NFL DFS WR/TE Usage: Reviewing Week 6
NFL passing attacks evolve, and stats like targets, air yards, and snap counts rarely stay consistent for an entire season. NFL wide receivers and tight end usage is therefore critical knowledge for our lineup decisions on DraftKings, FanDuel, and Yahoo. Let’s use the RotoGrinders Usage App from JoshADHD to remind ourselves of a few key usage trends from the week that was. We’ll want to understand how it could help us with our projections and projected ownership in the coming weeks.
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Today’s NFL DFS Wide Receiver and Tight End Targets and Air Yards Report
Irv Smith
NFL Team: Minnesota Vikings
Position: TE
Snap Percentage: 79% in Week 6
Team Share of Targets: 16.2% in Week 6
Team Share of Air Yards: 9.5% in Week 6
Irv continues to see his snaps and market share of targets trend in the right direction over the last three weeks.
Snap Percentage: 62% > 68% > 79%
Market Share of Targets: 4.8% > 12.8% > 16.2%
In the last two games specifically, he has turned his 10 targets into eight receptions for 119 yards. Especially on DraftKings (where he was priced at the minimum in both of those games), that kind of production (10.4 DK points in Week 5; 11.5 in Week 6) has gotten the job done at a position that seems to get weaker and weaker by the week.
The Vikings head into a bye for Week 7, but it will be interesting to see where the sites price Irv for Week 8 in a matchup against a bad Packers defense.
Julio Jones
NFL Team: Atlanta Falcons
Position: WR
Snap Percentage: 80% in Week 6
Team Share of Targets: 27% in Week 6
Team Share of Air Yards: 31.2% in Week 6
Remember this guy!? With Julio dealing with a hamstring injury seemingly all season, he has basically been an afterthought in the DFS community. But coming into the Week 6 game against the Vikings, he wasn’t even listed on the injury report. And yet our recency bias caused him to go severely under-owned in that contest.
It is easy to understand why he got overlooked though, and I’m not just talking about the injury concerns. The fact of the matter is that he just wasn’t seeing the same kind of volume that we saw out of him in 2019. For example, he saw almost a 26% market share of targets last season. But prior to Week 6, the only three games he appeared in this season resulted in target shares of 22.6%, 10.8%, and 10.3%.
If Julio is indeed over this hamstring injury, is that Week 6 performance (8 reception on 10 targets, 137 yards, 2 touchdowns) a sign that we will be seeing the Julio of old going forward? That data listed above certainly has me optimistic. He heads into Week 7 priced at only $7,100 on DK and gets a matchup against a Lions team that has given up the eighth most DK points per game this season to opposing wide receivers.
Travis Kelce
NFL Team: Kansas City Chiefs
Position: TE
Snap Percentage: 87% this season
Team Share of Targets: 26.3% last three weeks
Team Share of Air Yards: 32.9% last three weeks
With each passing week, Kelce is more and more becoming Mahomes go-to-guy. Consider that last season, the market share of targets on the Cheifs went something like this at the top of the totem pole:
Kelce: 24%
Tyreek: 21%
The two of them were bunched pretty closely together through the first three weeks of this season (with Kelce still out in front), but Kelce is almost lapping Tyreek over the last three games. In that time, Kelce is not only getting 26.3% of the market share of targets (compared to the 15.4% for Tyreek), but he is even beating out Tyrkeek in air yards!
Thanks to a very low air yards game from Tyreek on Monday night (just 8..huh!?), Kelce has 32.9% of the team share of air yards in the last three games compared to just 29.5% for Tyreek. I almost fell out of my seat when I saw that. And yes, I’m sure Tyreek surpasses him going forward, but it is more a testament to Kelce than anything. That type of market share of air yards would have him threatening for the Top 15 in the entire league amongst pass-catchers.
At a thin tight end position, Kelce is always going to have a ceiling that is only matched by probably one or two other guys (if they are all even on a slate together). And he always seems to come in a little lower owned than he should since DFS players prefer to spend up at running back and wide receiver instead.
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Image Credit: Imagn