689: 15 Transactions for Week 6

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zachera Ja zacher reefon what's up everyone? It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode six hundred and eighty nine of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Fandel and GMC are back to bring you the GMC Sierra Mountain Climber Pick Them, a free to play contest series that gives you a chance to win a share of ten thousand dollars in Fandal's site credit every Sunday courtesy of GMC. Here's how it works. Every Sunday during the NFL season, you'll have a chance to answer questions based on the day's one PM and four twenty five PM games. The more questions you answer correctly, the higher up the mountain you'll move. If during any week you answer every question correctly for a perfect score, you'll reach the summit and win your share of ten thousand dollars in sit credit. The contest series is now live, so head tofandel dot com Slash Free Slash Contest slash GMC to start climbing them out. It's a fifteen transaction show. Let's get to it. Add Kenneth Walker. So I don't know what Kenneth Walker goes by. Now, is he Kenny? Is he Kenneth, is he Ken whatever we're supposed to call him. If he's available in your league, pick him up. Let's first talk about Walker the prospect. He was a good prospect coming out of Michigan State. There were definite concerns about his pass catching profile, but overall, he had a ninety third percentile prospect score in my model, and he had a minus point five percent draft capital delta. So to put that all another way, he looked better than the majority of running backs entering the league, and he was drafted where he probably should have been drafted. A minus point five percent draft capital delta is very very neutral. Now, ideally we would have seen him over that ninety fifth percentile mark that's where we see stud running backs hit. But his sub six percent best season reception share really hurt him in that model. That doesn't mean that he's incapable of catching passes. I think that's something that gets misundertood a little bit when I talk about this stuff. It's just that we generally see true Bell Coow running backs in the NFL with higher marks in that category. Bell coow running backs in the National Football League did a lot through the air and on the ground in college because coaching stabs are trying to get them the ball as much as possible, So the receiving profile wasn't so much this guy is horrible at receiving. It's more that maybe he's not as good as someone like Breise Hall just as a player in general. But don't get me wrong, Kenneth Walker still a good prospect. He was still the RB two in this class, and now he's got all the opportunity in the world. Rashad Penny unfortunately suffered a fracture tibia. He's out for the rest of the season. That leaves the Seattle backfield wide open now. A huge knock on Penny's workload this season has been his lack of receiving work. I talked about that last week on the show. But Kenneth Walker's had multiple three target games this year in a part time role. There's at least some chance that he has a better target share per game than what Rashad Penny had been seeing, and that could make him an even more valuable fantasy asset than Rashad Penny. This is one of those cases where the backup running back might be more valuable without the starter in the lineup than the starter was with the backup running back. Generally speaking, backup running backs aren't as good in fantasy football when they get the call when the starter goes down and that handcuff steps in, he's usually not as good. But in the case of Kenneth Walker, we know that he's a talented back. Rashad Penny in order to see a lot of volume, he had a deal with Kenneth Walker. Kenneth Walker doesn't have to deal with Rashad Penny. And then on top of that, he might have more pass catching upside. And the Seahawks offense has been surprisingly awesome too. They scored thirteen offensive touchdowns this season. That's above average. Now, I know that Walker isn't available in every single league right now, he's out there in fifty six percent of Yahoo leagues. If he's available in yours, it's time to get aggressive. You should spend your top waiver priority and you should spend probably the rest of your free agent budget by Jamar Chase. So look, if you drafted Jamar Chase in the first round of your fantasy draft. You're probably not happy right now. We knew entering the season that regression was going to hit Chase in some way. He had the third highest yards per target rate that a one hundred plus target receiver had since twenty eleven. But what's going on right now is more than that. Chase hasn't even hit thirteen PPR points in each of his last four games. He's failed to reach more than fifty yards twice this year. But there is obviously some good news because he's a by candidate. Chase currently has almost a twenty eight percent target chair per game. That's an elite number, and the Bengals have an awesome wide receiver schedule upcoming. They'll face the Saints in Week six, a team that's been the tenth best matchup and adjusted fantasy points allowed to wide receivers, and then they get the