819: 10 Trends for Week 7

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zacher Retha Jay Jake Zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zachary sin in this episode eight hundred and nineteen of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before we get into the trends this week, I'm gonna do what I did last week and ask for a favor. If this show has helped you out in the past, if you listen to it and you enjoy it, do me a favor and leave a rating and review. Apple podcast is usually best for it, but it really helps the show grow. So that's my call to action. To kick off today's show, hit pause and leave a rating and review, and then enjoy the ten trends that I'm about to throw into your brain. Trend one this week is about Derek Carr the New Orleans Saints. I actually almost had Carr as one of the transactions for the fifteen Transaction show this week because of two things. First is the schedule. Over their next four games, the Saints get the Jags, Colts, Bears, and Vikings. According to my adjusted Fantasy points allowed numbers, the Jags are the sixteenth best matchup for quarterbacks, the Colts are fifth, the Bears are sixth, and the Vikings are fifteenth, so they're all average to plus matchups. But more related to this trend show is that the passing attack it's set to see a little bit of regression. Based on Derek Carr's yardage total, he should have closer to eight touchdowns rather than the five that he currently has. That plays into the fact that Carr's touchdown rate is just two and a half percent. That's a career low, and that's a number that typically does regress. So I'm expecting the passing attack to look a little bit better statistically moving forward, speaking of team touchdowns, did you know that the Broncos currently sit with a pass to rush touchdown ratio of twelve to one. They have twelve passing touchdowns this year to just one rushing touchdown. That's a passing touchdown rate of about ninety two percent. Based on their overall pass rate or how often they're throwing the ball, we should expect that number to be almost twenty five percentage points lower than it currently is. So while I'm expecting the Saints passing attack to look better, I think Denver's might lean the other direction moving forward. There was some evidence that Minnesota was gonna start leaning into cam Akers a little bit more in that backfield a couple of weeks ago. In weeks four and five, Alexander Madison had snap shares of sixty six percent and then fifty three percent, but in week six that number shot back up to seventy eight percent. He's not the sexiest running back in the world, but the running back position is an absolute disaster right now, so Madison's fine enough as an RB two. Zach Moss out snapped Jonathan Taylor forty nine to ten during Taylor's return two weeks ago. In week six, that gap shrunk. Moss had thirty seven snaps, Taylor was at thirty two. Taylor saw his route participation almost triple, which led to an eleven and a half percent target chair. Now, Moss was still getting better usage in week six, but it's clear that Week seven it might be the week where we see these numbers flip, where they start to favor Jonathan Taylor a little bit more. Unfortunately, the Colts get the Browns. The Atlanta Falcons have seen more dropbacks than rush attempts in each of their last four games, they've been throwing the ball more and when you compare that to twenty twenty two, it's pretty crazy because the Falcons last year that happened just three times. They had more dropbacks than rush attempts only three times last season. On the year, Atlanta ranks twenty fourth and pass rate. As we know, last season, their pass rate was historically low. So things have definitely bounced back as we see happen each season in the NFL, and that's helped make some of these weapons in the past attack more viable. Drake London in particular, has seen back to back top twenty performances in PPR leagues, and he's averaged over eight targets per game since that Week one outing where he had just one target. This is why we shouldn't overreact to Week one performances, right, Calvin Ridley managers. DeVante Smith has been a low key frustrating player for Fantasy this year. After such a promising start to the season where he had back to back top twenty performances, Smith hasn't finished in the top twenty since then, and over his last two despite seeing sixteen targets, he's combined for eleven PPR points. I'm concerned here, but I'm not overly concerned. The target chairs haven't been horrendous. He's set a twenty three percent target chair in four of six games. And one thing that I really like about Smith is the playoff schedule. The Eagles get the Seahawks, Giants, and Cardinals in the fantasy playoffs, so if you can buy low, I don't think that's a terrible idea. Quentin Johnson has yet to do anything in the NFL, despite Mike Williams going down with a season ending injury. QJ has caught six balls this year, and he failed to catch a pass in Week six against the Cowboys. Not to be fair, Johnson's playing about half of LA's snaps right now. He's not a full time player, and according to Fantasy Life's utilization report, just half of his targets have been deemed catchable. But Johnson also has a week fifteen percent targets per route run rate, and he's got by far the worst yards per rout run rate on the Chargers at point five to four. In fact, among wide receivers with ten or more targets this season, only Randall Cobb and Donovan People's Jones have a worse yards per route run rate than Quentin Johnston. He was a volatile prospect entering the league. That's something that I talked about a lot during the offseason. It looks like that volatility is hitting on the bad side of his range of outcomes. Now, if you want some good news for the Chargers, look at Austin Neckler. He returned from his ankle sprain in Week six and he ended up seeing eighty seven and a half percent of the team's running back rushes in a sixteen point seven percent target share. Those are elite numbers, and that's actually a combination that rush share and target share. That's a combination that Eckler's only hit once during his entire career. That kind of usage is gonna make him a high end RB one in fantasy this year. Without Justin Jefferson in the lineup this past week, the Vikings needed Jordan Andison and kJ Osborne to step up. Let's talk about Addison in particular here. He wasn't playing a ton in two wide receiver sets before this Justin Jefferson injury, but he did in Week six. He actually ran a route on one hundred percent of kirk Cousins dropbacks. That route participation was closer to seventy or eighty percent with Justin Jefferson. Now it only led to a seventeen percent target share, but that's good news for his potential without Jefferson. The last trend this week is that, according to my adjusted Fantasy points allowed numbers, the San Francisco forty nine Ers wide receivers have faced the toughest schedule in the league so far. They've gotten up against the Steelers, Rams, Cardinals, Giants, Cowboys, and Browns. Now, the Steelers are the best matchup for wide receivers and adjusted Fantasy points allowed, but the Rams rank is the twenty ninth best matchup. The Cardinals are ninth, the Giants are twentieth, and then the Cowboys and Browns are twenty eighth and thirty second, respectively. What that means is they faced three bottom five matchups for wide receivers across their first six games. That's what's bringing this number down in total. So a player like Brandon Ayyuk, he's been crushing despite these opponents, and guess what moving forward, no team has easier matchups at the position. Brandon Auk is looking really really good. Right now. 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 searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and friend to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening to everyone, I greatly appreciate it. I'll talk to you tomorrow with the weekly Sleeper Show