835: 10 Trends for Week 11

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason, and this is episode 835 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in.

I'm not sure if I've said it on the podcast before, but Late-Round Fantasy Football is on YouTube. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel by heading to youtube.com/ at Late-Round FF. I'll be doing more and more video content as Late-Round Fantasy Football grows, so make sure that you're subscribed now so you don't miss it. That's youtube.com/ at Late-Round FF. It's a 10 Trends episode. Let's get to it.

Now, I know everyone's sick and tired of Tony Pollard. I get it. You heard me say to draft him this year, and you even heard me say to buy him last week, and he didn't come through. I'm totally fine with taking the Pollard-L this year. I'm not going to get everything right. But I'm not sure people realize just how bizarre his season has been.

Pro Football Focus is a great expected fantasy points model. It looks at how many points we'd expect a player to have based on his workload. And Tony Pollard right now ranks as the RB7 and expected points per game this year.

Pollard's playing 4.5 fantasy points per game below expectation. He has 2 touchdowns when based on his usage, he should have closer to 9

Just sit back for a second and imagine a world where we split the difference with just his touchdowns. That instead of 2 touchdowns, maybe he has 6 So he scored 4 more times than he currently has scored. Remember, his expected touchdown total is 9, so he should have 7 more touchdowns, not 4 more touchdowns. That's 24 more points across the season. That would get him to 15.2 PPR points per game. That would be a low-end RB1 in fantasy football. When people talk about Pollard being this horrible fantasy asset, I get it, I really do. The current result shows that Tony Pollard was a bad pick. But I just don't think enough context is being given to this situation. He's playing way, way below expectation right now. And even if we assume that he doesn't play at expectation, even if we assume that he's just a little bit below expectation, all of a sudden, the narrative shifts completely.

Now I do think that Pollard is playing worse than last year. Numbers show that as well. He's not breaking tackles at the same rate. And maybe that makes Dallas not want to use him that much down the stretch.

That's a reason to add Rico Dowdle this week. But because of this schedule upcoming, and because of this regression-related information, I still believe that Tony Pollard is a buy low, with obvious risk. And now you can probably buy him very low.

We saw a shift in the Lions' backfield in Week 10 We had both David Montgomery and Jameer Gibbs playing, and Gibbs ended up seeing 54% of the team's running back rushes to go along with a 15.6% target share.

Montgomery, on the other hand, his running back rush share was 46%, and he didn't see a single target. Now, as my friend Hayden Winx pointed out this week on Twitter, the Lions essentially rotated drives between Montgomery and Gibbs. Gibbs had higher playing time because Montgomery had that huge 75-yard touchdown. So one of his drives was that big play.

Even still, I like Gibbs more than Montgomery straight up rest of season, because I see him with more receiving upside. And if you can still see some goal line work, as he did in Week 10, that's huge. But both players are more than viable, and don't forget there's contingent upside with both of these guys because the other player can get hurt.

Guess what, guys? Marvin Mimms finally played a good number of snaps for the Broncos. He ran a route on 73% of Denver's drop backs on Monday night, which was by far a season high. Unfortunately, he had just a 3.4% target here. He only saw one target. This is obviously a good sign for him, though. He can still be a viable stash. If Judy or Sutton go down, he'll be a full-time player. And I'm still a believer in Mimms as a talent. He looked pretty good in my prospect model.

Guess what else? The Falcons used Bijon Robinson more in Week 10 He saw 65% of Atlanta's running back rushes. That was a little short of a season high. He saw an 11% target share. That's what we've come to expect with Bijon Robinson. The receiving work was never in question. He's seeing a double-digit percentage target share each and every week, basically.

Most importantly, though, Robinson saw the lone goal line rush in that offense this week, and he scored on it from the five. He saw two rushes from within the 10 No other Falcons player had a rush within the 10 If he maintains this kind of workload, he can easily be an RB1 in fantasy football coming out of their buy.