915: 10 Trends for Week 4

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 915 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog Fantasy. Thanks for tuning in. Before we get into the trends this week, I want to remind you to check out Underdog Fantasy. Underdog is just a great place to play fantasy sports. There are so many different offerings that will definitely fit what you're looking for. Right now, if you sign up on Underdog, you'll get a nice deposit offer, a free pick that will help you win some cash, and then also my rest of season rankings. Those rest of season rankings are updated every Tuesday through the end of the season. You get access to all of those updates. Make sure you take advantage of those offers by heading to underdogfantasy.com and signing up. When you do, use promo code LATEROUND. That's promo code LATEROUND. It feels like we have to start this week with Mark Andrews. He didn't do anything in week 3 And by didn't do anything, I mean that he saw one target and he did not catch that target. He ran a route on just 35% of Lamar Jackson's drop-backs. In weeks 1 and 2, as we know, that route participation was down about 10 percentage points year over year. That was a bad sign, but it wasn't a death sentence. Going to a 35% route participation is absurd. Like that's really, really bad. The only time that Andrews has been that low, basically across his entire career, has been when he's been hurt. Now John Harbaugh came out and basically said that things will change week by week with this offense. And we can sit here and say, oh, we saw all this coming because of his week 1 usage. But what we saw in week 3 was legitimately nothing like week 1 I would take week 1 usage for Mark Andrews over week 3 usage all day long. You have to at least wonder if there's more going on with Mark Andrews. Whether it's the tightrope surgery and recovery, or the car accident stuff that happened in August. What we do know is that the only reason he's in our starting lineup is because the rest of the tight end position is absolute trash too. A topic that was brought up on the show recently had to do with Terry McLaurin in this commander's offense. I mentioned on last week's Mailbag episode how McLaurin's big problem was he just wasn't connecting on his downfield throws, or I guess his downfield targets. He had four of them and had traveled 10 or more yards. That was good for 100 intended air yards. He caught just one of them through two games for 12 yards. His average at the target had been lower year over year by about three yards. But in week three, the commanders opened things up more. Jaden Daniels had an average at the target of 9.7 by far a season high. And Terry McLaurin finally converted. It's no coincidence. McLaurin's peripherals were actually pretty wild in week three. He saw an average at the target of almost 26 yards, but he also still had a 26% target share. It could be the turning point that we needed to see for McLaurin and this offense. And by the way, Jaden Daniels, super legit.

Rashid Rice is a good football player. We can all see that. My year two model saw that. But we can recognize that while also recognizing that this situation has become a perfect storm for him as a player. Patrick Mahomes currently ranks second to last in 20 plus area yard rate. He's dead last in his percentage of attempts that travel 15 or more area yards. That's among relevant starters across the league. That helps out a guy like Rashid Rice. He's been a lower A-dot, higher yards after the catch player in the NFL thus far. Rice is a 5.2 A-dot this year. That ranks 83rd out of 89 wide receivers who have run 50 or more routes. He played that role last year too. And it's a great role for fantasy purposes. Rice is an easy top 10 wide receiver for me rest of season. But how we're getting to these numbers, strongly due to too high safety looks, it's pretty interesting given how Patrick Mahomes started his career. I always talk about team pass to rush touchdown ratio on this show as the season goes on. Because it's an easy way to spot regression. Team pass to rush touchdown ratio, it's just team passing touchdowns versus team rushing touchdowns. The percentage of team touchdowns that came via the pass. Right now, Denver is lowest in the league with a 0% passing touchdown rate because they haven't thrown a touchdown yet. And then Minnesota, who's historically been a little bit higher under this metric with Kevin O'Connell, they're first at an 89% rate. That's reflected in Sam Darnold's touchdown rate, which is above 10%. Expect those teams to meet more in the middle, to regress as the season moves on. One player I didn't talk about in the 15 Transactions episode this week was Emanuel Wilson. He got more run in week three, partially due to game script, partially due to offensive environment, and partially to give Josh jacobs a little bit of a rest. Wilson hit a 41% running back rush share and a 10.5% target share though. And even though he's not a household name, he's kind of looked the part. according to Next Gen Stats, Wilson's rushing yards over expected per rush is just 0.2 yards away from Josh jacobs' number. They're both in the top 20 in the league, by the way. Wilson has an absurd 57% success rate. Josh jacobs is at 32%. Now, I'm not saying that he's better than jacobs because he's not. But he might be a better handcuff than people realize with Marshawn Lloyd sidelined. The Anthony Richardson experience has not been fun and it's for two reasons. First, he's just not throwing the ball well. Richardson is currently last in the league in completion percentage over expected. That's not surprising to anyone who's watched him this year. He's missed some really, really easy throws. He'll make some crazy ones, but he's been wildly inaccurate. Now, that would be fine if the rushing production was there, at least from a fantasy perspective, but it hasn't been there. Richardson only has six scrambles on the season according to PFF. For reference, Jaden Daniels has 17, Lamar Jackson has 12, Josh Allen has 10 All the while, Richardson has 18 rush attempts. That's 20 fewer than Jaden Daniels and it's 17 fewer than Lamar Jackson. My friend Rich Rebar at Lord Reeves on Twitter, he tweeted, Richardson's 7.3% scramble rate when pressured is 28th in the NFL since last season. He has a lower scramble rate per pressure to start this year than Aaron Rodgers and Jared Goff. The Colts need to unleash Anthony Richardson more. And until that happens, we're going to see a roller coaster of results. Now, speaking of the Colts, Josh Downs returned to that lineup in week three. And it was bad news for AD. Mitchell. Downs is their primary slot guy. Michael Pittman, he's their strong perimeter receiver. So the final receiver spot opposite of Pittman comes down to Alec Pearce and AD. Mitchell. And in week three, it was Alec Pearce who won out. Pearce saw a season-low 11% target share, but he did run 20 routes. That's the same as Michael Pittman. Josh Downs was at 16 Ashton Doolin was at three. And AD. Mitchell was at two. Now that's subject to change each week, but so far, that's bad news for Mitchell. I had JK. Dobbins as a cell in The 15 Transactions Show last week, noting that you should only trade him away if you were seeing a big profit on the return. Because the way he was playing versus Gus Edwards, it was obvious who the better running back is. When that's the case, there's always room for more volume. Now the fear with Dobbins was that the Chargers just don't want to give him a massive workload for obvious reasons. He hasn't been able to stay healthy throughout his career. But Week 3 was a really good one for him, even if the production didn't match. Dobbins saw an uptick of about 40 percentage points in running back rush share week over week. He had an 83% share. His target share was 15.8%, which is awesome. Now the Chargers didn't run the ball quite as much as they did in Week 2 against Carolina. So that huge running back rush share still resulted in just 15 rushes. But it's a really good sign. If you were able to profit big on Dobbins last week, that's totally fine. You shouldn't feel upset about that. Hopefully you were able to upgrade into one of the top 10 backs. I don't think Dobbins is quite there yet, though my rest of season rankings do like him more than the consensus. But he's now more of a hold or a buy given the Week 3 usage. Ignore the production. You have to look at the peripherals.