1134: 10 Trends for Week 4

The Late-Round Podcast's Week 4 trends episode is a rapid-fire dive into usage data — snap shares, route shares, target shares, and yards-after-contact splits — used to separate real breakouts from mirages. JJ Zachary's central argument is that surface-level playing time numbers routinely lie, and the hosts spend the episode showing where volume and efficiency are (or aren't) telling the same story for a dozen skill players.

The arguments

Khalif Raymond's production won't hold at its current level, but he's still a rosterable player. Zachary built a comp set of wide receivers drafted outside WR60 with similar early route/target shares and found none averaged fewer than 9 PPR points per game the rest of the way, but only one topped 13. Raymond's 67% route share and 23% target share are stronger than his best comp (Russell Gage in 2020), yet Chicago's receiver room is more crowded than any of the comps' situations, which is why Zachary has him at just WR53 in his rest-of-season rankings — still about 15 spots above consensus, but tempered.

Ashton Jeanty's efficiency problems are real but not yet a reason to bench him. Zachary noted Jeanty ranks in the bottom third of qualified backs in yards after contact per attempt, 10-plus-yard run rate, and success rate, with no runs of 20-plus yards, while Mike Washington flashed a long touchdown on a small sample. Jeanty still carries a 74% rush share to Washington's 18%, ranks third among backs in expected fantasy points per game, and is coming off an ankle injury, so Zachary isn't panicking even if Washington chips into the rush workload.

DJ Moore is a buy-low relative to market rankings. Zachary has Moore five to six spots higher than consensus, pointing to a 16.2 expected-PPR-points-per-game pace in Weeks 1 and 3 (a top-10 WR rate) that only drops to WR34-expected-points territory once the limited Week 2 game is folded in. Moore also ranks second in the league in targets per route run and sixth in yards per route run, which Zachary uses to argue the box score is understating him.

Jeremiah Love's Week 3 workload signals a real shift in Arizona's backfield hierarchy. Love posted a 63% snap share (previous high was 44%) and a 78% rush share, the highest by any Cardinals back this season by 23 percentage points, pushing his expected PPR points to 20.2 versus 12.3 and 8.6 in Weeks 1 and 2. Route share barely changed, so this is specifically a ground-game shift, with Tyler Algier still involved at the goal line.

Zay Flowers' per-route efficiency is historically strong, even on a tiny sample. Zachary's market-score comp work flagged Flowers as this year's version of 2025 Jaxon Smith-Njigba before the season, and despite a 30% snap share and only 25 routes run, Flowers is averaging over 9 yards per route run with a league-high 48% targets-per-route-run rate. Zachary flagged the sample size and competition level as caveats but still called it a potential monster season if health cooperates.

Bashaud Tootle has been one of the best pure runners in football, but his route share is capping his ceiling. By yards after contact, success rate, and 10-plus-yard run rate, Zachary put Tootle behind only backs like Kyren Williams, Jahmyr Gibbs, and Christian McCaffrey, and he specifically outperforms Chris Rodriguez, who has zero runs of 10-plus yards. The problem is Tootle's route share ranks 25th among backs with only five targets, which keeps him in RB2 range despite elite rushing marks.

Route share matters roughly twice as much as snap share for predicting rest-of-season scoring, and this is currently being missed with Jacksonville's receivers. Using data back to 2016, Zachary found that among receivers with identical 50-70% snap shares, those with better route profiles scored 8.5 PPR points per game versus 6.0 for those used more as blockers. He applied this directly to Jacksonville: Parker Washington's 84% route share on a 73% snap share makes him more valuable than the raw number suggests, and Josh Cameron's higher snap count than Brian Thomas Jr. in Week 3 masked the fact that Thomas still ran six more actual routes.

What it means for your roster

• Add Khalif Raymond off waivers if available — Zachary's ranking him well above market at WR53, but treat him as a low-end WR4, not a league-winner, given Chicago's receiver competition.
• Hold Ashton Jeanty despite the poor efficiency marks; the workload (74% rush share, third among backs in expected points) outweighs three weeks of shaky yards-after-contact data.
• Buy DJ Moore if his owner is discouraged by the box score — Zachary has him five-plus spots higher than consensus based on target-share and per-route efficiency, not weekly totals.
• Bump up Jeremiah Love's role assumptions after his 78% rush share game; this looks like the start of a real workload shift in Arizona.
• Stash or buy Zay Flowers and Carnell Tate on bench spots — both profile as talented players in shaky-but-improvable situations (Flowers' health, Tate's Titans offense with a struggling Cam Ward), and Zachary explicitly said he'd trade bench pieces for both.
• Add Zach Charbonnet if available; Zachary flagged Jadarian Price's poor efficiency on contact at or before the line of scrimmage as a red flag that dampens his breakout timeline.
• Reassess wide receiver value using route share, not snap share — apply this to Jacksonville specifically: trust Brian Thomas Jr. over Josh Cameron's raw snap counts, and consider Parker Washington a sneaky-efficient add given his 84% route share.