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Time for Reflection and Retooling
By Steven Van Tassell (@SteveVT33)
With the Dynasty Owner regular season halfway over, it’s time to reflect on how things are going so far this season. Is your Dynasty Owner team in contention for the playoffs, a first round playoff bye, the League Championship or even more, such as competing in the Chase for the Ring? Or is it looking like your team is going to miss the playoffs and if so, can your team win the Loser’s Bracket and earn that extra first round rookie draft pick (pick 1.13) for 2023? Maybe you have multiple teams, and some are in contention and others are out of it. It’s also possible that your team is sitting at 4-4 and in between the two polar opposite positions that I’ve laid out. You may need more time to figure out if your Dynasty Owner team should be trying to make the playoffs and a playoff run, or selling off some assets and retooling for 2023. The time is right for reflection and if necessary, retooling.
For myself, in addition to these decisions, I’ve been thinking about the content that I put out and if it could be better. Better and more engaging topics, different features, or just a total retooling of how things are being done. The articles are long, so they will be getting shorter for the rest of the season. There will continue to be the same amount of information, as we are just going to make the articles shorter and more frequent. The weekly Surprise and Totally Predictable Event section will now be a stand-alone article with a weekly summary of the Sunday games.
For the purposes of this article, ADP and Dynasty Owner rostered percentage statistics were current as of the evening of October 31st.
Surprise of the Week – Trifecta
This section is where I highlight one fantasy football surprise of the week. It’ll be something that nobody really saw coming. It could be a good or bad surprise depending on the week. For the first time in a while, it’s not about the Jets and Giants winning since they both lost this Sunday.
This week’s surprise is that we had the first touchdown trifecta (rushing, receiving, passing) since 2005. Christian McCaffrey ($16,015,875) had it in just his second career game with the 49ers. A couple of things stand out about this surprise:
First, I’ll be honest and acknowledge that I’ve never heard it called the touchdown trifecta until last night. The name makes sense, it’s just that I never heard it called that before.
Second, the reason why me (and most everyone else) has never heard it called the touchdown trifecta is because it happens so infrequently. The headlines had that this was the first one since 2005, but digging a little deeper, I discovered that this is only the 11th touchdown trifecta in NFL history. Read about the first 10 here.
I remember WR David Patten of the Patriots doing it way back in 2001 because I’m a Patriots fan, he set a record for fantasy points in my long-time redraft league and singlehandedly helped a team win their weekly match-up in that league. The last part is a funny story as we used to have 15 teams in the league and would draft a team of players on nobody’s roster to play against one team a week in lieu of a bye week. It was the first victory for the undrafted team and gave everyone in the league years of material to make fun of the team that lost.
Third, if I was predicting the next player to do this, I would have gone with Taysom Hill ($10,000,000). Hill has one of each already this year and in his 4 TD game back in Week 5 versus Seattle, he had 3 rushing TDs and a passing TD, but no receptions or receiving TDs. McCaffrey’s new teammate Deebo Samuel ($1,811,869) was also a good candidate as he had a TD pass last season to go with 6 receiving and 8 rushing TDs. Only a handful of non-QBs throw a TD pass every season and other than Hill, the last time someone threw more than one in a season was when Patriots WR Jakobi Meyers ($3,986,000) had two passing TDs in 2020. Of course, Meyers didn’t have a receiving (or rushing) TD that year.
Honorable surprise to the Green Bay Packers for running more than passing in this week’s loss to the Buffalo Bills. It was only the second game all season in which they ran the ball more times than passing it (they had 35 rushing and passing attempts each in Week 4 as well). It only happened five times previously during the Matt LaFleur era (twice in 2021, three times in 2020 and zero times in 2019), it’s an infrequent occurrence and had never occurred before in a Packers’ loss under LaFleur. It should happen more this season as the Packers are clearly a better running than passing team, but with Aaron Rodgers ($33,500,000) calling the shots, I’m going to be surprised the next time it happens as well.
Totally Predictable Event of the Week: Pollard Better than Elliott
This section is where I highlight one totally predictable thing that might be surprising to other people, but might be something that I’ve been believing and saying for a while, but nobody’s been listening or agreeing with me on it.
