448: 10 Trends for Week 11

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zaferretha Jay Jake zacher reson What's up Everyone. It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at fandel and at number fire dot com And this episode four hundred and forty eight of the Late Round Podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast Network. I appreciate you for tuning in. The twenty twenty NFL season may feel like it's flying by, but there's still plenty of time to play fantasy football on FanDuel. I'm here to tell you that the FanDuel Podcast Network Listener League is back for week eleven. Enter the Rake free weekly NFL contest made exclusively for you the Listener for just five dollars and compete for your share of the fifteen hundred dollars prize pool, including a one hundred and fifty dollars first place prize. To enter, visit fandle dot com Slash League. Slash Listener League Eligibility restrictions apply. Now, let's get to these ten trends. Over his last two games, Baker Mayfield is throw at fifteen or more air yards just five times. He's averaging a deep ball rate of eleven and a half percent per game before that point in time, so across his first seven games that number was closer to twenty percent. Now, I'm bringing this up because over the Browns last two games, they've dealt with really, really bad weather. That's what I talked about on yesterday's show when it came to Jarvis Landry. So I'm bringing it up on today's show because you have to take their recent passing production with a grain of salt. Let's continue the deep ball theme for trend two. Through ten weeks, no player has accumulated more yards on deep ball targets or fifteen plus air yard throws than Justin Jefferson. He has four hundred and fifty four yards on deep ball targets that leads the league, but he's also seen only nineteen of those targets. That doesn't lead the league. It's actually not close to the league lead. He's tied for fourteenth and deep ball targets with players like Mark haz Valdez, Scantling and Josh Reynolds. Justin Jefferson is an absolute stud. There were two running backs who saw one hundred percent of their team's running back rushes in Week ten One of them was James Robinson. He's accomplished that feat four times now this year, so that's not a surprise. The other, though, was Duke Johnson. He had every single running back rush for Houston. That game just kind of sucked because of the aforementioned weather issues, But better days are ahead for Duke because David Johnson is on IR. So we're through ten weeks of football. Guess which team leads the NFL and pass attempts. I'll give you a second to think about it. You're probably thinking Dallas, maybe Atlanta, maybe Tampa Bay. The answer is Chicago. The Chicago Bears have more pass attempts this year than any other team in the NFL. Now, they haven't had their buy so that definitely has something to do with it. But they also lead the NFL and passed a rush attempt ratio, meaning they've been the most pass heavy team in the league this year. I'm definitely gonna throw the ball as much as your offense can advocate, but if Nick Foles is your quarterback, maybe that's not the best idea the world. So this next trend is kind of obvious, but I think it's an important thing to always note it's related to gamescript. No team has seen a larger difference in their overall pass to rush ratio versus their neutral script ratio than the Pittsburgh Steelers. Now, this really really should not be a surprise because the Steelers are undefeated. This is a reminder that good teams will almost always be more pass heavy when games are close than what their overall ratio shows. Because good teams see positive game scripts, they run more when they're ahead, so their overall ratio is capturing what happens when that script is positive, whereas their neutral script ratio or their ratio when games are within six points. That gives us a better idea of who that team actually is, because it's only looking at when the game is close. And the Steelers are still a relatively pass heavy team. In fact, they have the highest pass to rush ratio neutral game scripts this year. They're just winning a lot, so the overall ratio drops. And then, obviously the opposite of this is true too. The team on the other side of things, the team that's been way more pass heavy overall versus how they've performed in neutral scripts. It's Jacksonville. That makes total sense, given that they're not a very good team. All of this context is very important when building projections and figuring out the outlook for players and an offense moving forward. Trends six is that the Buccaneers have now had Antonio Brown for two games. That's not the trend, that's just the start of the trend. In those games, he leads the team in air yards and these second in targets, behind only Mike Evans. I know there are more off the field issues popping up for Antonio Brown, but on the field, things have been pretty good all things considered. And Kenyan Drake's return to action on Sunday, he didn't entirely go back to his old role. He saw two thirds of Arizona's running back rushes, when his season long average per game has been closer to eighty percent outside of last week's game. He also only had about a three percent target share in that game, which has kind of become the norm for Drake. I would guess that a lot of that has to do with him coming off the injury, but it's still something to monitor for Chase Edmonds. Because Edmunds in that game saw one third of the team's running back crushes. That was his highest share in a game this season when Kenyan Drake was active. I talked about this a little bit on the Mailbag episode last week when talking about regression, but Russell Wilson has absolutely regressed this year. From weeks one to three, Wilson had fourteen passing touchdowns on one hundred and three attempts that gave him a touchdown rate of thirteen point six percent. Since then, he's had fourteen passing touchdowns on two hundred and thirty one pass attempts, so he's had far more than double the number of pas attemps from weeks four to ten as he had weeks one to three, but he's had the exact same number of passing touchdowns. This is why you don't bet against regression. Over the last five weeks, no player has more air yards across the league than Jerry Judy. Unfortunately, it hasn't really mattered. He's been the wide receiver forty one points per game over this time. There should be he be some hypothetical regression coming in a positive way, and that made it tough to make him a sell in the fifteen Transactions podcast this week, but the schedule was enough for me to say, yeah, this likely isn't gonna happen for Jerry Judy this year, and by not happening, I'm talking about him not being a plug and play, no doubt starter, but anything's possible. The last trend this week is about Juju Smith Schuster and it's good news. Over the last four weeks, Juju's averaging a target chair per game of twenty four point four percent. Across his first five that number was seventeen percent, and from a fantasy perspective, he's finished as the wide receiver nineteen twenty nine thirteen to eight. Over his last four In PPR formats, he's averaging eighteen point eight PPR points per game over this time. During his first five games, his points per game was twelve point five. This is a combination of not just his volume increasing and looking better, but he's being used in a better way too. He's had an average depth of target of about seven point four from weeks seven through ten. From weeks one through six, that a dot was a little bit over five. But this is sort of why I always talk about air yards and depth of target to go along with volume. If a player isn't seeing targets down the field, he can make up for it with a lot of volume, but Juju wasn't seeing any of those things to start the year. Now the volume's coming in and the A dot is at least getting a little bit better, and that's revived Juju Smith Schuster's fantasy season. That's gonna do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and of course don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks everyone, I'll talk to you tomorrow.