946: 15 Transactions for Week 12

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zacheratha j J zacher Reefan, what's up everyone, It's JJ zachar Eeson in this episode nine and forty six of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in now. I know that your trade deadline might be up, but up until the final couple of weeks. On this fifteen transaction show, I still talk about buys and cells. You may not always get to use those transactions, but it can be helpful knowing where a player generally stands, if he's going to continue his production or if people are too high on him.

00:00:40
Speaker 2: But as the season gets.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: Closer to the end, there are more and more ad and drop transactions that make this list. And as wild as it seems, we're only a few weeks away from the fantasy playoffs. I just wanted to open up today's show with that little caveat Now, before get into the transactions, I want to remind you that even though you drafted your fantasy teams back in August, you can still do snake drafts right now over on Underdog just had an Underdog Fantasy dot Com or download the Underdog app. In the draft section. Click NFL and you'll see tons of drafts that you can participate in right now. And as usual, if you're new to Underdog, make sure to sign up with promo code Late Round. That'll get you a nice deposit bonus as well as my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are updated for you every Tuesday once you get the link to them, but to get them you have to sign up, use promo code Late Round, make a deposit, and start playing. Buy Bucky Irving now. I understand that most of the fantasy football world already recognizes that Bucky Irving's been an efficient back without this huge, huge ceiling because of the presence of Rashod White. If Shod White wasn't in Tampa Bay, everyone would be very high on Bucky Irving. But I think there's a chance for some high upside games down the stretch for Irving. Now. Irving's coming off a game in Week ten because they had to buy in week eleven, where he ranked as a top ten running back in PPR formats. I'm not trying to sell this to some by low moment. It's just that we haven't seen a massive game from Irving this year. He's maxed out at eighteen and a half PPR points, and again that's largely because of a split backfield. He hasn't had a fifty percent snap share since Week six, but I talked about this in the Mailbag episode last week. Tampa Bay running backs, they play certain roles in this offense. Irving's kind of do it all back. He can do everything for them. Rashad White, though, takes more of the pass catching duties on the season. According to Fantasy Life data, White's seen about seventy seven percent of the team's long down and distance snaps. That's led to about a fourteen percent target share per game rate. That's six percentage points higher than Bucky Irvings. So if you believe the Bucks are going to see negative game scripts, then Rashad White would be your preferred running back in that backfield, but that might not happen down the stretch. The Buccaneers remaining opponents through the end of the fantasy season the Giants, Panthers, Raiders, Chargers, Cowboys, and Panthers. Not only does that give them the best remaining schedule by justin fantasy points allowed for running backs, but they'll likely be favorites in all but one of those games, and because that schedule looks so good, the guy who could benefit in that backfield is Bucky Irving, at least more so than what we might see from Rashad White. That's why I think right now Irving's a bye. Add Jalen McMillan. So once again, the waiver wires not that strong. Anecdotally, I feel like waiverwires this season have been the worst that I've ever seen as a fantasy analyst. So with that being said, you know, I've talked about Jalen McMillan in the past. I don't think this is like a smash ad like you absolutely need to go after McMillan. But I do think that fantasy managers have given up on him too soon. I want to give him at least one or two more weeks. We have to remember he scepted a handtring injury before Week nine, he missed that game, and then in Week ten he didn't get any run. Now, was it because the Buccaneers all of a sudden want to use Ryan Miller instead?

00:04:11
Speaker 2: Probably not. Just look at McMillan's usage throughout the.

00:04:14
Speaker 1: Season, look at his skill set, look at his prospect profile, it's pretty unlikely that they want to use those wide receivers over McMillan.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: It was probably because of his injury.

