The Regression Files, Fantasy Football Week 6: Can Falcons offense keep running hot?
Positive Regression Candidates
Brock Purdy (SF)
The Regression Reaper continues to haunt Purdy and the rest of the Kyle Shanahan EPA Machine. I wrote last week about Purdy running ice-cold through the regular season’s first month. That continued into Week 5, with Purdy dropping back 41 times and throwing a single touchdown against the worst secondary in the NFL.
It’s not just that Purdy is throwing a touchdown on just 3.8% of his attempts; it’s about where he’s throwing. Purdy is second in inside-the-10 pass attempts (16) through Week 5. He has just three touchdowns on those throws. No one has logged more red-zone passes than Purdy, who has only five red-zone TDs on the year, good for seventh-most among quarterbacks.
Things will come up Purdy sooner or later, I just know it.
Terry McLaurin (WAS)
I was wrong about McLaurin because I never had faith that Washington OC Kliff Kingsbury would open up the offense and let his rookie quarterback cook. Kingsbury has done just that over the past couple weeks, as the Commanders are 1% over their expected dropback rate following a massively run-heavy start to the season. They’re also leaning more toward the pass on first downs, a decidedly positive development for everyone in this offense.
McLaurin through Week 5 has a 27% target share and a downright obscene 55% air yards share (he leads the NFL by a wide margin in air yards over the past three weeks). Something in the range of a 54-56% dropback rate for Jayden Daniels for the rest of the season should make McLaurin a locked-in top-20 option with room to grow if he lands on the right side of touchdown variance.
Amari Cooper (CLE)
Thanks to those who have written me heartfelt hand-written notes expressing empathy for my having to write up Cooper every week in this space. It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it.
No, wait, I’m hearing that’s not right. No one has to do this if they don’t want to. Nevertheless, I persist.
Cooper in Week 5 against the Commanders racked up another 115 air yards, the 10th most of the week. He ended with 60 receiving yards. Cooper now has a league-leading 585 air yards and 208 actual yards. Teammate Jerry Jeudy leads Cooper in receiving through five games. It is terribly clear that things won’t change for Cooper and the Browns offense unless and until Deshaun Watson is benched.
Watson is, by nearly every measure, the NFL’s worst starting quarterback. Folks should be careful about cutting bait on Cooper, who certainly has the profile of a top-15 wideout — if only he had a quarterback.
Dontayvian Wicks (GB)
The fantasy football industrial complex was united in its Week 5 adoration of Wicks, a longtime analytics darling and proven target commander.
Wicks did everything but score fantasy points in Week 5 against the Rams. He led the Packers with a 27% target share, seeing a look from Jordan Love on a solid 29% of his routes. Love’s dropback volume was slashed in half from Week 4 to Week 5; hence the Wicks collapse.
I mentioned on last Thursday’s Rotoworld Football Show that the Packers were likely to run the rock early and often against the Rams, one of the NFL’s most pronounced run-funnel defenses. This was always going to be bad news for Wicks and Green Bay’s pass catchers. This week, the Packers take on a Cardinals defense, allowing (by far) the league’s highest dropback success rate and the third-highest rate of long passing gains.
Wicks made you feel like a total chump in Week 5. Give him a chance to redeem your ego in Week 6 (if Christian Watson remains out). The fantasy football industrial complex is never wrong, only early.
Jordan Mason (SF)
You're frustrated with Mason. He looked like the most important player in fantasy football over the first few weeks of the season. After two down outings over the past three games, you're wondering what happened to your beautiful 14th-round pick.
Rest assured, Mason is seeing plenty of high-value opportunities. He's second in the league with 14 rushing attempts inside the 10-yard line. That he's only punched in three of those for touchdowns likely means Mason is running cold. He has 74% of the Niners' red zone rushes over the season's first five weeks and leads the NFL in red zone carries.
San Francisco produces enough neutral and positive game script to keep the high-value stuff coming for Mason.
Negative Regression Candidates
Atlanta Falcons Offense
Everything — and I mean everything — broke right for the Falcons in Week 5 against the Bucs.
Game script aligned perfectly for a back-and-forth affair, and it generated 87 offensive snaps for Atlanta, the most of the week and far more than its average of 59.
That play volume in turn produced 63 Kirk Cousins dropbacks and all the glorious box-score stuffing that ensued for Darnell Mooney and Drake London and even Kyle Pitts whom, I would argue, got lucky and is still not a great fantasy option. Cousins, in case you’re unaware, had averaged about 33 dropbacks per game going into Week 5.
The question is whether the Falcons are bound and determined to return to the run-heavy, low-volume ways of the season’s first few weeks or if we’ve seen a permanent shift in how Atlanta conducts its offense. The Falcons were 8% below their expected dropback rate over the season’s first three games. That put them among the run-heaviest teams in the NFL. In Week 4, they shifted to 11% over their expected dropback rate, and in Week 5 against Tampa, they cranked up the dial to 18% over. Cousins dropped back on 80% of the team’s offensive plays.
Look at it this way: there were 447 air yards to go around for Falcons pass catchers last Thursday night. That’s not a little. Some are saying it’s a lot.
