673: 15 Transactions for Week 2

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ ZACHERI. JJ zacher reson. What's up everyone, It's jj zacher eeson in this episode six hundred and seventy three of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. I don't really believe in the idea of not reacting to what happened in Week one. It's not like we received a relevant information, especially at running back. As I say on the show all the time, coaching decisions will often dictate how good a running back can be in fantasy football. We hope that talent wins out. We typically only have one running back on the field at once, and who's putting that running back on the field the coaches, So if the coach likes a certain running back or wants a committee, that shifts the fantasy football equation, and Week one can tell us at least a little bit about how coaches are viewing these backs. We also got a glimpse of other situations across the league, too, so it's fine to react. It's just necessary to not overreact and think of the extremes for these players. Your preseason research still matters. Not everything comes down to a week one performance, and that's the theme today's fifteen transaction show. I'm reacting, but I'm trying my best to not overreact. Now. One thing to keep in mind with us each week is that I don't want to repeat myself too often on this show in order to give you as many transactions as possible. Like last week, I talked about Johan Dotson, Kenyan, Drake, Romeo Dobbs, and Gerald Evertt. I talked about them as ads. I mentioned David Montgomery as a cell while talking up Khalil Herbert. So I won't be bringing those situations up on today's show because there are other situations to get to, but those other transactions often still matter for the current week. My goal is to be one week ahead with this stuff, and I think that we're off to a pretty good start here in twenty twenty two. Now, before we get into the transactions, I wanted to send a reminder about FanDuel Faceoff. Fandle Faceoff is where you can compete in quick, fun games against other real people for real cash. It has all sorts of games that you're familiar with, like a home run, derby, Wheel of Fortune, puzzle and strategy games. And there's more on the way. Contests are action packed and last between two to five minutes, so you can play on your couch, waiting in line, during a commercial break, wherever, and on your schedule. Plus, you can practice for free anytime, whether it be head to head, multiplayer or larger tournaments. Fandel Faceoff has something for you plus, and most contests you'll be matched against other players of similar skill level, so you're never totally overmatched even as a beginner. Face Off is also tied to your FanDuel account wallet, so you can easily use your daily fantasy funds or sportsbook winnings in the app. Visit fandle dot Com Slash Faceoff or download the Fandle Faceoff app in the Apple App Store today to get in the game. Agent location restrictions apply, void where prohibited. Seefandle dot Com Slash faceoffhyphen terms for terms and conditions. Buy Chase Edmonds if you ignore actual production. Chase Edmonds actually had a really nice debut for the Dolphins. He wasn't like terrible in fantasy. He scored ten and a half PPR points, but it's not like he crushed it in your lineup. The good news is that that output could create a nice by low opportunity because on Sunday, Edmunds saw sixty six point seven percent of the team's running back rushes and he had a twelve point nine percent target share last season. On a per game basis, just five running backs with eight or more games played were able to average the market share stats at Edmunds hit in Week one. Four of those running backs ended up top ten and PPR points per game last year. The fifth one he was top fifteen. We can't assume that Edmunds is going to maintain this pace, but this is all definitely a very good sign. AD Jeff Wilson one of the hottest waiver wire ads this week. It's gonna be Jeff Wilson. Elijah Mitchell suffered a knee injury that could sideline him for some time. Next in line for the forty nine ers offense, I guess is Jeff Wilson. I guess we know that Kyle Shanahan loves to switch things up at running back, so we could see some wild stuff happen in this backfield over these next handful of weeks. Not only will Deebo Samuel steal a lot of work, But the team could make Tirian Davis Price active on game days. They might give him the bulk of the early down work, or maybe they end up letting the out of nowhere rookie Jordan Mason have that role, because remember Mason was active over Davis Price on Sunday. But we're adding Wilson because it's the most logical thing to do. He saw every non Deebo Samuel Carrey after Elijah Mitchell's injury on Sunday against the Bears. If you're in a deeper format throwing a dart at Davis Price or Mason, that's totally fine too. Mason might seem like the target over Davis Price because he was the one who was active in week one, but according to Kyle Shanahan, that