McDaniel. Their running backs this season have a twenty five point eight percent target share. Their tight ends are at twenty five point one percent. That means that they're wide receivers are under fifty percent. To give you some context, Mike McDaniel had coached Miami in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three. Their running back target shairs during those seasons they were about twenty percent and twenty three percent, so lower than what we're seeing this year, but not by a ton. Their tight end target shairs, though, were nine and a half percent and thirteen point four percent. Remember this year they're above twenty five percent. Their tight end target share has basically more than doubled now clearly that's led to a lower target share to the wide receivers. They've had a target shair of forty nine percent this year. That makes them one of three teams with a wide receiver target share under fifty percent. The other two are Kansas City, who have very little a wide receiver, and New Orleans who's trotting out players have never heard of at wideout the Dolphins of freaking Tyreek killing Jalen Waddle, not Mason Tipton and Mark hez Valdez scantling. This is impacted to his performance too. His average depth of target this year is five point nine. It was eight point zero last year, and it was nine point nine the year before that. Obviously, throwing to running backs and tight ends more is likely to lower that a dot. But this has been a huge reason why Tyreek Hill and Jalen Waddle aren't living up the fantasy football expectation. Now. I'm not sure if it's gonna change, but their offense isn't nearly as dynamic right now as we're used to seeing, so let's hope they force the change. That's it for today's show, though, Thanks to all of you for listening. If you had 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 follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB and I'm on Blue Sky Now too, which is also at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper show,