1032: 10 Trends for Week 6

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ Zacher Reasa Jay Jay Zacher Reason. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode ten thirty two 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 with the DraftKings Daily Fantasy, the ultimate destination for football fans. New customers can play free for their share of millions and prizes with their first to 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 hunter Gambler New York call eight seven seven eight Hope n Why in Connecticut called eight eight seven eight nine seven seven seven seven eighteen plus most states. Eligibility restrictions apply. Ends December thirty, first c Terms at DraftKings dot Com Slash Promotions. It's a ten trends day. Let's get to it. The first trend this week has to do with this move from Jake Browning to Joe Flacco. Now. I talked about Jamar Chase being a sell on yesterday's fifteen Transactions episode, and that's less of an obvious move at this point. That is, if his cost stays the same, I would imagine that Chase's cost rises with this Flacco move. So if you can get like top eight overall value for him, I'd still go for it. That's essentially how he's being ranked over on Fantasy pros. I'm still below that now. Joe Flacco going to Cincinnati, I do think it's an upgrade, but that doesn't mean that the offense is all of a sudden gonna be awesome. One thing we have to point out here is that Cincinnati still has a brutal offensive line. Flacco's going to be under a lot of pressure. According to PFF, this season, only Gino Smith has a worse quarterback rating under pressure than Joe Flacco. Flacco's actually been okay in pressure to sack rate, better than Jake Browning, but his quarterback rating under pressure has actually been worse. Okay, small sample size. Let's look at twenty twenty four, where Flacco started six games. In twenty twenty four, it was just as bad. Flacco was third worst in quarterback rating under pressure, beating only Mac Jones and Tyler Huntley. He was behind Anthony Richardson. He ranked forty first of forty three qualified quarterbacks. Currently, this season, he's thirty six of thirty eight qualified quarterbacks. I think there's reason to be optimistic from a fantasy perspective, because he'll be able to do more at the line, he'll be able to deliver the ball when there is a clean pocket. But we should still temper expectations. An upgrade over Jake Browning doesn't automatically mean an incredible upgrade in general. Now, if you Chase brown managers want some hope, I've got some hope for you. This doesn't even have anything to do with Joe Flacco either. On the season, Brown has average a running back rush are per game rate of eighty two percent. His target share per game rate is fourteen point six percent. Imagining those numbers in a Joe Burrow led offense is honestly making me sad, a little bit mad. But let's move on. Let's shift those thresholds down to seventy percent for running back rush air in thirteen percent for target share. Those are well below where Chase Brown's actually at. Says twenty eleven. We've had fewer than twenty of those seasons from a running back across the entire year, among players who played eight or more games, and among the players who hit those thresholds, none of them ranked outside the top twenty four at the position in PPR points per game, eighty nine percent of them ranked in the top twelve. Now, I don't think that's gonna happen for Chase Brown. He's in a pretty bad situation right now. But if he keeps up this workload, and yes that's not a guarantee, I'm just saying, if he keeps this up, I would imagine better production is ahead for Chase Brown. It's been kind of a strange year for Kien Williams. He's living up to his ADP so far, but he's doing it in a way that I didn't anticipate at all. The Rams entered twenty twenty five with six straight seasons ranking the bottom three in the NFL and running back target share. That's a pretty solid trend and not one that you often find in fantasy football and football in general. It's nice when you have that stability at head coach and on offense like the Rams do. But because of last week, where Kyron Williams are the third highest target share of his career. The Rams are currently sitting with a fifteen point six percent running back target share that's at least three percentage points higher than any season from the Rams since twenty eighteen. Williams benefited a lot from that this past week, where he hit almost a twenty two percent target chair. But what's really been wild about this season is that, aside from last week where Blake Korum dropped a toss and then he dropped a pass, it was just not a good game for Blake Koram. But aside from last week, Williams had been seeing his running back rush sharees fall. He was at ninety five percent in week one, seventy seven percent in week two, seventy one percent in week three, and then fifty nine percent in week four. Then in week five, with that bad Korum game, it shot back up to ninety three percent. Meanwhile, Kyrien Williams isn't really he had these spiked target share games. Aside from last week. The thing that's really saved him is that he has three receiving touchdowns this year. He had two receiving touchdowns all of last season. What I'm really getting at here with Williams is that I do think his overall profile is still kind of fragile. If they decide to go back to quorum again, we could see that rushing profile stick to fifteen to twenty carries instead of twenty to twenty five, which is what we saw for a lot of last year. And if the target share stuff regresses back to how we've seen this Rams offense perform, and if Kien Williams doesn't find the end zone through the air, which has been more common than usual, then all of a sudden we're looking at worse production for Karen Williams. Now, with all that being said, I'm still above the market with Williams. As weird as it sounds, I think rankers are almost hurting him too much over this stuff, because in the end, there's a really good offense and most running backs they're in part time roles across the NFL, and as we saw last week, Williams still has upside of these sings games where he's a true bell cow back. He had amazing usage last week. I just thought his season has been interesting, which is why I wanted to bring it up on today's show. The Jags defense has been awesome in fantasy football this year, and they're still rostered in like fifteen percent of Yahoo leagues. They've been unbelievably opportunistic. They've had at least one interception per game and they're leading the league with almost three