1020: 10 Trends for Week 3

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zacheratha j J zacher reefon What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode, Oney twenty of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by DraftKings. Thanks for tuning in. There's no better way to get closer to the action than with DraftKings Daily Fantasy, the ultimate destination for football fans. New customers can play free for their share of millions and prizes with their first a positive five dollars or more. Download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app and enter promo code Late Round to play free for your share of millions. The crown is yours. Gambling problem called one hundred Gambler In New York call eight seven to seven eight Hope, enn Wine, Connecticut call eighty eight seventy nine seven seven seven seven eighteen plus and most states. Eligibility restrictions apply ends December thirty first see terms at DraftKings dot com slash promotions. Now, let's get to these ten trends. I didn't have Isaac Tesla as a player to add on the fifteen Transaction Show this week, but I do think that he should be on your radar in week one, Tesla only ran a few routes and had a seven percent route participation rate. In week two, that route share jumped up to twenty nine percent. Tesla has two targets on a limited sample and he's caught both of them for thirty nine yards in a touchdown, which is the most Isaac Tesla thing of all time. But keep an eye on that route rate. If it keeps increasing, maybe he'll have some random flex appeal during by weeks. But keep in mind he also has contingent upside for both Amara Saint Brown and Jamison Williams, and maybe even Sam Laporta to a degree. Let's give a little Seahawks backfield update. Kenneth Walker was the more productive player between himself and Zach Sharbonay in Week two. Walker went thirteen for one oh five and a score on the ground while adding thirteen yards through the air. Sharbonay had fifteen carries for ten yards and zero targets. Meanwhile, in that game against Pittsburgh, Sharbonne played thirteen more snaps than Walker, he ran twice as many rounds. I mean, on the peripherals front, Sharbonay is who we'd want, but on the production front, clearly that's not the case, at least in Week two. But look, I'm not here to crown one player better than the other based on two games. Certain holes are going to open up for one player and not the other on one drive and then not the next. Right, Sometimes it's just luck as to which running back ends up getting the right matchup on a particular play. To me, we need to just fall back on what we know about these guys as players, and what we know is that Kenneth Walker is the more explosive player, but he's not as consistent per rush. He's got a better chance to do damage in Fantasy football versus Zach Sharboney when there's a split like this, because he has a better chance of having a ridiculously efficient game. We also know that multiple coaching stabs now have preferred Walker to Sharbonay, and we know that Walker wasn't totally healthy over the summer. So I'm still favoring Kenneth Walker to Zach Sharboney. It's no different than how I felt last week. It's just easier to do so because we saw that production, and I think because of that production, we're gonna see less of a discrepancy between Zach Sharbona and Kenneth Walker and snaps and routes run moving forward, and when that happens, it's gonna make Walker a more reliable RB two. But we'll see. Obviously, I'm not on the coaching staff. I'm just making an educated guess. The team with the lowest running back target share through two weeks this season is the Tennessee Titans. They've only targeted their backs twice in two games. They have a three point six percent running back target share. Unsurprisingly, both targets have gone to Tony Pollard. This is definitely something to monitor. The Titans are getting pollared a lot of work on the ground, but this could be a quarterback tendency thing. And what's gonna be really interesting is to see what this looks like when Taja Spears is back. We know that he's someone who's been deployed as a pass catching back, but those opportunities they may not be there when he's back. But it's only been two games. We just need to monitor things. I was lower than the market with chew Be Hubbard the season because I questioned his ceiling and I really thought that he wouldn't be used a ton as a pass catcher, but I also recognized that they had a pretty nice schedule to open up the season. Regardless of all that, though, I just got to say the way Carolina's deployed chew Be Hubbard in their first two games has been kind of bizarre. First off, he's hit nice outputs in fantasy thanks to late game garbage time touchdowns as a pass catcher. Go figure. That's not nothing, though, because they're using him in those situations. That alone, in my eyes, was not a lock as we entered the season. But in Week one, Hubbard had an eighty percent running back rush share, his route share was below fifty percent. That honestly was more in line with what I thought we'd see this year from him, so I wasn't super surprised by his peripherals this past week, though the Panthers split the backfield up more. On the ground, Hubbard had a sixty two and a half percent running back rush share, but he ran a route on seventy five percent of their dropbacks. He only hit that mark three times last year, so in one week he had a pretty mediocre rout share and a great rush share the next it flipped. His usage overall, though, has been good and that's what matters. But I can't quite pinpoint how the Panthers want to deploy this backfield. It's just confusing me, and I don't like to be confused. And I'm just letting you guys know. The Colts have been the story of the NFL to start the season. But beyond their production, Jonathan Taylor's usage his peripherals themselves, they've been awesome. Things were a little bit weird in Week one with game script and such, but Taylor ran around on seventy three percent of Indies dropbacks. This past week, that number improved as seventy four percent. Those route shares didn't result in crazy target shars. He's been at ten percent and six percent target share, but those two route participation rates, the two from Week one and Week two, they would have ranked top five for him last