had to do with special teams. So between those two, it's a genuine toss up at this point until we hear a little bit more. So for now, prioritize Jeff Wilson in this backfield and have the other two options on speed Dial and Isaiah Pachecko. So for those of you who listened to the episode earlier in July on Breakout Running Backs, you might remember that middle round breakout running backs. They generally break out if they're the rb ones by average draft position on their team, their pass catchers, and their younger players. So Clyd Edwards, a layer, really checked a lot of boxes entering the season, and he couldn't have gotten off to a much better start for fantasy purposes. He scored twice against the Cardinals in Week one. He had a top ten performance at the running back position, but he didn't have great backfield chair numbers. He handled just thirty point four percent of the team's runing back rushes and he had a seven point seven percent target chair. But if you watch that game, you know that game script played at least some role in that he saw the majority of his touches during the first half. So that blowout win against Arizona allowed Isaiah Pachecko to see a lot of work in his first NFL game. Pacheco's still out there in almost seventy percent of Yahoo leagues, and he looked really good as the closer for Kansas City. He ran the ball twelve times for sixty two yards in a touchdown and for what it's worth, and this was late in the game, but Pachecko was the only running back on the Chiefs who had a goal line rush. That's just a noteworthy statistic. Pachecko's seventh round rookie, and he's already seeing this kind of work in the offense. I don't care when the work came. That's something that we should pay attention to. So at best, he starts to take more and more work in this offense. At worst, he's a handcuff to Clyde Edwards, a layer who you might be able to throw in the flex spot every once in a while. Ad Kyle Phillips. I don't think people understand how excited I am that two of the first transactions this week are Ad Isaiah Pachecko and ad Kyle Phillips. They're two guys that I really like during draft time. But in Week one, it wasn't Drake London who led rookie wide receivers and target share. It wasn't Chris Alave or Garrett wilsoner Johan Dottson or Treylon Burks. It was Treylon Burks's teammate, Kyle freaking Phillips. He saw twenty nine percent of Tennessee's targets. On Sunday, he turned nine targets into six catches for sixty six yards, and he made a really clutch catch at the end of that game. You don't let a target share like that sit on your waiver wire, especially from a rookie wide receiver. I'm into Kyle Phillips. I'm excited about Kyle Phillips, and so are my Dynasty teams hold Cadarius Tony. So Canarius Tony is either not very good in the doghouse or injured because he ended Week one with zero targets and two rush attempts and he played seven snaps. I've already been asked multiple times if it's time to drop Cadarius Tony, and the answer to that absolutely not. Not right now. If you listened to the show last week, you probably remember me talking about Tony as a player to buy. So right now, I'm taking an L. I'm taking a giant L. But the reason I said that was because news surrounding him was negative. His average draft position had been dropping. That was partially due to injury, but it created an interesting opportunity to raid for Tony, to buy him low. But I'll be honest, his Week one performance doesn't give me much confidence. Of course, it doesn't he played seven snaps, but if you were to drop him, you likely wouldn't be rostering a player who has as much upside as Kadarius Tony has. Tony had a really good yards per route run and targets per route run rate as a rookie last year. He's in very, very good company when it comes to some of the more predictive metrics in fantasy football on how rookies do moving forward in their career. That shouldn't just be wiped away because his coach decided to play Richie James and David Sills over him on Sunday. And I'm a big Richie James guy. So yeah, Tony Stock definitely took a hit, but you shouldn't drop him when there are a number of reasons as to why he barely saw the field in Week one. Evidence suggests, outside of this being a coaching decision, that talent is not one of those reasons. Evidence tells us that Kadarius Tony does have some talent. By Dalvin Cook, So it wasn't the best season debut for Dalla and Cook, but that's exactly why I'm talking about him today. He had twenty carries, he had ninety yards in the ground. He did a little bit through the air as well. But here's the good part. He handled seventy one point four percent of the team's running back rushes and most importantly, he had a sixteen point one percent target share. Now, that translated to just five targets through the air, but the Vikings were leading for the majority of that game against Green Bay in a more neutral game script. In a negative game script, expect the Vikings to throw a lot more and that would