839: 10 Trends 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 in this episode 839 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting into the trends this week, I want to send another reminder about The Late-Round Fantasy Football Patreon. I know the season is getting closer to the finish line, but the Patreon has an awesome Discord community, there's rest of season rankings and tiers, weekly rankings and tiers, and more. And if you just want something like playoff schedule rankings by team and by position, you can join the $5 a month tier to get the weekly data dump. That information is in there. And that can be a month-to-month thing. So check it all out by heading to thelateround.com.

From weeks one to eight, Josh Jacobs was averaging a target share per game of 17.4% over his last three, which are three with Antonio Pierce's head coach. That target share per game has fallen to 3.5%. That's a super significant change. Now, is this noise? Well, there was also a quarterback change when Pierce took over. It wasn't just the coaching change. Aiden O'Connell has started those three games. Jacobs did see a really healthy target share earlier in the season when O'Connell got that start against the Chargers, but there's definitely some fear here that this is a quarterback tendency thing. Now, the good news is that Jacobs is running a very similar number of routes. As a result, I do expect to see better target share numbers moving forward. But because there are a couple of factors at play here, the coaching change, the quarterback change, we have to downgrade Jacobs at least a little bit compared to his workload to start the season.

Travis ETN has now averaged 7.7 PPR points per game over his last two. During his four games prior to this two-game stretch, he was averaging 27.1 PPR points per game. This is obviously a small sample size thing, but I also think it speaks to something I talked to Ben Gretch about on last week's Perspectives episode. According to PFF's Expected Fantasy Points model, ETN actually ranks 12th this season in expected points per game. He's outperformed that mark by 2.5 points per contest. He's definitely playing above expectation.

Now, I'm not overly concerned about ETN moving forward, just to be clear. His route participation has dropped a little bit over the last couple of weeks, and they've used Diernes Johnson a little bit more, but they've also had some really weird game scripts. To me, he's still a strong RB1 rest of season.

When you watch the Vikings, if you saw them in week 11, it was evident that Ty Chandler has more burst than Alexander Maddison, and that showed up statistically too. Maddison had a 33% success rate against the Broncos, Ty Chandler 70%. Maddison played 64% of Minnesota snaps while Chandler was at 30%. That's a problem. And even though Chandler had more targets, Maddison ran 19 routes against the Broncos, Chandler only had 5 routes run.

Maddison was used a lot more than Ty Chandler, but Ty Chandler definitely looked better.

This is a classic case where you should just be rostering who you think the more talented running back is. In my opinion, I think Ty Chandler still presents a little bit more upside. I think that he's the better back per touch. But Maddison's still fine to have rostered. Let's be honest. If they give him a lot of work, they have a favorable schedule, he can still be usable in fantasy football.

The biggest thing about Justin Fields return this past week was the fact that he ran the ball 18 freaking times. That's the most that any quarterback has run in a single game this season, and it's the most that we've seen from a quarterback since Justin Fields hit 18 rush attempts last November. Now, 14 of those 18 rushes, according to PFF, were designed runs. If the Bears are going to use him that way rest of season, he's going to be a locked in QB1. And keep in mind that Chicago has a pretty favorable rest of season schedule according to Adjusted Fantasy Points allowed.

Dawson Knox has now been out for four games. In those four games, Dalton Kincaid has ranked no worse than tight end seven in weekly PPR scoring. He's averaged a 25% target share per game rate. He's averaged over 15 PPR points per game. He's actually been a tight end seven or better in five straight games. I'm just pointing out the games without Knox. Now Dawson Knox is not ready to return yet, but even when he's ready, I have a hard time believing that the Bills are just going to revert back to what they were doing before Knox's injury.