923: 10 Trends for Week 6

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Speaker 1: This is the last with your host JJ zacherathas Jay Jake Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode nine and twenty three of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. If you sign up at Underdog right now, you get access to their promos for Boost Tober, and you'll also get a deposit bonus and a free copy of my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are updated every Tuesday through the end of the fantasy season, and with the link that Underdog provides when you sign up, you get access to all of those updates. All you have to do is head to Underdog Fantasy dot com and sign up with promo code Late Round, make a deposit, start playing, You're good to go. That's promo code Late Round. The first trend this week is that Kareem Hunt was a workhorse on Monday Night. I thought they'd have more of a committee against the Saints, but it was the Kareem Hunt Show. He handled eighty four percent of the team's running back rushes against New Orleans, but he only saw a three percent target share. His route participation was around the forty one percent mark. That was better than Week four, but that's still not an elite number, so he's not getting like elite usage, but it's very very good usage. If that continues, he'll be someone that you're playing most weeks in your lineup. The Falcons have looked different offensively over the last couple of weeks. From weeks one through three, Atlanta had pass rates of fifty six percent, fifty three percent, and fifty five percent. Over the last two games, those pass rates have shot up to seventy one percent and seventy eight percent. Now, obviously, matchup can dictate some of this, as can gamescript. But in neutral script environments, which I define as plays run in the first three quarters while the game is within a six point margin, and those environments were also seeing a pretty massive increase in pass rate. This may sound like it's a bad thing for someone like Bijon Robinson, but targets are more valuable than rush attempts. It may change how they score touchdowns to some degree, but Robbinson's Brendan Butters is receiving work, and like I said yesterday, if they decided to start allowing him to run more routes like he did in weeks one and two. His ceiling could really hit. But this is good for the passing attack and the players in that passing attack, especially with a great upcoming schedule. It feels like the Cleveland running back usage is a mystery every single week. Let me read you Jerome Ford's running back rush are numbers by week this year eighty six percent, thirty two percent, eighty three percent, seventy one percent, and forty seven percent. It's hard to say this is just game script related to last week. The Browns trailed the Commanders throughout that game, and Ford is the hypothetical player that you'd have on the field in that environment. Instead, Deontay Forman saw as many touches on the ground and Pierre Strong, according to Fantasy Life data, saw a nice uptick and long down and distance snaps. Ford has been the definition of fine, but this offense is a mess. At Nick Chubb he could be back soon. That's just gonna make things even messier. Jacksonville is the new Washington, at least in terms of being a great matchup for passing attacks. On the season, team wide, receivers facing Jacksonville have seen an increase of over fourteen PPR points versus their season long average. So let's say that a team scores thirty PPR points per game they're team wide receivers against Jacksonville, they've seen that number increase to forty four PPR points. Play your pass catchers, your wide receivers against the Jacks. A good example of coach speak mattering is with Kenneth Walker. I wasn't an on Walker in the mid July timeframe. I was worried about a new coaching staff and how they might view him versus Zach Sharboney, and I was worried that he continued to not see a lot of receiving work. And then when training camps started, we started hearing more from their coaches and it became clearer and clearer that they wanted to use Walker in that way. I want to use him as a three down back, So thankfully I change my tune, and thankfully he's on a number of my rosters because season long drafts mostly happened in August. Walker currently has the fifth highest target share among all running backs. He's run around on fifty four percent of Seattle's dropbacks, which is also a solid number. It kind of goes back to what I've said about pass catching at running back. I think there are some elite players at it, Alvin Kamara, Christian McCaffrey, hypothetically, Bijon Robinson, and Breeze Hall. And then there are players who we know just won't be pass catchers, like Gus Edwards. And then there's a lot of players in the middle, which is where Walker's always been. Even if he's below average at it, if the team wants to use him in that way, they're gonna use him in that way, and he's obviously dynamic with the ball in his hands. Now, I don't do much of the I got this right, I got this wrong stuff while the season's going on. I don't want to waste anyone's time. And hopefully you're not taking this as a back padding moment, because that's not what this is. If anything, I'm telling you guys that I was wrong, because I initially