838: 15 Transactions for Week 12

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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, and in this episode, 838 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. This week's schedule is a little bit funky because of Thanksgiving. Today, you're obviously getting the 15 Transactions episode. That's what you're listening to right now. Tomorrow, you'll get two shows. You'll get the 10 Trans episode that's going to drop in the morning, as it usually does, and then I'll get the Sleepers episode out as soon as I can in the afternoon. That way you have everything you need before the games start on Thanksgiving. But there won't be a mailbag episode or a Late-Round Perspectives episode this week. That'll be the case for me in a couple of weeks as well, but we'll get to that when the time comes. For now, let's talk about some Transactions.

Tell Joe Mixon So the Cincinnati Bengals offense without Joe Burrow is obviously going to be a lot worse than an offense with Joe Burrow. And even if the Bengals become more run-heavy without Burrow, Joe Mixon still gets a rest-of-season downgrade. I talked about this last week on the mailbag episode. When it comes to projections, you should take a top-down approach. You start at the team level and then work into the player level. And if the team level looks bad, as it does for Cincinnati or at least looks worse, that's bad for all players on that team.

Now to be clear here, I'm not always an advocate of just selling players when their quarterback gets injured. The market will often overreact to situations like this. I mean, Garrett Wilson, even though he had a bad week 11, he's had a better season than most probably projected when Aaron Rodgers went down.

And I think that's probably the case for someone like Jamar Chase. With Joe Mixon though, there is some concern. He's coming off a big performance. Maybe you could sell high as a result. He's now finished as a top 10 PPR running back in three of his last four games. And that's because he's had a touchdown in all four of those games. That's pretty unlikely to maintain. We should not expect Joe Mixon to score a touchdown every single week, especially without Joe Burrow. But not only that, Cincinnati running backs have a pretty brutal fantasy football playoff schedule. They'll get the Vikings, then the Steelers and the Chiefs in weeks 15, 16 and 17 Minnesota and Kansas City are bottom 10 matchups by just the fantasy points allowed to running backs. And Pittsburgh's about average. And you'd imagine a game against the Steelers that late in the season, a divisional rival, that's probably going to be a lower scoring game. Even if your trade deadline's already passed, it's important to temper expectations with Joe Mixon.

By Nico Collins. So right now, the fantasy football world is rightfully obsessed with Tankdell. Because Tankdell is a monster, he's been a beast. Over his last three games, he's averaged 11.7 targets per game, 106.3 yards, and 25.8 PPR points.

Tankdell is looking like a league-winning player. And that's not a phrase that I use very often. While everyone's obsessed with Tankdell though, don't forget about Nico Collins. After missing Week 10, Collins re-entered the picture in Week 11, and he saw 28.9% target share. He's averaged about a 22% target share per game rate this year. That gives him a nice projection week in and week out in this pass-friendly offense.

Texans wide receivers have a pretty good rest of season scheduled too. According to Adjusted Fantasy Points Allowed, Texans wide outs have the best median opponent during Weeks 15 through 17 And that makes sense because they get the Tennessee Titans twice. Tennessee's the third best opponent for wide receivers within that metric. Now, sandwich between those two games against Tennessee is one against Cleveland. That's not a great matchup. But with everyone focused on Tankdell right now, this could be the time to get Collins a little bit cheaper than he should go for.

Add Isaiah Likely.

Look, no one can replace Mark Andrews one for one. The Ravens are going to do their best to replace him with a variety of their weapons. And that starts with Isaiah Likely. He only had an 8.7% target share against Cincinnati this past week, but his route participation was almost 90%. That's an elite number at tight end. So if Likely keeps running a route at that pace, he's likely, you get it, going to be usable in fantasy football. I'd project him to be a high-end tight end too with Upside week in and week out.