939: 10 Trends for Week 10

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 939 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Before getting to the trends this week, I want to send another reminder that 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 and 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 that link to them. But to get them, you have to sign up, use promo code LATEROUND, make a deposit, and start playing.

So, over Cedric Tillman's last three games, his yards per route run rate has been 1.80. That's according to PFF. That's a strong number. It's not elite, but it's strong. And to be clear, this is the split without Amari Cooper. Tillman had a historically bad yards per route run rate as a rookie. It was.63. The rookie wide receiver since 2011 to be under that.7 yards per route run mark were Xavier Gibson, JJ Arthega Whiteside, Andre Patton, James Washington and Zay Jones. That's among wide outs with at least 300 routes run as rookies. Now, if you open that up to rookies with rates below one, so a 1 yards per route run rate, you get more players. There are 16 of them, including Tillman. There's only one big hit, and it was Devonte Adams. But I was curious how many of those players had a high yards per route run rate during year two. Well, a handful of those 16 were from 2023 They don't have next season data. But the only player from that group who had good yards per route run numbers in year two, after being kind of miserable in year one, was James Washington. But even Washington didn't see the uptick that Cedric Tillman has seen from year one to year two, if we assume that he finishes the year with a 1.8 yards per route run rate. Now, make no mistake, I don't think yards per route run is a flawless metric. It's predictive, but there are flaws, including the lack of context of quarterback play, which does matter here. The main point that I want to drive home is that Tillman is pacing without Amari Cooper to do something relatively historic from an efficiency standpoint. I think that he's looked good. He's passed the eye test. But it's going to be interesting to see if this trend keeps up.

There's something to monitor with the Tampa Bay backfield. We've kind of seen this annoying split over the last few weeks ever since Sean Tucker had that big breakout against the Saints. For what it's worth though, against Kansas City, Tucker had a 23% running back rush share. That's his highest since that Saints game. Rachaad White played a solid 62% of the team's snaps, but his running back rush share was the exact same at 23%. He's seen that number fall in three consecutive weeks. White does appear to be the primary pass catching back. Tucker isn't running a ton of routes, and then Bucky Irving is just kind of in the middle. But don't let White's double digit PPR performance totally fool you. His backfield share was not super strong in week nine. Now, in that same game was DeAndre Hopkins, and I have to say, I'm bullish. I'm higher than the market with Hopkins right now. Hopkins had a 21.4% target share against the Bucks. He scored 29 PPR points. That was on a 69% route share, meaning his targets per route run was 26%, which is a very strong number coming from Patrick Mahomes. Now, for context, Rashid Rice was at a 32% targets per route run rate, and he was number one in that offense for the off season and didn't just join the team in the number two, a top five wide receiver in fantasy football. Now, the difference between Hopkins and Rice is alignment, and obviously age and all these other factors, but alignment is one of the big keys. Hopkins has lined up in the slot on 27% of his routes run for Kansas City. Rashid Rice was over 50% this year. This is why we're able to see Kelsey and Hopkins kind of work in unison, not cannibalize each other's workloads. Kelsey said target shares of 34% and 38% over his last two games. Those are his two highest of the season. Altogether, this DeAndre Hopkins trade was great for fantasy football. Taysom Hill saw his best usage of the season in week nine. He ran around on 47% of the Saints drop backs, which was a season high. He had an 18% target share, which was also a season high. And he carried the ball five times in that game against Carolina too. With all the injuries in New Orleans and all the issues that they've been having, I think we're in a spot right now where Hill at least has consideration every single week for your starting lineups.