560: 15 Transactions for Week 6

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachersa j J Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacheres and the editor in chief at fandle and at number fire dot com in this episode five hundred and sixty of the Late Round Podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. Fandal is giving new users an exclusive offer to play NFL Daily Fantasy for free all season long. All you have to do is sign up for Fandel Daily Fantasy and you'll receive one free voucher for each remaining week of the NFL season. You'll receive your voucher upon sign up to Fandle Daily Fantasy, and vouchers will automatically apply to each weekly entry. Head over to fandle dot com and sign up to play daily fantasy football. Eligibility restrictions apply new users only. Go to fandle dot com or download the Fandel app for more details. Add Kadarius Tony. So back in Week three against the Falcons, we saw Stirling Shepard and Darius Slayton get injured. That allowed Kadarius Tony to see more work in the Giants offense. In weeks one and two, tony snap shares didn't even reach thirty percent in Week three. That snap share number jumped to sixty six percent the next week. Both wide receivers were out, so Tony played seventy eight percent of New York snaps, and like I mentioned on last week's show, because Kadarius Tony was an ad last week, he played the majority of his snaps in that Week four game from the slot. According to next Gen Stats, he played about sixty one percent of his snaps from that area of the field and he had a six catch seventy eight yard performance. That all makes sense because Sterling Shepherd's their slot guy and Sheppard was out, so Kadarius Tony took over. Sheppard and Slayton were both out in Week five as well against Dallas, and then Kenny Gallada ended up missing most of that game with a knee issue that resulted in Kadarius Tony playing only twenty nine percent of his snaps from the slot. He saw ten targets in that game against Dallas while playing on the outside, and he caught eight of them for one hundred and fifty yards. He had one hundred and eighty nine total receiving yards on the day. So why am I bringing all this up? Because it shows versatility. Even if each of these wide receivers is healthy, rational coaching would keep Kadarius Tony on the field. He's probably not gonna hit one hundred and eighty nine receiving yards in a game again this year, but he's absolutely worth an ad this week if you passed on him a week ago. By AJ Brown. Now, look, let's walk through the AJ Brown journey of twenty twenty one. AJ Brown managers, you might want to earmuff this. In Week one, the Titans offense was just a dumpster fire, but even still on eight targets, AJ Brown was able to find the end zone. It was the best week of his fantasy season. In Week two, Brown had arguably the worst game of his entire career. He caught just three of nine targets in a pass friendly script. He was hurt early in Week three, and then he missed week four, so weeks three and four don't really count. And in this past weekend he only had thirty eight receiving yards against the Jags. So what does that tell you? It tells you that Brown managers are probably a little bit frustrated and honestly, they should be. In each of his last three games he scored fewer than eight PPR points. He only did that once in twenty twenty. But there is some reason for optimism. In the three games that aj Brown has finished this year, he's averaged a target chair per game of twenty four point eight percent. That's only two and a half percentage points lower than his average a season ago, and it's a good target share. A twenty five percent target chair is a good target chair. And Tennessee continues to score touchdowns on the ground. Yeah, guys, I get it. They have Derrick Henry and he is an absolute freak of nature. But their past to rush touchdown ratio this season how they're scoring their touchdowns is point seven to five. That's a bottom five ratio in the league, and it's a lot smaller than the team season long low under Mike Rabel of one point zero seven. Their average pass to rush touch on ratio over the last three seasons has been one point twenty four, and that's with a whole lot of Ryan Tannehill rushing touchdowns. Tannehill this season has scored only once on the ground. So to put this all another way, we should expect the Tennessee offense to score their touchdowns through the air, at least a little bit more than they have so far this year. When you combine that with a solid target share, Brown's gonna be fine. He should be fine. So it makes sense to buy low this week hold Miles Gaskin. So I have a little secret for you guys. I have Miles Gaskin in one fantasy league this year. I drafted him in one league and it's in a league where I have Christian McCaffrey. Little did I know by slotting Miles Gaskin into my starting lineup this past week, I would get Christian McCaffrey production