919: 10 Trends for Week 5

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 919 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure you're checking out what's going on over at Underdog. Fantasy football draft season might be over, but it's not over on Underdog. You can draft teams each week over there based on the slate of games, and those drafts are for all sorts of price points in all different sizes. There's also pick them in champions mode that you can dig into as well. If you want to get in on the action, just head to underdogfantasy.com and go sign up. When you sign up, use promo code LATEROUND. That'll get you a free pick, a nice deposit offer, and you'll also get my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are emailed to you from Underdog after you sign up, and they're updated every Tuesday, and you get those updates. That's underdogfantasy.com, promo code LATEROUND. There's been a lot of chatter about Tyler Algier and his role for the Falcons in Week 4 If you missed it, Bijan Robinson saw fewer than half of Atlanta's running back carries this past weekend, and Tyler Algier looked good getting the work that he got. And Algier is a good player. Don't take this the wrong way. I'm just admittedly growing a little bit tired of the this backup running back is better than his starter takes. We're seeing those fly out there continuously. Not only are we dealing with small sample sizes here, and not only is there more to the running back position than just running the football, but Algier has not seen the same situations that Robinson has. On the season, according to Next Gen stats, Robinson has faced stacked boxes at an 18% rate this year. 18% of his rushes were against stacked boxes. Tyler Algier is at 3.7%. No relevant running back in football has faced stacked boxes at a lower rate than Tyler Algier. That's not everything, of course, but it does give us some context to his numbers. Now, I was going to have Bijan Robinson as a potential buy candidate this week on the 15 Transaction Show, but he popped up on the injury report. I didn't want to force it, but my stance is that Robinson is still one of the best assets in fantasy football. Algiers is a really good backup. He should still be rostered everywhere, but Bijan Robinson is still very, very good. Trey McBride was out this past week, but I do want to call out that Michael Wilson has had some decent target shares over his last two games. In week three, we saw Wilson hit a 26.5% target share against the Lions. In week four, it was 31.8% against Washington. He hasn't been massively productive, but it's something to monitor and take note of.

Speaking of Arizona, Kyler Murray had an unbelievably disappointing outing in week four against Washington. Not only did he not throw the ball as well as we'd hoped for, but he only had one rush attempt. He had five rush attempts in all three of his other contests this season. Murray should see more rush attempts moving forward, but he also unfortunately has the third toughest schedule among fantasy quarterbacks over the next month plus. They get matchups against the 49ers, Packers, Chargers, Dolphins, Bears and Jets. They've got a bottom ten quarterback schedule from here on out, so keep that in mind as you evaluate them. I was high on Jordan Whittington after Cooper Cup went down in week two, and then in week three, he didn't show us a ton of promise, at least from a usage standpoint. Week four though was a totally different story. Whittington ran a route on 97% of LA's drop backs. That was a team high. And he didn't play the slot either. According to PFF, just 29% of his routes were out of the slot. They were rotating their wide receivers all over the field. That resulted in Whittington getting a 30% target share. Meanwhile, Tutu Atwell has been the consistent piece in that offense ever since that Cooper Cup injury. He's seen route participation rates of 83% and 91% over his last two games. His target shares have been over 20% in each contest. So I think Atwell's the safer investment in the short term. But Whittington's not a bad look in deeper formats. You guys know that I like looking at adjusted fantasy points allowed to help with upcoming matchups. But I also like looking at it in hindsight to see the kind of schedule that a player or team has had thus far. One thing that's kind of interesting is that Seattle, despite looking pretty good offensively this year, they face kind of a brutal schedule across the board. They've seen the second toughest one for quarterbacks, the toughest one for running max, and a bottom five schedule for wide receivers. That's after facing Denver, who's been really strong defensively this year, then New England, Miami and Detroit. I think you could argue that this entire unit is kind of a buy. Ryan Grubb has been a really strong addition to this offense. The team is fifth in yards per play and 11th in EPA per play, and that's despite facing some tougher matchups. Calvin Ridley's kind of been disappointing to start the season. He's run around on 85% of Tennessee's drop backs, but he's seen just 17% of the team's targets. He does fortunately rank in the top 15 in an area share across the league. That's good at least. Now, part of the reason for that is schedule. I'll mention it again. When I did my schedule analysis a couple of months ago, I called out Tennessee as having a brutal schedule to start the season, and we've seen that so far. Their quarterbacks by adjusted fantasy points allowed have seen the toughest schedule. Their wide receivers have seen the third toughest schedule. Fortunately, from now through the end of the year, everything flips. Tennessee's wide outs have the second best schedule. Their quarterbacks rank first. That's especially going to hit during the second half of the year. The short term is not amazing, but I'm still expecting better numbers from the offense during the second half of the season. Make sure you're not letting an anchoring bias dictate how you feel about this offense.