I was somewhat dismissive—ok, very dismissive—of Kallen Ballage when we discussed waiver wire options yesterday, but Mike Clay pointed out on Twitter that the team placed practice squad protection on him, which suggests he’ll be back on the active roster next week.
It’s hard to know how the backfield will shake out if Troymaine Pope returns, but at the very least Matthew is enjoying it all from afar as a former Ballage truther.
Wednesdays Are For The Stats
As usual, I like to get into the weeds with the stats on Wednesdays to get prepared for the upcoming week. You can access many of the sites linked below via a Rotopass sub, which includes Rotoviz, Sharp Football, ESPN+, RosterWatch, Rotowire, and Footballguys.
- “Among 34 wide receivers with 50-plus targets this season, Jerry Jeudy's 14.9 aDOT is the highest and certainly helps to explain his 16.1 YPR (fifth highest) and 51% catch rate (second lowest).” Clay has one nugget for all 32 teams in this week’s edition of Fantasy 32 on ESPN+.
- D.J. Chark exploded on Sunday with a massive 32% target share and 53% air yards share. Pat Kerrane broke down Chark’s big day, as well as all of the Week 9 fantasy football stats you need to know in this week’s episode of Stat Chasing.
- Rich Hribar calls Joe Burrow an “intermediate assassin” completing 75.2% of his passes on 15 yards and in (sixth in the league). But he’s only 21-of-60 on throws further downfield (which is 30th). Check out Rich’s thoughts on every game in his Week 10 Worksheet on Sharp Football.
- Robust RB has been an unmitigated disaster in 2020. Shawn Shiegele describes on Rotoviz how WRs are outscoring RBs across the board in the early rounds:
- It was overshadowed by Breshad Perriman’s big day, but in Week 9 Denzel Mims was Top 10 in Air Yards (138), Top 10 in Target Share (32%), and ran a route on every drop back. You can sort all of the WRs by these metrics on Rotowire.
- Nelson Agholor leads the NFL with 20.4 yards per reception. WTF.
Injury Roundup
The Patriots are placing rookie TE Dalton Keene on IR...T.Y. Hilton (groin) was a full participant at Tuesday’s practice...Cam Newton is dealing with neck soreness after Monday’s game...Sam Darnold lists himself as day-to-day…For in-depth breakdowns on all of the week’s biggest injury situations (Christian McCaffrey, Ben Roethlisberger, Preston Williams, etc.), check out Jene Bramel’s injury column on Footballguys.