against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And I understand I'm one of few who actually started Miles gasking this past week. It was not a good matchup, and as someone who has Gaskin in that one league, I think there is going to be some unpredictability with gas and moving forward. He had a ten target game in Week five. That's a good thing. He had almost thirty two PPR points. I just don't think that what he did is that sustainable, like to that degree, even close to that degree. As we know Tampa Bay is a tough team to run on. We've seen back to back opponents now barely even try. In Week four, New England ran the ball just eight times against the Buccaneers. In Week five, Miami had nine rush attempts. Now, of course, some of that can be credited to game script, but even in a neutral game script against the Bucks, the Dolphins had a seventy two percent pass rate. Their neutral script pass rate entering the week was over ten percentage points lower than that, and their Week five matchup they didn't have all their pass catchers. DeVante Parker and Will Fuller were both out, and they were still that pass heavy. This is all just another reason to believe that this twenty five point six percent target share that Gaskin had in Week five that it's not going to be easy to maintain. That's obvious though, because you have to ask yourself what happens if Devonte Parker and Will Fuller are healthy. Running backs don't just get twenty five percent target chairs week in and week out. So you're probably wondering, why not sell Miles Gaskin? Then, if we know he's not gonna do this again this year, why not try to trade him away high. Why not get rid of Gaskin after this huge performance? Well, I don't think the market for Miles Gaskin is that strong. I would assume it's not that strong. We can't just sit here and assume that a manager is just going to ignore what happened during the first four weeks of the season, where gas can average fewer than eight PPR points per game. But here's the other thing. Gaskin did see a season high sixty eight and a half percent snap rate. What if his strong outing means that the Dolphins put him on the field more in the coming weeks, that seems rational. In over Miami's next two games, they get the Jaguars and the Falcons. Those are two bottom seven teams and adjusted fantasy points allowed to running backs. Those games set up a lot differently than the Week five matchup against the Buccaneers. We should not expect the Dolphins to be as pass heavy against those teams as they were against the Bucks. That's going to lower the expectation for Miles Gaskin because what he did against Tampa Bay was almost entirely through the air. But if Gaskin's able to capture a similar snapshare as to what he captured in week five, he should be able to produce. I mean, I think all of us would look at that backfield and say that Miles Gaskin is the best running back that they have. So I don't think it's time to sell high because I don't think the market is really there and there's at least something that we can latch onto his snapshare and feel good about Gaskin moving forward. So he's not a bye because I do think this is somewhat fluky, but he's not a cell either. At DeVante Booker. So, Saquon Barkley has an ankle injury, and it wasn't even because of what he did on the field. I mean, he was on the field, but he stepped on a cowboy defender's foot and his ankle just started swelling up on the sideline. I'm sure a lot of you guys saw that. That naturally led to a bigger workload for Devontae Booker, their backup. Booker saw sixteen, if a possible seventeen non Saquon Barkley running back rushes against and with all those pass catcher injuries that they have, he had an eleven percent target share as well. I mean, honestly, he saw Saquon Barkley type usage. Apparently Barkley could be sidelined two to four weeks with this injury. That makes Booker a good ad off the waiver wire. Drop Trey Sermon. So a few weeks ago on a mailback episode, I tried to talk through this San Francisco backfield. I tried to just look at things logically. So let's do that once again. In week one, Trey Sermon was a surprise and active, and then Raheem Moster got injured in that game. Elijah Mitchell then became the lead back, and then Mitchell was injured in week two, which allowed Sermon to be the top back. And I would say that Sermon was mostly disappointing. He was the PPR, RB twenty six and RB thirty seven in his two games as starter without Elijah Mitchell. He was giving up a lot of pass catching work to Kyle Huschek. Well, Elijah Mitchell returned to the field in week five, and guess what, he was the starter. This isn't a confusing This is actually pretty straightforward. From week one until now, we kind of have a pretty good idea of how the San Francisco backfield works. They like Elijah Mitchell more than Trey Sermon. As long as Elijah Mitchell is healthy, Trey Sermon is not going to get that