1123: Week 1 Sleepers

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

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

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. This episode 1123 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. I'll be doing this Sleepers episode every single week, and I have to be upfront. This is not a start-sit show.

Instead, I'm just trying to give you guys some players who are readily available on the waiver wire, who you might want to consider starting in that given week. If I call player out on this show, it doesn't mean that you're starting him no matter what. It just means that I like his matchup, I like his situation, maybe I like the player himself, and I could see him coming through with a usable day. But in the end, we're talking about lower tiered players on this episode every single week. I'm happy to just hit on like 30% of them. Most of them will not hit. Now, I'll do what I did last year and bucket players into 3 categories. Players rostered in 50-80% of Yahoo! Leagues, players rostered in 20-50% of them, and then players rostered in fewer than 20% of them. As you'd guess, that last category won't see a ton of hits this year. But these ranges of roster exposure allow for everyone to get a little bit of something from this episode. We'll get to that first group in just a second. First, I do want to remind you once again to check out lateraound.com. We've got brand new offerings this year for members. We have a much better interface for weekly and rest of season rankings, new metrics in the data dump, and so much more. You can learn more about it and what it means to be a late round fantasy football member by just heading to lateround.com. Now let's get to these sleepers.

Week 1 is always one of the toughest sleeper shows because we just don't have that much information on how these teams are going to perform. How they're going to play. As the season goes on, this show should get better and better. That's the goal, at least. We'll kick things out by looking at players rostered in 50% to 80% of Yahoo! Leagues, and we'll start at quarterback with Baker Mayfield. Now, I'm probably a little bit less bullish about this matchup from Mayfield versus ConsenSys. Mostly because I think Cincinnati's defense got better compared to last year, and their secondary in particular is not that bad. DJ Turner is legit. But this game environment should be really strong. The Bucs have a 23.5 point implied team total, and the game total is over 50 points. Our adjusted points allowed numbers have this as the 8th best matchup for Baker. So he should be fine. Just don't be surprised if Cincinnati's defense is better this year than last year.

Now, in that same game, I'm intrigued by Kenny Gainwell. The Bengals are 3.5 point favorites, so a negative game script is possible for Tampa Bay. Sean Tucker is also iffy for that game. And even though he's not going to play a massive role this year, that does limit the Bucks' backfield to basically two players.

If that negative game script hits, it would make sense for Gainwell to see more work as a pass catcher. Last year with Pittsburgh, Gainwell ranked seventh among running backs in route share when the team was trailing by a touchdown or more. And what's interesting is that Rashad White ranked eighth within that metric, obviously Rashad White having played for the Buccaneers. When specifically looking at the fourth quarter, so when the team is definitely trailing and they're in comeback mode, White had the fifth-highest route share. Gainwell, he ranked ninth. This is all to say that Gainwell could just naturally get some work, but maybe there's a slight boost if the game script goes a certain way. But it is week one. Game script is even more difficult to project than usual, just to be clear. Now, speaking of game script, I think one game that we probably feel best about this week is Jacksonville against Cleveland. The Jags are seven and a half point favorites, which could lead to a more ground and pound approach overall for their offense. And that means both Bashall Tutin and Chris Rodriguez might be useful, specifically for this episode, Chris Rodriguez.

Now, we still don't know how this backfield is going to be split. But my guess is that we get close to a 50-50, maybe 60-40 split to start the season. Tutin has more pass-catching upside given Rodriguez's history, but that may not matter that much in this matchup. Rodriguez was second in the NFL in yards after contact per attempt last year, though that was knocked down to 14th or so when adjusted for situation. Even still, he's got the ability to handle a big workload and help drain clock, and that could lead to fantasy production as big favorites against the Browns.