Get an early start on your preparation for the upcoming week with the RotoViz Monday Review tool. Every week in 1 Big Thing, Blair Andrews uses the tool for a deep dive into an interesting and potentially actionable development from the last week of fantasy football.
Week 1 Target Share Leaders
The Week 1 target share leaders were your usual suspects: Justin Jefferson, Cooper Kupp, Davante Adams, A.J. Brown, Tyreek Hill . . . Donovan Peoples-Jones.
Simply in terms of draft cost, one of these things is not like the others. Peoples-Jones had 11 targets — five more than any other Cleveland pass catcher and good for nearly a 37% share of team targets. Only Adams, Brown, and Hill had a higher team share.
DPJ’s Surprising Versatility
If there was any argument for drafting DPJ this offseason, it was that he had been extremely efficient on low volume in his first two NFL seasons. That efficiency didn’t show up in Week 1 — he caught just six of those 11 targets for 60 yards. But it’s also worth noting that his role appears to have changed from previous seasons. Last year, he ranked sixth in air yards per target with an aDOT of 15.4. In Week 1 his aDOT was 7.9, and he didn’t have a single target deeper than 15 yards down the field. Five of his 11 targets were within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage. He also finished dead last in expected points added. (EPA is a metric that approximates a play’s contribution to reality scoring; it’s separate from our discussion of EP, which are expected points in a fantasy context.)
It’s possible he’s not well suited to a short-area target hog role. But it’s also possible he suffered from poor quarterback play in Week 1. No Week 1 QB had a lower EPA total than Jacoby Brissett’s -21.2.
