1. Rex Burkhead and Dion Lewis Are Both Usable
We tend to get super paranoid whenever it comes to a guy playing running back for the New England Patriots. And with the way the position has changed this year, maybe that's justified. But for right now, it seems like we should feel pretty solid in using both Dion Lewis and Rex Burkhead.
Those two took almost full control of the backfield Sunday, handling 28 of 31 running-back carries between them and netting two targets apiece in a win over the Miami Dolphins. Lewis ran for 112 yards, and Burkhead scored twice. You were happy pretty much no matter what.
Still, this isn't as high of a usage spot as we get with the Saints in Kamara and Ingram, meaning we likely can't just trot out both whenever we so please in a given week. We probably need to choose one or the other. There just may not be a wrong choice there.
The main allure in using a Patriots player is the touchdown equity within the offense. This makes it important for us to look specifically at the run each player got in the red zone to see if they leaned on one over the other. However, that didn't seem to happen.
Here is the opportunity (either a touch or a target) breakdown for the two once the team got inside the red zone in Week 12.
| Total Opportunities | Inside 20-Yard Line | Inside 10-Yard Line | Inside 5-Yard Line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dion Lewis | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| Rex Burkhead | 3 | 3 | 3 |
Even though Burkhead was the guy who scored twice, they clearly weren't opposed to using Lewis in close. It's possible Burkhead just happened to be the guy on the field in those situations this week. Maybe it's Lewis who will get that opportunity next. Regardless, this makes it seem like both guys are going to hit paydirt at times down the stretch run of the season.
This allows us to have a little bit of fun for DFS. If ownership is gravitating toward Burkhead after his two-touchdown day, we now have justification for using Lewis instead. The same would be true if the public were to favor Lewis. There's not a huge difference between their respective workloads, so we should be going where the public is not.
In Week 13, the Patriots will be facing a Buffalo Bills run defense that had struggled mightily prior to Sunday's game with the Kansas City Chiefs. It means that both Lewis and Burkhead are firmly in play. Given Burkhead's big day this past week, we may be best suited to load up on Lewis at $6,300 while sprinkling in shares of Burkhead, as well, at $5,900.
2. Robby Anderson Could Cool Off Quickly
If you've been using Robby Anderson recently, your bankroll is likely quite plump and happy, and your process behind using him has been sound. He's generally a low-cost, low-ownership player who now has 51.9% of the New York Jets' deep targets and has scored a touchdown in five straight games. Dude's pretty good at football.
That said, it may be time to abandon ship before his volatile ways rear their ugly head.
With Anderson, we've felt only the positive side of that volatility recently with his ability to find the end zone. But players who rely on deep targets don't tend to be ones with high floors in fantasy football. When you add in that Anderson has just 22.0% of the Jets' overall targets in this five-game touchdown streak, that floor sinks a bit deeper.
What makes this stretch more incredible (and far less likely) is that he has just two red-zone targets the entire year. One of those was back in Week 2 before Austin Seferian-Jenkins was back from a suspension. Anderson's not a player the Jets are utilizing close to the goal line, meaning it's big play or bust from a touchdown perspective.
We can accept this type of volatility when a player is cheap and low-owned. But now, his price is up to $7,200 for Week 12, and you know ownership will follow after a blow-up game. That makes the downsides of Anderson a bit harder to swallow.
Anderson moves around the formation, meaning he'll be able to avoid stud cornerback Marcus Peters if the Jets want him to. From a pure matchup perspective, this is a tremendous situation for Anderson. But if he's going to carry restrictive ownership, do we really want to have him on our rosters?
It's possible that Anderson could go off against Kansas City, and he has shown his ceiling plenty of times recently. So if you can't lay off, that's totally understandable. But there are reasons to believe that Anderson's floor is much lower than it has looked recently, incentivizing us to fade him here and go back to him once the ownership has gravitated elsewhere.