1046: Mailbag - Rookie Wide Receiver Breakouts, Trey Benson, and More

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha. J J zacher reefan. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode ten six of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by DraftKings. Thank you for tuning in. There's no better way to get closer to the action. With DraftKings Daily Fantasy, the ultimate destination for football fans. New customers can play free for their share of millions and prizes with their first a positive five dollars in more. Download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app and enter promo code Late Round to play free for your share of millions. The crown is yours. Gambling problem called one hundred gambler in New York call eight seven seven eight hope en why and Connecticut called eighty eight seventy eight nine seven seven seventy seven eighteen plus and most states eligibiliya. Stritians apply ends December thirty first see terms at DraftKings dot com slash promotions. It's a mail bag day. Let's get to these questions. The first question this week is from NFL Bernie on Blue Sky. It says is Burshard Smith still a drop in Redraft or are we holding now because of the Isaiah Pacheco injury. Looks like Kareem Hunt is gonna be the guy given the last game? Do we think Kareem just takes over? So I had this discussion with late Round Fantasy Football subscribers on my Tuesday night live stream with them. I think this is just a really important general outlook on fantasy football. When young, up and coming and promising players have a clear path to more opportunity, you want to lean into that. You don't want to go away from it. We currently have Kareem Hunt projected for the most work in that backfield here in Week nine, and the most likely outcome this week is that Hunt sees a huge workload that he's way more productive. And then next week we're all sitting here with the Chiefs on by, and we're saying, can I just cut Burshard Smith to make room with my roster? Just because that's the median outcome doesn't mean that's the only outcome, and it doesn't mean that we should act now before that game's even played, because what happens if the Chiefs don't give Kareem Hunt the workload we expect? What happens is Brishard Smith's. He's a little bump in work and he's just really really good on his limited touches. What if it tells us that it could lead to more volume down the stretch. These types of moves in fantasy football, they're not going to work out all the time. In fact, they're going to fail more than they're gonna succeed. When you're talking about someone that you're getting off the waiver wire, who's young, who's often a rookie, and you're seeing if that player can take advantage of more opportunity, it usually won't work out, but when it does, it can really pay dividends. I mean, look at Ronde Gatston right now. I talked about Gadston pretty early on in the season because he had good peripherals when he was first active. Now, never did I think that we were going to see this. But you take a chance on talent that you like and you see where it can go. You see where opportunity can lead itself. He had opportunity with will Disley out and it ended up working out. Sometimes oftentimes it won't work out. I'd say it hasn't really worked out for someone like elk eyamanor That's just a random example. That dude's probably been tossed around your fantasy league this year. It may not work for Jalen Knowle, maybe his workload doesn't get any better, especially with the other wide receivers getting healthier. We see this all the time, But if you believe in the player, you believe in the fit, you believe in the environment, you should take a chance on that player and at least have that dude rostered through that potential opportunity. This is a game of probability. I say it all the time, and this is such a great example about thinking in range of outcomes. Don't get rid of Burchard Smith now. Just because Kareem Hunt has a better outlook in week nine doesn't automatically mean that Smith can't improve his fantasy value from week nine into week ten and beyond. And even if he doesn't, I still think it's the right process to buy into explosive, potentially very talented rookies. You won't regret doing that in the long run. The sess questions from Patreon's from con st it says, how do you view Justin Jefferson rest of season? Would you be looking to trade him now? It was concerning that we've only seen one good quarter from JJ McCarthy and they preferred to play Wenz when he was clearly banged up over McCarthy, who looked healthy on the sidelines. I see guys like Rashid Rice, A Mecha Abuka or a Roma Dounza having a better rest of season just for the fact that they have more capable quarterbacks throwing them the ball. I mean, Patrick Mahomes, Baker Mayfield, sure, but to throw Roma Dunza in there because of his quarterback, that's kind of crazy. Adunzay's had a sixty three percent catchable targets rate this year on a twenty six percent target chair. That's a cordon of Fantasy Life data. Justin Jefferson has a seventy percent catchable targets rate on a thirty one percent share And for the record, at courtn of Fantasy Life data and weeks one and two with JJ McCarthy, the seventy seven percent of Jefferson's targets were deemed catchable. I love a Doonsay. I'm heavily invested in Roma Dunsay this year. I want him to ball out, trust me, but I don't think he belongs in the same tier as Justin Jefferson. I'm not really buying this soft benching narrative for JJ McCarthy either, nor do I really want to speculate. All I want to say is that even though McCarthy made some mistakes, he had some bad throws to start the season, he did play well during the second half of that opening game against Chicago, and everyone's criticizing his play against Atlanta, which I agree it was not great, but we now know that Atlanta's only allowed one two hundred yard passer so far this year, and it came last week, with Tuatungue of Ailoa throwing for two hundred and five yards. Justin Jefferson is beyond an elite talent. He's one of the best wide receivers that we have literally ever seen. Despite playing with a broken Carson Wentz, he's averaging well over fifteen p yure points per game this season with one touchdown. He hasn't scored since Week one. I can't sit here