Falcons, they're the eighth best matchup. The Browns are the eleventh best, the Panthers are the twelfth best, the Steelers they're the absolute best, and then the Titans, who are the fourth best. Bengals wide receivers according to adjusted Fantasy points allowed. This is my method of calculating it. They have the third best schedule in fantasy football from here on out, So if you have Jamar Chase, you should probably hold. If you want to buy low, now would probably be the time add Taysom Hill. It's been hard to recommend Taysom Hill this year because his peripherals are not good objectively, Like, are you really gonna trust the player in your tight end slot who's averaging four rush attempts in a third of a target per game. Can you really throw a guy into your lineup who's not on the field for eighty percent of his team's offensive snaps. It's just hard to recommend that. But as we know, touchdowns are always possible with Taysom Hill, and a tight end just needs one of them to be relevant, and in Hill's case, in Week five, he got you three of them. Now, that pace of scoring touchdowns won't keep up. He's got five touchdowns in five games this year on twenty two total touches, and his efficiency isn't going to maintain either. But when something works, when a team sees something work on the field, it's not like the team doesn't recognize it. He'll sew nine carries. In Week five he had twelve carries over his first three games, and what happened. The Saints offense looked a lot better regardless of the matchup Taysom Hill produced. He had a legendary performance. He scored over thirty four PPR points without catching a pass. The tight end position is morphed once again into the upside down. So while you're probably gonna see a ton of volatility with Taysom Hill, I'll be the first one to admit that you're gonna see that with most tight ends. The hope with Taysom Hill right now is that the Saints continue this type of usage after finding success against the Seahawks. Period. If he sees this exact same usage moving forward, he's gonna have some spiked weeks. But what if he sees a little bit more. What if that thirty percent snapshare which he finally saw this past week, what if that turns into a forty percent share. I don't think that he's very easy to start week in and week out, but I do think that you should add him this week just in case the Saints due change things up sell Dalvin Cook. So it's becoming pretty clear the Vikings are going to take it slow with Dalvin Cook. This year. He suffered a shoulder injury in Week three, and he's now played two games with a slang. In those two contests, his snaphas have been sixty two and a half percent and about fifty seven percent. In weeks one and two, when he was fully healthy, his snap rates were seventy seven percent and sixty nine percent, respectively. And Cook has also seen just a three point six percent target chair per game over his last three games. His high during this time is under six percent. It's five point seven percent. In weeks one and two, Cook ran fifty four routes to Alexander Madison's twenty two. Over the team's last two games, that gap, it's shrunk to thirty five versus thirty one. Dalvin Cook's coming off a huge twenty six point outing in PPR formats. That gives managers a nice opportunity to sell. I think he's still going to be a good running back asset in fantasy football, but there are definitely concerns here. There are definitely concerns about him being a high end RB one in fantasy. By Christian Kirk so Kirk had a really hot start to the season over the first three weeks. The last two not so great. He scored just ten point four PPR points combined, but it's not time to panic. His Week four game against Philadelphia, it had some iffy weather, and in that contest, Kirk actually saw his highest target share of the season at thirty nine percent. Now he lined up in the slot on seventy five percent of his snaps against the Texans in Week five. Entering that game, Houston had actually done pretty well against slot guys this year. They ranked twenty fifth and percentage of targets that had gone to the slot and twenty first in slot yards allowed. He ran the most routes for Jacksonville this past weekend, and even though his target share was under seven percent, he was averaging a target share per game rate of almost twenty nine percent entering that game. He should still be a solid wide receiver two moving forward, add Rondell Moore. So late last week, I was shocked to see that Rondell Moore was still rostered in just eighteen percent of Yahoo leagues people. He's back from his injury, He's playing starter snaps. In Week four against the Panthers, his return to action, he saw a sixteen percent target chair while scoring three point seven PPR points. I understand that's not great. In that game, though, he tied Marquis Brown for the most routes run for the Cardinals. The biggest issue in that game and why he was probably so inefficient, it was a game against Carolina a couple weeks ago. He played just thirty nine percent of his snaps from the slot. That's according to next Gen Stats. That was probably because aj Green was sidelined. Arizona's choices at wide receiver