830: 15 Transactions for Week 10

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason, and this is episode 830 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before we get into the transactions this week, I want to send another reminder about The Late-Round Fantasy Football Patreon. With the Patreon, you get livestream Q&As, rest of season rankings and tiers, weekly rankings and tiers, a great Discord community, and more. The rest of season rankings and tiers can be really helpful in gauging how I'm valuing some of the players that I talk about on this specific episode each week. It's $10 a month for the main tier, and you can do it month to month if you'd like. I'm not trying to take all of your money, just trying to do what I do for a living. But check it all out over on lateraound.com.

Add Keaton Mitchell. So I talked about Keaton Mitchell on this show maybe three or four weeks ago. He finally had his big breakout performance in week nine. He saw his first work on the ground this season, carrying the ball nine times against the Seahawks, and he turned those nine carries into 138 yards in a touchdown. Is that sustainable? No. Is it really, really fun? Yes.

In the end, Mitchell played just 17% of Baltimore snaps in week nine. His running back rush share, 33.3%, nothing special. He only saw one target. If that kind of workload continues, Mitchell won't be very reliable in fantasy football. But if you want the glass half full take, it's this. Mitchell showed up when he finally got the chance, when he finally got some work on the ground. And it didn't really come in garbage time either. He was touching the ball in the second and third quarter. Only two of his touches came in the fourth quarter.

Now look, the median outcome here, this Ravens backfield moving forward is a three-headed monster. It was a two-headed one with Gus Edwards and Justice Hill, and now you got Keaton Mitchell in the mix.

Mitchell's a really great change of pace back, given his size and speed. But chances are, most of his touchdowns, they're going to have to come from outside the red zone and outside the goal line, because that's Gus Edwards' territory. Off the waiver wire, though, let's just see what the Ravens do with Mitchell. He's the type of player who can be fantasy relevant on just a handful of touches. But there's going to be a lot of volatility that comes with that.

Buy Bijan Robinson. I know, I know, I've been on Bijan Robinson this season, and he hasn't really lived up to expectation. I get it, you're probably frustrated that I'm even bringing him up again. But the way I do fantasy football analysis, I don't really care about the past. If I was wrong, I was wrong. If I was right, I was right. But what I'm trying to do is analyze right now in the moment and moving forward. Because that's what matters for you guys. You're trying to win. Robinson was averaging 17.6 PPR points per game across his first four of the season. Things were looking pretty good. His running back rush share per game at that time, about 55%. Now that was a little bit low, but the hope was that he was going to get more and more work as the season progressed.

The receiving volume was never a problem.

Over his last four games though, we'll remove the headache game here because that was sort of an anomaly. But over his last four games, Robinson's seen that running back rush share dip to 48%. His target share per game has gone from 21.2% across his first four to 12.6% across his last four.

And now understandably so, people are panicking about Bijan Robinson. They're watching Tyler Algier get rushing work, get a lot of rushing work, and more importantly, get goal line work. Tyler Algier has six goal line attempts this year, Bijan Robinson has one. But I've got four reasons to still be optimistic about Bijan Robinson. The first one is we know that he's good. According to Next Gen Stats, Robinson is better than Tyler Algier this season and expected points added per rush, rushing yards over expected per rush and success rate. Robinson's been adding a full yard over expected per carry. Algier has lost.4 yards. Now the second thing, there's contingent upside. If Tyler Algier gets hurt, Robinson would see an uptick in backfield share, even if they would use more Cordero Patterson. The third reason to be optimistic, the Falcons just lost a second straight game to a backup quarterback. That might force some change.

Lastly though, Atlanta's schedule is awesome. According to my Adjusted Fantasy Points Allowed numbers, the Falcons have the second best running back schedule over the next four games. They've got the best one across the rest of the season. And in the fantasy playoffs, that's weeks 15 through 17, they get the Panthers, Colts and Bears. Those teams are all currently top six matchups for running backs and Adjusted Fantasy Points Allowed.