1073: Mailbag - George Pickens' Outlook, the Miami Offense, and More

**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, 1073 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast.
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The first question this week is from Twitter. It's from at late round DB. It says, How would you assess or approach the Miami Dolphins offensive weapons for this Bengals matchup with you are starting? Waller seemed like a must start in all formats with the data that we had with him and Tua. Now with yours, how do you view it? Impact on others like Waddell and Aechan? My general stance is that this is bad for all the players in that offense in general. Of course, there's an outcome here where Quinn Uers is just way better than anyone anticipated. He just surprises everyone. But we've kind of seen this story before many times and they generally don't go in a favorable direction. The splits last year when Tua was out for Devon Aechan, that's especially noteworthy and frightening, especially as someone who's relying on Aechan quite a bit this week. But with Tua last year, Aechan averaged a 60% running back rush share per game rate. He was at an 18.5% target share. Without Tua, those numbers were 55%, so a similar enough running back rush share. But his target share per game rate fell to about 10.5%. It fell pretty dramatically. And I'm not even talking about his PPR points per game. I'm just focused here on his usage. His PPR points per game fell dramatically with and without Tua. We're talking like 19.5 PPR points per game with Tua and 8.8 without him. Now look, we don't know the tendencies of viewers within this particular offense, and what he'll prefer to do. And fortunately for A-chan, this is a good matchup overall. Cincinnati's defense is playing a little bit better though. Four of their best seven games by EPA per play have come over their last four games, and that's against Buffalo, Baltimore twice, and New England, all good teams. Now, I was already nervous about Waddle in this matchup to begin with. Cincinnati's been pretty good against top wide receivers, and even as a whole, they ranked close to a bottom ten matchup for wide receivers this year by adjusted fantasy points allowed. So yeah, this is a downgrade for these guys. I think Waddle, he's something you now consider benching this week, depending on who you have. And then Darren Waller for me, he's now in a tier with like Theo Johnson and Dalton Schultz. He's like a high-end, tight-end too. And then A-chan, he's still a higher-tiered guy. I don't think you're benching Devon A-chan. I just moved him down a couple of spots below the other elite running backs. Overall, though, not very good for fantasy football, even if Tua has plenty of question marks as a passer at this point.
This next question is from Patreon. It's from Joel. It says, how do you feel about George Pickens? The last few weeks, he's received criticism for lack of effort. His target share has declined below 20% and he's scored single digits the last two. His motivation and body language seems to have changed since the Cowboys leaked, he will be franchise tagged. And CD LAM has taken over again since. Look, I don't know if that's the direct connection. If the franchise tag stuff is the pure 100% reason we're seeing George Pickens kind of take some plays off. But that's also just George Pickens. This isn't the first time this has happened. This has really been a two-week thing for George Pickens. They had that game against the Lions, where I think things were more glaring, where he saw nine targets on a 19% target share. We can kind of brush that aside and say, okay, he had a bad game. That happens for everyone. We just haven't been used to it with Pickens. But then last week, 17% target share. Not horrific, but not great. And his previous five games before these two, he was closer to a 29% target share. But guys, Minnesota is a really tough match up for wide receivers. They're the third toughest match up for wide outs by adjusted points allowed. They also ranked 26th and adjusted target share allowed to wide outs. So wide receiver rooms are generally seeing less volume when they face the Vikings. Now, something I think is really important this time of year is to really focus on the action. Like we sit here and we question players in week six, week seven, week eight, because there are a lot of games left to play. There's more forecasting going on. At this point in the season, though, we're essentially saying, are we starting or sitting this player? And if we're sitting him, should we be dropping him? And I think with Pickens, you're probably starting him, given the state at wide receiver, right? Now, I plan on researching this over the offseason. I've been talking about it over the last couple of weeks, but wide receiver twos, they've been terrible this year for the most part. And wide receiver threes, they've been so much more replaceable than usual. And even if Pickens starts to find himself in that group of players, he's still going to be someone that we're ranking ahead of those players. Think of it this way. Let's say that George Pickens has another single digit PPR point game this week on like an 18% target share. Next week, the Cowboys get the Commanders. Great matchup. We're probably going to be putting Pickens as a top 20 wide receiver again, even with the down performances, unless something happens on the field that clearly tells us not to do that. Because even though some of those players are likely going to outscore him, someone like, I don't know, Jaden Reed, he might outscore Pickens. Who knows? I mean, it's just a two-game sample. We can't necessarily project that. When we're projecting these things, we're looking at the most likely outcomes. So my feeling with Pickens is that I think that we can be a little bit forgiving here. He's certainly not as much of a lock as he was like three or four weeks ago. But at the same time, I don't think that's really changing our approach unless we're in a shallower league, or unless we have an unbelievably loaded team. This is still overall a very good fantasy environment. If he's running routes, he has a good chance to score some fantasy points. Maybe he won't be top six, but because of that environment, he can still be useful.