428: 10 Trends for Week 6

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zachera, j Jake Zacherson. What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyese and the editor in chief at fandel and at number five dot com. And this is episode four hundred and twenty eight of the Late Round podcast. So the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. Today's show features a lot of talk about the running back position. Unlike wide receiver and tight end, running back production is more driven by coaching decisions. As I always say, targets are earned. Wide outs and tight ends need to get open in order to see targets. With running backs, talent matters because we want coaches to be forced to play good running backs. Coaches are going to play their most talented backs, hopefully, but from a volume perspective, if a coach wants a committee, a committee is going to happen, and that lowers the chance that a running back will be usable in fantasy football. Now that we're five weeks in, we've got some idea as to how coaches want to utilize their backfield, so we're seeing some interesting trends emerge. There's a lot of interesting running back information that I dug up for today's show. But before get into that info, I want to remind you guys about the Ringers Mega Contest. It's easy. Just make five picks against the spread, including one double down every week. The top one hundred users at the end of the season will compete for twenty five thousand dollars in prizes during the playoffs. And the best part, it's free to enter. To enter for free, visit playfree dot Fandel dot com. Slash the Ringer eligibility restrictions apply. So we had our first game without Austin Eckler on Monday night. In that game, the Chargers featured Justin Jackson more than Joshua Kelly. Jackson ended up with about fifty eight percent of the team's running back rushes and almost nineteen percent of the team's targets. Kelly had the remaining running back rush share and just a three percent target share. So Jackson, as we expected, took on the receiving work, but he also saw more on the ground and honestly, he looked better in that game. I love josh Kelly, but Justin Jackson looked better. Kelly was still the goal line guy, but Jackson's going to have value while Eckler's out, especially with how Justin Herbert's playing. IRV Smith ran seven more routes than Kyle Rudolph on Sunday Night against Seattle, and he had more than a thirteen percent target share. That was the biggest discrepancy that we've seen between Kyle Rudolph and Irv Smith all season long in terms of routes run. I don't think Irv is really usable in fantasy yet, but it's a trend worth noting, especially because the tight end position is terrible and it would be nice to just get another usable player in that pool. Jordan Howard was a healthy scratch in Week five against the forty nine ers. In that game, Miles Gaskins saw all of the work within the ten yard line on the ground and threw the air out of the backfield. Over the last three weeks, Gaskins averaged about a seventy percent running back rush share per game to go along with an eighteen percent target share per game. I almost considered him as a bye this week on the fifteen Transaction Show, and I do think that it's not a bad idea to see if you can buy him given his name value. Isn't very strong. Some people might not believe in him, but I think he might be here to stay. He's crushing right now. The Rams have been absolutely elite against wide receivers to start the year. According to my adjusted Fantasy points allowed method, they're allowing fourteen points per game above expectation against wide receivers, meaning team wideouts are scoring fourteen points below their season long average against the Rams. They've been the best team in terms of regular fantasy points against, but the difference is even more drastic when you adjust things, and when you dig into this further, you can see how good they've actually been. They largely held the Cowboys wideouts to mediocre games. In Week one, no Eagles wide receiver did anything against them. Stefan Diggs was the wide receiver thirty one. No wide out for the Giants was higher than wide receiver fifty seven, and Terry McLaurin was the wide receiver sixty this past week. It's a matchup that you want to avoid. Trend five is that after weeks one and two, Kenyan Drake was averaging about a six percent target share per game. There was some hope that it would increase, but even if it didn't, he could get by he would be fine. But over the last three weeks, those target shairs have been three percent, zero percent, and three percent. Like I talked about on last week's fifteen Transaction Show, Chase Edmonds is the one who's benefiting from this, and it wouldn't be surprising to see Chase Edmonds continue to get a bigger workload in that Cardinals backfield as we moved through the season, you can't consider Drake as anything more than a touchdown dependent RB two. DeVante Freeman starting to get more and more work in this Giants backfield. During his first game with the Giants, he only played twenty nine percent of the team snaps. That numbers jumped to a fifty four percent share over the last two weeks, and Freeman's running back rush share has gotten from fifty percent to sixty one percent to seventy four percent and over the last two weeks, he said a double digit percentage target share. And I think DeVante Freeman's look decent too. At the very least, he should be a flex play moving forward. Guys, things are trending way way up for Antonio Gibson and I'm very excited about it. Let me read you. His running back rush shares by week thirty one percent, fifty nine percent, fifty three percent, seventy two percent, and ninety two percent. That's a nice upward trend. And then target shares are seven percent, six percent, eight percent, eleven percent, and eighteen percent. His snap shares aren't as high as I'd like to see, but his utilization has been getting better and better. If there's a way to buy now, I would definitely try. I just haven't brought him up on the fifteen transactions episode because I brought him up so much earlier this season. Over the last three weeks, Ryan Fitzpatrick has finished as the QB ten, six and two. He's playing really well. And get this, this is an ad to this trend for my buddy rich Reebar from Sharp Football Analysis. Since Ryan Fitzpatrick took back that job in Miami in Week seven last year, he's been the QB three in all of Fantasy football. Trend nine is good news on the Joe Mixon front. After target shares of six percent, seven percent, and seven percent over the first three weeks of the season, Mixon seen shares of seventeen percent and twenty eight percent over the last two weeks. According to Pro Football Focus, over the first three weeks of the season, Mixon had run seventy two rounds versus Giovanni Bernard's fifty seven. Over the last two, that difference is forty two versus fourteen. Now, we've seen different types of game scripts for the Bengals all season long, but this is very good news. It's about damn time the Bengals used Joe Mixon as a receiver. The last trend this week is about James Connor in Week two, because remember he got hurt in week one, But in Week two, Connor saw his snap rate up to seventy seven percent. Week three, that fell to sixty six percent. This past week it was sixty three percent. So we've seen a snap right fall week over week since Week two. Meanwhile, in that Week two game where everyone was rightfully saying Connor's fine, this isn't Benny Snell's backfield, he had an eighty four percent running back rush share that week. Over the last two games, it's been fifty six percent and sixty percent. Benny Snell has also seen one of three goal line rushes, while Connor's seen the other two. In each of the last two games, so they've had a total of six goal line rushes from running backs. Benny Snell has seen two of them. I don't think it's time to just totally panic, but this is definitely something to watch here in week six. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribe to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and no forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone. Got another show tomorrow for you, the Matchup Show. I'll talk to you then,