827: 10 Trends for Week 9

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

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason in this episode 827 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, if you could do me a favor. If you've enjoyed this show, you've gotten something out of it over the years. Do me a favor and leave a rating and review. Of course, make sure you're subscribed to the show too. But leaving a rating and review helps the show grow. It really helps me out. Apple Podcasts is a great place to do it. So if you could, leave this show a rating and review. Now that that's out of the way, let's get to this week's trends.

Taysom Hill was really living it up as a tight end in weeks 6 and 7 He had target shares of 17.4% and 9.4% during those two weeks. His route participation was around 67%. In week 8, he had a huge outing, but it wasn't as a receiver, it was as a rusher. As a receiver with Jawan Johnson back, Hill saw his route participation fall to 40%. That was a big difference compared to week 6 and week 7

It's good that they used him so much as a rusher, but I do think that we're going to be running into the typical Taysom Hill volatility once again.

Over the last three weeks, Breeze Hall is ranked as the RB3, RB4 and RB7 in weekly PPR scoring. During this time, he's seen a 75% running back rusher in each game, and his target share per game has been 17.7%.

Now for some context with how that compares to how he started the season, from weeks 1 to 4, his running back rusher was 28 percentage points lower. His target share per game was almost 9 percentage points lower. We're seeing Breeze Hall the bell cow, and it's a beautiful thing.

Another running back coming off a big injury last year is Javante Williams, and we've been seeing better usage from him over the last two weeks. In weeks 7 and 8, Williams averaged a running back rusher of 75%. His target share was 16.7% in both contests. That's some big news. He's given us two straight performances now with 12-plus PPR points. He failed to reach double digits in each of his first five games. And Denver's a big regression candidate. This season, just one of their 17 offensive touchdowns have come via the ground. That pass-to-rush touchdown rate of 94% is second in the NFL behind only Minnesota. It's a number that will definitely regress moving forward. That's all awesome news for Javante Williams.

The New York Jets have been unbelievably good against wide receivers this year. Only three wideouts have ranked in the weekly Top 24 against them this year. Those three wideouts were Stefan Diggs, who's good at football, CD. Lamb, who's good at football, and AJ. Brown, who's also good at football.

The Jets rank as by far the worst matchup for wideouts and adjusted fantasy points allowed. Their opponents are scoring 11 fewer wide receiver points against them than they typically score in a given game. Now, some of this is definitely due to what happened last week against the Giants, but even when you adjust for that, the Jets are still the toughest matchup for wideouts. Keep that in mind moving forward.

Rhamondre Stevenson has been trending in the right direction over New England's last three games. He's averaged a target share per game rate of 17.9%, which is in line with what we saw in 2022 Prior to this stretch, his target share per game was just 10%. According to Fantasy Life's Utilization Report, which you can check out yourself for free over on fantasylife.com. But according to that report, Stevenson really hasn't been seeing substantially different route participation. What's changed is his targets per route run. It's hovered the 27% range over this three week period. It was in the low teens before that. Essentially, how the Patriots have been using Stevenson over the last three weeks, it's more in line, at least as a receiver, with what we saw in 2022 I'm not sure it keeps up, but I do think that we're bound to see better numbers from Stevenson than what we saw at the start of the year.

Rashid Rice ran the second most routes for Kansas City this past week. That's great. But running the second most routes for the Chiefs, it's a lot less meaningful than if it happened on another team. Because they're still rotating their wide receivers at a pretty high rate.

Rice has seen his route participation stay above the 60% mark over the last two weeks. That's up from the 40-50% range that he'd been seeing prior to that. But his 60% route participation still is not ideal. That's led to Rice failing to hit higher than a 15% target share in each of his last four games. In my opinion, the Chiefs need to get him on the field more. He has by far the best yards per route run rate on the team at Wide Receiver.