831: 10 Trends for Week 10

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is the Late Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zacharissa.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason, and this is episode 831 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before I get to the 10 Trends this week, I want to send an update about the Tony Pollard information that I talked about yesterday on The 15 Transaction Show. I mentioned that the Cowboys have faced the 5th toughest schedule so far this year for running backs. That was wrong. It's closer to average. Everything else, though, still stands. Pollard's been totally fine in plus matchups. He's still a by candidate. But I wanted to revise that statement because I was looking at the wrong data, so my apologies for that. It's a 10 Trends episode, though. Let's get to it.

We've seen a lot of teams start to regress when it comes to how they score their touchdowns. Minnesota finally has a couple of rushing scores. Tampa Bay, they're finding the endzone more on the ground, too.

One team that's a definite regression candidate in the opposite direction, meaning they've run for way more touchdowns than they should have so far this year, it's Baltimore. The Ravens have 27 offensive touchdowns. 17 of them have come via the ground. 37% of their touchdowns have been rushing ones. Based on their pass rate, that's roughly 17 percentage points lower than expected. Gus Edwards has benefited greatly from this, but I do expect regression.

I had mentioned a few weeks ago in the 15 Transaction Show that the Dallas Cowboys passing attack was a by candidate, specifically CD Lam. So far, so good. Over their last three games where they faced the Chargers, Rams and Eagles, Dak Prescott has ranked as the QB1, QB3 and QB2 in weekly scoring. So far this season, he's averaged 11.1 points per game when facing a team that ranks in the top half of the league in adjusted points allowed to quarterbacks. When facing bottom half opponents, that number jumps up to almost 24

Moving forward, 70% of Dallas' matchups are favorable matchups.

Dak could continue to be a nice fantasy starter for you moving forward.

Things have not been good for Patrick Mahomes in fantasy football. He's currently the QB5 in points per game. He's averaging 19.1 points per contest. He's pacing for his worst fantasy season as a starter by far. He hasn't even taken advantage of good matchups this year. This isn't just a schedule thing. When you adjust Kansas City's performance for strength of opponent, they come in with just the 12th best quarterback numbers in the league. So really, Mahomes' number right now might even be considered inflated, which is crazy to think about. And unfortunately, from now through the end of the year, Kansas City has the second toughest quarterback schedule by Adjusted Fantasy Points Allowed. Now, I called Mahomes a buy low a handful of weeks ago because of a good upcoming schedule. He's completely whiffed. It was an L by me.

I sort of hinted at buying Alexander Mattison on this week's 15 Transaction Show, and I do think that he's an interesting buy when you consider the sentiment around Mattison. As purely a running back, he hasn't been very good this season, but it's really hard to deny their upcoming schedule alongside his usage without Cam Akers this year. Akers started to get run for Minnesota in Week 4 against the Panthers. From Week 1 to Week 3, Alexander Mattison averaged a running back rush share per game of about 85%. His target share per game was 12.5%. That running back rush share with Cam Akers dropped by about 18% points. The target share by roughly 4% points. If Mattison is able to get back to his pre-Akers usage, he's got a chance to surprise a lot of people in fantasy football.

We finally saw a shift in the Indianapolis backfield in Week 9 Jonathan Taylor played a season-high 75% of the team's offensive snaps. He ended up seeing 72% of the team's running back rushes and an amazing 20.8% target share. That's been really great to see from Taylor this season. In three of his last four games, he's hit an 11.5% target share. His target share per game over this time is 14%.

For some perspective, Taylor's never finished a season with a target share per game rate over 10.6%. So he's been used significantly more as a pass catcher this season. And that's huge for his fantasy value.

According to Fantasy Life's utilization report, which again, you can look at this for free over on fantasylife.com. But according to that utilization report, over the Falcons' last two games, Taylor Heinecke has had average depth of targets of 11.7 and 9.4. When looking at every game from Desmond Ritter this season, he surpassed an 8 out of 9.4 zero times. So Heinecke, at the very least, is pushing the ball down the field a little bit more than Desmond Ritter did. That's a good thing for the pass catchers. In this past week, the team's running backs still saw a healthy 23.5% target share. So the volume coming their way hasn't taken that much of a hit.