much work. That's what we saw in Week five with Mitchell back. Mitchell had nine carries, Tray Sermon had one. Mitchell played forty offensive snaps, Trey Sermon played two. Literally every action that the forty nine ers have taken since the start of the regular season, let's just ignore the preseason for a second. Every action that they've taken has shown us that they don't really like Trey Sermon. Right now, Elijah Mitchell is the back that you want to own. So at this point, Trey Sermon is a handcuff. I mean, maybe his role grows as the season progresses, but with my eyes, what I'm seeing, Elijah Mitchell looks like a better running back than Trey Sermon. Let's forget any of our priors that we had. I mean, I've called Elijah Mitchell a raheem Moster club, so I can understand why Kyle Shanahan likes him. But just because Tray Sermon had the better draft capital doesn't mean that he's automatically better Elijah Mitchell has looked a lot better in this offense. So again, Trey Sermon is basically a handcuff. And given the fact that when he became the starter when Elijah Mitchell was out that he still didn't produce, that's when you know that he's not even a good handcuff and that's why he can be dropped. Add Ramandre Stevenson. Damian Harris is now dealing with the ribs injury. He's also dealing with fumbling issues. We remember what happened in Week one, he fumbled the ball away. Miami was able to win that game against New England. This past week, he was at the goal line, he was about to score a touchdown and he fumbled the ball once again, those are two very very big fumbles. Those are two fumbles that Bill Belichick might not like very much. So let's look at Ramandre Stevenson. He's a pretty well rounded, big bodied back. He was one of the biggest running backs that came out of this draft class. But one of the big things that I talked about on this show during the offseason is that his production profile was sneaky good. It wasn't totally complete, but in games that he played during his final collegiate season, he had a really good fifteen percent reception chair. He was a bigger bodied back who was able to catch passes out of the backfield. You don't see that combination very often. That was the main reason that I was interested in Stevenson as a prospect. So I think because of this injury that Harris might be dealing with, it might not be that big of a deal, but we have this injury that he's dealing with and then the fumbling issues. Those two things combined, it makes sense to add Ramandre Stevenson this week, sell Kareem Hunt. Are you guys having deja vu? There was a really really stupid fantasy analyst who sat on a podcast last week and said, hey, you guys should trade away Kareem Hunt. And then Kareem Hunt in week five scored almost twenty six PPR points. As you guys know, that stupid fantasy analyst was me. Now, the idea in trading Kareem huh Hunt was not that he wasn't gonna be relevant. I'm not that stupid. It's just that I viewed to more as a high end RB two rather than the RB one that he was performing as and I still kind of feel that way. Now. If the Browns participate in ninety point shootouts each week like they did in Week five, then yeah, Kareem Hunt's gonna ball out. But there's no reason that we should assume that's gonna happen, and that means that regression is eventually going to come for Kareem Hunt. Hunt now has five rushing touchdowns when Cleveland scored a total of sixteen times on offense this year. His rushing touchdowns then have accounted for thirty one point three percent of the Brown's overall touchdowns. So that's Kareem Hunt rushing touchdowns divided by Brown's total offensive touchdowns. Since twenty eleven, that type of touchdown share has been hit just twenty one times, so like twice per season. When looking at that sample of twenty one running backs, the average running back rush share among that group was about seventy three percent. The average rush attempts per game of that group is a little over eighteen. This all makes sense. Running backs who see a lot of volume in an offense, they're gonna be able to capture a larger share of an offense's touchdowns. Volume equals touchdowns. This season, Kareem Hunt has a running back rush are of thirty six point nine percent. That's basically half of what we've seen from that sample of twenty one running backs. He's averaging eleven rush attempts per game. Again, the average among that sample was eighteen rush attempts per game and then all the while, Even though that number got higher in Week five, the Browns are still scoring their touchdowns in a pretty strange way. Their point three to three pass to rush touchdown ratio is tied with Chicago for the lowest in the league. Over the last decade, no team has finished the season with a pass to rush touchdown ratio below point five to nine. I think there's this idea that Kareem Hunt is seeing all of the goal line work in the Browns offense. That's not true. He