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Fantasy Football Outlook: Justice Hill, Gus Edwards, Jaleel McLaughlin, Tyjae Spears

Fantasy Football Outlook: Justice Hill, Gus Edwards, Jaleel McLaughlin, Tyjae Spears

Hello and welcome to the Week 6 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 are all of my takeaways ahead of Week 6. Below we dive into a few notable players.

Fantasy Football Outlook

Running Back Usage

  • There’s a very real chance that Javonte Williams is going to get Wally Pipped while he’s missing time due to injury and that’s because of the impressive performance Jaleel McLaughlin has put on. Over the past two weeks, McLaughlin has been given 16 carries and has rushed for 140 yards (8.75 yards per carry) on top of seven targets with which he’s turned two into touchdowns. Samaje Perine has also been on the field slightly more in Williams’ stead, with snap shares of 46% and a season-high 63% this past week, but that’s resulted in just eight and 11 opportunities in those games, respectively. McLaughlin has still been given just a 34% snap share across those two games, but this level of efficiency and explosiveness (something we have yet to see from Williams) could warrant more playing time in the future.
  • With each passing week, it seems more and more likely that we’re going to get a more even split of the workload in Tennessee. Through five games, Derrick Henry ranks as the RB14 in Half PPR leagues, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any manager who thinks it feels that way. That’s largely due to the fact that Henry has just one game with more than 80 rushing yards this season (he had at least that many in all but four games last season). Henry also only has one game in which his snap share was above 60% and that’s due to the solid usage that rookie Tyjae Spears has seen as he’s been above a 50% snap share in all but one game this season. While Henry still has the rushing workload locked down (he has a 76% running back rush share), Spears is the much bigger threat as a pass-catcher, running a route on 49% of the team’s dropbacks (compared to 33% for Henry). Spears has at least four targets in all but one game this season, giving him a great 0.23 targets per route run rate (7th-highest among qualified running backs). Tennessee is still leaning more run-heavy with a 49.3% neutral-script pass rate, but on a team that lacks pass-catching weapons outside of DeAndre Hopkins, Spears should continue to have a solid role.
  • Since JK Dobbins went down with a season-ending injury, the Baltimore Ravens have had a mixed bag of usage between their running backs. The two primary players in this backfield are Justice Hill and Gus Edwards. There have been two games (Weeks 2 and 5) in which both have played at least 40% of the snaps (Hill left Week 3 early due to a toe injury that also caused him to miss Week 4). Edwards has more total opportunities across those two games, but Hill has had more snaps and, most significantly, more HVTs. In fact, Hill recorded five HVT in both of those games, including seven total receptions. Since 2020, there have only been 12 games among Baltimore running backs in which 5+ HVTs have been recorded, and Hill has two of those games in his last two full games played. So far this season, Edwards has just five HVTs total. For one of the more HVT-stingy teams in recent memory, that is massive.

-Sam Hoppen

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