This week, it’s the totally predictable event that Tony Pollard ($796,945) will finally be seen as better than Ezekiel Elliott ($15,000,000). I’ve believed this for a while, but now we have statistical “proof” as Pollard has scored more Dynasty Owner fantasy points than Elliott, both overall this season (108.7 Dynasty Owner fantasy points for Pollard vs. 77.5 for Elliott) and on a per game basis (13.6 for Pollard vs. 11.1 for Elliott). It’s the first time that Pollard has surpassed Elliott and hopefully Dynasty Owners saw his 35.7 Dynasty Owner fantasy point (131 rushing yards, 1 reception, 16 receiving yards, 3 TDs) performance or will see highlights of it and finally realize that Pollard is better.
I believe that I’m in the minority on this belief because even though Elliott’s salary for Dynasty Owner is over $14 million more, he was still being drafted higher than Pollard on average in 2022 Dynasty Owner start-up drafts (64.9 ADP for Elliott vs. 82.5 ADP for Pollard). I’m sure that there are a few leagues in which Pollard was drafted earlier, but not overall.
It’s obvious when you look at how Pollard does when Elliott is out versus how Elliott does when Pollard is out. Both are very durable, so it doesn’t happen much, only twice for each player over the past three seasons. Here are the results:
| Player | Year | Week | Rushing Attempts | Receptions | Total Yards | TDs | DOFP |
| Tony Pollard | 2020 | 15 | 12 | 6 | 132 | 2 | 31.7 |
| Ezekiel Elliott | 2021 | 14 | 12 | 1 | 60 | 0 | 9.0 |
| Ezekiel Elliott | 2021 | 18 | 18 | 1 | 90 | 0 | 10.0 |
| Tony Pollard | 2022 | 8 | 14 | 1 | 147 | 3 | 35.7 |
As you can see, Pollard is averaging 33.7 Dynasty Owner fantasy points per game when Elliott is out, and Elliott is averaging only 9.5 Dynasty Owner fantasy points per game when Pollard is out.
This is not definitive proof that Pollard is better but all of the statistical evidence plus the fact that Pollard is doing better on the “eye test” compared to Elliott. Having the stats to back up what myself and a few others have been seeing for a while is helpful. It was pretty predictable that Pollard would play well in Elliott’s absence this week to me, but might have been a surprise to everyone who drafted Elliott in Dynasty Owner before Pollard.
Conclusions
Thanks for reading this new, shorter article. Hopefully everyone enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it and all of these surprises and predictable events all season. I’ll start by adding a short wrap-up of the Sunday games at the beginning of these articles starting next week. I’ll do my best to summary the games and how the results impact Dynasty Owners.
In addition to this article, Dynasty Owner has plenty of other great content to help you win your League Championship and maybe be our 2022 Chase for the Ring Champion. Our updated 2022 in-season publication schedule is as follows:
- Mondays: This new stand-alone weekly Surprise and Totally Predictable Event article will usually appear on Monday morning. Jay Pounds will also preview the Monday Night Football matchup from the Dynasty Owner perspective.
- Tuesdays: First, I’ll have the Dynasty Owner recap article with the winners of Player of the Week, Value Player of the Week and our Dynasty Owner Match-up of the Week. I’ll also give you a player per position who played well and should have been in your Starting lineup as well as one per position who didn’t do well and should have been on your Bench. In the afternoon, Jay Pounds is back with his weekly Free Agent Auction targets article to help you figure out what players to bid on before the first Free Agent Auction run of the week is processed on Wednesday at 5 AM (Eastern).
- Wednesday: Matt Morrison – The Jerk writes about a topic of his choosing and his weekly rankings will also pop up on Wednesdays as well. He will give us his candidates for Value of the Year so far this week.
- Thursday: Matt Morrison – The Jerk will preview the Thursday Night Football game, which will include his selection for “Value of the Game”. Starting this week, I’ll have a separate article that will preview the upcoming NFL games and present a Dynasty Owner Match-up of the Week.
- Friday: Listen to the Dynasty Owner podcast with me and Jay or watch it on YouTube on Friday morning. In the afternoon, I’ll have a slimmed-down weekly preview article with my Starting lineup and Bench recommendations plus a look back at the previous week’s recommendations.
Don’t forget that we also have the Champions podcast which is on Dynasty Owner on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
Please read all of our articles, listen to the podcasts and watch the Livestream with me and Dynasty Owner CEO Tim Peffer on Wednesday or watch it afterwards if you can’t catch us live. Don’t forget follow Dynasty Owner on Twitter as well. Thanks for reading!
Steven Van Tassell is the Head of Content for Dynasty Owner
Follow us on Twitter: @SteveVT33 and @Dynasty_Owner