has four goal line rushes this season. That number has been matched or exceeded by seventeen running backs, and one of those players that has exceeded that number is Nick Chubb. Nick Chubb has six goal line rushes. Kareem Hunt has four. It's just that Chubb has converted only one of them. Kareem Hunt has converted three of them. Kareem Hunt is a very very very good running back. He's going to be efficient, especially in that offense. That offense is favorable for running backs, and Kareem Hunt has a fifteen percent target shir that's top five of the position. This is why he's not going to disappear. The idea was never that he was going to disappear. He's just not going to keep up this pace more than likely. Now, Hunt has upside with an injury to Nick Chubb, so you've got a price that into any sort of trade. But to me, Hunt is more of a mid range to high end RB two in fantasy rather than this full blown RB one. The way I see it, I think that a guy like Darryl Henderson is a better rest of season running back than Kareem Hunt is. Whereas I don't think everyone agrees with that touchdown regression is eventually going to hit. He's still a good running back, you still won him on your fantasy roster, but touchdown regression will eventually hit. And Khalil Herbert. In Chicago's first full game without David Montgomery this season, we saw more of a split backfield than probably most of us expected. Now, Damian Williams had the valuable looks in that offense. That's what matters the most. He had forty seven percent of the team's running back rushes, but he had a fifteen percent target chair and he saw goal line work. He had three goal line rushes against the Raiders, but rookie Khalil Herbert was involved. He had eighteen carries versus william sixteen. Now, a lot of that did have to do with game script. Khalil Herbert's going to see more work in this offense more than likely when Chicago's leading. But even still, during the first half of that game against the Raiders, Herbert had seven rushes. Damian Williams had eleven. So I think that he could have flex appeal during this by week period, and he's got handcuff upside now as well. By Zach Man. Zach Moss has had a pretty interesting journey of the season. He was inactive in Week one against the Steelers, but he's seen his usage get better and better each and every week. In Week two, his first game of the season, he played just twenty eight percent of Buffalo snaps, but that number jumped to fifty six percent in both weeks three and four. And then on Sunday night, we saw Moss reach a seventy four percent snap share, and that increase in snaps correlated with an increase in touches. Moss has seen about half of the team's running back rushes over the two weeks before Week five, but in Week five his running back rush share jumped to almost sixty five percent. His target share was sixteen point seven percent. Moss has slowly but surely become the one A in the Buffalo Bills backfield, and I'm bowlish in the short term. Over the next five weeks, no team has a better running back schedule than the Bills, due they get Tennessee in Week six, a team that ranks in the bottom half of the league and adjusted Fantasy points allowed to running backs, they get a buy in week seven, and then they get the Dolphin, Jags, and Jets, each of those teams ranking the bottom seven in the league and adjusted Fantasy points allowed to running backs. So if Moss's current usage holds, he could be a locked in RB two during this four game stretch and Ricky seals Jones So Logan Thomas was put on IR last week, and the initial timeline was that he'd be sidelined for about four weeks. So in Week five, Ricky Seals Jones was the starter for Washington and he did really well. He saw twenty percent of Washington's targets that turned into five catches for forty one yards. His target share was higher than any share that Logan Thomas had seen all season long, and Seals Jones was essentially used like any other wide receiver on that team. According to Pro Football Focus, he had forty two routes run. That was second most on Washington this past week, behind only Terry McLaurin, who had one more. That's really good usage and that makes him a near plug and play option at a weak fantasy position until Logan Thomas gets better at Dan Arnold. So, Dan Arnold played his second game with the Jags on Sunday. He had a twenty four percent target chair in that game. His first game with the team saw pretty big split in routes run at the tight end position. Arnold ran eleven routes. Chris Manherts had seven, Luke Ferrell had four, and Jacob Hollister had four. That's all according to Pro Football Focus. Arnold saw that route's run number jump to thirty and Week five, Hollister was second on the team with only eight routes run. This could mean fantasy football viability moving forward. Jacksonville has been forced to be a pretty pass heavy team because of game script this year. They rank in the top half of