and say that I'm overly bullish about JJ McCarthy. We don't really know right now, but I'm definitely bullish on the talent of Justin Jefferson and it doesn't hurt the Minnesota and the fantasy playoffs, they get the Cowboys, Giants, and Lions. It's hard to find a better three game stretch than that. So I'm more in the by camp than the Cell camp with this passing offense, in this offense in general, Kevin O'Connell, he's one coach to feel pretty good about. The sess questions from Patreon is from Florian Sindler. It says, Hi, you think Trey Benson will be a solid RB two after his return. So I got a lot of questions this week about my favorite trade targets for good fantasy teams, and honestly, I think this one could be for any team that's like five hundred or better right now. Trey Benson was ranked way too low in my opinion in rest of season rankings this week, I was way higher than the market with Trey Benson because I expect when he's back, he's gonna see a good workload in that backfield. Not only that, but if the Cardinals give him some time to recover, at the very least, he's set up decently for the fantasy playoffs. They'll get Atlanta, who's been worse against running backs of late and then Cincinnati, who's the best matchup for running backs in Week sixteen and seventeen. But yeah, like Benson didn't give us crazy production. In Week four, which is the last time we saw him, he had a seventy three percent running back rush share, though in at twelve and a half percent target share. I do think when he's back, they're gonna sprinkle in some of the other backs, potentially a De Marcado type for third down stuff. But Benson has a shot to be a solid RB two when he's back and healthy, and that could happen very very soon. It's obviously a risky type of player to buy into because injuries are never certain. We never know when someone's gonna be fully healthy. We can't just assume he's gonna be back in normal But when I say I was higher than consensus this week, consensus was just very, very very low on Trey Benson because a lot of times the market forgets about these kinds of players. But overall, I think he's a bye. You're weighing the cost benefit. Of course, there's downside, but there's also upside there, and the schedule is a net positive for Arizona. Cardinals running backs rest of season, though their matchup against Dallas this weekend is definitely helping that. This as questions from Twitter. It's from at Drop Taco. It says, how do we feel about t Higgins targets the last couple of weeks? Feels like we got bailed out last week with a touchdown? Yeah, I mean this Bengals offense is absolutely wild right now. You can say that you are high on Jamar Chase when the Bengals traded for Joe Flacco, but absolutely no one on planet Earth was projecting Jamar Chase to see a forty six percent target share. That's literally historic. Literally no player in the modern era has come close to that across the season. Not to say that Chase is going to do that across the season, but that's also the point, right regression is probably gonna hit like we very very rarely see a wide receiver with multiple fifty percent target share games in a given season. Jsn's done that thing year, and Jamar Chase has over the last two weeks. Basically, what I'm saying is Chase is clearly running really hot right now. It's not in me to assume he's gonna maintain an almost fifty percent target chair. That's absurd. He's just so talented that even when he does see that dip in target share, he's still Jamar Chase. But I bring that up because t Higgins over the last couple of games, he's felt that impact. When targets are being funneled at that rate to Jamar Chase, they're not gonna go elsewhere, and that's why Higgins had just a six percent target share this past week. Now, he fortunately found the end zone on a forty four yard touchdown, but he only had two targets. So my stance is that I don't really think anyone's buying Higgins given what Chase is doing right now. But I don't think it's very rational to believe that, no matter how good Jamar Chase is, I don't think it's rational to believe that he's gonna have a fifty percent target chare week in and week out. Chase is already on a list of just five wide receivers with multiple fifty percent target share games since twenty eleven. Doing that like eight times would be otherworldly. I don't want to put anything past him because it's Jamar Chase, but I do want to be level headed here. The Bengal schedule is great moving forward, and Higgins won't have that six percent target share week in and week out. I'd expect better volume. In his other two games with Flacco, his target chhairs have been twenty two percent and twenty percent. That was with Chase also seeing a lot of looks. I'd anticipate his target shair being in like the twenty to twenty five percent range rest of season, which can result in like seven to ten targets per contest given their offensive environment. And there's nothing wrong with that for a talented player in t Higgins. This that's questions from at JSM Underscore twenty twenty. It says how important is depth at non wide receiver and running back positions? For example, say someone has both Kittle and Gatston completely hypothetically, of course, would you recommend flipping one for a marginal starting lineup upgrade or holding both for the injury insurance slash variance protection. So every week I've been getting questions about depth versus optimizing your starting lineup, like loads and loads of those questions, And look, I definitely don't expect everyone who plays fantasy football to listen to every single episode of this podcast that I do. That'd be frightening, that'd be really weird. But I do want to note that I talked about this very topic on episode ten thirty four. It was the first mail bag question of that week. With that being said, I'll just quickly say that you should continuously be trying to beef up your starting lineup. Depth is obviously helpful, but your starting lineup that's what's gonna win your fantasy championship. And it's not like if you trade depth, you can't get that back via the waiver wire. And that's the thing I think one place from a game theory perspective that fantasy managers just don't think about enough is what the waiver wire looks like. Like you should be doing analysis