1138: 10 Trends for Week 5

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

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

What's up everyone, it's JJ Zachariason, and this episode 1138 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. Thanks for tuning in.

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Let's talk about Josh Downs. Anytime a player is hyped up by a group of people, and then that player disappoints, there's almost like an extra disappointment. We remember it more, we feel it more. I've seen a lot of Josh Downs takes since Sunday morning, and I disagree with a lot of them. So like I said, let's talk about Josh Downs. All the time, I reflect on why I did something wrong with my job. Why did I get this thing wrong? And I was pretty high on Josh Downs this past week. There's no Alec Pierce, there's no Keenan Allen, and the commanders, they're terrible in the secondary. Downs was probably going to see a lot of looks. Now in hindsight, I think one of the mistakes that I made is that Washington is really bad against perimeter-wide receivers. They've actually been not that bad against slot guys. In fact, their slot-to-perimeter wide receiver points allowed ratio this year, as in the ratio between slot points allowed to perimeter points allowed. It's second lowest in the league. Meaning when teams face the commanders, the wide receivers who are scoring points are doing so more so on the perimeter, on the outside than on the inside. In week four, the thought was that maybe Josh Downs gets more of those routes on the outside. He and Allen wasn't in the mix, but then he didn't. He had a 73% slot share in week four. He hadn't seen that high of a slot rate since week one. And that was the only game that Alec Pearce played in, or at least played the majority of the Colts offensive snaps in. Downs has now slowly seen higher and higher slot rates over the last three games. He was at just 54% in week two against the Chiefs when Alec Pearce went down. He was at 67% the following week and then this last week he was at 73%.

This isn't impacting his route share though, just to be clear. He's had at least an 80% route share in every single game this year. It's just that his alignment has continued to be more in line. I think what we saw in week four was that the extra ceiling, that extra oomph probably isn't there for Josh Downs, at least reliably. But I don't see why he can't be at least a wide receiver three type rest of season. I mean, he's a top 20 wide receiver right now and expected PPR points per game. The bigger problem for him, in my opinion, is Daniel Jones. He's seen a dip in basically every efficiency metric year over year. But overall, I think the masses, myself included, probably understated the slot component to that match up in week four for Josh Downs. I'm just not ready to give up and call him unusable after just one game.

Sticking with the Colts, I think Jonathan Taylor's profile is probably more fragile than the typical fantasy manager believes. It's not that I think Taylor's bad rest of season. I have him as my RB four in my rest of season rankings, which are available over on lateraound.com. But I'd be lying if I said that I think this current pace is going to continue. The Colts currently rank bottom half in the league in EPA per play. They're 25th in the league in yards. They're 23rd in their rate of drives, ending without a score. And among the 26 quarterbacks with 100 or more drop backs this year, Daniel Jones ranks only ahead of Baker Mayfield in EPA per drop back. Meanwhile, with Jonathan Taylor, he's now scored 60% of Indianapolis' touchdowns. That's the highest mark of any running back in the league by 10 percentage points. Since 2016, only one running back who played more than four games has accounted for half of his team's total touchdowns. None of them have been over the 50% mark. India scored a disproportionate amount of touchdowns via the ground versus the air this year. They have 10 touchdowns offensively. Seven of them have come via the ground. So just 30% of their offensive touchdowns have come via the pass. Only the Dolphins and the Falcons have seen a lower proportion. And since 2016, only three teams have been below the 40% mark in that statistic. I'm not saying that this makes Jonathan Taylor like a clear cell. He's still going to produce and it's hard to find running back production. Let's just be real. But what I am saying is that we're still in this phase of the football season where we can't assume what we've seen. It's just how things are going to go.