00:04:25
Speaker 1: Now, Mike Evans is set to be back soon and that could limit McMillan's ceiling. But this might be a case where McMillan just needs a player like Evans on the field to take some of the pressure off, because the fact is McMillan was a pretty good prospect. He is playing in a pretty decent offense, and his schedule down the stretch also pretty good. And we can't forget that we often see rookie wide receivers close out that first season better than how they started. Their second half numbers are usually way better than their front half numbers. Says may amount to nothing. I totally understand that it's not like Jaylen McMillan has dominated since Chris Godwin got hurt, but I'm still anticipating that he runs a lot of routes in this Bucks offense, and it's an offense with a pretty strong rest of season schedule. Hold or by Kyron Williams. So, Kyron Williams started the twenty twenty four season by recording a touchdown in six straight games. But since Week seven he's only found the end zone once, and that touchdown it came through the air, wasn't on the ground. The Rams were massive, massive regression candidates with how they were scoring their touchdowns, at least to start the year. I talked about that on ten Trends. From week one through week seven, they had three passing touchdowns and eight rushing touchdowns. Regardless of what was going on with Pukin Nakua and Cooper Cup and the fact that they were sidelined. Regardless of that that number, the way they were scoring touchdowns was going to regress. It was gonna start skewing towards the past more. The problem is that now it's gone too far in that direction. Over their last four games, those are four games with Pookin a Coup and Cooper Cup. LA has ten passing touchdowns and zero rushing touchdowns. Now they've definitely been more pass heavy close to the end zone. Those kinds of things are happening. That's gonna happen when you're receiving weapons return to action, but ten passing touchdowns without a rushing touchdown is not normal. The Rams should be somewhere in the middle. The expectation can't be the three to eight pass to rush touchdown ratio they saw to start the year, but it also can't be ten passing touchdowns and zero rushing touchdowns. Now, there's definitely a narrative out there that suggests that Williams is performing worse in fantasy football because Cooper Cup and Pookinakou are back. There is some truth to that, but there's a lot of just dumb luck playing a role here. And the good news is that the Rams rushing schedule, it's a lot better than the passing one. From now through the end of the year, Rams running backs have the twelve best rest of season schedule by justin fantasy points allowed. The quarterback one is twenty six best, the wide receiver one twenty second, and that same difference is seen during the fantasy playoffs they get the forty nine Ers, Jets, and Cardinals. Now, I'm not sure if Williams is just a straight up by candidate, because there's gonna be a lot of anchoring bias involved with Kian Williams. He started the season offf so hot, people anchor their takes to how he started the season. What I do want to call out here though, is that I do see Kien Williams regressing back to the mean. He's gonna score more touchdowns, and to me, the schedule does favor him more than a passing attack. So maybe at the end of the day that does make him a bye. Add Christian Watson. Now, I know Christian Watson's not available in your league, but look, I got a cater to shallower leagues here too. He's still out there in fifty six percent of Yahoo leagues. It's not like every twelve team league has Christian Watson rostered, but he should be added. He's getting more work in this Green Bay offense. From Week one through Week seven, and games where Watson was active, he was running a normal number of routes. He averaged a target share per game rate of just nine percent. Over his last three games, though, his target share numbers have been twenty two percent, nineteen percent, and twenty four percent, and his route participation has gradually increased. We know that Watson has big play upside. If that's what your team needs, then you should be adding him. Sell Jamison Williams so sort of similar to Christian Watson. We know that Jamison Williams can also make those splash plays, and we've seen that this year. Williams has played eight games. Two of those games have resulted in twenty plus PPR points, and also two of those games have resulted in fewer than two PPR points. It's always smart to lead with peripherals, though, and while williams target shairs haven't been that bad of late, they haven't been consistent all season long. He's seen target sharers of twenty one percent and nineteen percent over his last two games, but he averaged an eleven percent target share per game rate in his four games prior to that. That's not very usable.

00:09:16
Speaker 2: Now.

