Starts of the Week + Week 8 Breakdown, Pitty City - Fantasy Football Podcast for 10/28

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to the fantasy footballers podcast with your host, Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Oh, welcome in. It's football time, June nights. Oh, that it's football time. That is football time reminded me of like, you know when like a band is playing their hit.

and they've played it so many times. Oh, you got changed it up a little bit. They mix up a little bit of the cadence and it sounds a little bit different. You rift. Yeah, man. Well, he was excited. We are all going to this game tonight as a company and we are going to walk strong over Al Borland, our producer, who will be lying on the ground as a giant Packers fan.

Welcome to the show Thursday, October 28th, the fantasy footballers. Al is a bona fide Packer fan, has been forever. I mean, to the degree that at one point I think his old house used to be, he had Hugh lights everywhere. And on game day, the house was like just, it was like the house dressed up as a Packer player. We would set up one of those outdoor pop-ups, but it was a Packer one and we did it in our living room. Yeah, I mean, wait, wait.

That's a joke, right? That's real. Oh, my goodness. I'll tweet a picture of it later. Yeah, so real legit Packer fan. Now, we obviously, we don't go to a lot of games because I used to have season tickets. Mike used to as well. I did too. Yeah, we all did. And that was super fun, but ever since we started the show, we need to take in all the content, all the games. We've got to talk about it on Monday. So we don't have season tickets.

So we're always eyeballing like the island games for the Cardinals. Like if they're at home on a Monday or Thursday, a Sunday night, those are the games we can sneak into. So we're like, hey, Thursday night, Al Borland's Packers, little do we know that it would be a matchup of the two, you know, two of the winningest teams in the NFC. However, I want people to weigh in on this. Like, what is our obligation as Cardinal fans? Like, we paid for a suite. Right. Like, we're bringing everybody from the company.

and, like, there's already going, like, Green Bay travels way too well. Like, there's already going to be a problem tonight. And here we are, we're going to stroll in on our dime with a man dressed in green and yellow. It's not right. So, I mean, do we have an obligation to, like, leave him behind? I think, I think it's fine because, like, do we have to defend him if he's attacked?

He won't be attacked. He's just going to be really depressed. And a person wearing green and yellow who is sad? Oh, you look real stupid. Real stupid. Yeah. I'm green and yellow. Yeah. I mean, especially without Devonza. That is his voice. That is me. Out for you. You know, without Devante Adams, without Alan Lazard, it makes me so much more scared of losing.

because of what the dunk will feel like. Yeah. Yeah. It's like when the really short guy dunks over you, that's worse than when the, you know. Oh, come on. Well, we'll see what happens. I mean, the Cardinals, you're sitting pretty, and then all of a sudden we got news this morning that JJ Watts out for the year. Oh, yeah, that was cool. So I've been in a, it's always something. It reminds me of when Matthew went out for the car. Anyway.

Anyway, this is not Cardinals Hour. We've got so much to talk about. Never not working on today's show. Very excited about this discussion today. News and notes, the fantasy forecast, all the matchups, or half the matchups. And then starts of the week, and Jason continues the season one of Boom Boom Kicker on Netflix continues today. Yes, it does. We have a Halloween show tomorrow. I don't know if I've ever said the word quite like that, though. It's Halloween? Halloween. Is that right? Halloween.

Okay. This is Halloween. Halloween. Halloween. Halloween? Halloween? You want to watch it. That's why I say. Oh, are you just trying to, like, are you branding it for yourself? I'm thinking about it. Yeah. At their house, they celebrate Halloween. YouTube.com slash the fantasy footballers. Subscribe, click the bell. Get tomorrow's episode. We've done a lot of different costumes over the years. Brooksie, what was last year? Was last year the,

Chris Goblin? No, that was the year before. Oh, okay. Gosh, last year I know Mike was. I was Adam Gays. Adam Gase. Yeah. One sec, one sec. I'll, I'll check. I mean, this is. It's amazing that we just don't remember. Like, there's a lot of us that were here. It was just last year. So like, I know who I was. Who were you? I'm picturing the other costumes, past ones. Andy was Cliff Kingsbury. Oh, that's right. And Jason was Rodrigo.

Oh, you're a blinkenship. That's right. Boom, boom. So that's tomorrow. And you can find our community of 27,000 incredible human beings at Jointhefoot.com. You get a bonus weekly show, premium perks. We got a good time on Spotify Green Room yesterday. I mean, the season is, we're in it. And, well, let's move on. Never Not Working. Presented by Head and Shoulders, Scamp Shield Technology, available at Walmart.

All right. We've been doing these every week and have been getting an increasingly large amount of feedback that people have benefited a lot from our kind of digging in, digging deeper, never not working segments every week. Love it. Trying to take some of the things that we look at and go one layer deeper.