was wrong with Kenneth Walker, but I adjusted. This is a moment of reflection and letting you guys know that ignoring how teams are talking about their players, at least talented players that can hurt your chances in fantasy football. This game is about reacting to new information and trying to stay ahead. And while I was wrong about Walker initially, I'm glad that I was right and the way that I reacted, at least so far. But this trend overall, Kenneth Walker has been pretty much a belcow this year. Some might think that DeAndre Swift's Week four and Week five is the result of better usage. He averaged twenty four point eight PPR points per game over his last two. During his first three that number was six and a half, but his running back rush year per game is identical in this split his raw participation, it's up by just four percentage points. His usage has just always been good. That was something I noted on the show earlier this season. But he was so unbelievably inefficient with his touches to start the year, and lately he hasn't been. He still is in the primary goal line back, which is a problem, and the Bears are coming off games against the Rams and the Panthers, but things aren't getting a whole lot worse from a schedule perspective moving forward. So to me, DeAndre Swift is not some obvious cell candidate. He's more of a hold. Rico Dowdell's trending in the right direction, but we haven't seen a dramatic bump in his workload yet, and it feels like the narrative with Dawdell is saying the opposite now. Dwell hit a season high seventy one point four percent running back rush share against Pittsburgh. His snapshare was a season high as well, but not by much. His snapshare is fifty one percent, his season long average is forty seven percent. His rout participation that was a season high thirty six percent. His season long average is thirty three percent. It's not like things were so dramatically different this past week, but he is trending in the right direction, and he's been better than Ezekiel Elliott on a per rush basis. With him basically every single metric, he deserves a bigger workload. We just haven't seen it yet. One thing they keep in mind with Washington pass catchers is that they've been running for so many touchdowns to start this season. They have seventeen offensive touchdowns and just twenty three and a half percent of those have come through the air. We haven't seen a pass to rush touchdown ratio that low in recent history. Since twenty eleven. The lowest that we've seen was about thirty six percent from the twenty sixteen Bills. Now, the reason we're seeing what we're seeing is because Washington is thirtieth in pass rate from within their opponent's ten yard line this season. They may try to keep that up, and if they keep winning, it'll be easier for them to do that, but we should still expect some regression in how they're scoring touchdowns. Speaking of regression, Matthew Stafford has had it rough to start the year. He's yet to give us a weekly Top twelve performance, and according to PFF's expected fantasy points formula, he's playing four point six points per game below expectation. Right now, just thirty three percent of the Rams touchdowns have come via the air, and Stafford has a one point seven percent touchdown rate. That's by far the lowest of his career. That's gonna regress, you guys. This is how math works, This is how things work. I know the pass catchers haven't been there, but even with those injuries, this number should hypothetically be a little bit higher. So even if Cooper Cup wasn't coming back, even if Pooka and Akua wasn't coming back, this number would regress. It just makes it a lot easier with those guys hopefully coming back soon. The last trend this week is about Breese Hall and how tilting his season has become. He's been bad the last two weeks. They face some tough matchups, but he's still been bad. From a fantasy perspective. We can blame the offensive line, we can blame the play calling. All of that is playing a role. But it's pretty interesting to see how his season's playing out versus how Bejon Robinson season's playing out, because it's very similar. His start to the season saw awesome usage, and that shifted downward ever so slightly, just enough to make a difference. The one thing that I'll say about Haul those that since Week one, his rale participation has largely stayed the same. He had a down game in Week four within the metric, but week five his raw participation was fifty eight percent. Weeks two and three sixty two percent and sixty three percent, so not far off. The difference is that he's just been targeted at a lower rate. He had an eight percent target share in Week five that was by far the lowest of his season, Hall kind of went from being targeted at too high of a rate to not being targeted at too low of one. That's just based on his raw participation, so I'd expect things to land somewhere in the middle moving forward. It probably won't be as bad as it's been, but also don't expect the usage that we saw from him in week one, which was pretty insane usage. 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 four. It pretty much anywhere. Podcast can be found following me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone. We got the Sleepers episode tomorrow. I'll talk to you then