XANDAMERE’S SHOWDOWN SLANT
Week 9 and the official halfway point of the regular season begins with the Texans visiting the Jets. This game has a 42.5 total (which has already dropped 2.5 points from the open) with New York favored by 2. At first glance, having the 2-6 Jets coming off of a loss to the Patriots, favored against the 6-2 Texans feels weird. I don’t know, though. The Texans have scored 188 points and allowed 179, which indicates they’re at least a little bit lucky to be 6-2, and while the Jets aren’t great, their point differential doesn’t look like that of a 2-6 team at 150-170. Let’s see if we can figure out where the edge is on this one.
New York
On the Jets side, chalk Breece Hall flopped last week after RB2 Braelon Allen saw an increase in his snaps and handled 12 opportunities to Hall’s 19. Hall ran much, much better, but Allen stole the touchdown, disappointing quite a few DFS players. Allen has had his moments as a rookie but hasn’t exceeded even 4 yards per carry since way back in Week 4, so one wonders where this spike in volume came from. Overall, though, Hall’s role is robust. We did still see 19 opportunities last week, he leads Allen in touches inside the 10 yard line 8-2, and he’s averaging just shy of 6 targets per game. The matchup isn’t great against a Texans defense that is much easier to attack through the air, but Hall has the talent to succeed in any matchup, and the passing game role keeps him involved everywhere. The only real ding against him is Allen’s tendency to pop up with higher volume in unpredictable ways and the Jets tendency to go pass heavy when close to the end zone. Packers fans will recognize that Aaron Rodgers loves to throw when close in (gotta pad those stats!), leading Hall to have just 10 touches inside the 10 yard line compared to a total of 16 pass attempts. Hall has a bit less touchdown equity than you’d expect for a running back of his normal workload. Allen is a touchdown dependent RB2 who really needs a Hall injury or a broken play to pass off. At his salary, just a short yardage touchdown is unlikely to be enough.
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In the passing game, Rodgers will be missing former Green Bay buddy Allen Lazard, but of course, he did get Davante Adams so the plan of “bring all the Packers over so we can keep losing but just in new uniforms” is going swimmingly. We only have a one game sample of this crew of pass catchers, and on 28 pass attempts the target distribution looked like this: 8 to Garrett Wilson, 6 to Davante Adams, 4 to Tyler Conklin, 3 to each of Breece Hall and Jeremy Ruckert, and the rest to backup/rotational guys. Wilson and Davante are the clear main guys in this offense but they may be kind of sharing the WR1 role here, preventing either of them from ascending to the kind of target heights that we’re used to seeing from a Rodgers WR1. It’s just a one-game sample and I expect they’ll each have good games the rest of the way and that we’ll see volume skew one way or another on a game-by-game basis based on game planning and who’s playing well, but I’d guess the kind of games, like Wilson’s 22 target Week 5, are likely out of the picture. Priced next to each other, exposure to Wilson and Adams is a major decision point on this slate. I’m going to lean towards Wilson as he’s younger, seems to have established a strong connection with Rodgers in the earlier part of the season before Davante arrived, and has been better since Davante arrived with a 10/174/0 line on 17 targets while Adams has a 7/84/0 line on 15 targets. Small samples here, of course, and both are in play but I will have more Wilson. With Lazard out we only saw a modest increase in Mike Williams’ role, going from 33% of the snaps in Week 7 to 58% in Week 8 and seeing 0 targets. We have yet to really see Williams hit the “boom” end of his boom/bust range of outcomes, but I expect he’ll hit it at some point before the year is out. At $3,600, he’s a scary play with no real floor, but I believe there’s ceiling in there. He’s someone I want some exposure to in tournaments. Xavier Gipson and perhaps Malachi Corley will fill in for a few snaps here and there and can be used as punt plays.
At tight end, Tyler Conklin has the TE1 role locked down. His volume expectations are more modest with Adams now on the team but we’ll still see him used close in to the goal line, where he’s second on the team in targets inside the 10. $5,600 is getting to the point where I no longer consider him a real value play, he’s pretty fairly priced there, but he’s a reasonable option. TE2 Jeremy Ruckert has a few games of 2-3 targets but also three games of 0 so he’s another punt option but one I’d prefer to the WRs.
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