beyond Hollywood Brown in that game it was Greg Dortch, another slot player, and Rondell Moore, so they put more on the outside. And then what happened in Week five when AJ Green returned, Rondell Moore played the slot. He played eighty four percent of snaps from the slot and that resulted in a seven catch sixty eight yard stat line. He saw twenty one percent of the team's targets. DeAndre Hopkins is going to return to the field pretty soon from his suspension, but even when he returns, Rondel Moore he will be the slot guy. DeAndre Hopkins coming back is gonna hurt AJ Green much more than the other wide receivers who are already there. Although the other wide receivers are clearly going to take some hit and target share. But the bottom line is Rondell Moore is getting a lot of run in this offense. He's playing the slot role and that's been a role that's been very productive for fantasy purposes to start this season, so he should be rostered in way more than eighteen percent of Yahoo leagues add Eno Benjamin, so Rondel Moore's teammate, Eno Benjamin, he should get a look off the waiver wire this week too. James Connor left Sunday's matchup against the Eagles with a rib injury. Backup Daryl Williams execited with a knee injury, so is the Eno Benjamin show. As a result. For at least part of that game, he had a season high forty percent running back rush share and he saw over ten percent of the team's targets. Now, at the time of this recording, I don't know how long either of those running backs are going to be out, if at all, but Arizona gets Seattle this week. Seattle's allowed the most rushing yards in football through five weeks, so Benjamin would be a pretty good play If both those other running backs are out by Justin Herbert, so definitely not someone who usually advises a fantasy manager to trade for a quarterback, especially one that's not posting huge rushing numbers. But I do think that Justin Herbert's kind of an exception, and that's mostly because he's been kind of average since injuring his ribs. He scored about thirteen, twenty one and fourteen fantasy points over his last three but things should get better. Obviously, we want those ribs to heal, and hopefully they will heal, and hopefully that means he's going to feel stronger each week. But Keenan Allen's going to be back eventually too, so that's a big plus. And the Chargers have the seventh best schedule for quarterbacks in terms of adjusted Fantasy points allowed over their new four and across the entirety of the season, their schedule's third best, So I think Justin Herbert makes sense as a by low ad Alec Pierce. So I think a lot of people saw Alec Pierce for the first time this past Thursday, and he had a great game against the Broncos. He caught eight of his nine targets for eighty one yards. He's quietly posted yardage totals over his last three of sixty one, eighty and eighty one. Now, his target chairs weren't amazing in weeks three and four, but in week five it was twenty five percent. As I talked about in episode six hundred and forty seven, rookie wide receivers tend to perform better during the second half of the season versus the first half, especially players with a profile like Alec Pierce's. Pierce was a decent enough prospect. He got drafted in the second round, but he wasn't an elite prospect. He's not someone that you would expect to perform right away. Right now, he's technically playing behind Paris Campbell, but I think that'll shift as the season goes on. So add Alec Pierce this week. Sell Michael Carter. Maybe this transaction is an obvious one, but it needs to be said. Michael Carter is the quintessential Cell High candidate. After his two touchdown performance on Sunday, Carter has seen his backfield share slip. In weeks one through three, he was averaging a running back rush heare per game of fifty seven percent. His median snapshare during that time was almost sixty percent. After three weeks, he'd run ten more routes than Brece Hall. But over his last two games, his running back rush here per game has dropped by over twenty percentage points. His snapshare is now close to forty three percent instead of sixty percent, and Brice Hall over their last two games, he's run fifteen more routes than Michael Carter. Carter's going to be fine as a random flex play, but he's not going to be super reliable as long as Breeze Hall's healthy. So coming off a big game, maybe there's a desperate manager in your league who doesn't recognize this, who doesn't recognize that this is Breece Hall's backfield, or it's at least becoming that way. Add Jamison Williams. Like I just said with Alec Pearce, we see rookie wide receivers make an impact in fantasy football all the time. We're seeing that this year, So why not take a chance on Jamison Williams. The Lions have a bye this week, but just last week head coach Dan Campbell he said that williams rehab from his torn acl has been picking up. There's at least some chance. Some chance. It's probably not very big that we could see him on the field after Detroit's by this week, but even if that's unlikely, he could find the field over the next few weeks. And Detroit's offense has been competent this year. That's