Tale of the Tape: Ryan Fitzpatrick & Tre Mason
Sunday of Week 13 of the NFL season was one of the craziest from a fantasy football perspective, as several teams saw serious breakout games from players easily fit into daily fantasy lineups. A minimum salary quarterback went bananas along with a reasonably priced stackable wide receiver, while a bargain bin running back broke out for a huge game in another contest.
Looking ahead to Week 14, can these players keep up their strong performances this past Sunday? Let’s take a look at the Texans and Rams film to assess how Ryan Fitzpatrick, DeAndre Hopkins and Tre Mason broke out this weekend, and if it’s sustainable moving forward.
Do You Believe in Fitzmagic?
Ryan Fitzpatrick was one of my favorite fantasy quarterbacks coming into the season, as he’s always been underrated from both a real and fantasy football perspective. A lot of his underlying numbers suggest that he’s an average NFL quarterback, yet teams in the NFL treat him as if he’s a borderline starter. In fact, the Texans benched the Harvard product this season in favor of the young, erratic Ryan Mallett, but were forced into reinstalling Fitzpatrick due to an injury to the towering former Patriot.
One of the advantages Mallett provided was a bigger arm than Fitzpatrick, which would have theoretically led to big plays for the Houston offense. But on Sunday against Tennessee, Fitzpatrick showed that he was fully capable of some big plays of his own. But we’ll start with an example of Fitzpatrick doing the little things right, and how it helped start the scoring avalanche for Houston.
The Titans have loaded up the middle of the field on 1st-and-goal here, anticipating a run or a throw over the middle. They’re bringing pressure up the middle, with multiple linebackers set to charge after Fitzpatrick as soon as the ball is snapped. The veteran QB recognizes this, and also picks out his obvious advantage over the defense. His fullback will flare out into the flat where there is bound to be no defenders, as the only Titan outside of the tackle to his left will be covering the receiver.
As soon as the outside defender to the left stays at home, Fitzpatrick’s focus is getting the ball out to the fullback in the flat.
And with a pass that leads his receiver into space, rather than forcing him to stop and make a catch, then start running again, the Texans find the end zone and Fitzpatrick gets on the board for the first of six touchdowns.
This poise under pressure, combined with good mobility (one of Fitzpatrick’s traits that’s never discussed), means the Houston quarterback is always able to extend a play and stay composed despite defensive interference. Here’s another example from a similar spot on the field.
Arian Foster is going to get up the field and run an out route once he cross the goal line, and will do so against a linebacker in coverage. Fitzpatrick locks in on this matchup early, and holds on to make the throw under heavy pressure.
As you can see in the second picture, the Houston QB had to angle his body in awkward directions just to get this throw off, but once he did, it was going to the right place for a score…
Both of the plays profiled so far are examples of brilliant play design from Houston, who have too many tools on offense to be mediocre, as they’ve been at times this season on offense. Part of that was due to struggles from Fitzpatrick, but a game against the weak Tennessee defense after being benched may have shaken the veteran signal caller from his sleep.
Neither of these plays are particularly impressive, though. They both show good pocket presence by Fitzpatrick and good playcalling by the Houston coaches, but they’re otherwise pretty run of the mill for a veteran QB. So let’s take a look at a couple of the bigger plays from the Houston offense, led by rising star receiver DeAndre Hopkins.
On this play, Hopkins will line up at the top of a stack of receivers, and that will help to mix up the Tennessee defense enough to get him one-on-one deep down the field despite a conservative two-deep look from Tennessee.
As you can see here, the only Titan defender with eyes on Hopkins is the corner who has allowed him inside leverage from the snap, and will never be able to catch him in a foot race to a well-thrown post route pass.The safeties are occupied with other players, while the linebackers are too shallow (probably by design) to help the safeties manage the wealth of options over the middle of the field.
Fitzpatrick does a good job of stepping up in the pocket here and giving Hopkins just a bit more time to get upfield, and also to allow the safety to commit to a receiver (you can see his hips turned toward midfield, a sure sign that he’ll be unable to cover Hopkins as he runs past).
This wouldn’t be the only time Hopkins and Fitzpatrick were on the same page on a deep throw. Another instance came at a crucial moment for the Houston offense, as they were backed up to their own goal line, and ran an aggressive passing play to get out of a dangerous spot.
Fitzpatrick scans the field and doesn’t find anyone open, so he takes advantage of the Tennessee defense’s lack of contain to his left and scrambles outside to buy more time.
As he scrambles, Hopkins turns upfield into open space and makes himself available for a throw for a big gain.