lead to a lot more love for Dalvin Cook. And if and when some of those passing touchdowns turned into rushing touchdowns, that's also going to benefit Cook. So I think that Cook should be considered still an elite running back in fantasy football. That's why I'm giving him a shout. Add Robbie Anderson. So two years ago Robby Anderson first debuted for the Panthers. He averaged a target share per game rate that year of twenty six percent. That was higher per game than what DJ Moore saw when DJ Moore was a thirty year wide receipt. And then last year we had a new quarterback situation. Things shifted. But on Sunday, Anderson out targeted more eight to six. He finished the week with a thirty two percent target chair. And keep in mind this is now happening with another new quarterback. Now, to be clear, I'm not sitting here saying that Anderson is the better player to roster compared to DJ Moore. In fact, I think DJ Moore is a bi low candidate, so there's an extra transaction for you. This is just more to say that with fantasy football, we have to sometimes expect the unexpected, especially when we've actually seen it before. We've seen Robby Anderson on this team, see a high target chair. I mean, if we sat here and we had a place of bed on which Panthers wide receiver was gonna be the most fantasy relevant this year, we would absolutely one hundred times out of one hundred say DJ Moore. But DJ Moore is not free Robby Anderson, He's available in eighty nine percent of Yahoo leagues. Why not add him and see if this is somewhat sustainable. Drop Mike Gasiki. So again, I don't want to overreact to what happened in Week one, but when it really lines up to what we thought entering the season, I do think that we should react fairly strongly, and that's what's going on with Mike Giziki. There's plenty of talk about Gasiki being less involved in this Dolphins offense this season, and then on Sunday he saw one target to tight end teammate Durham Smites two and he ran just three more routes. According to PFF, Gaziki's best out right now from a fantasy standpoint is a trade straight up. That's not something that you can bank on though in season long fantasy football. So it's time to drop Kasiki and embrace the stream. Add Donovan People's Jones. So through Sunday's games, there were six wide receivers who did a thirty five percent target share or better. One of them was Justin Jefferson. That's not a surprise. Another one was Cooper Cup That's also not a surprise. And then the next three were the studs who switched teams during the offseason, AJ Brown, DeVante Adams, and Tyreek Hill also not that much of a surprise. The last one though Donovan Peoples Jones. He saw eleven targets and he had a thirty six point two percent target share for Cleveland. On Sunday, he had six catches for sixty yards. Now, it may be tough to start a pass catcher on the Browns week in and week out, but Deshaun Watson will eventually be back. So what if People's Jones can carve out a decent role in this offense until that point, maybe he can be thrown in your flex at times, and then when Deshaun Watson his back, DPJ gets a nice big boost. And that's during the most important weeks of your fantasy football season. So the potential is there. I would be adding DPG this week by Drake London. The Falcons offense actually looked competent in Week one and that's a great sign for their pass catchers. Drake London his first NFL action, he had five catches for seventy four yards against Pro Football Focuses seventh ranked secondary Entering the season, he tied Kyle Pitts for the team leading target share at two twenty one point nine percent. Now, as I mentioned on this podcast during the offseason, rookie wide receivers who get drafted in the top one hundred overall in redraft leagues, they tend to do very very well in fantasy. They exceed expectation at a higher rate than alternatives in that area of the draft, and rookies also tend to perform better during the second half of the season, so things could just be getting started for Drake London, who by the way, had a ninety eight percentile prospect score in my prospect model. Ad Jalen Warren. So Naji Harris was injured in Week one against Cincinnati, and it sounds like that injury is related to the Liz Frank injury that he suffered and dealt with in camp. It evidently isn't major, but it's best to just snag Jalen Warren this week just in case. He was the only other running back for Pittsburgh to register a snap on Sunday. Here's the thing, though, I think that your league mates probably would want Jalen Warren more than I would. There's a very real chance that he's going to be the bellcow back for the Steelers. That's as long as Najie Harris misses some time. So yeah, you should absolutely add him. But the situation in Pittsburgh is not great. It's why I had Najie Harris as a cell just last week. So Warren should be added because volume matters in fantasy football. But the Steelers offensive line in Week one it looked just as bad as what it looked like in twenty