the league in both pass rate and total pass attempts, and they've been slightly above average and tight end target share even though they haven't had really really good tight ends to throw to. So I think Dan Arnold makes sense. I like Ricky Seals Jones a little bit more, but don't forget about Arnold. Off the waiver wire this week by ron Dale Moore. So, by no means was Week five bad one for Rondale Moore. He had six targets, he caught five of them for fifty nine yards, and he had an additional thirty eight yards on the ground. So this isn't exactly like a by low moment, but I do think it's an interesting time to go buy Rondale Moore for the first time this season, more ran more routes than Christian Kirk. He still wasn't on the field in two wide receiver sets. That was still aj Green, who ran ten more routes, but from weeks one through four, Kirk had run one hundred and thirteen routes versus Moore sixty seven. On Sunday, it was twenty to eighteen in favor of the rookie. And now you have Max Williams who suffered a significant knee injury that could lead to more volume for the other pass catchers in this Arizona offense. So Rondell Moore is trending up from a usage standpoint, and he's also a rookie that will naturally progress. So I think he's a really good player to target in hopes that he has a monster second half of the season at Daryl Williams so Clyde Edwards Hilaire suffered an MCL sprain on Sunday night against the Bills. He's expected to be out a few weeks now. Without Ceh, we should expect Darrell Williams to be the dude in that backfield. In a negative game script against the Bills, Williams played the most naps for Kansas City, and he out targeted back up Jerreck McKinnon five to two while seeing the most work on the ground. McKinnon isn't a terrible ad in deeper leagues, but Williams needs to be the priority. Add Taylor Heineke. Week five was the first time this season since Taylor Heineke has become a starter where he didn't finish as a top twelve quarterback in Fantasy football. He's been that good. And the fact is New Orleans has been good against quarterbacks. They ranked fourth best and adjusted points allowed to the position. We could see a serious bounce back game from Heinekee in Week six the football team gets the Chiefs. A cording of Fandles Sportsbook, there's a fifty four and a half point over under in that game. Kansas City has now surrendered four straight top five quarterback performances, and even though those games have been against good quarterbacks, when you adjust for schedule, there's still a bottom five defense in points allowed to the position. So I like Taylor Heineke a lot as a streamer this week. Add the Cincinnati Bengals defense. So the Bengals defense has really only had one game where they played well below expectation defensively this year, and it was against the Jags in Week four, obviously when everyone was streaming them. This week, though, they have a good match up against the Lions, Cincinnati's a three and a half point road favorite, and Detroit's been a top ten opponent for defenses when looking at adjusted fantasy points allowed. The sixteen transaction this week that you can't get my fifteen transactions column over on number fire dot com is to hold Aaron Jones. People are freaking out. Aaron Jones hasn't really had a monster performance since Week two, when he scored almost forty two Fantasy points and then all the while AJ Dillon has finishes the RB thirty and the RB eighteen over the last two weeks in PPR formats. I get it, it's a little bit scary, but consider this. From Week two through Week five, Aaron Jones's snapshare has been between sixty three percent and seventy three percent in every single contest. AJ diyllan snapshares have been between twenty eight percent and thirty two percent in one of those games. In there, though, he did hit a forty percent snapshare and a positive game script against Pittsburgh, so from a snapshare perspective, not a whole lot has changed. Now. I know AJ Dillon had an eleven percent target share in Week five, but again, don't panic. It was by far the highest of his season, and it's likely just somewhat of an outlier. Dylan only ran ten routes against the Bengals. Aaron Jones ran twenty nine. That's actually a wider gap than what we'd seen from any other week this season. Jones still has four goal line rushes to Dylan's won this year, and he has two goal line targets to Dylan zero. I'm using this time to let you know that it's not time to panic with Aaron Jones. AJ Dillon's market share numbers might have looked slightly different this past week, but how Green Bay utilized him really wasn't different. Aaron Jones will be just fine, and AJ Dillon is still a flex option for more desperate teams who also serves as a hand cuff. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round 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 Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you tomorrow.