Fantasy Football: What we learned from Week 6, including Sterling Shepard dominating one key metric
Fantasy expert Jacob Gibbs dug into every game from the sixth week of the NFL season and found several interesting takeaways.
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Early each week, SportsLine's Fantasy expert Jacob Gibbs will provide a data-driven deep-dive into the usage for every team's running backs and pass-catchers. You can find full team-by-team data on snap counts, target share, routes run, red-zone usage and more for every Fantasy relevant running back, wide receiver and tight end.
Below, Gibbs covers the 10 most important storylines from Week 6 to help provide a better understanding of what we learned and how it will impact the Fantasy outlook of specific teams and players.
If you have questions about any stats, players, or situations covered or not covered in this article, feel free to reach out to Gibbs on Twitter.
No stat correlates more closely with Fantasy scoring at the RB position than snap rate.
A player's route involvement rate simply represents the percentage of the team's total dropbacks on which that player ran a route. So, the running backs listed above all have run a route on at least 59 percent of their team's dropbacks. Running routes is the first step towards drawing targets, which is key to unlocking Fantasy upside at the RB position.
These receivers have shown a unique ability to dominate both the target and air yardage share.
Target per route run rate is one of the most important stats available for evaluating pass-catchers in Fantasy. I wrote about it in more detail here, if you are unfamiliar with the stat.
What a frustrating list! All but two or three of these guys underperformed in Week 6.
If you have Allen Robinson on your squad, it's at least nice to see his name at the top of this list. Darnell Mooney has typically been Chicago's weekly air yardage leader, but we saw Justin Fields air it out to Robinson in Week 6.
These tight ends are being targeted at the highest rate when allowed to run routes, but that's only part of the equation when evaluating tight ends for Fantasy purposes. Understanding how often each tight end's offense allows them to actually run routes is another important piece of the puzzle.
Players like Hockenson, Andrews and Pitts haven't needed a massive target per route run rate, because they are running so many routes. This type of route involvement provides exciting upside for those guys if their TPRR rate rises, as we saw on full display with Mark Andrews' big Week 5 performance.
Dating back to 2017, targets that come on first down are worth 18 percent more PPR points than targets that came on second, third or fourth down. In Week 5, we saw the Rams go out of their way to feed Robert Woods the ball. Bobby Trees had more first down targets in Week 5 than in the first four games of the season combined. In Week 6, Woods saw just two first down targets.
One player whose first down targets really stood out in Week 6 was the recently returned Sterling Shepard. He led all players with eight first down targets in his return to the lineup, and we have seen Shepard leaned on in such a way at basically any point that he has been healthy across the past two seasons. Kadarius Toney has been targeted at an unprecedentedly high rate when on the field, and we haven't really seen him and Shepard share the field much at all. I'm not sure if Shepard's dominant target share is going to be sustainable when the rookie returns, but we do have a much larger sample size of the veteran demanding targets at a high rate.
So which RB saw a surprising role in Week 6? And which top tight end could be impacted by a breakthrough rookie campaign? ... Join SportsLine here to see Jacob Gibbs' What We Learned from Week 6 feature, all from one of the nation's most accurate experts as graded by FantasyPros!
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