Josh Downs' Breakout & Kareem Hunt's Surge + Patrick Mahomes Droppable!? | Stats With Sam: The Top 5 Things You NEED to Know for Week 6

Published Oct 9, 2024, 10:00 AM

This week, Sam Hoppen uncovers why Josh Downs is a rising star, how Kareem Hunt is dominating in the Chiefs' backfield, and the surprising case for dropping Patrick Mahomes. Plus, he'll discuss why Tank Bigsby is a sell-high candidate and what the Texans should do without Nico Collins. Perfect your lineup for Week 6 with the latest fantasy football analysis.

Timestamps (may be off due to ads):

Intro - 0:00:00
FantasyPros: Are They Playing Tool? - 0:00:40
Patrick Mahomes is Droppable! - 0:01:35
Kareem Hunt is Dominating Touches - 0:03:25
Sell-High on Tank Bigsby - 0:04:53
Josh Downs Is On The Rise - 0:06:53
How The Texans Can Fill Nico Collins' Void - 0:08:14

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Hello, and welcome to the Week six episode of Stats with Sam. This is a microcast where I Sam Hoppon go over five key stats that stand out to me from a fantasy football perspective to help you make your starters, stay, your waiver and your trade decisions, ultimately hoping to get you that championship crown. Even if you are zero and five or one and four. We're here to hopefully get you back into the race. But before I dig into the stats, one way that you're going to be able to get back into the race if you are starting out a little slow is with Fantasy Pros brand new Are They Playing tool which will help you get a sense of whether your injured players will suit up for their game. It is a tool that uses AI and several years of injury data to give you an accurate prediction on whether an injured player will You can sink your league and get a simple report for all your players on the practice report throughout the week, and best of all, it is available to everyone for free. It's going to help tremendously when you need to make lineup decisions for a player that's questionable on Sunday, but your best replacement is starting this Thursday night, So stop sweating the Sunday inactives and get ahead of those tough lineup decisions by visiting fantasypros dot com slash are day playing. So I'm gonna kickstart this episode with a bit of a banger, but I think Patrick Mahomes can and should be dropped in one quarterback leaguees because I think you'd have better luck streaming quarterback right now on a per game basis, Patrick Mahomes ranks as the quarterback nineteen in Fantasy points. He has just one game above fifteen total fantasy points this year. He's only thrown multiple touchdowns in two of five games and has an interception in every single game. Monday night against the Saints was just the second game that he threw more than two hundred and fifty passing yards in a game this season, and Mahomes has also become the most conservative passer in the league with a league low five point zero yard average depth of target. They're throwing very short underneath routes. Travis Kelcey does not have the athleticism at this point in the year excuse me, at this point in his career to really be breaking off long runs that he could years ago. They've obviously lost Rashie Rice in the passing game, aren't going to get Marquise Brown in the regular season. So with how little the Chiefs are passing the ball, I just don't really see a ton of confidence in starting Mahomes, which sounds crazy because I still think he is the best quarterback in the league from a pure football perspective, but we're talking about fantasy football here and he quite simply is not producing, and I think you should be exploring alternate options if he has been your starting quarterback so far this season. For my second stat I actually want to stay with the Chiefs, but shift your attention to the backfield, where Kareem Hunt is absolutely dominating usage. In the two games that he's been back with the Chiefs, Kareem Hunt has seventeen and twenty eight opportunities. Opportunities here are targets plus carries, and the Chiefs this year have a very slightly positive pass right over expectation. But like I mentioned, with with several key pieces in the passing game get injured, they've leaned much more heavy on the run than they have in years past. They at this point seem content with building a lead then and grinding the win out on the ground. And Kareem Hunt has been the main guy for them in the backfield after Carson Steele and samajp Ryan both saw double digit opportunities in Week three, they have just seventeen total opportunities between the two of them over the past two weeks combined, and if you remember, that's how many Hunt had in just Week four alone. So if you want to get in on the Chiefs offense, I think Kareem Hunt right now is the best opportunity you would be buying high, but I do think it is a worthwhile investment. Another backfield I want to touch on is that of the Jacksonville Jaguars, where Tank Bigsby had more snaps and more total opportunities than Travis Etn for the first time this season, and we've actually seen etn snapshare decrease in each of the past four games consecutively. One of those decreases was because of an injury he suffered in game, but it still is a concerning trend. The bright side for Etn is that he still has a hold on the majority of the high value touches, as he's had at least five of them in three games this year, while Bigsby has just five total this year. He had two in Week four and three in Week five, so that is going up a little bit. But Etn also had a forty routes run rate for the fourth time this season this past week, while Bigsby has yet two eclipse a twenty five percent rate, so it seems like ETN is still the primary passing downs back. Notably, Dearness Johnson ran route on twenty nine percent of dropbacks this week, which was his highest all year. But I don't think he'll be a true factor in stealing a ton of touches away from from these two. After the game this past Sunday, when Doug Peterson was asked about the backfield, he said, Travis is our guy. Tank had a good game. That's just the way games go. So I ultimately think that we're just going to see more of a time share in this backfield as opposed to Etn having a workhorse role like he did last year. So I would be selling high on Bigsby if I can. If you're getting you know, anything better than RB three value for Bigsby, then I would like to make that trick sticking in the AFC South. Josh Downs has been active the last three weeks after they're missing the first couple of games, and he has seen target shares of twenty eight percent, thirty two percent, and twenty seven percent in the three games that he's played this year. His raw target numbers have jumped from five to nine to twelve in successive weeks, So I do think that his ceiling will be a bit higher if Joe Flacco is under center, given those numbers are are pretty correlated with the games that Flacco has played in. But I also do think that he has a little bit of meat left on the bone in terms of opportunities because he has yet to eclipse a seventy percent rops run rate in a game this season, So if he can get up to that eighty five to ninety percent reps run rate, that's that could be an extra target or two per game. So I'm not necessarily buying him because again, I do think his outcome is highly based on who is starting for the Colts, but I do think he as a hold. I think he's a solid bench player right now and could be a great flex option depending on the week for the Colts. Another AFC SAT team, I'm going to talk about it. I didn't realize I had so much on the AFC South today, but on the wide receiver position. Unfortunately, Nico Collins suffered a hamstring injury that currently has him considered week to week by the Texans. I would not expect him to play this week against New England, and I think one of the biggest beneficiaries of this is Xavier Hutchinson, who stepped in to fill the routes that Collins would have been running. In the remainder of the Bills game, Hutchinson had a fifty seven route swan rate. This was by far his highest of the year. It was a little weird because in Week four, when Tank Dell missed the game, it was Robert Woods who saw a bump in usage with a seventy eight percent routes rate. But he was in on just seventeen percent of dropbacks this past week and did not get a single target. I do think he entered the game with some injury ailments, but I do think another big beneficiary is Stefan Diggs. He's the only one who is being targeted at a high rate and could see a higher target share He's been targeted at least eight times in each of the last three games. Take Dell unfortunately only has one game with more than six targets this year. He hasn't been above an eighty percent routes rate since Week two. I would guess some of that due to his injury as well, and I hope that collins absence gives him an opportunity to step up. But I think, I mean, you're already starting Diggs, and I think you can raise the expectations for what you get from him on a weekly basis while Collins is out, And I think you just got to hope that Dell's opportunities increase with Hutchinson and Woods potentially splitting the wide receiver three roles. So that'll do it for this episode of Stats with Sam. Would really appreciate your feedback and reviews of the show throughout the seasons that we can continue to make this episode better and until next week, have a great week six.

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