00:09:16
Speaker 1: Interestingly, Williams hasn't faced a single opponent this year that ranks as a bottom twelve one for wide receivers by justin points allowed. Seven of his eight matchups have been against teams who rank as top half favorable opponents for wide receivers within that metric, and from now through the end of the year, the Lions get the Colts, that's a fourteenth best matchup and adjusted points allowed to wide receivers that's not a terrible matchup. But then the Bears, who are twenty eighth, the Packers, who are twenty fourth, the Bills who are twentieth, the Bears who are twenty eighth, who I just said, and the forty nine ers who are twenty fifth. They have a bottom five rest of season schedule according to my numbers. Now that's not everything, but I already talked about his peripherals, and his peripherals are very inconsistent. Some of you might want off this roller coaster. You don't want those spiked weeks because you know that they come with really poor weeks too. And if that's the case, this could be a time to sell, because yes, that schedule is tough, but also he's coming off a twenty two point outing. He had a good game in week eleven, so right now might be the time to sell. Jamison Williams add Elijah Moore. I've talked about Elijah Moore in the Sleeper Show, but let's just formalize things a little bit. Let's talk about on the fifteen transactions one. Amari Cooper's now been out of Cleveland for four games. Moore scored ten plus PPR points, and three of those four outings, he's averaging a twenty point three percent target chair per game rate. That's not bad at all. And you might think that Moore has just been seeing low aid DOT targets. That's not really the case. In Week eleven, according to PFF, his aid DOT was eighteen point eight. That was the highest on the Browns. Now, since a Mari Cooper's been gone, his aid DOT has been slightly lower than Jerry Judy and Cedric Tillman by about a couple of yards. But we're not talking about like a Wandell Robinson type role out of the slot for Elijah Moore. He's seeing pretty decent usage. Now I said this before with Cedric Tillman, but Cleveland does have a pretty brutal schedule from now through the end of the fantasy season. They get Pittsburgh twice alongside Denver over their next three games, and then the fantasy playoffs they get the Chiefs, Bengals, and Dolphins. So it's not a k qwalk. But I do think that more should be rostered in twelve team leagues by Calvin Ridley. So people might be turned off by Calvin Ridley's Week eleven stat line, but he did have a fifty one yard touchdown that was taken away by an illegal formation penalty. Had he converted, then we're talking about a third twenty plus p PR point performance for Ridley across four games without DeAndre Hopkins. Calvin Ridley has been very good from a fantasy perspective without Hopkins. He's averaging a target chair per game rate of thirty two percent over this four game stretch, and despite not getting that touchdown, his PPR points per game is at eighteen. If he maintains that kind of usage, he's going to overperform rest of season. It's part of the reason I've been higher on him versus the market over the last month in my rest of season rankings because the Titan wide receivers have a top five schedule from here on out, and in the fantasy playoffs they get the Bengals, the Colts, and the Jags. Those are all top half matchups for wide receivers. Two of those matchups are top five ones. I truly think that Calvin Ridley has a legit chance to do some serious damage down the stretch. And I've been saying it for some time now, but not a lot of people care about this Titans offense, and understandably so. But there can still be good fantasy assets out of bottom half offenses. I think that's what we're getting with Calvin Ridley add Roshan Johnson. So we've talked about Roshan Johnson at times this year. Not a whole lot has come of those discussions. But with that being said, the Bears played their first game without Shane Waldron as offensive coordinator this past Sunday, and things were a little bit different in that backfield, and DeAndre switched three games leading up to that game. On Sunday, he had running back rush shares of ninety percent, eighty four percent, and ninety four percent. Against the Packers, it was fifty eight percent. He ended up with the second lowest snapshare of his season, and it's because Roshan Johnson took a lot of those short yardage downs. He had a forty one point seven percent running back rush share, which was a season high. I say this all the time, but coaches dictate backfields. They can say I want this backfield to be split, regardless of the talent back there, and if they want to switch things up, they can switch things up, and we as fantasy managers, we have to listen because volume directly impacts fantasy football. Now, the Bears have a brutal rest of season, schedule for running backs, but Johnson should still be rostered. He's a potential flex play in deeper formats with contingent upside hold bow Knicks. Bo Nix has averaged twenty one and a half fantasy points per game since Week four, and I just got to get it out there.

00:14:23
Speaker 2: He's not a streamer. He's a full blown QB.

00:14:26
Speaker 1: One in fantasy football, and I think some of you need to hear that because Nix is still available in way too many leagues. I'm not sure things are going to substantially slow down either. According to PFS Expected Fantasy Points formula, Nicks has actually played a little bit under expectation this season, and the same can be said when you look from Week five onward. The Broncos also face a favorable quarterback schedule through the end of the year, and in the fantasy playoffs, they get games against the Colts that's the eighth best matchup for quarterbacks by justin points allowed, and the Bengals, which is the third best one. You may not be able to play only bo Nicks in your quarterback spot through the end of the year, but there's no chance that I'd be treating him as a backup at this point, drop Deontay Johnson. Look, you need to look at your roster if you have Deontay Johnson, and you just need to ask yourself, is he more valuable than a high end handcuff. And it's really hard to say yes, because in this three games with Baltimore he's seen rap participation rates of twenty seven percent, eight percent, and seventeen percent.

00:15:34
Speaker 2: That's laughably bad.

00:15:36
Speaker 1: Now Johnson's likely gonna see that number increase, or we would expect that to increase, But are you gonna have enough confidence to actually slot him into your lineup when that time comes. Not only that, but the Ravens still have a buy in week fourteen. Like I can understand holding onto Deontay Johnson on deeper rosters or ones where wide receivers mean a lot and leagues were wide receivers get a lot of points and you're starting a lot of them. You can cross your fingers and just hold Deontay Johnson. But it's really hard to see a path to true relevancy at this pace, Like even when the playoffs hit, if we haven't seen anything from Deontay Johnson, even if he does give us production, it's not going to be very predictable production. That's my fear. And we can sit here and we can say that Deontay Johnson's good, that he's better than Rasha Bateman, but the Ravens have their system, they do things the way they do them offensively Baltimore. Through their actions and even Deontay Johnson's play, they've shown us that he may not be their wide receiver two and we need to all accept that. Add Adam thelen So Adam Thelens set to return for the Panthers this week. He hasn't played since Week three, when he caught that touchdown against the Raiders. I don't think our expectations should be sky high with him, but I think he's worth a stash just to see what happens. I don't think judging thelan on his two and a half games in twenty twenty four is really that fair. Not only is that a small sample size, but he was playing with Deontay Johnson at the time. The Panthers offense was also largely a dumpster fire. Back then, he still had a respectable one point four to seven yards per rout run rate, though during that timeframe earlier this year, that number is a lot better for the record than what Xavier Legette has seen all season long and yards perrout run. I think we'll see three wide receiver sets of Xavier Lagette, Jalen Coker, and Adam Thielen. The question is who's gonna play the slot and I don't really have an answer for that right now. I think you just have to add Adam Thielen and see if he has any juice left. There's a chance that he becomes a target magnet in that offense because it lacks established pass catchers. Why not take the chance by Jonathan Taylor. Now, look, it's tough to be super optimistic about a running back playing in an offense with a mobile quarterback who's been pretty inaccurate all season long. But there's a chance that you can really buy low on Jonathan Taylor this week because over his last three games he scored eight point nine, fourteen point two, and seven point zero PPR points. But his peripherals are absolutely there. He leads the NFL this year in games with a one hundred percent running back rush are despite missing time this season. He's now hit that mark in three of his last four. He's just been underperforming, according to PFFS Expected Fantasy Points metric, Taylor should be at about seventeen point two PPR points per game over his last three that's based on his volume and where he's seeing his touches. Instead, he's been at ten point zero. That's the largest delta in the league. Now, there's nothing overly special about the Colts rest of season schedule, and they get a tough one against the Lions here in Week twelve. It's just that if you want to make a higher upside move, this is probably the one to make.

