1060: 10 Trends for Week 13

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 1060 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. Just a reminder, you're getting this 10 Trends episode right now, obviously. But the Sleepers episode that usually drops on Thursday, that's gonna be out later today. Cool? Cool. Let's get to the Trends this week. Emeka Egbuka is really struggling, at least for fantasy purposes. He's failed to reach double-digit PPR points in five of his last six games. That's despite seeing a target share per game rate of 28% during that time frame. Now, one thing I will say is that this started in week six when he had that hamstring injury. Then in week seven, he wasn't expected to play, or at least not that much. He did play, and he played more than anticipated because Mike Evans got hurt. But for argument purposes, let's just forget about that right now. From weeks one through five, Egbuka was averaging 20.5 PPR points per game. Since then, he's been at 9.9. The question is why? What's going on here? Well, first off, during that first stretch, 76% of Egbuka's targets were deemed catchable by PFF. That's been just 48% since then. That's a huge difference. A 48% catchable targets rate is really, really low. We're talking like second or third percentile stuff if that continued throughout the entire season. Another problem, though, is deep ball conversion. From weeks one through five, Egbuka saw 13 targets that traveled 20 or more air yards according to PFF. He caught eight of them for 291 yards and four touchdowns. The dude was feasting on big plays. Since then, Egbuka only has five of those targets, five deep ball targets. He's caught one of them for 31 yards. That difference alone is literally more than 10 PPR points per game. Now, we knew that regression was going to hit eventually for Egbuka, just given the way he was producing to start the year. I even did a trend talking about that, but this is too far in the other direction. Regression does not mean an overcorrection, and this is an overcorrection. A 48% catchable targets rate is not something that we see last a long time, and the lack of deep ball looks should regress at least to some degree. The good news is that Egbuka is seeing a lot of volume, he's averaging over 10 targets per game over his last 5 If the quality of those targets goes up even a little bit, he can go back to giving fantasy managers wide receiver 2 type numbers. But those are the high level statistical reasons as to why things just aren't working for Emeka Egbuka right now.

Tyrone Tracy saw pretty good usage in week 12, worthy enough usage to call it out on today's show. Now, I talked just last week about how Tracy was seeing more volume than Devon Singletary since Cam Scadaboo's season-ending injury, but Singletary was seeing all the work in the green zone or within the opponent's 10-yard line. Entering last week and since Cam Scadaboo's injury, Singletary had 10 green zone attempts. Tyrone Tracy had Well, that changed in week 12 Tracy saw 3 of a possible 4 rush attempts from within the Lions' 10-yard line, and Tracy hit his highest route share of the season and his highest snap share since week 1 If that usage continues, and that's obviously a big if, but if that usage continues, then we're going to see a lot more production from Tyrone Tracy down the stretch. I thought JJ McCarthy was worth a shot this year. You've got a great system with Kevin O'Connell, you've got great weapons, and he was a late-round pick in fantasy. Worst case, he doesn't work out, you move on. He most definitely has not been working out. McCarthy ranks 33rd out of 34 qualified quarterbacks in completion percentage over expected according to NextGen stats. His passing EPA per drop back, minus.42. That's dead last in the league. The player in second to last is Dylan Gabriel at minus.26. McCarthy has a quarterback rating of 57.9. The player in second to last Cam Ward, 75.7. I mean, guys, this is really, really, really bad. McCarthy scored fewer than six fantasy points in half of his starts this year, and his receivers are feeling it too. Justin Jefferson is averaging 11.7 PPR points per game with JJ McCarthy. Without him, he was at 16.3. JJ McCarthy has completely torpedoed this Minnesota Vikings offense.

The Steelers offense is honestly just stupid. It's obnoxious. If you thought the low average depth of target thing was specifically an Aaron Rodgers related thing, you'd be wrong because Mason Rudolph, he started this past week. He now has 49 pass attempts on the season. Among relevant quarterbacks, there are 49 of them who qualify. Rudolph is dead last in average depth of target at 4.6. Kyler Murray is 48th on that list. He has an 8 out of 6.0. Then of course, Aaron Rodgers, he's 46th. He has an 8 out of 6.3. The Steelers have targeted their wide receivers on just 43 percent of their targets this year. That's easily the lowest in the league. DK Metcalf has seen roughly 22 percent of their overall targets, so more than half of their wide receiver targets essentially. And really, DK Metcalf's problem, it's not deep ball volume. He ranks 18th in the league right now at wide receiver and 20 plus area yard targets, as according to PFF. That could be worse given these circumstances, given the fact that these average up to target numbers are so low. The problem is conversion. DK Metcalf on deep balls is basically Keon Coleman. He's caught just three of his 14 deep ball targets. That's the fewest receptions, at least tied for the fewest receptions among all players with 12 or more deep ball targets. Metcalf is now averaging 52 yards per game as a result. That's the lowest of his career, which includes his rookie season. So it's just a mess in Pittsburgh. It's DK Metcalf are bust at wide receiver, and it's mostly been bust from that perspective. Now, speaking of the Steelers, they really leaned into this whole Kenneth Gainwell thing in week 12 Against Chicago, Gainwell out snapped Jalen Warren 37 to 36, and arguably more importantly, he ran 23 routes to Warren's 11 Gainwell had a 20% target share, Jalen Warren 0%. Warren saw a 64% running back rush share when there was a four game stretch about a month ago, whereas running back rush share was closer to 80% per game. But Warren hasn't seen a double digit percentage target share since week 7 That's pretty crazy when you consider how he's been deployed throughout his career. And yes, I know that he had that ankle injury, but I don't know if that really impacted the usage in week 12 Now, I could make the argument that Warren's better statistically than Kenneth Gainwell, but I don't think it's so glaring and so obvious that Pittsburgh needs to change things up. Warren's still been usable enough, but he's more of a floor play in fantasy now, not a ceiling play. And Gainwell in PPR formats, he can sometimes be flexed now. It's kind of hard to say otherwise when he has target shares of 14%, 11%, 28% and 20% over his last four games. The Raiders' run game is absolutely terrible. It's horrific. They've been stuffed on 27.5% of their runs this year, according to next-gen stats. That's the worst rate in next-gen stats history, which dates back to 2018, or at least the data that we're able to see. Somehow the Cleveland Browns have a worse success rate than the Raiders do, but Vegas is second-worst in success rate. Now, clearly, this funnels down to Ashton Gentey. According to PFF, Gentey is bottom five in the league in yards before contact per attempt, which is partially an offensive line-based metric, but he's also bottom five in rushing yards over expected per attempt. Really, at this point, you're not using or rostering Gentey because of what he can do on the ground. He hasn't had a game with more than 3.5 yards per carry since week five, but since week four, he's averaged a target share per game rate of 16.6%. We'll see if that keeps up now that Chip Kelly's out of the picture, but you have to imagine it will to some degree, as long as Gentey's healthy, because this team has not been able to get any push at all running the football.