So today I want to talk about, you know, we've talked about the off season, so much about passing pie, right? Like how much volume in offense gets. And, you know, we talked about the Ravens. And then we've, we used the term and the reference to Target Share a lot, which is, you know, the, it's not a complicated stat, right? It's the percentage of targets in an offense. And you want a high one. Yeah. And so the other day in the office, I kind of brought up, I said, you know, Target share.

can be deceptive as well, where it's a piece of the puzzle. And I think the best way to look at it is truly as a broad brush painted across a bigger picture of what a wide receiver's value is because we have seen both sides of the coin. So I wanted to dig in a little deeper. I wanted to look at developing a more holistic view when it comes to Target Share and what you should look at. And so that's what we did. Kyle the Borgogne dug into some numbers.

I wanted to look at and say, you know, through the first seven weeks, what is the story? What does Target Share represent? Does it represent a very strong correlation to the best wide receivers out there? And it's interesting. Like your first three guys in Target Chair in the NFL right now, it's Debo Samuel, 34%, Devante Adams, 34%, Cooper Cup 34%. And looking good so far. Those three are like,

Bulletproof top wide receivers. Like that's not changing. Their point per game rank is very close to where they finish target share percentage wise. What's interesting is the next three on the list all have a completely different story to them. It's Brandon Cooks at 31.2%. Terry McLaren at 29% and DJ Moore at 29%. And their points per game rank, you know, where there are three, four.

where they're 4, 5, and 6 in Target Share, their actual rank is 21, 16, and 15. So obviously they have a different story. You know, Brandon Cooks has General Mills at quarterback. The Texans are 28th in past success rate. They have the second fewest fantasy points per reception in the NFL.

that's a number and a metric that we haven't really looked at a lot. But fantasy points per reception is interesting to me. Terry McLaurin has dealt with a stinky Heinz. Bad Heine. Stinky Heiney. Hiney is willing to throw it a lot. Heineke. I can't even, I can't call him Hiney. It's just too weird. But one of the things we looked at the other day was the fact that Terry McLaren, all by himself,

48% of his targets are contested. Like Taylor Heineke is doing the thing that we kind of joke about that quarterback should do, which is when in doubt, just chuck it to your best player, no matter what the coverage is, no matter what's happening. Like 50% of the time, he probably shouldn't throw the ball to Terry McLaurin, like by... Disagree. Yeah, and that's fair to disagree. But I mean, like...

When you say a quarterback goes through his reads and then makes a judgment call on what he sees, like 48% of the time, that judgment call by any other quarterback would be not throw the ball to Terry McLaren. So it matters if your targets are contested, right, on whether or not that target share is good for the player because even though, you know, Terry McLaurin's great, sometimes that 50-50 ball hits. He's finished at wide receiver 3, 4, and 5. That's why it's a 50-50.

Some weeks it doesn't. Wide receiver 5745, 51, 64. Oh, he's got four bad games and three good ones. 50-50. That's going to balance out. Didn't he get? Isn't he banged up right now? Yes. The other name, you know, DJ Moore, it's been a 50-50 story for him too. In 16 career games without Christian McCaffrey, his target share rises from 22 to 27%. But he averages the exact same receptions per game.

Right? Because target quality diminishes for him. So it's not as simple as, oh, man, the target share goes way up. No, the production is the same because the quality of the target goes down. So which begs the question when we look at this metric, like would you rather have DJ Moore with a 29% target share from same Darnel? Or Chris Godwin with a 19% target share from a quarterback in Tom Brady that's completing.

you know, a far higher percentage of his passes. Because even if you're a great wide receiver, there's only so much you can do. Didn't DJ Moore have a game where he had a 30% catch rate the other day? I believe, I think two games ago. It was like 34%. So I think it's pretty interesting when you look at the broad picture. I don't know if you guys have different thoughts about that, but you know, you have to take Target share and then combine it with who's throwing them the ball.

Are the targets contested? Are they a 50-50 target? And how close to the line of scrimmage are they? You know, we always talk about Hunter Renfro and we talk about, you know, the value of a target to a slot wide receiver versus an outside wide receiver. So what are you guys just thought? It's certainly interesting that everything in fantasy football needs context. It needs extra context. And that's why we're like when it's just.

you know, like rankings on a page where this is why we talk about, you know, in the draft season, the ultimate draft case, like we have these tiers because there's no real context between the number two running back I would draft and the number six running back I would draft. They might be four spots apart, but they might, in projected points, be very, very similar. So there's really not a difference to us. We slightly prefer one. But yeah, you always need the context of these things.

That's why what I like about, you know, the show, we have like basically an hour long show five days a week. And we, we try to dig into those things because Target share, it does matter. Oh, it absolutely does. It matters. But like maybe, maybe there, with this discussion, maybe there is a better way that we can try and get all of these things, you know, Target share.