935: 10 Trends for Week 9

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 935 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Even though you drafted your fantasy teams back in August, you can still do snake drafts right now over on Underdog. Just head to underdogfantasy.com or download the Underdog app. In the draft section, click NFL, and you'll see tons of drafts that you can participate in right now. If you're new to Underdog, make sure you sign up with promo code LATEROUND. That'll get you a nice deposit bonus as well as my rest of season rankings. Those rankings are updated for you each Tuesday once you get the link to them. But to get them, you have to sign up, use promo code LATEROUND, make a deposit, and start playing. Now, let's get to these 10 Trends.

Now, I of course have to start today's show by talking about my guy Tyrone Tracy. Tracy missed the end of their game against the Steelers because of a concussion, but even still, he finished the day with a 91% running back rush share, and he dominated. He had 20 carries for 145 yards on the ground. That 91% running back rush share, that's noteworthy. Because it not only was the highest of his season, but it was in a game where Devon Singletary was active. Tyrone Tracy, when healthy, is the Giants' RB1. Let's hope he can get back on the field sooner rather than later. It's so alarmingly clear that the Browns were running out their worst quarterback when Deshaun Watson was healthy this year. Jameis Winston jumped in this past week, he got the start, and he threw for 334 passing yards. Watson hadn't gotten over 200 passing yards all season. The last time he threw 300 yards, January of 2021 Now, the Ravens have been a team that teams are throwing on. In fact, when you adjust for strength of opponent, Baltimore has given up about 71 more passing yards per game than their opponent's season-long averages. We can't expect Jameis to do what he did in week eight each week, but it's very clear that the move to Winston, it's a plus for everyone on the Browns. No way that outcome would have happened with Deshaun Watson. And I've got more on the Browns later in the show.

Devon Aitchan has been an absolute beast in fantasy football this year when Tua has started. It's a small sample, but he's now scored 23, 29.5, and 26.7 PPR points in Tua's starts this year. He still hasn't dipped below a 13% target share in a completed game all year. He hasn't been nearly as efficient as he was last year, but his receiving usage is making him a really, really strong fantasy asset in PPR formats. The quarterback change is huge for him. The Jets have played three games since their coaching changes. It hasn't gone well for them, but it started out as a huge plus for Breece Hall. In Weeks 6 and 7, Hall had running back rush shares of 86% and 80%. He saw target shares of 18% and 23% in those two games. In Week 8, those numbers dropped to more so what we were seeing right before the coaching changes. Hall had a running back rush share of just 57% against the Patriots. His target share was 12%. His route participation dropped by about 16 percentage points, too. Now, I don't know if there's something deeper going on here. One theory that I have is that they felt good about New England, and they have to turn things around quickly this week because they're playing on Thursday night, so they wanted to save Breece Hall. But, it's something that we have to monitor, because it's basically the difference between Hall being an elite RB1 and a low-end RB1. In that same game as Breece Hall this past week was Ramandre Stevenson. He hadn't seen more than a 56% snap share since week 2 in the Patriots offense. His running back rush share hadn't been higher than 70% since week 1 Well, in week 8, Stevenson had an 80% running back rush share. He played 79% of the team's offensive snaps. Those are basically his best numbers since week 1 Game script and the game being relatively close throughout likely help things here, but overall it's really good news for Ramandre Stevenson.

I like talking about how teams are scoring their touchdowns because it's a place where we can spot team level regression. I talked about this just last week with the Rams and Matthew Stafford, and they went out and they scored four touchdowns in week 8, and all of their touchdowns came through the air. Now that was an over correction, but we couldn't assume that they were going to be running for their touchdowns at such a historic pace. The team that I'm watching now is the Seattle Seahawks. They have 19 touchdowns this season. 11 of those 19 have come on the ground. That's the third lowest ratio in the league. But the difference between them and a team like Washington or a team like Philadelphia, who are also very low, is the fact that Seattle throws the ball more. No team has a higher pass rate over expected than the Seattle Seahawks. Geno Smith right now has a 2.6% touchdown rate. That's by far a low for him since he's been in Seattle. So I'm anticipating things turning around a little bit for the Seattle passing attack. Their touchdowns scored should start skewing more towards the pass.