951: 10 Trends for Week 13

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 951 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. Underdog is a great place to play fantasy sports this Thanksgiving. Right now in the lobby, you can check out The Turkey. It's a $5 entry with $200,000 in prizes. It's all centered around one of the best slates of the year, the Thanksgiving Slate. You can check that out and more by heading to underdogfantasy.com or downloading the app. If you've never played there, make sure you sign up with promo code LATEROUND. That'll get you a nice deposit offer, as well as my rest of season rankings, which I'm still updating every Tuesday. That's underdogfantasy.com promo code LATEROUND. Now let's get to these trends.

Trend one this week is about the Tampa Bay backfield. Bucky Irving, for the first time this season, out snapped Rashad White against the Giants. He ran 20 routes to White's 11 His running back rush share wasn't anything to write home about at just 43%. It's actually his lowest in five weeks. But it was good seeing the Buccaneers use him more as a receiver. He had a 20% target share. Now, I don't think this means the Buccaneers will use Irving if they face a negative game script. That's probably Rashad White's role still. But as I've been saying on the show, the Bucs have a pretty cakewalk schedule rest of season. They're going to face a lot of positive game scripts. And once again, that's going to benefit Bucky Irving. We're going to want to watch Tyrone Tracy's usage as we enter Week 13 He had another fumble, and that was likely the key reason that we saw him hit just a 41% snapshot against the Buccaneers. That was his lowest mark since Week 4 He did hit a double digit percentage target share for the first time in a month. That was thanks to a final drive during garbage time. But that snap share, it needs to rise in order for Tracy to hit the ceiling that we know that he can hit down the stretch.

So Jonathan Brooks made his debut for the Panthers on Sunday, and he played a grand total of five snaps. Now, what's hilarious about that usage is that obviously it means that Chuba Hubbard played a lot, and he did. Chuba had a solid 89% running back rush share and a 15% target share, and his snap share was 88%. That was his second highest snap share of the season. So the game that Jonathan Brooks is finally healthy for, the Panthers give Chuba Hubbard his second highest snap share of the season. Go figure. I think we can keep treating Hubbard as a must start until we see things change. I don't think we're going to see this big of a disparity moving forward, but at this point, considering how they've been so slow with Brooks' injury, you have to assume that Chuba is easily their top back rest of season. I had Jacoby Meyers as a buy on the 15 Trends action show a couple of weeks ago, but I noted that his immediate schedule was tough. But the late season schedule was absolutely there, and most importantly, his usage had been good without Devonte Adams. Well, I never expected him to see a 33% target share and score 22 PPR points against the Denver Broncos. Results over process, right? Meyers though has been getting great usage. Since Devonte Adams left town, Meyers has averaged a target share per game rate of 29%. He scored almost 15 PPR points per game. And don't forget, in the fantasy playoffs, the Raiders get the Falcons, Jags, and Saints. He should be able to produce when it matters most for you, regardless of who's under center. Trey McBride's lack of touchdowns is absolutely wild. Tight ends this season have averaged a touchdown on every 22 targets. Trey McBride hasn't scored a receiving touchdown this year. He has 80 targets. And McBride's obviously better than just the ordinary tight end. According to PFF's expected touchdowns formula, McBride has played three and a half touchdowns below expectation this year. Right now, when looking at PPR points per game, McBride's in third with 14.2. Had he scored three touchdowns, I'm not even rounding up here with his expected touchdowns. Had he scored three touchdowns, his average would be 16.3 fantasy points per game. He'd be having an elite season at tight end. Let's hope regression hits down the stretch.

I saw an interesting tweet from friend of the show Josh Norris of Underdog where he noted that DJ Moore's A-dot has been 1.9 yards since the coordinator shift in Chicago. Moore does indeed have a 1.9 average at the target over his last two. Week 11 it was.9, week 12 2.9. From weeks 1 to 10, Moore had an A-dot of 9.4. They're clearly trying to get the ball in his hands because he's a playmaker. And those lower A-dots have led to 100% catch rates in back-to-back weeks. He's caught all 14 of his targets. Now he'll likely need to break one in order to hit a really high ceiling at this rate. But this new deployment is definitely going to raise his floor in PPR formats. We've already seen that happen. He scored 14 and 27 PPR points over his last two. Before that, he had four straight games where he didn't even hit eight PPR points.