678: 10 Trends for Week 3

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with with your host JJ zacheras Jay Ja Zacher Reason. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen and this is episode six hundred and seventy eight of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. The twenty twenty two NFL season is underway and Fandel and GMC are back to bring you the GMC Sierra Mountain Climber Pick Them, a free to play contest series that gives you a chance to win a share of ten thousand dollars in FANDLE site credit every Sunday courtesy of GMC. Here's how it works. Every Sunday during the NFL season, you'll have a chance to answer questions based on the day's one PM and four twenty five PM games. The more questions you answer correctly, the higher up the mountain you'll move. If during any week you answer every question correctly for a perfect score, you'll reach the summit and you'll win your share of ten thousand dollars in site credit. The contest series is live, so head TOFANDL dot slash Free Slash Contest Slash GMC to start climbing the Mountain. Now, let's get to these ten trends. Trend one this week is at Ezekiel Elliott. Through two games has a five point six percent target chair. He's seen four total targets and he's caught two of them. Meanwhile, Tony Pollard is at a twelve point seven percent target share with nine total targets, and the Cowboys clearly wanted to get Pollard more involved this past week, giving him seven targets. This is bad news for Zeke. His lowest per game target shair in a single season over his career has been nine percent, so this is well below that mark. There's very little chance he'll be able to live up to expectation if this maintains, and it can still change. We're only two games in, but this is a trend show, so I've got to call it out. Miles Sanders now has thirty rush attempts in two games, and in week two he saw seventy four percent of Philadelphia's running back rushes. In twenty twenty one, he captured that high running back rush here just twice, and in Week two he also saw almost ten percent of Philadelphia's targets. With the Eagles offense looking so efficient this can work. Sanders can at least be an RB two this year if this keeps up. The Chicago Bears have twenty eight pass attempts through two games, twenty eight. They obviously ranked dead last in the league with that total. The team ranked thirty first is San Francisco, and they've almost doubled the Bears and pass attempts. The Jets ranked first, and they've thrown it one hundred and four times. They've thrown it three point seven times as much as the Bears have. I mentioned this with the Cole Camet transaction yesterday, but this offense is complete hell for fantasy football purposes. Darnell Mooney is easily the biggest loser here because of what people spent to acquire him over the offseason. He's got an eighteen percent target chair through two games. That's not only low for him, but that's a result in just five total targets. You can't trust anyone from this passing attack right now, and that's especially true when you consider the Bears have targeted running backs and one of the highest rates in the league so far, so the traditional receiving weapons are just getting crushed. Lovey Smith said that he was gonna get Damian Pierce more touches, and that's exactly what he did. Pierce was the only running back in Week two for the Texans to have a rush attempt. He ended up with a one hundred percent running back rush share. He's the first player of this season to do that. The problem, though, is that he still just had a two point seven percent target share. According to four for four's Player stat Explorer, Pierce has played just nineteen percent of the team's third down snaps. Burkhead is at eighty one percent. That's the hurdle that Pierce has to get over to be a plug and play starter in fantasy football. Now, speaking of third down snaps, samaj p Ran is still largely playing over Joe Mixon on third down mixing. Has played about a quarter of the Bengals third downs this year. That lines up exis exactly with how he was deployed last year. Interestingly enough, though, Mixon is running routes at a higher rate this year, and that's resulted in two straight double digit percentage target share games. He had a seventeen percent share in Week one and it was eleven point four percent in Week two. We saw this at times last year with mixing, but I do think he's a pretty good by low candidate right now. If this keeps up, he's going to be a really good fantasy asset, especially when the Bengals offense finally gets it together. After his Week two performance, there's some worry with Austin Eckler. I do think he's still fine for the rest of the season. Don't take that the wrong way. We're still working with small samples. I'm just pointing out a general concern because I do think there is a concern with his goal line work. Sony Michelle has the lone goal line carry on that team so far this year. Eckler's also seen fifty eight percent of LA's running back rushes this year, when that was about five to six percentage points higher last season. Again, don't panic, he's a really good football player and a high powered offense. But this is something to watch as future weeks unfold. In Week two, I think we sort of saw the downside of DeVante Adams not playing with Aaron Rodgers anymore. It's not that Adams isn't going to be a monster. He will be. He's one of the best, if not the best, wide receivers in the game, but down games are likely to happen more frequently in this Raiders offense, and Week two, Adams scored nine point two PPR points. That's the first time he failed to score ten PPER points in a game since Week two of the twenty twenty season, and he was injured in that game. It really dates back to twenty nineteen. His seventeen point nine percent target chair was by far the lowest since that time too, So yes, he's still a stud, but I would bet on him not producing like he did in Green Bay. That's what we all thought entering the season anyway. It's not like this is a hot take based on Week two. Now. Speaking of Aaron Rodgers, he's been the QB thirty two in the QB sixteen over his first two games of the season. In twenty twenty one, he finished lower than QB fifteen and weekly scoring just three times, so he's already done that twice when he did it three times during the entirety of the twenty twenty one season. Not having one of the best weapons in the game seems to matter, at least for fantasy purposes. Please don't come after me. Packers fans breeze. Hall found the end zone in week two, but it was on his only target in the game. Michael Carter had an eleven point six percent target shair Brece Hall was at two point three percent. That was a difference from week one, where Hall had one more target than Carter. They're still splitting carries down the middle, but the Jets used Carter more in week two than they did in week one. Hall had just a twenty seven percent snapshare in week two. In week one that was forty five percent. Maybe this was sort of game script related, but it's something to watch moving forward. The last trend this week is about the Bills. Gabriel Davis and play in week two. As we know, so, I was interested to see how they deploy their wide receivers because Jamison Crowder and Isaiah mackenzie they're both slot guys. And we got our answer. They stuck them in the slot. According to Pro Football Focused data, McKenzie played eighty five percent of his snaps from the slot on Monday. Crowder was at eighty eight percent. Jake Kumero basically operated as the outside receiver for Gabriel Davis. The Bills are basically telling us through the first two weeks of the season that their slot position is a committee. McKenzie's been playing a little bit more there, but he's been in a forty five percent snapshare through two weeks. He's now becoming borderline droppable in a lot of formats. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got to subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found. You know, for it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. I'm gonna check out Late Round dot com and click Patreon. The Patreon page is filled with the rest of season rankings, weekly rankings, a discord community. There's lots of stuff over there, so check it out Lateround dot com. Thanks for listening to everyone. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the Weekly Sleeper Show.