721: 10 Trends for Week 14

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zacherretha, j J Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Eeson in this episode seven d and twenty one of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in the Week fourteen, NFL Sunday Million is officially live on FanDuel. Showcase your NFL knowledge and construct your best nine player roster while staying under the salary cap. Then follow along using FanDuel's live scoring feature to compete for your share of one point two million dollars in cash prizes, including a cool two hundred thousand dollars first place prize, all for just five dollars. Sunday's approaching quickly. It's head to Fandel and submit your lineups today. Eligibility restrictions apply. Go to fandel dot com or download the Fandel app for more details. Trend one this week is about the Shawn Watson. He had a really bad first game. We all saw it. It's to have to walk away from that game against Houston with any optimism about the playmakers in Cleveland. But if you want something, look to Amari Cooper because in that game, Cooper ended up seeing a forty three percent target share. That was his highest target share in a single game all year. Watson seemed to have a favorite and if that continues while he potentially improves, then Cooper could have a pretty great December. Samaj p Ran has been a very good fantasy asset with Joe Mixon sidelined. In his two games, He's handled almost ninety three percent of Cincinnati's running back rushes. Joe Mixon this year has averaged a running back rush share a little over eighty five percent. P Ryan has a twenty one percent target share per game rate. Mixin's is at fifteen percent, p RAN's averaging twenty point four PPR points per game. Mixon is at nineteen point one. And what's most interesting is that over the last couple of weeks, p Ryan has been a top ten running back in each game. That's the exact same number of top ten finishes as Joe Mixon in PPR formats. Mixon had some that were just outside the top ten, but that monster fifty five point outing is skewing his points per game average. We should expect Mixon to be mostly a warkhorse when he returns, but we at least know that p ran is a high end handcuff. Now, Alvin Kamara's usage was pretty bizarre. In Week thirteen, he played fifty nine percent in New Orleans snaps. That was a season low. He saw sixty percent running back rush share that was also a season low, and he had a ten point seven percent target share. You guessed it a season low. Maybe this is an injury thing, or it could just be how the Saints want to deploy this backfield, but it's a noteworthy trend. Nonetheless, Ceedee Lamb has just won game this season where his target shair dipped below twenty four percent, which is insane. He's seen a thirty one percent target share in Dallas's offense, and he said double digit PPR points in all but two games this year. And one thing that you should know about Lamb. The Cowboys have the second best fantasy playoff schedule for wide receivers according to my adjusted Fantasy points allowed method. They get the Jags, Eagles, and Titans in the fantasy playoffs, so two of those three games is an ultra plus matchup. The Jags and Titans are top four matchups for wide receivers. It just feels like Lamb isn't getting enough love for what he's doing this year, and he could really end up having a huge playoff. According to Pro Football Focused data, George Pickens has a yards per route run rate this year of one point one eight. Deontay Johnson is right there at one point one to nine, but a one point one eight yards per route run is pretty rough. For some context, Among fifty plus target rookie wide receivers since twenty eleven, the only hit among that group of players with a one point one eight yards per route runner lower was Devonte Adams, and Adams had a huge turnaround early in his career. Most successful wide receivers in the NFL were pretty good as rookies, and they were pretty good within that specific metric. So let's hope that Piketts can turn this number around a bit by the end of the year. It's good that Deontay Johnson is just as low because that shows us that the team situation is likely playing a role here. Gabe Davis has ranked higher than wide receiver thirty and PPR, scoring just once over his last six games, and what's crazy is that he has a twenty one percent target share during this time. That's not bad. It really is just about the big play. Davis has seen seventeen targets of fifteen plus air yards during the stretch, that ranked sixth in the NFL. But he also has one hundred and eighty five yards on those targets, which is ninth in the NFL, and he hasn't scored a touchdown on any of them during his first five games of the year. So every game before this split, Davis converted six of nine of those targets for two hundred and seventy seven yards and three touchdowns. So in fewer games and on fewer deep ball targets, Davis was far more productive. That resulted in three top twenty performances across his first five games, So unsurprisingly, it really comes down to big plays with Gabe Davis. I think there's this idea that Tyler Huntley was a really good fantasy asset last year, but I think people just remember that huge thirty five point outing that he had against Green Bay. As I mentioned on yesterday's fifteen Transaction Show, Huntley threw the ball thirty plus times in five games last year. In those games, he scored ten point eight, fifteen point three, thirty five point nine eleven point three and six point eight fantasy points, So he averaged sixteen fantasy points per game, which isn't great, but he scored more than sixteen points just once. Lamar Jackson's been struggling to be a high end fantasy quarterback in that offense. It's obviously possible for Huntley to turn that trend around, but isn't it logical to think that he probably won't. Kyle Allen has started two games for the Texans. In those two games, opposing defenses have ranked as the week's top defense both weeks. You had Miami two weeks ago in Cleveland this past week, Houston's actually allowed the top defensive performance in three straight games. They've given up nineteen, eighteen, and thirty standard fantasy points over this time, totaling sixty seven points. Across the entire season. There have been eight teams who haven't even hit sixty seven fantasy points, including the Pittsburgh Steelers. What I'm saying here is start defenses against the Texans. Matt Ryan just does not push the ball down the field. On the season, fewer than eight percent of his attempts have gone fifteen or more air yards. I know I've done trends on this in the past, but it hasn't changed at all. To give you some perspective, though quarterbacks are averaging a deep ball rate this year closer to seventeen or eighteen percent, Ryan is at seven point nine percent. That offense and its quarterbacks have completely ruined Michael Pittman for fantasy purposes. Justin Fields was back on the football field this past week, and while he had I had seventy one rushing yards in a rushing touchdown, he also ran the ball just six times. In his three previous games, he was averaging fifteen rush attempts per game. Just three of those six rush attempts were design runs, too, so it was pretty clear that the Bears ran things a little bit more conservatively with Justin Fields coming off that injury. We have to hope that the bye week helps and that they don't keep that up, because if they do, Fields definitely has a lower ceiling. That's it for today's show, though thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and don't for to follow me on Twitter at late round QB. Remember to check out lateround dot com. You can join the patreon, the free newsletter, all that good stuff. Appreciate you guys listening. I'll talk to you tomorrow