Fantasy Football Outlook: Michael Pittman, Miles Sanders, Josh Downs (Week 6)

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

Team Pass Rates

After two weeks with a positive PROE to start the season, the Colts have leaned extremely run-heavy with a -11.6% PROE and 55.5% neutral-script pass rate since then. The Colts will now be without rookie quarterback Anthony Richardson for “some time” (whatever that means), leaving Gardner Minshew to command the offense. With Minshew, Indianapolis has had a -7.6% PROE (compared to -5.5% with Richardson), meaning the target volume will be hard to come by. Fortunately, Indianapolis has had a fairly condensed target tree among its top two receivers, Michael Pittman and Josh Downs. This season, Pittman and Downs have a combined 50% target share for the Colts (29% and 21%, respectively), while no other Colts player has more than a 14% target share. They’re also both consistently running a route on more than 80% of the team’s dropbacks. While Alec Pierce is also getting his fair share of route running in, they just have him mainly running wind sprints as he’s earned just 16 total targets this season. Pittman and Downs are the two most valuable pieces of the Colts’ passing attack, and I’m willing to buy high on them for some solid reliable production.
- Action: buy Michael Pittman and Josh Downs
The chart above may imply that the Carolina Panthers are not a pass-happy team given they have a -2.3% PROE on the season, but a deeper dive into the data suggests otherwise. So far this year, the Panthers have an expected dropback rate of 70.7%, the highest in the league, while their actual dropback rate is the 5th-highest at 68.4%. Carolina has dropped back to pass at least 37 times in every game this year, which is largely driven by the large deficits they find themselves in early in games (and it won’t be much different against Miami this week). Early on, this was benefitting Miles Sanders, who saw at least five targets in each of the first three games, but he’s earned just four total targets in the last two weeks combined. Still, Sanders has run a route on at least 45% of dropbacks in all but one game this year while his primary competition, Chuba Hubbard has yet to eclipse the 40% mark in a single game. Sanders still seems like the guy in Carolina, as most of Hubbard’s touches typically come in garbage time of games. If the targets bounce back he’ll continue to be a solid RB2 option.
- Action: hold Miles Sanders