1052: 10 Trends for Week 11

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host JJ Zachariason.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode 1052 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. Now, before I get to the trends this week, I've got a favor to ask you. If you check out the description for this episode, you'll see there's a link to a survey. That survey shouldn't take long to fill out, but it's really, really helpful for myself and David Kitchin, my COO, to get honest feedback from you guys. I want Late-Round Fantasy Football, this podcast, the content I'm producing, I want it to be as helpful and entertaining as it possibly can be. And the best way to get that done is through listening to what's working for you guys and what isn't. So if you could fill it out, it would be greatly, greatly appreciated. Now, let's get to these 10 trends.

The Raiders played their first game without Jacobi Meyers in Week 10 It resulted in a lot more Tyler Lockett. Lockett ended up running a route on 80% of Vegas' drop backs against the Broncos. That resulted in a 25% target share. Now, Trey Tucker was the other primary wide receiver. He ran a route on every single Raiders drop back. He's now done that two weeks in a row. Lockett wasn't a transaction this week on the Transactions Podcast because it's the Raiders, and Lockett himself is 33 years old and passes prime. But Vegas does get Dallas this week. Anything is possible against that defense.

There was a huge shift in the Texans' backfield in week 10 I know I mentioned Woody Marks being a bycandidate last week, but I can promise you guys, I did not expect this. It was no doubt a weird game script, but Marks played 78% of the team's offensive snaps, which was by far a season high. Nick Chubb, he was at 14%, a season low. That resulted in Marks seeing a 74% running back rush share, which was a season high, and a 55% round share, which was another season high. Based on their rest of season schedule and all the stuff I talked about last week, if this usage continues, we're looking at RB2 production for Woody Marks. But it's just one game. That's still a pretty big if.

Another backfield that flipped last week was with the Giants. A couple of weeks ago, Devin Singletary out snapped Tyrone Tracy, seeing a 55% snap share versus a 45% one. In week 10, though, that flipped. Tyrone Tracy had a 66% snap share, Devin Singletary 34%. Now Tracy only scored 8.1 PPR points. But he was used a lot more than he was the previous week. Now a huge problem for Giants running backs, they have a brutal rest of season schedule. Specifically, the next few weeks are absolutely terrible. They'll get the Packers, Lions and Patriots 3 bottom 5 matchups for running backs by Adjusted Fantasy Points allowed. Now it eases up a little bit after that, but they do get the Vikings in week 16, which is another bottom 10 matchup. So overall, this is good for Tracy, but the offensive environment, the schedule, just brutal for him. Tedaro McMillan is seeing good target shares. He's been at 44%, 32% and 35% target shares over his last three games. Those are some pretty crazy numbers. That's resulted in 24 targets, but that number is so much lower on the Panthers than it would be on another team, most other teams, because Carolina loves to run the football. Since week 4, according to Fantasy Life data, Carolina has a minus 12% drop backs over expected rate. Only Seattle has had a lower rate during that time frame, but Seattle is averaging over 30 points per game in this stretch. Carolina is averaging 16.4. It's just not conducive for fantasy purposes. Otherwise, McMillan could be smashing this year. After Kyle Menungai's big performance against the Bengals in week 9, no one knew exactly how the Bears would split their backfield in week 10 Well, the results are in. Deandre Swift basically just played his typical role. He saw a 61% snap share exactly his season-long average. He had a 56% route share higher than his season-long average. And he had a 65% running back rush share and a season-high 22% target share. Those peripherals were kind of awesome for Deandre Swift. Honestly, in general, Deandre Swift has been low-key awesome just himself this year. He's scored double-digit PPR points in every game since week one. He's averaging almost 16 PPR points per game. This appears to still be Deandre Swift's backfield. Definitely from a fantasy perspective too, given that pass-catching ability. The Philadelphia Eagles have one of the most frustrating offenses in football for fantasy purposes, and they're winning games, which makes this even more tilting. But if you remember, I talked about this earlier in the season. Over their first three games, they really were running the ball a ton. According to Fantasy Life's drop-backs over expected rate, the Eagles were 31st from weeks 1 through 3 They had a minus 7% rate. Then we saw that shift a little bit. Weeks 4, 5, 6 and 7, they were mostly neutral. And actually, during that stretch, because of one big game and drop-back rate over expected, the Eagles were first in the NFL and drop-backs over expected. That was from week 4 through week 7 Things were moving in the right direction for fantasy purposes. And then the last two games, week 8 and week 10, they've been at minus 6% and minus 12%. They had a drop-back over expected rate of minus 12% against the Packers. The issue with this is that the Eagles' offense just isn't as good year over year, period. Through 10 weeks, just 36% of Philadelphia's drives are ending with a score of some sort. That ranks 25th in the NFL. Last year, across the season, that number was 45%. Philadelphia ranked 8th. Kevin Petullo and this offense, they're just not doing as much to confuse defenses. This is also something that we talked about earlier on in the season. Last year, the Eagles ran play action on 25% of their drop-backs. This year, that's fallen to 21%. Last year, the Eagles had an RPO rate of 14%. This year, it's 10%. They used motion on 46% of their plays. This year, 44%. All the while, the offense is just running a little bit slower too. They're not running as many plays. So it's sort of all of these small things. Not converting as well, not being quite as creative, not running it as quickly. All of those small things have combined to create more of a mess for fantasy purposes, especially for that passing attack.