It’s possible that Cousins’ Achilles is fully healed and that he has more confidence in the injury than he did in Week 1, when the Falcons operated exclusively from pistol or shotgun and avoided true dropbacks for their aged, immobile quarterback. Maybe Falcons OC Zac Robinson is ready to let it rip now that Cousins is back to his pre-Achilles self, or something resembling it.
If that’s the case — if the Falcons are going to regularly be 8-10% over their expected dropback rate — then London is likely a top-12 option while Mooney isn’t all that far behind. Pitts, even though he was only targeted on 14.5% of his pass routes against Tampa, could be serviceable too.
Fantasy managers can’t (and shouldn’t) bank on the kind of offensive play volume we witnessed in Week 5 though.
What this would mean for Bijan Robinson is less clear. His route participation (55%) wasn’t exactly sparkling last Thursday against the Bucs, and through Week 5, he’s been targeted on 16% of his routes. It’s not bad, exactly, but it’s not great either. Alvin Kamara, for example, has seen a target on 28.6% of his routes this season. Kamara is a key piece of the Saints passing attack. Robinson can’t say the same for his place in the suddenly pass-heavy Atlanta offense.
Without highly efficient rushing performances, Robinson’s path to elite territory in 2024 has all but closed.
C.J. Stroud (HOU)
Losing Nico Collins to a hamstring injury would be hideously bad for a Houston offense that has struggled in 2024 any way you look at it. For all the chatter about how awful Jacksonville’s offense has been this season, hardly anyone is pointing out that the Texans have almost the exact same EPA per play as the dow-bad Jags.
Stroud is helping OC Bobby Slowick get away with it, bigly. Houston has the league’s third-lowest rush EPA and the second-worst rushing success rate. Only five teams have a higher rate of stuffed rushing attempts and nine teams have a lower rush yards before contact. Outside of Week 1’s destruction of the Colts — the league’s worst rush defense — the Texans have no run game of which to speak. The absence of Joe Mixon, I think, is just part of that problem.
Then there’s Stroud. He’s bailed out Slowick’s predictable offense with five touchdown passes on just eight attempts from inside the 10 this season. That Stroud has a meager 11 red-zone pass attempts all year — 27th among QBs — speaks to the larger struggles of a Houston offense that ranks 20th in red-zone possessions. The Texans' problems are structural. Stroud is certainly as good as advertised; he’s probably better this year than he was during his outstanding rookie campaign.
Stroud through Week 5 has essentially the same dropback EPA and success rate as Trevor Lawrence. The difference is that Stroud is getting away with a high touchdown clip so far. If or when the bottom drops out of that touchdown luck, Stroud’s fantasy prospects will suffer. The Collins injury could be the trigger for a short-term Stroud regression.
Kareem Hunt (KC)
Hunt on Monday night against the Saints needed 27 carries to barely crack 100 yards on the ground. He led the KC backfield in routes but saw just one target. It’s not the kind of profile to get giddy about unless you, like me, are a fervent Zero RB zealot and 100 yards from your running back sounds downright delightful.
The Chiefs offense ran 84 plays against New Orleans; only the Falcons had more in Week 5. That was part of the reason Hunt saw so much volume. It’s hard to say that kind of volume is sticky considering the Chiefs going into Week 5 had averaged 59 offensive snaps per game.
There could be something afoot in the interminable Kansas City offense, however. The Chiefs, once the kings of pass rate over expected, are now below their expected dropback rate in four straight games. Against the Saints, they dropped back at a 52% clip when the game was within one score. A mere eight teams have a lower neutral pass rate than Kansas City this season. That was unthinkable as recently as one year ago.
Perhaps the loss of Rashee Rice (knee), the declining play of Travis Kelce and the lack of an Xavier Worthy emergence will leave Andy Reid no choice but to establish the run and treat Patrick Mahomes as an Alex Smith-style game manager. Mahomes had taken on something close to that game-managing role in the team’s 2023 Super Bowl run.
It appears the transformation is complete, and if it is, Hunt could be a major beneficiary.
Garrett Wilson (NYJ)
Wilson got away with it in Week 5 against the Vikings because the Jets were forced to run 72 plays and Aaron Rodgers had to drop back 59 times in a comeback game script. Wilson benefited with 13 grabs on 22 targets for a humble 101 yards and a touchdown.
I don’t have to tell you that Wilson won’t see 20-plus targets every week, or perhaps ever again in his NFL career. Wilson’s average depth of target has sunk to 8.3 through Week 5, down from around 11 in his first two NFL seasons. Seventy percent of Wilson’s targets this season have come behind the line of scrimmage or within nine yards of the line. This is objectively not a good wideout profile.
Wilson is Fancy Wan’Dale Robinson until further notice.
The Jets’ offensive struggles — they’re 21st in dropback success rate — is going to crush Wilson’s upside unless the team can pull off a miraculous offensive overhaul after the shocking firing of head coach Robert Saleh.
This is a bad offense. There’s no way around that.
Alec Pierce (IND)
You had fun plugging Pierce into your 14-team flex spot and reaping all the big, beautiful benefits in Week 5. And you shouldn't feel bad about that.
This is but a reminder that Pierce has seen 7% of the Colts’ targets over the past two games while running a bunch of wind sprints down the sideline. He’s averaged 40 air yards per reception over that span.
Don’t get cute with Pierce in Week 6, whether or not Anthony Richardson is back from his oblique injury.