585: 10 Trends for Week 12

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha j Jake zach Areson. What's up everyone. It's JJ Zachareson, the editor in chief at Fandel and at number fire dot com in this episode five and eighty five of the Late Round podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. Before get into the trends this week, I want to let you know that Fandal is partnering with EA Sports to bring you this week's NFL Sunday Million Contest. Enter the NFL Sunday Million Marquee Contest presented by EA Sports Madden NFL twenty two this weekend and compete for your chance at a share of the one and a half million dollar prize pool. Simply build your best nine player roster while staying under the salary cap, and follow along as the game's unfold. With ten games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, there's plenty of big names to choose from and plenty of opportunity for a big payday. Kickoff is right around the corner, so head to fandel dot com and get in the game today. For more detail, is a fandle dot com or download the FANDLE Fantasy app eligibility restrictions apply. Over the last couple of weeks, I've talked about the Eagles defense, whether it was on the Matchup Show or yesterday's fifteen Transaction Show. The Eagles have been really good against wide receivers in fantasy football, and they've been really bad against tight ends, and when you look deeper into that data, it makes sense. So far this season, wide receiver groups against Philadelphia have seen their target share drop on average by over six percentage points. So when they face the Eagles as a team, their wide receivers see their target share drop by over six percentage points. The Eagles have been the best matchup for tight ends and adjusted fantasy points allowed this year, and that's reflected and adjusted target share allowed. While the Eagles ran thirty second and adjusted wide receiver target share allowed, they're third and adjusted tight end target share allowed. So teams are attacking the Eagles in a very specific way, and that volume is what's driving the results in fantasy football, which is what we typically see with volume. David Montgomery has now been back from injury for two games, a Week nine contest against Pittsburgh and in this past week against Baltimore. In those two games, he's played one hundred and nine snaps. His backup Khalil Herbert has played seventeen. Montgomery hasn't put up a monster game yet, and his target share is in these contests, they haven't been great. They've been seven percent and three percent, but he's still running plenty of routes and he's dominating the backfield rushes. He saw ninety three percent of the team's running back rushes in Week eleven. I considered making Montgomery a buy candidate on this week's fifteen Transactions episode. That tells you how I'm feeling about him right now. Very early in the season, right when I saw Austin Eckler get goal line work, I immediately made him a buy candidate because that's what he really needed in order to become an elite fantasy football running back. He needed that goal line work. So get this. Eckler currently has eight rushes from within his opponent's five yard line this year. His career high in a single season is nine goal line rushes. He has five goal line rushing touchdowns, when his career high is three, and if you look at his touches from within the ten. It's even more glaring. He has seventeen rush attempts from within the ten yard line this year. His career high is eleven. This is why he's now an elite RB one. It was the biggest question mark for Eckler entering the season, and it hit He's a beast a Monday night against the Buccaneers. Yes, the Giants offense the whole team. They look terrible, and while Kadarius Tony didn't get you a ton of fantasy points, there were some good signs. Number One, the man is a human joystick. He's one of the shiftiest players that I've ever seen. But number two, he saw one third of the Giants targets. Kenny Galladay and Darius Slayton ran more routes. But the target share is encouraging because he hasn't hit that high of a share since that Week five explosion against Dallas. Now, I still don't know what things will look like when Sterling Shepard is back in health. Tony played the majority of his snaps from the slot, according to Pro Football Focus against the Bucks, when Shepherd's played seventy two and a half percent of his snaps from the slot this year, We do have a small sample of Shepard and Tony together this season, and Sheppard was the one who got to the slot more often, but we haven't seen them at full strength with Kenny Galladay, so it's gonna be interesting to see how this all shakes out. There's still a possibility that the Giants aren't smart and they just underutilize Tony, but he's at least worth a hold. Trend five has to do with the Buffalo Bills backfield. It's currently a disaster for fantasy football. In each of their last two games, Matt Brida has scored the most PPR points. In this past week, Brida ended up seeing the most rushes on the ground with five that accounted for forty five and a half percent of the team's running back rushes. Maybe some of this is game script driven, but it's still really alarming. It was already bad enough that we had to split backfield between two guys, but now it's become a three headed backfield. You can't trust anyone there right now, and in deeper formats, you could consider adding Brita. Christian McCaffrey is back to having elite usage. He's now been back from his injury for three games. One of those games came against New England, where he had a seventy eight percent running back rush share in a seventeen percent target share. Those are really good numbers, but they're not necessarily Christian McCaffrey like numbers. Things have gotten better over the last two weeks. In Week ten against Arizona, CMC's target share was over thirty one percent. He didn't have a super high rush share, but part of that was likely game script driven, at least part of it. This past week, in a closer game, we saw that elite usage once again. He saw ninety one percent of Carolina's running back rushes and he had a thirty percent target share. He's now been a top four weekly running back in PPR formats and four of his six games played this year, and that includes the game where he was injured and had to exit early against the Texans. He's a Fantasy football cheat code. We knew Jamar Chase wasn't going to maintain his early sea in pace. It was just too hard for any human being to do that. Now, over the last three weeks, he's ranked as the wide receiver twenty six, thirty nine, and twenty eight. Is it time to panic. I don't think so. Chase is a target share per game of twenty six and a half percent over his last three that's actually higher than what he'd seen over his previous seven. He just hasn't given us the big plays that we were seeing earlier in the season. Those will come. When looking at my adjusted fantasy points allowed numbers, the team with the easiest running back schedule so far this year has been Pittsburgh, which is interesting and not that surprising because if you listen to the fifteen Transaction Show yesterday, the Steelers have had the toughest wide receiver schedule in terms of adjusted Fantasy points allowed moving forward, So from weeks twelve through seventeen, the Steelers don't have the toughest running back schedule in the league, but it's one of the toughest. The hardest goes to the Raiders and the Bills, then the Patriots, Bengals, Packers, and Jets, and then the Steelers. So I wouldn't stress having nause Harris as a result volume fantasy football. This is just a small piece of the puzzle, but it's at least something to think about. I didn't mention Leaviscus Chanauld on Yesterday's fifteen Transaction Show because his percent roster number was right on the fringe of being an actual waiver wire ad. So I'll just talk about him here with Jamal Agnew on ir Chanalt has a little bit more intrigue and week eleven, he played half of his snaps from the slot. That was the first time that he'd seen that since DJ Shark's injury, and those numbers are courtesy of Pro Football Focus. Agnew was playing that role and he had been seeing decent volume from there. Chanault should be in that role and he could end up seeing an uptick and volume as a result of the injury. There's a chance they do something like role Tavon Austin out a bit, but it makes sense to at least get Chenault and see if his usage changes. He's seen target shares of twenty three percent and twenty one percent over his last two games, after back to back games of just four targets, now stemming from that Channault trend. With this last trend, let's talk about Trevor Lawrence. He hasn't thrown multiple touchdowns in a game since Week one. Over his last seven, he's totaled three touchdown passes. It's been rough out there. Now. Jacksonville does have a pass to rush touchdown ratio of zero point eight, meaning they've run for more touchdowns than they've thrown four this year, and based on their pass rate and just based on how teams generally score their touchdowns, that number probably should be a little bit higher. The problem is that the Jags have only scored eighteen offensive touchdowns this year. It's just a bad offense. So even if regression hits, it's not going to like catapult Lawrence into any sort of usable conversation. Those numbers might be beneficial for the pass catchers like Leavisco Chanault, but it's a really tough situation for that passing attack right now. That's going to know for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you get subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. I got the sleeper show tomorrow. I'll talk to you then.