The fantasy football landscape shifts each week, bringing fresh opportunities and unexpected challenges that separate the prepared from the pretenders. Savvy managers know that last week’s performance tells only part of the story, and diving deeper into the underlying metrics reveals the accurate picture.
This week presents some intriguing decisions. Here’s insight about key Miami Dolphins players heading into their matchup with the New York Jets to help you craft a winning lineup.
Tua Tagovailoa, QB
The NFL rate for the percentage of throws traveling 15+ yards in the air annually settles in around 21%. League-wide, this number has been trending downward, but Tua Tagovailoa is taking it to a different level, and that’s an issue when maximizing a player like Tyreek Hill.
He’s been under 17.5% in two of three games this season.
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In theory, the run-after-the-catch potential of his weapons makes this a more viable strategy for him than most. Still, when you have the broadcast fawning over his willingness to play within himself in a game where he averages 4.3 yards per completion, we’ve got a problem.
At this point, the bar for Tagovailoa to impress is so low that we are willing to latch onto anything. His quick decision-making on Thursday was a decent step for the Miami franchise, but he’s a long way away from mattering to us.
Without rushing upside-downfield shots, isn’t Tagovailoa what you’d expect from Tom Brady if he came out of retirement?
Tagovailoa is a low-upside option in superflex formats at best this week, and I’m not sure we see that change at any point over the next three months.
De’Von Achane, RB
The man is doing all he can for the floundering fish, and with 15+ PPR points in all three games (all top 12 finishes) this season, De’Von Achane is trying his best to sustain fantasy value as the focal point of an offense that is on the fringes of broken.
Achane is currently Miami’s leading receiver in terms of targets and catches, doing what he can in this horizontally based attack (180 of his 141 receiving yards this season have come after the catch). He’s also running hard, a must given that opponents have yet to really be burned by the pass game for crowding the line of scrimmage.
In 2021, Achane was an above-average RB after contact on 54.2% of his carries. His job is largely to run away from contact in the first place, and he’s shifty enough to do that in many situations, so I didn’t label that unimpressive mark as much of a red flag.
His rushing stats will fall off a cliff if he regresses to that rate moving forward.
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Through three weeks, that rate sits at an elite 76.7%. Miami is struggling in almost every facet of the game right now, but its standout running back is running hard and pacing for 102 receptions.
Ollie Gordon II was used to spell him much more on Thursday night than the two weeks prior, and while that deserves your attention, it could just as easily have been a result of the short work week for a sub-200-pound running back that handled 19 touches the week prior.
Ollie Gordon II, RB
We might be onto something here.
There were whispers during the preseason that the sixth-round bruiser (6’2″, 225-pounder) would absorb enough work to be on our flex radar by the second half of the season, and, after a slow start, we might just get there.
In the first half, Gordon and Achane split 12 carries right down the middle, with the kid getting the call on a two-yard plunge that resulted in his first professional score (36 rushing TDs during his three seasons at Oklahoma State).
His size is his calling card, and that looks to be what the Dolphins are most interested in leveraging. With 13% of his collegiate touches coming via the reception (7.3 yards per catch), there’s potentially more versatility than meets the eye given his size, but 75% of his snaps as a pro up to this point have come on the first two downs, and that appears to be sticky.
Gordon still doesn’t need to be on your mind when locking in your starting lineup, but he does need to be rostered across the board. The Dolphins are winless, and if they don’t make some noise over the next two weeks (they play at Carolina next week), this could well be a team that turns its sights onto the future, something they very much would like Gordon to be a part of (Weeks 6-11: Chargers, Browns, Falcons, Ravens, Bills, and Commanders).
Jaylen Waddle, WR
The production profile of Jaylen Waddle passes the sniff test, but I’m nervous.
He scored at the end of the first half on Thursday night, and that’s been encouraging. He’s seen three of Miami’s five end zone targets. With him functioning as the chain mover to Hill’s verticality (Hill: 15.6 aDOT, Waddle: 8.47), the high catch rate is likely here to stay (82.4% is probably a bit optimistic, but the easy-button targets are his to lose).
Be careful.
Hill is out-targeting Waddle 8-2 on third downs this season, and that speaks to where Tagovailoa is comfortable going when the chips are in the middle of the table. We also have this weird trend where Waddle only carries scoring equity against opponents he is familiar with.
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The fact that he hasn’t scored against a non-AFC East opponent since Week 6 of 2021 is a weird one, but with a divisional opponent on tap this weekend, we can worry about that another time.
Waddle has earned at least eight looks in four straight against the Jets and averages 6.4 catches per game for his career against the divisional rival. I’ve got his numbers checking in around that level on Monday night, and that’s enough for him to crack my top 30, ranking above Hill for the first time this year.
Tyreek Hill, WR
On Thursday night, we got a vintage Hill route on the short touchdown against the Dolphins, where his speed in those tight windows can put the corner in a blender.
For a moment, everything looked as it was supposed to. Hill ran the shifty pattern, and Tagovailoa put the ball right where it needed to be, perfectly on schedule. There was a toe-tap third-down play that followed the same pattern in the game as well, so it’s not as if all hope is lost, but I’m not exactly encouraged.
Hill caught just one pass in the second half on Thursday, and that is where the problem lies. The quality of the target is a real concern these days, and the deeper down the field those looks come, the less confident I get.
The speed is still there, and we see glimpses of it, but he’s come down with just three deep passes (20+ air yards) this season, and the highlight of that collection was a play in Week 2 where Tagovailoa appeared to be trying to throw a 21-pound football and came up well short of the desired placement.
He missed by enough that Hill was able to work his way back and make the play for a 47-yard gain, but it was far from a clean effort and nowhere near what we’ve seen from this offense in the past. The tandem took a shot against the Bills, but the timing was off, and the pass sailed high without posing much of a real threat.
Hill is the downfield threat in this offense, which is clear with an aDOT nearly double that of Waddle. That’s valuable, but it comes with more risk, especially when the opponent is familiar with this system and has an ace corner.
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I prefer the high catch rate that we get access to with Waddle in this specific spot, but both will be in the WR3 range for me every week moving forward, and I don’t see that changing.
If past trends are of interest to you, in Hill’s last four games against the Jets, he’s failed to reach five PPR points twice and cleared 25 PPR points in the other two instances. This is an all-or-nothing spot, something we are going to have to get used to.
