1134: 10 Trends for Week 4

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 1134 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, thanks for tuning in. Late-Round Fantasy Football members get a lot of stuff in season. There's weekly rankings, which includes my top 100 flex rankings. There's a live stream Q&A with yours truly over an hour every Tuesday night. There's rest of season rankings, monthly dynasty rankings updates, an incredibly awesome and active Discord community, and more. You can learn more about being a late-round member by heading to lateround.com. Now let's get to these 10 trends.

I want to start today's episode with how I ended the 15 transactions episode, and that's by expanding on Khalif Raymond. Like I said yesterday, given his usage, given where we're at, you can't leave him on the waiver wire, pretty clearly.

Now I've been doing more work with comps this year because we have access to more data than we have in the past at Late-Round Fantasy Football, or I should say, I have the ability to do this a lot faster than I could in the past. So I was curious about Khalif Raymond. I looked at wide receivers drafted past wide receiver 60, who had comparable route shares, target shares and fantasy output through the first three weeks of the season. To put that another way, they came out of nowhere, but they had pretty good peripherals during those first three weeks. In that list of comps, it tells a story where the production doesn't maintain, but it doesn't fully drop off either. Looking at the top 10 player comps, you get no player averaging fewer than about nine PPR points per game from week four onward. But there's also only one player who's above 13 PPR points per game. So you're looking at players in like that wide receiver three to wide receiver four range.

But here's why my rest of season ranking of Khalif Raymond is at wide receiver 53 right now. So technically outside of that wide receiver four range. I guess it's close, but it's not quite there. It's also like 15 wide receiver spots higher than consensus for what it's worth. So I do like Raymond more than most. But when you look at the comps that are popping up, only one of them, Russell Gage in 2020, had a crowded room like Chicago's by average draft position. In 2020, Gage was playing for Atlanta. He had Julio Jones, Calvin Ridley and Hayden Hurst with high average draft positions. And in weeks one through three, Gage had a 60% route share, a 19% target share and 13.9 PPR points per game. Now, Khalif Raymond is a little bit better with those peripherals. He has a 67% route share, a 23% target share and 15.5 PPR points per game. But Gage averaged fewer than 10 PPR points per contest rest of season. And that was in a season where Julio Jones ended up getting hurt. Basically, this is a really, really unique situation. I can't remember seeing anything like this as a fantasy analyst, which is why I'm just so fascinated by it. Like I said, I'm still adding him if he's out there, and I'm higher than the market right now. But I do think that these comps, they paint a picture that says Raymond's performing better right now than he will through the rest of the season. And no, of course, that's not all that shocking. But I do think it's interesting that a lot of these comps, they still scored like 10 PPR points per game through the end of the year. But I do think the difference with Raymond is that those other players, they didn't have the same teammate competition that he currently does.

I don't want to overreact because it's only been three games, and he's coming off an ankle injury too. But Ashton Gentey, he's kind of struggling this year. He hasn't been that great on the ground. In terms of yards after contact per attempt, he ranks 29th out of 43 qualified running backs with 20 or more rush attempts this year. Among that same group, he's 31st in 10 plus yard run rate. He still doesn't have a 20 plus yard run. Meanwhile, his success rate, 35th. And here's another problem. He hasn't converted at the goal line. But I'm not going to overstate a 7 snap sample within his opponent's 10 yard line, where he has 4 rush attempts and minus 1.3 yards before contact on those rush attempts. Or his 3 goal line rushes, where his yards before contact is minus 2.3 per rush. People are going to compare and contrast Gentey to Mike Washington for sure. Because Washington stepped in last week, he immediately had a long touchdown. On a very limited sample, he's got the better 10 plus yard run rate and 20 plus yard run rate. He's electric with the ball in his hands. We might see Washington dig a little bit more into Gentey's workload on the ground. Gentey wasn't great in pass pro in week 3, but I don't think he's just ready to give up that work either. The Raiders have made it clear that Washington is not ready for that. He has 12 routes in the season, he's playing 13% of their 3rd down snaps, and Gentey's actually been really effective per route run. So where we're at is that I wouldn't be surprised if Gentey's rush share does dip just a little bit. We might not get such a lopsided split. Right now it's 74% for Gentey and rush share, 18% for Washington. But Gentey's coming off that injury and he's third among running backs right now and expected fantasy points per game. The usage has been amazing. I don't think the efficiency on the ground and some bad pass pro reps are the reason that we should be panicking. Even if he does lose a little bit of work to Mike Washington.