of what's actually available and what's out there in your individual league. Let me give you an example. This week's question is about Kittle and Gadston. Another person asked me about Drake May and I think it was Patrick Mahomes or some other elite quarterback. So they have two very good onesie position players. Generally speaking, you should be trying to optimize your starting lineup. Yes, but this is actually easier to check and analyze when it comes to the onesie positions or positions where you're only starting one in your league, like quarterback and tight end. Check your waiver wire. If Jordan Love and Kyler Murray types, if they're available on your waiver wire, then you don't need a backup quarterback. You can trade one away. If Mason Taylor types and Theo Johnson types, if they're littered throughout your waiver wire, the depth at tight end then matters less because in that worst case scenario where one of those players gets hurt, you know there's a decent enough alternative. That's not the case if the league is deeper and those types of players aren't available. And just remember that you can always try to refill your depth when you make a trade to optimize your starting lineup. You're not like losing a bench spot, but when you make that trade, you should absolutely have what's available top of mind. The last question this week is from at MT dynasty. Ff. It says, hey, JJ, which rookie wide receivers do you see breaking out in the second half of the season, so aside from the obvious guys like Ted Roe, McMillan, I guess Travis Hunter two, who was a fifteen transactions by this week. Let's talk about a handful of rookie wideouts who I think could be possible second half breakouts. Injury, possible trade deadline movement that's going to help these players out too, and that's more unpredictable. But when I can bind how they've performed, the situations they're in, and their talent profile coming out, here are some wide receivers who popped in mind. Luther Burden is one of them. He's flashed this year, and unfortunately he suffered a concussion this past week, so we can't see how his usage changed a week over week. But he's a very talented player who scored really well in the ZAP model. I still think he's a good state and he's got good contingent upside. With an injury to Roman Dunes, a DJ Moore or even a Lamide's Akias, I wont to roster talented players, and I'm of the belief that Luther Burden is talented. He's averaging the same number of first downs per route run as DJ Moore right now. Fantasy points numbers have him with the best Fantasy points per route run rate on that team, and he's got by far the best yards per target over expected according to Fantasy Points two. Now those are all small sample driven, and he made a splash play earlier this season. I get all that, but let's see what he can do with a bigger role. And there's a chance that that bigger role comes to fruition down the stretch. Another one's Jalen Nole. I already talked about him on fifteen Transactions. The median outcome with Nol is that he's buried on that depth chart behind a healthy Nico Collins and a healthy Christian Kirk and that's really really frustrating. But he's now given us pretty great performances in back to back games. I don't want to just ignore that. And the Zap model really liked him too. He was a superverse player who comped to Randall Cobb. Jayden Higgins is probably the safer bet. He might run more routes from like a median projection standpoint, but I think Noel brings a dynamic to this offense that they desperately need. Tes Johnson's another one. This is pretty self explanatory. He's seeing more work given all the injuries in Tampa Bay, though, I do think if Jalen McMillan is back down the stretch or if Chris Godwin returns, Tes Johnson's not going to be quite as usable, but he's still someone to watch. And I know I'm naming a lot of players, but I do like Chim ray DK too. He gives that offense a yards after catch element that they're not getting from the other wide receivers. I'm always intrigued when a wide receiver does something that the other players just don't generally do. And he really wasn't a bad prospect. I talked about that earlier this week with his breakout score in the ZAT model. Now some deeper ones, Pat Bryant, he was a pretty strong prospect. I was definitely surprised by his draft capital, though, But Denver's a team that has multiple injury outs for Pat Ryan to get more work, and he's been over the fifty percent route share mark over his last four games. He was well below that during his first four. He's had four targets and back to back contests, So Pat Bryant should be on your radar. I'll also call out Jack Besh here if Jakobe Myers gets traded. He was an okay prospect, he had the draft capital. He's a tough player, he can handle a lot of volume hypothetically. And in the last one, I'm gonna go with Tory Horton. He flashed at times this year though It's really tough to get a lot of work alongside JSN and even Cooper Cup. But Kup is thirty two years old. He's just been mostly fine this year. I like him this week, like I talked about on the Sleeper Show. But there's always a possibility that we start to see a shift in usage there. And there are gonna be some other rookie wide receivers who just have injury upside, like Isaac Tesla. But those are some rookie wideouts to watch out for. I think the final couple, they're a little bit more long shots. But even like a Pat Bryant in deep leagues that I'm in, I've stashed him. Going back to what I said earlier, you've got to look at the waiver wire and look at what you have rostered to see if it's worth it. And you can use the information that I just gave you to see if it is worth it, but remember not many rookie wide receivers are gonna break out, especially if they were Day three picks, so at least temper your expectations. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by starting for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I got an episode of Late Round Perspectives dropping later today, and then there's also the Late Round Fantasy Football Show. We'll be live at one pm Eastern on the YouTube channel that's YouTube dot com slash at LATEROUNDFF. But if you miss it, that episode's audio will drop in this feed tomorrow morning. Appreciate all of you. Have a great weekend.