important when we're talking about supporting another pass catcher in the offense. Now, the rest of season's schedule for Lions wide receivers is not ideal, but Williams is an elite talent. He did a ninety fifth percentile score on my prospect model. If you've got a space to stash him, it's not a bad call by Drake London. Now, speaking of rookie wide receivers, Drake London's last couple of weeks have been so so frustrating. He saw target shares of thirty nine percent and twenty nine percent, but he canbine to score just eleven point two PPR points. And it's because Atlanta loves to run the football. It's a problem for the team's pass catchers. Marcus Mariota has thrown it twenty nineteen and twenty five times over Atlanta's last three games. Only the Bears have thrown the ball less than the Falcons this year in terms of pure pass attempts. Now, I'm not expecting the Falcons to be this like pass heavy team, but we still probably shouldn't expect such low passing numbers moving forward. They're averaging about twenty one pass attempts per game over their last three, but since twenty eleven the season low and pass attempts per game has been a little over twenty five. It's hard to maintain such low passing volume, and thankfully London is commanding amazing target shaars. He now has a thirty three percent target chair in the season. Only Cooper Cup and Ceedee Lamb have matched that. The Falcons also have an awesome schedule for Drake London moving forward. In fact, when looking at adjusted fantasy points allowed to wide outs, Atlanta has the absolute best schedule for wide receivers from here on out. London's a high end talent. He's already producing in the NFL. He's a stud with the schedule and the passing volume regression, I think he's a great by low add Geno Smith. Look, I don't think anyone expected this. I certainly didn't expect this, but Gino Smith is bawling out after five weeks of football, He's a top six fantasy quarterback. He ranks in the top five and expected points added per dropback, and he is first in success rate. That's according to number five ers expected Points model. And he's done this while facing the twelfth toughest quarterback schedule by adjusted fantasy points allowed. It's hard to just ignore what's going on after a few weeks. Sure we can just say, yeah, it's just some variants. It's been five weeks. There are a lot of quarterbacks who are not getting it done, but Geno Smith is getting it done. So he's the obvious choice to add off the waiver wire this week if he's available. And not only is he playing like a stud, but Seattle's schedule moving forward is great for fantasy quarterbacks as well. He could end up being a plug and play quarterback, at least in the short term. By Brandon Cooks. So Brandon Cooks has now scored fewer than ten PPR points and sixty percent of his games this year. That number was thirty seven and a half percent last year. He's averaging just ten point seven PPR points per game. Last year it was fourteen and a half. His target share is down by a couple percentage points this season, and he's seeing deep targets at a slightly lower rate too, But the bottom line is that he's just not converting. He's not converting like he did a year ago. His catch rate's the biggest issue. It's down ten percentage points year over year, but it still could be a time to buy low. Cooks is just one of nine wide receivers who have played five games this year with at least a twenty percent target share in each one of those games, and Houston's faced the third toughest schedule thus far and adjusted points allowed to wide receivers. They've got the fourth best schedule for wideouts over the next four weeks, and they've also got a top ten to one across the rest of the season. Now, the Texans are on a bye this week. That might be a bad thing for your particular team if you need a win right away, but it could also mean that you could buy Brandon Cooks even lower. He's probably not going to be a wide receiver one or even a high end wide receiver two this year, but his peripherals are still great. He's a very, very solid wide receiver and his numbers should get better. Add the Washington Commander's defense, So Thursday Night football is probably going to be pretty sloppy. We got the Commanders and Carson Wentz versus the Bears and Justin Fields. According to Fandals Sportsbook, the Commanders are just one point road underdogs in the game, with a thirty eight and a half point over under now Minnesota. This past week. They didn't have a great performance against Chicago, but Justin Fields has been sacked at least twice in every single game this year, and the Commanders currently rank in the top ten and pressure rate according to Pro Football Reference. So I think the Commanders are a strong streaming choice. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribe to 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 at LATEROUNDQB. I'm gonna check out Lateround dot com. Join the free newsletter, Join the patreon. The patreon has rest of season rankings, weekly rankings in a great, great discord community. Appreciate all of you for listening, I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Ten Trench Show.