943: 10 Trends for Week 11

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason in this episode 943 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Before we get into the trends this week, I want to remind you 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 of drafts that you can participate in right now. And if you're new to Underdog, make sure to 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 every 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.

So, Shane Waldron was fired by Chicago this week, and it's easy to see why. The Bears haven't thrown a touchdown pass since week six when they faced Jacksonville. Only the Dolphins, who have played a backup quarterback for half the season, have fewer passing touchdowns. The average total offensive touchdowns this season through week 10 is 22.2, meaning the average team has about 22 offensive touchdowns. Chicago with all of their talent is at 18 Now, Thomas Brown is now serving as offensive coordinator. And this tweet from my friend, Connor Allen, says a lot. It says, Thomas Brown takes over as Bear's offensive coordinator with Waldron fired. The good, worked under Sean McVeigh and the Rams for 3 years. The bad, Brown was the play caller for the Panthers periodically last season, including the final 6 games. In that span, number 1, they scored 9 or fewer points in 4 of their last 6 games. Number 2, they were 29th in EPA per play. Number 3, they were 28th in success rate. And number 4, they were 32nd in pass rate over expectation. Things are about to get very, very interesting in Chicago.

I did my rest of season rankings update this week, and the player that I'm highest on versus the market is Joann Jennings. I have him like 18 wide receiver spots above consensus. And it's because he's been really freaking good this year. Jennings has now played one game without Debo Samuel this season, and one game without Brandon Iuke. In that game without Debo, he saw 40% target share, and he casually scored almost 47 PPR points. This past week without Iuke, he saw 32% target share, and he scored 16 PPR points. He got 7 of 11 targets for 93 yards. Among players with 30 targets this year, here are the leaders in yards per route run. This is according to PFF. AJ Brown is number one. Nico Collins is number two. Justin Jefferson is number three. Jawan Jennings is number four. And here's the other crazy thing about Jennings. In week 10, he ran 72% of his routes from out wide. He was more 50-50 with his slot in wide usage from week one to week nine. He's lining up everywhere, and he's been insanely efficient per route run. He was a 15 transactions buy last week, and I still think he's a buy. Another player my ranking is like more than consensus is Chase Brown. He's now seen 100% of since 90s running back rushes in back-to-back games. Just to show you how crazy that usage is, we've only had 10 games this season where a running back saw every single running back rush. The only player on that list more than once, other than Chase Brown is Jonathan Taylor. Brown's also coming off a game against Baltimore where he saw 20% target share. That's a season high. He's seen his two highest target shares of the season over the last two weeks without Zach Moss. And the reason for that is because they're letting him run more routes. He had a 63% and 75% route share over his last two. Again, those are the two highest of his season. This Zach Moss injury has allowed Chase Brown to be a bell cow. It may not keep up at quite this pace as Khalil Herbert learns the offense, but Brown is looking really good rest of season. The Eagles are currently last in targets per game. Those are the number of targets that wide receivers, tight ends and running backs see each game. They're under 25 Now, that's not the lowest that we've seen since 2011, but it's actually close to it. During that time frame, since 2011, only 4 teams have finished the season with fewer than 25 targets per game. So why is this happening? Well, the Eagles have the lowest pass rate in football, and it's a bottom 10 one in neutral game script environments. The Eagles had about 31 and 30 targets per game over their last two seasons, so they're seeing 6 or 7 fewer targets per game here in 2024 That hasn't impacted AJ Brown as much because his target shares have been so elite, but it's definitely hurt a player like Devontae Smith, which is really unfortunate. Now, I do expect things to regress a little bit rest of season, but it's something at the team level to understand and think about. The splits for Travis Kelce without Rashid Rice have just been insane. With Rice this season, his target share per game rate was just 14.3 percent. Those are in games where Rice played a significant number of snaps. Without Rice, Kelce has averaged a target share per game rate of almost 31 percent. During his three weeks now since they traded for Deandre Hopkins, he scored 25, 22, and 20 PPR points. Since Rice's injury, Kelce has had just one outing out of six games where he ranked outside the top five of the position. So yeah, he's trending towards the tight end one once again.