twenty one, and the quarterback situation does not look great either. I'm not very bullish on the Steelers' offense right now, so I can't be bullish on their backup running back. With that being said, he should still absolutely be added this week because he could see a big workload ad Curtis Samuel. So this transaction is actually pretty simple. Curtis Samuel's usage in Week one spectacular. He led the Commanders with eleven targets, he had a twenty six point eight percent target chair, and he ran the ball four times. Even if he doesn't maintain that from here on out, it's at least worth a shot to see if he can do something moving forward. I think is a really good ad this week. Sell cord Aero Patterson. So I've had a weird relationship with Cordero Patterson and how I've analyzed him this offseason, because it started with me thinking that I was low on him, and then I found out when drafts kind of started that I was actually one spot higher than consensus with him. In the running back rankings, so he ended up finding some of my teams and so week one I was all about it. He crushed it. In Week one. His eighty four point six percent running back rush are against the Saints was actually higher than any share that he'd seen during the twenty twenty one season. So you're probably wondering, why am I sitting here talking to you saying to sell Cordero Patterson. Well, here's the thing. According to PFF, Damian Williams played seven of Atlanta's first ten offensive snaps before getting injured on Sunday. Avery Williams was the only other running back who was active on Sunday for the Falcons, So after Damian Williams was hurt, it was Cordero Patterson and Avery Williams, and Williams was active because of special teams. So Patterson ended up handling twenty two rush attempts. That was six more than any other game in his career. So we'll see how much time Damian Williams misses. At the time of this recording, I don't know exactly how long he's going to be sidelined, if at all. But rookie Tyler Algier, who was a scratch on Sunday. He'll probably be active if Williams is out, and I think that Tyler Algier would be the one to give Cordero Patterson some relief. AKA, this backfield might be more split up than what we saw in week one. So that's the idea behind selling Cordero Patterson right now. You'd be selling him high. And I know that there are people out there who absolutely love Patterson and for good reason. He's a really, really fun player. I'm just trying to look at this objectively. It's not a bad idea to see if you can sell high, and it's also not a bad idea to snag Damian Williams are Tyler Algier if they're out there. That all depends on reports surrounding this Williams injury, add Rex Burkehead, and hold Damian Pierce. My fear for Damian Pierce entering the season, and I talked about this a lot on the podcast, was that he'd lose receiving work to Rex Burkehead. Even if we think that Pierce is the better talent. If the Texans themselves want to throw Burkehead into the field, then that would limit Pierce's upside and We saw that in Week one, but we saw that and more. Not only did burke Head run twenty five routes to Pierce's five, but he also out attempted Pierce fourteen to eleven. Burkehead absolutely needs to be added this week. Seeing more than half of his team's running back rushes while eating up a twenty two point two percent target share, that's awesome usage for a running back. I don't care what team you're on, but the reason that pierces a hold is because as the season goes on, we could just naturally see some of that burke Head work go to the rookie. For now, though, given what we saw in week one, Burkehead is the player that you want to start from this backfield. Add Josh Palmer so Keen. Allen suffered a hamstring injury against the Raiders in Week one and the Chargers ended up having essentially a committee at wide receiver after that injury. Or at least that's what the target totals showed, But if you look at the snaps routes run data, it painted a little bit different of a story. Mike Williams led the team with thirty one routes run. Josh Palmer was second at twenty five, and then DeAndre Carter, the team's number four option with a healthy Keenan Allen, he was at fourteen, and Palmer also played twice as many snaps as Carter did so even though everyone in that offense essentially finished with four targets. On Sunday, Mike Williams and Josh Palmer are looking like the starters with Keenan Allen banged up, and since Mike Williams isn't sitting out there in seventy nine percent of Yahoo leagues like Josh Palmer is, Josh Palmer is the one that you got to add. 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 and join the Late Round Fantasy Football Patreon. I have weekly rankings for you, rest of season rankings, a great discord channel q and a live streams and more so, definitely check it out go to Late Round dot com. Thanks for listening. Everyone really appreciate it. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the ten Trends episode