00:19:00
Speaker 2: Add a Mir Abdullah.

00:19:01
Speaker 1: Both Zamir White and Alexander Madison were banged up in their Week eleven loss to the Dolphins. That helped a Mir Abdullah hit a ten plus ppero point game for just a second time this season.

00:19:12
Speaker 2: If either guy is out this.

00:19:13
Speaker 1: Week, Abdullah could take on a larger role in that Vegas offense, especially in the pass catching front.

00:19:19
Speaker 2: So if both guys are out, he could be.

00:19:21
Speaker 1: A flexworthy play and then also keep an eye on Dylan Lowby. He'd get more run If White and Madison are both out, you just want to monitor this situation. That's what this transaction is all about. White and Madison would get priority over both Abdullah and Lowby obviously, so if only Madison is out, then you want to snag Zamir White. It's more so that if both of them are out, then Abdullah and Lowby would get.

00:19:47
Speaker 2: A lot more run.

00:19:51
Speaker 1: Sell Austin Eckler. So Austin Eckler's put together a few big outings in a row. In Week nine, we saw him score seventeen PPO points against the Giants, and we ten he had eighteen PPR points against the Steelers, and then in week eleven he had seventeen point six against the Eagles. Now keep in mind Brian Robinson missed those games against New York and Pittsburgh. He was back last week, though, and Eckler did see a snapshare drop a little bit to fifty two percent. That was still better than a season long average, but it's not a significantly high number. The thing is, Eckler saw season best twenty eight percent target share against the Eagles. That's the crux of this transaction. His raw participation has been okay all season long, but nothing in week eleven suggested that he should have seen that high of a target share Aside from like the matchup, I'm talking about usage. He had a fifty nine percent raw participation rate. He's been that high in the past, so you have to ask yourself, why hasn't his target share been that high. Well, it's because a twenty eight percent target share is really hard to hit. He's almost definitely not going to see a target shair that high rest of season. So someone's willing to pay up for his recent performance. Knowing that his target share was inflated, and knowing that Brian Robinson was sidelined, trading him away right now makes a lot of sense. Add the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defense. So the Buccaneers are going to face Tommy DeVito this week. They're five and a half point road favorites. New York with Daniel Jones has been the fourth best matchup for fantasy defenses this year by justin points allowed. Maybe Tommy DeVito's a huge upgrade, but I don't necessarily.

00:21:31
Speaker 2: See that happening.

00:21:32
Speaker 1: I think overall, the Giants are still an offense that we want to target. But this Buccaneers defense could have long term value too. As I talked about earlier, they have a strong rest of seasons schedule. After the Giants this week, it's Carolina, then Vegas. Those are two teams that you could use the Buccaneers against. Then it's the Chargers. You probably don't want to use them there, but after them it's the Dak prescottless Cowboys, and then the Panthers once again.

00:21:58
Speaker 2: So maybe you're in a league at hordes.

00:22:00
Speaker 1: Defenses, or maybe you're in a league that limits transactions.

00:22:04
Speaker 2: If that's the case, you.

00:22:06
Speaker 1: Might want to consider being a little bit more aggressive and getting Tampa Bay this week because they could work through the end of the year for the most part, at the very least, though they actually work over the next three weeks. 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 podcast can be found, and to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Make sure you subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football YouTube channel that's YouTube dot com, slash at LATEROUNDDEFF and I'm on Blue Sky too at LATEROUNDQB. Thanks for listening everyone. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly ten Trends episode.