XANDAMERE’S SHOWDOWN SLANT
Sunday night should be a fun one as the Bills visit the Ravens for a 46.5 total game in which the Ravens are favored by 2.5 points. Fortunately for us, this is one of the few games of the week without any questionable tags due to hamstring injuries, so we can look at it pretty straight up.
Baltimore
We’ll start with the Ravens and their run game. Derrick Henry has been racking up fantasy points (20.2 DK points per game!) and to some extent, carries (56 in three games), and he’s also a home favorite in a plus matchup, but before we go all in, there are some caution signs though. First, of course, Lamar Jackson is going to steal some rushing scores. Second, Henry has only played 50% of the offensive snaps on the season. Third, his passing game role is nearly nonexistent with just four targets so far. Fourth, his production has been buoyed by a likely-not-sustainable four touchdowns (I doubt he will score 1.3 per game the rest of the way). Henry’s a solid play – again, he’s a home favorite running back in a good matchup and attached to a good rushing offense – but he’s not a lock-button type smash. At least to me. He’s also a scary fade who can bury you in any game. I’ll probably just roughly match the field in exposure here and move on. Behind Henry, we have Justice Hill in a fairly robust RB2 role – just 10 carries but also 12 targets on the year. Obviously, somewhat game script dependent due to the majority of his production coming from receiving, Hill fits best on rosters predicated on the Bills pulling off the upset win. $5,400 is a tough price to pay for him, which should result in his ownership being minuscule.
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In the passing game, well, by now anyone who’s been around OWS for a while knows how much I hate writing up the Ravens. Zay Flowers is the WR1 and has played the most snaps of any skill position player. His targets per game have gone 10, 11, and . . . 4. Look, this isn’t a high-volume passing offense, generally speaking, but it can be when needed: Lamar Jackson had 41 dropbacks in a loss against the Chiefs in Week 1, then 31 in an upset loss against the Raiders in Week 2, then just 15 against Dallas in Week 3 (in a game that the Ravens controlled start to finish). Do the math real quick and that gives Flowers a robust 27.8% target share, which we like, we just need passing volume, for which we need game script, or we need him to hit a long play and/or a touchdown to pay off on less volume. WR2 Rashod Bateman has played the next most snaps on offense (just a bit under 80%), and since the next-highest is around 60%, there is a very meaningful gap between Bateman and the rest of the receiving corps in terms of how much they’re on the field. Bateman hasn’t hit yet and he’ll likely need to come down with a long one in order to do so, but he has 4-5 targets in each game and he’s priced next to the kickers. This is a high-risk spot and not one I feel especially safe with but it’s hard to ignore a player who’s on the field that much for a good offense and at this price, and I want to invest in Bateman as a tournament play. Same with WR3 Nelson Agholor, who’s on the field a bit less but is also priced all the way down at $3,200. The downside for Agholor is that he comes off the field when the Ravens run 2-TE sets, which they do at a pretty high rate, and he isn’t a big target earner, but at his price, one touchdown catch will likely pay off his salary and that’s something we saw him pull off four times last year despite the extremely modest receiving volume. WR4 Tylan Wallace is a punt option, which brings us to tight end…ugh.
Mark Andrews, where are you? Andrews’ snap counts have gone 74% → 63% → 33%. In Week 1, Andrews was bracketed all game, in Week 2 he saw 5 targets on 31 Lamar pass attempts (ok, I guess, but under a 20% target share), and in Week 3 he saw 1 target and barely any snaps, albeit in a game the Ravens barely threw. What is happening here? I have some suspicion there might have been some kind of nagging injury last week, but you’d think we would have heard something by now. If not an injury, then either the Ravens think Likely has passed Andrews (i.e. they think Andrews is at least a bit washed), or, they were intentionally trying to preserve/protect Andrews in a game where they felt they didn’t need him. It’s hard for me to imagine Andrews is washed at age 29 given how elite per-target and per-route metrics last year, so my best guess is they were just protecting him. He’s a super risky play because we just don’t know, but that, to me, makes him an elite tournament option. The floor is clearly zero here as we saw last week, but how often have we gotten to play Mark Andrews in Showdown at just $5,800? The answer here is . . . well, I don’t know, because I don’t keep a data set of player pricing, but my guess is either never or almost never. I’m in for tournaments. As for Likely, he’s playing a lot but after his Week 1 explosion that was driven by matchup, he has four targets. He’s super talented and will have other big games – and maybe this will be one – but he’s really not all that different from the rest of the Ravens secondary receiving options in terms of workload (though clearly he’s better in terms of talent). I’ve thought a lot about Andrews and Likely and if we can pair them – there’s clearly some negative correlation there, so I’d be a little wary of it, but I wouldn’t rule it out entirely (that means in an optimizer if I have one I’d have a rule that applies a negative boost to the other, or in the Bink Machine you could make a group of the two and limit the paired exposure).
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