year. So if this continues, I'd expect Taylor to see better than usual receiving numbers this year. We just have to hope that this Colts offense can just keep doing what they're doing so far this season. The Eagles offense has been awful for fantasy purposes outside of basically Saquon Barkley and mostly Jalen Hurts, but there are a lot of reasons for it. The number one reason they've been run heavy. Their pass rate right now even lower than what it was last year. It's only thirty eight and a half percent. That's on attempts only. When a team is that run heavy, they're not going to gain chunk plays, the plays that we love in fantasy football, at the same type of clip. The number two reason they're running at a slow pace. No team has taken more time per play so far this year than the Philadelphia Eagles, which plays in the game script. Winning games and being run heavy. The number three reason. All five of their offensive touchdowns have come via the ground. Now, that's obviously gonna be something that happens when you're as run heavy as the Eagles are, but regression will eventually hit there. I know it's crazy, but something tells me they won't finish the year with zero passing touchdowns. The number four reason. Jalen Hurts has an average depth of target right now with five point nine yards. He's never finished the season with an a dot lower than eight point four yards, So there are just a lot of things coming together right now to make sure those wide receivers are not successful in fantasy football. Now, I'm not sure this creates a clear by opportunity, but it's basically impossible for Philly to maintain this type of offense across a seventeen game season. If you want to know why Chargers wide receivers are absolutely killing it right now, it's because, first off, LA has by far the highest pass rate over expected in football when you factor in situation, the Chargers are throwing it more than any other team, like by a margin. They may have just the twentieth ranked overall pass rate, but that's partially because of game script. Largely because of game script. On top of that, though Chargers wide receivers they're seeing a huge proportion of the team's targets. Eighty two percent of the Chargers targets have gone to wide receivers. For what it's worth, since twenty eleven, the highest wide receiver target shair that we've seen from a team has been seventy five percent. So the Chargers are well above that mark. And even though their personnel dictates that they should be doing this, we shouldn't assume that they keep this up. And when that happens, when they don't keep it up. We should also assume that a player like Quentin Johnston, maybe someone like Keenan Allen, while still usable in fantasy football, they may not see quite the same target share that they're currently seeing. But yeah, this Chargers offense has been completely surprising this year. Now. They had a higher pass rate over expected down the stretch last year, but it's shocking to see what they've done compared to what we thought they would do, and really it's hard to blame them. One of the problems in the short term for these Cleveland Browns running backs is that Jerome Ford is being used in hurry up and long down in distant situations. So far in the season, according to Fantasy Life data, Ford to seen ninety percent of the team's two minute snaps and eighty four percent of their long down and distant snaps. Dylan Sampson's essentially seeing the rest ten and thirteen percent. Now, I thought Quinn show Judkins looked the part in his limited action in Week two, and for what it's worth, in my rest of season rankings, I seem to be a lot higher on Quinn Shawn Judkins than other rankers. But this Browns team gets Green Bay in Detroit over their next two games. We may not see this two headed monster of Judkins and Sampson fully unleashed over the next couple of weeks because they're likely going to face a negative game script in multiple games. When that happens, Jerome Ford is going to be on the field. But we need to monitor this because having a three headed monster in Cleveland that's not gonna cut it. That offense is not good enough to sustain three running backs in fantasy football. But if it's Judkins and Samson, if the focus is just on them, that's a little bit different. Speaking of three headed monsters, this Tyler Bidet usage was not in my Bengo car to start the year, not to this degree. After two games, RJ. Harvey has run around on thirty two percent of Denver's dropbacks. JK. Dobbins is at thirty one percent, Tyler Badey twenty seven percent. Bade's played nineteen percent of their snaps, RJ. Harvey thirty one percent. That's a problem arguably for both Harvey and Dobbins, but Dobbins just seeing the majority of the work on the ground right now, so he's been okay in fantasy Bada's just being used as a receiving back, but it's enough to dig into the other guy's workloads and it hurts their upside. So we have to hope that this Tyler Bidey usage kind of goes away. But he's been making some too, some of you might remember, but I actually liked him as a prospect coming out. I don't stand on the rooftops and shout that because he really hasn't done anything in the NFL, But I don't think he's that bad of a player in this kind of circumstance, and that overall could be a problem at least in the short term for RJ. Harvey and JK. Dobbins. The last trend this week is about everyone's favorite early round wide receiver bust through two weeks, Brian Thomas. Let me just leave you with some optimism. Thomas is averaging almost a twenty seven percent target share per game rate, and he's averaging just nine PPR points per game. Since twenty eleven, we've had over two hundred wide receivers get to a twenty five percent target share per game rate while playing at least eight games, So that's lower than where Brian Thomas is at right now in target share. Of those wide receivers, not a single one of them scored nine PPR points per game. All of them were better As long as he he maintains this usage, the only direction Brian Thomas can go is up. That's it for today's show, though, Thanks all ofy for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found, and to follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening, everyone greatly appreciate it. As always, I'll talk to you tomorrow with the Weekly Sleeper Show