904: Week 1 Sleepers

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is The Late-Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zachariason.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 904 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. On this Sleepers episode every week, I look at players who might be on your waiver wire and who you might be able to start if you're in a pinch. That's really all there is to it. I set parameters at players rostered in 10 to 50% of leagues as the normal Sleepers. And then there's deep Sleepers. Those are guys who are rostered in fewer than 10% of Yahoo! Leagues. Naturally, the hit rates on this show, they're not going to be incredible. I'm dealing with players that people don't want on their rosters. But there's been some success in the past, and at the very least, you can sometimes get ahead with some players before their usage and production goes up. Hopefully, in week one, though, you don't have to dig this deep. Oh, and also keep in mind that if a player is mentioned on this show this season, it doesn't mean that you've got to start them no matter what. If you're curious where I land on these players, you can check out my weekly rankings and tiers over on the Late-Round Fantasy Football Patreon. You can access that by just heading to lateround.com. Before getting to the Sleepers this week, there's yet another underdog offer that I want you guys to know about. On Thursday, September 5th, all underdog customers get a 30% profit boost token to use on any entry. You can apply your Thursday 30 token to any qualifying entry to boost your profit by 30%. If you're not signed up on underdog Fantasy, get on it. New users can use promo code LATEROUND and get a nice deposit offer, along with a free copy of the Late-Round Draft guide. Just go to underdogfantasy.com, sign up, and use promo code LATEROUND when you sign up. Once you make a deposit, the draft guide will be sent to your inbox. Again, that's promo code LATEROUND. Now, let's get to these week one sleepers.

Now, as I said, this first group of players consists of guys rostered in 10 to 50% of Yahoo leagues at the time of this recording. Let's kick things off at quarterback, and let's go to my favorite streamer this week, Baker Mayfield. The Buccaneers face a commander's defense that was absolutely brutal against the pass last year. They allowed the most fantasy points to quarterbacks. And while that type of data isn't going to have amazing year over year correlation, Washington does rank third worst in PFF's preseason secondary rankings. Mayfield and the Bucs have the 12th best implied team total on this week's slate, and I'm intrigued by the amount of plays that they may end up running because Cliff Kingsbury is on the other side of the field. He's their opponent, and he likes to push the pace of play. So Baker makes plenty of sense. The other quarterback stream that I've got for you is Geno Smith. Seattle's now got Ryan Grubb running their offense. I'm expecting them to run a little bit more up tempo and more importantly, throw the ball down the field. Two years ago when Geno Smith had his really solid season, he had 14 touchdowns on 15-plus area yard throws. That fell to just four last year. They need to push it down the field. They get Denver and they have a top 10 team total on the week. The Broncos have some talent in the secondary. Obviously, Patrick Sertanz there, but there's a chance that it's beatable outside of him. The high team total and the new offense should keep you interested in Geno Smith. Moving on to running back in this tier, let's stay in that same game and let's go to Jaleel McLaughlin. Generally speaking, when we're talking about running backs in the waiver wire, there usually aren't many of them who are obviously usable. Otherwise, they'd be rostered, because running backs are in very high demand in fantasy football. We just have to lean on volume regardless of matchup. Well, not only is the matchup fine, but McLaughlin should see plenty of work this season in general. It's crazy that he's out there in over 60% of Yahoo! Leagues. As I talked about in the 50 Transaction Show, Sean Payton's offenses love using running backs out of the backfield as receivers. And this could end up being more of a negative game script for Denver. That's going to force a higher pass rate. Now McLaughlin doesn't need a ton of touches to be fantasy relevant based on what we saw last year. He was most efficient running back on the Broncos. He was one of the most efficient running backs in the entire NFL. I won't reiterate what was said in the 15 Transaction Show, but he should be rostered in way more leagues. But both Williams and McLaughlin should have a nice floor in PPR formats. I'd expect double-digit touches from McLaughlin, which is enough to call him out here. JK Dobbins is currently healthy, currently. And that's enough for me to say that he's a sleeper this week. A healthy JK Dobbins, in my opinion, is a better player than Gus Edwards. The fantasy community is understandably leaning Edwards' way, but Dobbins has more pass-catching upside than Edwards does. Gus Edwards, the most targets he's seen this single season throughout his career is 13 He's been in the league since 2018 He has 37 total targets. Now, Kamani Vidal has season-long upside, especially given how fragile the running backs can be in front of him. But early on in the season, I'm not going to be surprised if Dobbins gets more work than anticipated. And this could be a favorable game script for the Chargers this week because they get the raiders. And that makes Dobbins an enticing flex option. I've talked up Ray Davis during the summer, and I'm interested to see how much work he gets here in week one against the Cardinals. Because the Bills are relatively decent favorites against Arizona. And if this game script does go favorably, at least for Buffalo, we may end up seeing a lot of Ray Davis. Not only do I think Davis could end up being the Bills' goal line back this year, remember, James Cook had only five goal line rushes last year. But don't forget that when Joe Brady took over as offensive coordinator last year for Buffalo, he really shifted their offensive philosophy. They were below average in drop backs over expected during their final six regular season games. That's going to favor the grinder in this backfield, which is Ray Davis. So the script, the philosophy, those are both reasons to be interested in Davis this week. Now, the last running back call out this week, it's a lot riskier in my eyes than the other dudes that I just talked about, but it's Antonio Gibson. We don't know exactly how this New England backfield is going to be deployed. Like, is Antonio Gibson going to be there hurry up running back? That's important, because if he is that player, there's some appeal in week one, because New England is the biggest underdog on this slate. If that game script goes south for them, maybe we see more Gibson giving his pass catching ability. Like I said earlier this week, he's never had a season with a target share per game rate below 9.5%.