It's Time to Sell George Pickens 💰

Honestly, it seems like hamstrings are only part of the human anatomy to keep athletes from playing football at this point.

What’s in store:

• Jonathan Taylor trending towards a full workload. 🐴 Two full weeks of practice should have him right for Sunday afternoon.

• Jahmyr Gibbs misses practice to open the new week 😵‍💫.  The issue now shifts from his utilization to his availability.

• Sell this AFC North WR and buy this AFC South RB. Faraz is making moves this week, and there are two players he’s keying on.

• Drake London is an outlier for the wrong reasons in Week 1. See what’s got the fantasy community infuriated with him.

• Bears rookie RB Roschon Johnson, RB Khalil Herbert miss practice Wednesday

  • Both running backs went down in last week’s Thursday night matchup against the Bears. While the expectation has been for Khalil Herbert to miss a few weeks with a high ankle sprain, Johnson missing practice with his concussion is somewhat surprising. Given the 10-day break from Thursday to Sunday, there’s hope that Johnson can be ready to go without missing any more time – but a missed practice to open the week indicates he’s not clear of the league’s concussion protocol just yet. There’s plenty of time yet between now and kickoff, but fantasy managers should stay tuned throughout the week to get a better idea of how Johnson is coming along in his recovery. If he would start, he’d be a mid to low-RB2 play this week; if he would miss, D’Onta Foreman would become the clear play with plenty of flex appeal.

• Colts RB Jonathan Taylor will have his workload “ramped up” this week, says HC Shane Steichen

  • We knew going into the game last week that Taylor would be limited, but nobody could have predicted the outright dominance by Zack Moss of the available work in the Colts backfield. That’s likely to change this week with Taylor having two full weeks of practice behind him, and Steichen’s comments suggest that this could be the week we see the fantasy RB1 we’ve all come to know and love. With Anthony Richardson on IR, Taylor’s ceiling is higher than it would have been with Richardson on the field – but it would be a mistake to assume that Zack Moss will just disappear into the background after taking care of business in his relief. Regardless, fantasy managers can expect a much more fantasy conducive workload at the very least this week and continued progress towards 100% as time moves forward.

• Lions rookie RB Jahmyr Gibbs misses practice Wednesday with hamstring injury

  • After landing on the injury report late last week as a surprise addition and ultimately missing the Lions’ Week 5 game against the Panthers, Gibbs opened this week by missing practice on Wednesday. He’s the latest victim of a rash of hamstring injuries occurring across the league through the first few weeks (Justin Jefferson, Cooper Kupp, Aaron Jones), and given the nature of these injuries to hang around, there’s a chance it’ll be another week before we get to see the dynamic rookie suit up again. Even when he was starting, Gibbs was at best a suspect start in most fantasy lineups thanks to an undying insistence on the part of the Lions’ coaching staff to run David Montgomery until the wheels fall off – even at the expense of playing time for their first-round running back. That being said, Montgomery is an excellent start leagues of all shapes, sizes, and formats, and will continue to be until Gibbs is able to establish a fantasy-relevant role for himself in the Detroit offense.

• Diontae Johnson said that he’s completely healthy and he’’ll be back in Week 7 against the Rams after the Steelers bye week, so it seems like you can plug him right in as a WR3 in his first week back and then we can potentially upgrade him as he ramps up - but in the mean time, I’m selling George Pickens right now before Diontae is back and before the bye week.

• Here’s the thing with Pickens: he’s pretty great against man coverage, and we saw that big TD he had late last week. It came against man coverage - he said he knew it was man coverage, the play was changed into a go route, and he won - that’s his wheel house, and he’s really good at it. In his other big game this year against the Browns. who also play man coverage a majority of the time, he went for 127 yards and a TD on four catches. He didn’t do much in Week 4 against Houston, though, and they play a zone scheme a majority of the time.

• If you look at Matt Harmon’s Reception Perception, Diontae Johnson doesn’t have any issues in man or zone coverage - in fact, he dominates - 85th and 88th percentile win percentages, respectively, for Johnson. George Pickens, on the other hand: 5th percentile in winning against zone 😬. The league is moving towards more and more zone every year and teams now play significantly more zone than man.

• Check this out - he has a bye this week, Week 7 he gets the Rams who play mostly zone (tough matchup anyway); the Jags, who play zone at a 65% rate; Week 9 against the Titans, who are a big zone team - Week 10 against the Packers - 66% zone rate - big zone team… not great… so I’m taking advantage of a couple of big games from Pickens, and I’m selling because I’m also not sure he can maintain these high target shares when Diontae comes back - we haven’t seen him do it before.

• Things don’t look amazing at first glance on paper for Pierce, but there are a few reasons why it can get better. And I’m not saying that Pierce will be a RB1 or anything like that anytime soon, but he’s been a low-end RB2 play at best and at times just a flex play… but things should get better for a few reasons.

• The first, his share in the backfield just got significantly better. He had 100% of the RB carries in Week 5 - Devin Singletary, according to Fantasy Life’s utilization report, was getting 28% of the rushing work over the first four weeks of the season, and two of those weeks he had shares of 39% and 36%. That work Singletary was getting was significant enough to downgrade Pierce, especially since Pierce was only getting work on early downs (which he still is, by the way) – but if he’s going to get 80%+ of the rushing work, let alone 100% like he did last week, things should get better and there’s a chance he can be a high-end RB2.

• The Texans offense is way better than we thought it was going to be, and he just got two key offensive linemen back this past week - Laremy Tunsil and Tytus Howard. In weeks 1 through 4, Pierce had the 5th highest rate of being stuffed, and that should get better. Now, the production on 20 carries for Pierce wasn’t amazing in Week 5, but they were also playing the Falcons, who the week before saw Travis Etienne get the same amount of carries as Pierce and had even less production.

• Pierce has handled 24 and 20 carries over the last two games - the volume is there, and he should have a big game here soon. He’s still 9th among 30 RBs in missed tackles forced/attempt, a stat he was 1st in last year ahead of Nick Chubb. He’s also 5th overall in most missed tackles forced this season.

• He’s still not getting passing down work, so he’s a game script dependent RB - he’s in that Brian Robinson category, but does have a little more upside because he’s on a better offense. If you’re looking for a RB2 that you don’t have to give up much more, I think he’s a solid target.

The Cowboys offense has been in multiple extremely positive game scripts (blowouts vs. the Giants, Jets, and Patriots) and multiple negative game scripts (vs. the 49ers and Cardinals) through five weeks, and it’s pretty clear through the eye test alone that they’re not firing on all cylinders just yet. A big part of their struggles over the past two weeks has revolved around the limited use of Ceedee Lamb, who has fallen off a cliff these past three weeks.

After being by far the Cowboys’ most utilized weapon last season - he saw a 29% target share that ranked top-5 in the NFL among wide receivers - Lamb has seen just an 18% target share over the past three weeks while averaging just over 11 points per game. Of the Cowboys big three receivers (Cooks, Gallup, and himself) Lamb (24%) is tied with Gallup and has a lower air yards share than Cooks (26%).

The fall from grace has coincided with the Cowboys offense averaging just 13 points per game in their two losses over the past three weeks. QB Dak Prescott is also averaging his lowest average depth of target on passes in his eight-year career, which raises concerns for Lamb’s fantasy ceiling outside of qualifying as a volume-based play.