690: 10 Trends for Week 6

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host James Jake Zacheron. What's up everyone, It's jj zachar Esen in this episode six hundred and ninety of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before get into the ten trends this week, I wanted to send another reminder about FanDuel Faceoff. Fandel Faceoff is where you compete in quick, fun games against other real people for real cash. It is all sorts of games that you're familiar with like Homer and Derby, Wheel of Fortune, puzzle and strategy games, with more on the way. Contests are action packed and last between two to five minutes. You can plan 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. FanDuel face Off has something for you. Plus in most contests will be match against other players of similar skill levels, you're never totally overmatched even as a beginner. Face Off is also tied to your fandal accountant wallet, so you can easily use your daily fans he 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. Voidware prohibited seefandle dot Com slash Faceoff hyphen terms for terms and conditions. Trend one this week is that Michael Pittman has one fifteen plus air yard target on the season one. Matt Ryan has attempted eighteen of those types of throws. Only Kirk Cousins has a lower deep ball rate this year than Matt Ryan, but Alec Pierce has four of those targets, Ashton Doolan has six, Kylan Granson has three. This has been a problem for Michael Pittman and fantasy football. He is a twenty three percent target share per game rate, but he's ranked higher than wide receiver twenty seven once this year, and that came all the way back in Week one. The Colts need to get more aggressive for Michael Pittman to live up to his draft day expectation. Let's do a quick update on the Washington backfield now that Brian Robinson is back. With Brian Robinson back, Antonio Gibson saw a thirty three percent snapshare this past week. He's now seen his snaphare drop each week this season, starting at sixty four percent in week one, going all the way down to thirty three percent in week five, so it's basically been cut in half. Naturally, his workload has taken a hit. This past week. He saw just twenty five percent of the Commander's running back rushes, when his previous low was fifty percent. Brian Robinson was taking a lot of that work on the ground, while Gibson hit an eleven percent target share. This is an absolute mess. Hopefully, if you drafted Antonio Gibson you were able to get out after Week two. Aj Dillon saw his worst usage of the season in London. He played thirty one percent of Green Bay snaps when his previous season low was about fifty one percent. And what's worse is that his target share has now dropped every single week of the season. He had a seventeen percent target share in week one, than at twelve percent one in week two. In this past week, he didn't see a single target. I do expect the Packers to get him more involved than they did in London, but this is definitely a humongous problem for AJ Dillon if this continues. David Montgomery got his rollback. He returned from injury this past week, and he saw seventy two percent of the team snaps and seventy five percent of the team's running back rushes, and he had a target share of nineteen percent. Honestly, David Montgomery had amazing usage this past week. Naturally, that means that Khalil Herbert didn't see a lot of work. He had just four rush attempts and didn't see a single target. Now, we'll see if this continues, but it's not good news for any of us hoping that Herbert would get a decent sized roll even if Montgomery returned. Deontay Johnson hasn't finished a week this year ranked higher than wide receiver twenty two, so he has just one top twenty four wide receiver performance in five games. That's a twenty percent rate of finishing as a wide receiver two or better. Last year that rate was almost sixty nine percent. A big reason for this is touchdowns. The Steeler through five weeks have two passing touchdowns. That's the lowest number in football so far this year. Wide receivers have caught a touchdown for every one hundred and eighty six yards receiving. Based on that number, Johnson should have about one point four touchdowns, but he has zero. That one point four touchdown difference is the second largest in the league so far a wide receiver, behind only Nico Collins. These are just ways of saying that touchdowns matter a whole lot in fantasy football, and when the offensive environment is as poor as it's been in Pittsburgh, everyone suffers. Jerck McKinnon out snapped Clyde Edwards A Layer once again a Monday Night. McKinnon had a fifty three percent snap share, Cech forty three percent. McKinnon has now out snapped Cech in three of five games, and he tied with him in another. So Edwards A Layer has out snapped Jerreck McKinnon in one single game this year. This is why it's been hard for me to declare Cech is some RB one in fantasy football. He's a touchdown reliant RB two. He's just in an environment where those touchdowns can come. But the Chiefs backfield is very frustrating. It's one that's hard to deal with every week because Isaiah Pacheco is randomly in the lineup. Two Trends seven is that the Ravens have targeted their wide receivers on fewer than forty four percent of their targeted throws this year. For some context, the league average aside from Baltimore is over sixty percent since twenty eleven. We've only seen this low of a wide receiver target share five times, but one of those times was the twenty nineteen Baltimore Ravens. So this could very well maintain because it's not like the personnel there screams you gotta throw to the wide receivers. Now. I know. I talked about Rashad White on last week's fifteen Transactions episode, but the usage continued into Week five. He played almost forty percent of Tampa Bay snaps. He didn't have the same backfield rush are as he did in Week four, and Leonard Fournette had a huge receiving day with a twenty two percent target share, but White actually ran just seven fewer routes than Leonard Fournette this past last week. According to PFF, Fournette was at twenty nine, White was at twenty two. In Week four, that difference was twenty five to seventeen, so it was pretty similar. It's just that Brady ended up targeting four Nette more against the Falcons. Fourtette should be fine just given the offense and Brady's trust in him. But my stance has definitely not changed on Rashaw White being number one a good handcuff and number two a potential flex play during bye weeks. If anything, it was just reinforceds past week. DeVante Smith posted a goose eg in Week one on just a fourteen percent target share. Since then, he's averaged a target chair per game of nearly twenty seven percent, and he's posted over seventeen PPR points per game during this stretch of four games, Smith has a higher target chair mark than AJ Brown. He's averaging four more PPR points per game. I think there's definitely an anchoring bias going on with Smith. After Week one. People remember that terrible game and they just assume that he's not that great of a fantasy asset. But he's been really, really good over the last month. Now. The last trend this week is about quarterback scoring, one of my favorite topics in fantasy football. If you felt like your quarterback situation has been rough this year, you're not alone. In a twelve team league. Two thirds of your league is probably feeling that exact same way, or people who don't have Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, and Patrick Mahomes. Those four quarterbacks as a cluster are giving you a more significant edge at quarterback than what we've seen in modern fantasy football history. Those top four quarterbacks are averaging twenty six point four points per game. That's over two points higher than any other season over the last five years when looking at that bucket, when looking at top four quarterbacks, But then compare that to QB five to QB twelve, look at that bucket, and in that bucket quarterbacks are averaging eighteen and a half points per game. In other words, the top four quarterbacks right now are scoring nearly eight more points per game than the next eight on average. That is by far the biggest different that we've seen over the last five years. Like by far, last year, the difference between top four quarterbacks the QB five to twelve was two point three points per game. Most seasons it's between two and four points. This year it's eight. Now I use an arbitrary cutoff there to make a point because we know this year we have these four quarterbacks who are absolutely crushing it. That's where a huge drop off exists. But I'm getting questions from people every single week about the quarterback position and their frustration with that position, and those frustrations are literally the majority. As long as these quarterbacks keep playing out of their minds, we're going to see a gap. And if you don't have those quarterbacks, you're gonna naturally suffer. Now, my guess is that that gap naturally shrinks as the season moves forward, but there's no doubt that those players will be giving you some sort of edge here in twenty twenty two. 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 Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and to follow me on Twitter at LATEROUNDQB. Remember to check out lateround dot com and everything going on over there. Otherwise. I will catch you tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper Show