Five Stats to Know: 2024 Week 14

Week 14 is (mostly) in the books! In case you aren’t an insane person like me who likes to spend his Sunday night digging through usage data, I’ve curated five stats that will help you make better decisions in all fantasy football formats for the coming weeks.

Based on my findings, I’ll also do my best to provide buy, sell, and waiver recommendations for managed leagues where applicable. For a broader (if slightly less detailed) overview of usage across the league, I recommend this Twitter thread.

Stat #1: The Alvin Kamara Scam Might Be Over

Alvin Kamara has had the best workload of any RB in the league all season. Entering Week 14, he’d been averaging 20.2 XFP/G (RB1) on top of a 20.3% target share — a mark only Christian McCaffrey (among RBs) has touched at any point over the past four seasons, and beating out WRs like Mike Evans this year. With Taysom Hill out for the season, Kamara’s outlook dramatically improved. My only warning in last week’s Everything Report was that Kendre Miller was finally drawing some praise from the coaching staff — but come on, Kendre Miller? Be serious.

It turns out that Saints interim HC Darren Rizzi is deadly serious. Kamara received just a 56.7% backfield carry share in Week 13, his lowest since Week 7 (or, Kendre Miller’s first game of the year). Miller also received the backfield’s only carry inside the 10-yard line of the day, fighting through a full-team pileup through the last five yards to punch in the score. Rizzi was very complimentary of Miller in his post-game presser, per The CoachSpeak Index:

“Kendre Miller is showing you why we drafted him where we drafted him…He can make people miss and get tough yards. After losing Taysom Hill, we don’t become one-dimensional with Alvin Kamara, because we have another guy in Kendre Miller who can get us tough yards.”

It makes sense for the Saints to see what they have in Miller — who has rarely seen the field over the first two years of his career — at the end of this lost season. If that means he will take at least a third of the carries (as he did today) and be the favorite in the red zone, it’s pretty tough to envision Kamara posting anything approaching top-5 RB numbers over the rest of the fantasy season. In fact, he’s now averaged just 13.2 FPG across three games Miller has been active this year.

To be fair, two of those games were blowouts at the hands of Spencer Rattler — but now we come to the fact that Derek Carr likely fractured his hand and could be in danger of getting shut down for the rest of the season. The schedule is still favorable, and Kamara should continue seeing his usual target volume, but it’s hard to have much belief in either Rattler’s or Jake Haener’s ability to sustain drives and provide Kamara with scoring opportunities — he received only one carry inside the 5-yard line in Rattler’s entire three-game stint. Kamara is now just a low-end RB1 at best.

Stat #2: The Backfields That Will Drive Us Insane, Week 14

With Breece Hall inactive, Braelon Allen and Isaiah Davis took part in an almost perfectly even backfield split. Allen narrowly led in carries (11 to 10), while Davis had a narrow edge in targets (6 to 5). Each back ended with respectable fantasy scores (15.7 fantasy points for Davis, 12.1 for Allen), but this was close to a worst-case scenario for Allen in particular, as Davis was involved throughout the game on both early and passing downs. The only reason either back was productive was that the Jets’ offense in Week 14 was among the most functional it’s been all year, providing the backfield with a season-high 31.6 weighted opportunities in total.

Hall is reportedly not going to be shut down for the year, but even aside from that, I’d be tempted to declare it over for Allen’s fantasy value if the Jets’ Week 15 opponent were any team aside from the Jaguars. Assuming Hall misses again, both Allen and Davis will be in FLEX consideration next week, which is a massive headache for the first round of the fantasy playoffs. Stay tuned for detailed snap and route data that may provide a better hint of which player can be better trusted.

Tank Bigsby received 81.8% of the backfield’s carries in Week 13, including the only one inside the 10-yard line. He’d never previously exceeded 65.0% in a game with Travis Etienne. This is the second straight week Bigsby’s usage has caught my attention — he ran more routes than Etienne last week. Depending on how his usage looks next week against the Jets, he could well end up as a viable spot start against the Raiders in Week 16… this is a lame-duck coaching staff likely trying any and everything to save their jobs, and feeding Bigsby seems to be what they’ve landed on.

