XANDAMERE’S SHOWDOWN SLANT
Oooh baby, Week 15 starts with a bang as the Rams visit the 49ers for a 49-point total game with San Francisco favored by 2.5. The Rams main offensive pieces are back to health and they’re coming off of a 44-42 upset against the Bills, while the 49ers have (FINALLY) gotten their red zone offense back in gear and scored 30 points last week for the first time since Week 8. It should be a fun one.
Los Angeles
On the Rams side, we know the deal by this point in the season: Kyren Williams has one of the safest and biggest workloads of any running back in the NFL. He’s coming off a whopping 31 touch game against Buffalo, and that kind of workload plus a short week makes me at least a little bit cautious that they might hold him back a bit and work in Blake Corum more…but then again, this is a critical game. I think the Rams will do what it takes to win. Another note of caution: Kyren’s passing game volume has been extremely sporadic this year. He’s averaging only about 2.5 targets per game with three games of 5+ targets, and that means that while his rushing workload is immense, there’s more game script risk here than we’d like to see for a $10k running back. The TL;DR here is that I think Kyren is fine but a touch below the other highest-end options in this one. Behind him, Corum has two games in a row of 8 carries, giving him at least the faintest whisper of RB2 appeal. He’ll probably still need a touchdown or for Kyren to get hurt, but if you want to play into the idea of “maybe the Rams take it a bit easy on Kyren with the short turnaround,” he’s a likely low-owned tournament piece.
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In the passing game, the Rams have been kind of widening their receiving corps of late as six different wide receivers have played offensive snaps in four of the last five games. The main guys are still Puka Nacua, Cooper Kupp, and Demarcus Robinson, of course, but we’re seeing more of Tutu Atwell mixing in (primarily eating away at Robinson’s role) and then Tyler Johnson and Jordan Whittington are both still getting snaps. This really just introduces a bit more volatility to the roles here – primarily Robinson’s – and gives us more tourney punt plays (what fun). Puka and Kupp are the primary weapons here and in their last five games (when Puka returned to a full-time role after his early-season injury), out of 163 Matt Stafford pass attempts, Puka has 58 targets and Kupp has 42 – good for a 61.3% target share between the two of them. That’s insane, and it also leaves little room for other guys to thrive in this offense absent some kind of big play and/or touchdown as there just isn’t much other volume to go around. Both Puka and Kupp are strong options, but even at $1k more, I still have a slight lean toward Puka’s way as we’re just seeing him separate from Kupp as the season goes on. He’s leading in volume but also materially in average yards per reception at 13.1 vs. 10.4, and maybe I’ve been a little late jumping onto this train, but it does look like this is becoming more of a 1A/1B situation instead of an even split. Robinson missed a bit of time last game but returned, so I assume he’s going to play through the injury this week given that he played through it on Sunday. He’s the least bad of the other options just because he’s on the field the most.
Everyone else is a punt play, including the tight ends who are now in a 3-way split between Colby Parkinson, Davis Allen, and Hunter Long. Of all of these punt options, my favorites are Atwell and Parkinson, because both have more significant per-target upside than the rest of the crew (and it looks like Atwell’s role has been nudging upwards a bit of late), so they’re a bit less “wing and a prayer” punts and more “risky tourney options.” As for the rest, good luck – it’s awfully hard to project more than 1-2 targets for any of them, but they can be included in player pools.
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