1032: 10 Trends for Week 6

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode 1032 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 DraftKings Daily Fantasy, the ultimate destination for football fans. New customers can play free for their share of millions and prizes with their first deposit of $5 or more. Download the DraftKings Daily Fantasy app and enter promo code LATEROUND to play free for your share of millions. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. In New York, call 8778-HOPE-NY. In Connecticut, call 888-789-7777. 18 plus in most states. Eligibility restrictions apply. Ends December 31st. See terms at draftkings.com/promotions.

It's a 10 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 15 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 his Flacco move. So if you can get like top 8 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 going to be awesome. One thing we have to point out here is that Cincinnati still has a brutal offensive line. Flacco is going to be under a lot of pressure. According to PFF, this season, only Geno Smith has a worse quarterback rating under pressure than Joe Flacco. Flacco has 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 2024, where Flacco started six games. In 2024, it was just as bad. Flacco was third worst in quarterback rating under pressure, beating only Mack Jones and Tyler Huntley. He was behind Anthony Richardson. He ranked 41st of 43 qualified quarterbacks. Currently this season, he's 36th of 38 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 averaged a running back rush share per game rate of 82%. His target share per game rate is 14.6%. 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 70% for running back rush share and 13% for target share. Those are well below where Chase Brown is actually at. Since 2011, we've had fewer than 20 of those seasons for running back across the entire year. Among players who played 8 or more games. And among the players who hit those thresholds, none of them ranked outside the top 24 at the position and PPR points per game. 89% of them ranked in the top 12 Now, I don't think that's going to 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 Kyren 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 2025 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 Kyren Williams had the third highest target share of his career, the Rams are currently sitting with a 15.6% running back target share. That's at least three percentage points higher than any season from the Rams since 2018 Williams benefited a lot from that this past week, where he hit almost a 22% target share. But what's really been wild about this season is that aside from last week where Blake Corum dropped a toss and then he dropped a pass, it was just not a good game for Blake Corum. But aside from last week, Williams had been seeing his running back rush shares fall. He was at 95% in week one, 77% in week two, 71% in week three, and then 59% in week four. Then in week five with that bad Corum game, it shot back up to 93%. Meanwhile, Kyren Williams hasn't really 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 Corum again, we could see that rushing profile stick to 15-20 carries instead of 20-25, 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 Kyren 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 Kyren 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, this is a really good offense, and most running max, they're in part-time roles across the NFL. And as we saw last week, Williams still has upside of these single games where he's a true bell cow back. He had amazing usage last week. I just thought his season's 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 15% 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 10 in 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 49ers and Chiefs one time in both games combined. According to Next Gen Stats, Jacksonville ranks 23rd in pressure rate. So I do think this is going to 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 5 was definitely his best performance of the season. He saw an 81% route share after dipping to 42% the previous week, partially due to injury. His targets-per-route run rate was a season high. His target share was highest since Week 1 when they faced the Broncos. His average at the target was 17.6 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 he should find your line up each week. He's still more of a bi-week fill-in. We've got to see more consistency, not just from him, but that offense in general. That offense right now has 4 touchdowns. That's half of the next closest team among teams that have played 5 games so far this year. The next closest team is Cleveland who has 8 Ridley's also seen just 61% of his targets deemed catchable by PFF. Among relevant wide receivers, that ranks around 100th. But he's at least trending in the right direction after that Week 5 outing.