Hello and welcome to the Week 4 edition of Hoppen to Conclusions! This is where I, Sam Hoppen, will share some of my favorite charts, which are designed to give you an overview of the NFL landscape. These charts, along with the commentary that I provide, aim to help you make start or sit, DFS lineup construction, betting picks, or any other fantasy football decisions. There can be a lot of noise in fantasy football analysis, but these charts have been carefully selected to give you some of the most relevant and useful decision points. Here is the full article for Week 4. Below we’ll dive into a few players.
- Waiver Wire Advice
- Weekly Fantasy Football Expert Rankings
- Fantasy Football Start/Sit Advice
- Fantasy Football Trade Tools
Fantasy Football Trends & Takeaways
Wide Receiver Usage
- It’s been a roller-coaster of emotions for those with Tee Higgins on their roster. In Week 1, Higgins was targeted eight times for 151 air yards, but didn’t catch a single ball. He then followed that up with eight catches for 89 yards and two touchdowns, only to come falling back down to earth in Week 3 with two catches for 21 yards despite another eight targets. For the season as a whole, Higgins still has an extremely solid workload profile: 0.67 WOPR (15th among wide receivers), 94% routes run rate (18th), and 0.24 targets per route run (32nd). That’s resulted in just 28 half-PPR fantasy points, most of which have come in his Week 2 performance. I don’t think Joe Burrow’s injury is to blame as Higgins’ targets are coming on routes when he has very little separation – his average of two yards of separation on targets is fourth-lowest among qualifying receivers, according to Next Gen Stats. For now, you’re just going to have to live with the highs and lows while shifting expectations that Higgins may not have the same consistency as he once had.
- Action: hold Tee Higgins
- When the Seattle Seahawks drafted Jaxon Smith-Njigba with the 20th overall pick as the first wide receiver off the board, many expected him to step into a starting role immediately. While that’s happened in some respects, he certainly hasn’t taken over Tyler Lockett (running a route on a team-high 90% of dropbacks), the man whom he was presumed to replace. Smith-Njigba has run a route on 63.4% of dropbacks (third on the team behind Lockett and DK Metcalf) and is clearly in when the Seahawks use 11 personnel. But, the issue is that he hasn’t been able to break into 2WR sets, and Seattle is using 11 personnel at just a 56.6% clip. The other glaring concern is his 2.7-yard average depth of target, which is dead last among 88 wide receivers with at least 10 targets this season. Both Lockett and Metcalf sit above a 10-yard average depth of target, so Smith-Njigba is being used in a very specific role for the team, making it more unlikely he breaks into a different role without an injury. Rookie wide receivers notoriously take some time to develop in their first season and typically don’t break out until the second half of the season, but when you see fellow rookies like Jordan Addison and Zay Flowers having success early on, it’s hard to be patient. So, if you’re in need of immediate production or are in a shallower league, I don’t have any issue dropping JSN, especially with a Week 5 bye upcoming, but I’m not going out of my way to pay up for a rookie with this current production profile.
- Action: don’t buy Jaxon Smith-Njigba
- It’s high time I give some attention to the Arizona Cardinals because they’ve been much friskier than even I thought they would be heading into the season. Joshua Dobbs hasn’t played out of his mind, but for someone who was traded for in August, he has been serviceable enough to not completely tank the offensive production. As this is the wide receiver section, let’s start with Marquise Brown, who inherited the WR1 role after DeAndre Hopkins was released this offseason. Brown is currently commanding a team-high 42% air yards share and 27.5% target share while running a route on nearly every dropback. He hasn’t been particularly efficient at 1.66 yards per route run, but his two touchdowns put him at WR26 on the year. Next in line is rookie receiver Michael Wilson, who is Arizona’s deep threat with a 17.2-yard average depth of target, but he has only been targeted nine times this season. Finally, we have Rondale Moore, who Drew Petzing is using more creatively than Kliff Kingsbury ever did. Moore is only averaging 4.3 touches per game, so his floor is as low as any, but I’m certainly keeping an eye on how this usage plays out over the next several weeks. All this to say, I think Brown holds some solid weekly WR3 value with a bit of upside while Wilson and Moore should be bench stashes in case Arizona starts passing more or there’s an injury.
- Action: hold Marquise Brown, add Michael Wilson and Rondale Moore in deeper leagues
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