Stat #3: The Dolphins Started Throwing To WRs Again

I’ve covered the Dolphins’ offense frequently in this space all season. In short, they’d begun funneling an inordinate percentage of their targets to RBs and TEs underneath, leading to disappointing seasons from the likes of Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle. But that changed in Week 14:

Hill had his best game of the year on a season-high 14 targets, cresting 100 receiving yards for the first time since Week 1. Waddle’s 12 targets were also a season-high, propelling him to over 20.0 fantasy points for the second time all year. All of this came at the expense of Jonnu Smith — who had zero receptions until overtime and only saved his fantasy day by catching the game-winning TD, but still ended the day with his lowest target share from Tua Tagovailoa since Week 1.

I’ll need to dig into coverage data and some of our advanced stats before settling on a firm take, but for now, it’s worth having in your head that the Jets have leaned toward playing single-high looks this year — which the Dolphins have rarely ever seen (to that point that I’d begun assuming every defense would simply play a massive rate of two-high against them), and which has classically benefitted both Waddle and Hill. The same would theoretically be true of their Week 17 opponent (the Browns), but again, I imagine we’ll have a firmer, data-backed take on this offense moving forward in The Everything Report this week.

Stat #4: Sincere McCormick Might Be A Real Thing

Over the final four weeks of 2023, Raiders then-interim HC Antonio Pierce had lost bell cow RB Josh Jacobs to injury. Through Week 14, then-rookie Zamir White had seen only limited action. But Pierce committed to him over those final four weeks, feeding White a 69.4% snap share and 21.0 carries per game, resulting in a more-than-serviceable 15.2 FPG. The Raiders got wins over all three of their divisional opponents, Pierce was officially hired as head coach, and the rest is history.

Something similar is starting with practice squad promotee Sincere McCormick. With both White and Alexander Mattison missing the last three games, McCormick has slowly become more involved in the offense, culminating in him receiving 15 of 16 backfield carries (including two at the goal line) in Week 14.

Of course, for McCormick to be of any use in juicy top-10 matchups against the Jaguars and Saints in Weeks 16-17, both White and Mattison would either need to remain out, or the Raiders would simply need to decide to continue playing him as a bell cow regardless. The former option seems unlikely — Fantasy Points injury expert Dr. Edwin Porras has projected a Week 15 return for White, and a Week 15 or 16 return for Mattison — but the latter seems well within the realm of possibility.

McCormick is averaging 5.5 YPC over the past three weeks (to White’s 2.8 and Mattison’s 3.3 this year), and he’s looked like the most effective and physical runner the Raiders have had all season. We’ll need to closely monitor practice participation and Pierce’s press conferences this week to see if the team agrees with me, but McCormick is rostered in just 11.2% of ESPN leagues and 19% of Sleeper leagues — he’s worth a speculative add.

Stat #5: Brock Purdy Is Not Just A Weapons Merchant

Brock Purdy has been nothing short of excellent in a season his entire team has crumbled around him. As pervasive as the talking points have been for years — that he’s only posted top-tier efficiency metrics and results due to his surrounding weapons — I’ve heard little discussion of how great he’s been even with those benefits removed.

As well as Jauan Jennings has played, it should also be a credit to Purdy that his previously unheralded number 3 receiver has stepped in to average 17.4 FPG on a 29.2% target share in the Brandon Aiyuk “X” role since Week 10.

Very few teams are able to make such substitutions so cleanly — just look at what the Bengals’ offense looked like in games without Tee Higgins earlier this season, or how unwatchable the Texans were without Nico Collins for much of this year. Purdy has arguably weathered injuries in his receiving corps better than Joe Burrow and C.J. Stroud, topping each in EPA/play. Neither has the benefit of Kyle Shanahan, but it’s pretty hard for me to entertain arguments that Purdy is not worth extending at this point.