Hopkins and Fitzpatrick showed that they have very good chemistry, and while Fitzpatrick’s deep throwing ability might not be as good as Mallett’s, it was good enough in this plus matchup against Tennessee and their struggling corner Blidi Wreh-Wilson.
Not every Houston game will come with such a cupcake matchup, but consider this game a reminder as to just how good Ryan Fitzpatrick can be in the right situation, and how he’s able to keep the Houston offensive stars viable for fantasy purposes. He likes to throw the ball to Hopkins and Andre Johnson early and often, and also gets Foster involved in the passing game.
Two games against Jacksonville, and a game at the Colts and at home against Baltimore loom on the schedule for Houston, with none of these teams presenting too difficult of a challenge for the Texans offense. For the right price, Hopkins, Johnson and Foster should be lineup staples as the year goes on, with Fitzpatrick representing a good tournament option under center moving forward.
Is Tre Mason a Top-Tier Running Back Option for the Rest of the Season?
Zac Stacy was seen as one of the top options at running back in fantasy leagues drafting over the summer, as the St. Louis tailback seemed to have the starting job locked up after a fairly impressive rookie campaign. But fast forward just a couple of months, and Stacy is hardly seeing the field, as he sits and watches rookie Tre Mason handle the heavy lifting for the Rams offense.
Mason had a breakout game against the Oakland Raiders, running for 117 yards on only 14 carries, and adding a 35-yard receiving touchdown to his two rushing scores. A majority of his fantasy production came on one big run, which we’ll take a look at first.
The Rams will release left along the offensive line, which will get most of the Oakland defenders flowing in that direction. Fullback Cody Harkey will cut back to the right, seemingly setting himself up as a lead blocker on a designed cutback run, rather than a true zone run which would allow Mason a choice of running lanes.
But even if it was a zone run to the left, Mason made the right read by not following the blocking, and cutting back against the grain with a defense that was totally out of position for a run to the right.
Circled in the image above is linebacker Sio Moore. What exactly is he doing on this play?
The ball had been handed off for at least a full second by the time he decided to chase the receiver into the flat and/or watch quarterback Shaun Hill run his fake bootleg. Yet he still left his gap to chase down the fake action to his left, leaving Mason and Harkey with plenty of room to run. The lead blocker would have picked up Moore anyways, so this may have still been a touchdown without his missteps, but this was an example of just how bad the Oakland defense was on Sunday.
The defense looked similarly awful on Mason’s long receiving touchdown, which was a screen pass set up very well by the patient Hill at quarterback. He faked to one side, spun around, and waited as long as he could to dump the ball off to Mason, who was being held at the line by a Raiders defender. Once he broke free, there was no one in front of him, and he got to the sideline with ease. Once he was there, Oakland players jogged in his general direction and reached out their arms as if this were a Thanksgiving family Turkey Bowl with two-hand-touch rules, seemingly disinterested in stopping him from scoring.
When the Oakland defense did show up, however, Mason revealed some of his rookie mistakes that will plague him as the season goes on.
Mason ran the ball in an unconventional offense at Auburn, and that was one of the main reasons why he fell so far down the draft board despite great production in college and a solid athletic profile. His ambition on most plays is to get outside and use his speed and strength to hold off defenders en route to a big play, but that can be a bad choice in the NFL against top-level defenders.
The Oakland defensive line blows up this play, already 2-3 yards past the line of scrimmage by the time Mason takes two steps. And you can already see that he’s thinking about turning the play further outside to out-run the defenders. That probably worked in the SEC at times. It doesn’t work here.
In watching Mason’s tape, I noticed a few instances where he only had eyes for the outside option on running plays, which was sometimes the right call. At others, it reminded me of Bryce Brown, which is hardly complimentary considering my previous thoughts on the Bills’ back.
He has shown, at times, that he has the vision to run between the tackles, which gives me hope that he’s simply learning the game more and more every week. Maybe he was just chasing big plays against Oakland against a defense that seemed largely apathetic toward tackling him? Either way, it’s a cause for a bit of concern.
Mason is a talented player, but is running for a team that is below-average at running the football this season. Outside of premium matchups, like this past game against Oakland, he’s still a bit boom-or-bust thanks to the instability of the offense in general, and his own penchant for trying to find a bigger play than the one presented to him.
A Week 16 date with the New York Giants stands out as a solid place to play Mason, and next week’s contest with Washington should be a decent enough spot for him. But Week 15 against the Cardinals and Week 17 against Seattle are unlikely to be anything more than GPP spots for Mason, who is capable of running well against tough opposition (as he did in his first game against the Seahawks), but shouldn’t be trusted for consistent production, especially as his price and expectations rise.