takeaways per contest. That's allowed them to rank in the top ten and weekly scoring every week this year. Now, to be fair, they faced three pretty easy opponents then San Francisco and Kansas City. They only sacked the forty nine Ers in Chiefs one time, and both games combined. According to Next Gen Stats, Jacksonville ranks twenty third in pressure rate. So I do think this is gonna regress a little bit. They're not like a must have defensive unit for fantasy purposes, but they've definitely been really good to start the year and they could be usable this week against Seattle. Now, I don't think everything is just solved for Calvin Ridley and that he's back, but Week five was definitely his best performance of the season. He saw an eighty one percent routeschare after dipping to forty two percent the previous week, partially due to injury. His targets per route run rate was a season high. His target share was highest since Week one, when they faced the Broncos. His average up the target was seventeen point six yards, highest of the season. It was a good week overall for Calvin Ridley, and it's a move in the right direction, But I'm not ready to say that you should find your lineup each week. He's still more of a bye week fillin. We've got to see more consistency, not just from him, but that offense in general. That offense right now has four touchdowns. That's half of the next closest team among teams that have played five games so far this year. The next closest team is Cleveland, who has eight. Ridley's also seen just sixty one percent of his targets deemed catchable by PFF among relevant wide receivers. That ranks around one hundredth But he's at least trending in the right direction. After that Week five outing, Daniel Joe has scored twenty nine and a half and twenty two point eight standard points and games where he's found the end zone on the ground and games where he hasn't. He's scored fifteen point eight, ten point four and sixteen point seven points. He's basically been like Bryce Young in those games. Now, this isn't to say that that's who Daniel Jones is in fantasy though. On the season, Indianapolis has scored seventeen touchdowns on offense, one of the higher marks in the league, but just thirty five percent of those touchdowns have come via the air. That's the lowest mark in football. Daniel Jones, in turn, has only a four percent touchdown rate. That's nothing special. Now, maybe that doesn't dramatically rise by the end of the year, but I do expect the Colts to score their touchdowns a little bit differently from here on out, and that'll help Dimes have a little bit more of a cushion in fantasy. Baltimore's bad defense is going to force more pass heavy scripts for that offense, which is probably good news for someone like Zay Flowers, who had some volume concerns entering the year, and bad news for someone like Derrick Henry, who's usually been games script to pens. But get this. Last season, Baltimore ran eighty two offensive plays in the regular season while trailing by ten or more points. That was fifth lowest in the league. This year, they've already run sixty two plays while trailing by ten or more points. That's more than the league average. Lamar Jackson if healthy, he could honestly go nuts in fantasy football because Baltimore is bound to drop back and pass a lot more given the way this defense is playing. As you guys know, I adjust fantasy points allowed for strength of opponent, and at this moment, the best matchup for any position across fantasy is probably wide receivers facing Dallas. On the whole, team wide receivers when they face the Cowboys, they're scoring fourteen point four PPR points over their season long averages. So a team scores will say twenty PPR points per game. When they face Dallas, they're gonna score over thirty four. This is why Tedoro McMillan was a bye this week. In particular, he's not a lock to have a big game. Nothing's a lock in fantasy football, but it's a great spot for him. Now, speaking of adjusted numbers, I keep an updated playoff schedule that I send out the late round Fantasy Football patrons each week where I show the schedule rank for each position in Fantasy football during the fantasy playoffs. Now this is gonna change but right now today, Green Bay Packers quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers all have the top fantasy schedules for weeks fifteen through seventeen. That's based on median opponent, and that's because in week sixteen they get Chicago, in week seventeen they get that aforementioned Baltimore Ravens defense. That's something to keep in mind as you make trades over the coming weeks. The last trend this week is about my guy, a Mechagbuca. He's on a tear. He's averaging twenty and a half pper points per game through his first five games, and he's doing it while never hitting a thirty percent target here in a single contest. Now, admittedly, based on where he's seeing his looks and how much usage he's getting, he's a Russian candidate. Like on paper PFFS expected Fantasy points model, it's saying that he's scoring over six points per game more than expected right now. Meanwhile, you have Mike Evans eventually coming back, Chris Godwin getting healthier. There are reasons to consider Igbuka a cell, but here's the reason I would only do that for an elite, elite fantasy asset like if you could sell really high. Since twenty eleven, and we've had ninety six wide receivers get to nineteen or more PPRO points per game, so a full point and a half below where Agbuka's at who played at least four games across the first five weeks of the fantasy season. Of those ninety six, eighty three of them ended up playing eight or more games from week six through the end of the year. Among those eighty three wide receivers, seventy percent of them scored fifteen or more PPERO points per game after week five. That's a pretty strong rate all things considered. But only three of those wide receivers were rookies. One of them was Puka Akua, who scored fifteen point two pp your points per game after week five, one was Malik Neighbors, who scored sixteen point five, and one of them was Jamar Chase who scored seventeen point two. All of them were clear league winning seasons. Egbuka is trending to be a very special player, at least for fantasy purposes. That's it for today's show, though thanks to all of you for listening. If you had subscribe to Late Round fantasy football podcast. Make sure you are be searching for it pretty much anywhere. Podcasts can be found in follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I'll talk to you tomorrow with the Weekly Sleepers episode.