Fantasy Football: What we learned from Week 5, including DeAndre Hopkins' surprising No. 1 status in one metric

Fantasy expert Jacob Gibbs dug into every game from the fifth week of the NFL season and found several interesting takeaways.
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Early each week, SportsLine's Fantasy expert Jacob Gibbs will provide a data-driven deep-dive into the usage for every team's running backs and pass-catchers. You can find full team-by-team data on snap counts, target share, routes run, red-zone usage and more for every Fantasy relevant running back, wide receiver and tight end.

Below, Gibbs covers the 10 most important storylines from Week 5 to help provide a better understanding of what we learned and how it will impact the Fantasy outlook of specific teams and players. 

If you have questions about any stats, players, or situations covered or not covered in this article, feel free to reach out to Gibbs on Twitter

Important Week 5 metrics

No stat correlates more closely with Fantasy scoring at the RB position than snap rate.

A player's route involvement rate simply represents the percentage of the team's total dropbacks on which that player ran a route. So, the running backs listed above all have run a route on at least 59 percent of their team's dropbacks. Running routes is the first step towards drawing targets, which is key to unlocking Fantasy upside at the RB position.

These receivers have shown a unique ability to dominate both the target and air yardage share.

Target per route run rate is one of the most important stats available for evaluating pass-catchers in Fantasy. I wrote about it in more detail here, if you are unfamiliar with the stat.

Without a doubt, the most surprising inclusion on this list is DeAndre Hopkins' 76 percent air yardage share. The target and air yard volume had been way down for Hopkins to start the season, but Kyler Murray was focused on delivering the ball downfield to his top weapon in Week 5.

These tight ends are being targeted at the highest rate when allowed to run routes, but that's only part of the equation when evaluating tight ends for Fantasy purposes. Understanding how often each tight end's offense allows them to actually run routes is another important piece of the puzzle.

Players like Hockenson, Andrews and Pitts haven't needed a massive target per route run rate, because they are running so many routes. This type of route involvement provides exciting upside for those guys if their TPRR rate rises, as we saw on full display with Mark Andrews' big Week 5 performance.

Dating back to 2017, targets that come on first down are worth 18 percent more PPR points than targets that came on second, third or fourth down. In Week 5, we saw the Rams go out of their way to feed Robert Woods the ball. Bobby Trees had more first down targets in Week 5 than in the first four games of the season combined.

So which RB saw a surprising role in Week 5? And which top tight end could be impacted by a breakthrough rookie campaign? ... Join SportsLine here to see Jacob Gibbs' What We Learned from Week 5 feature, all from one of the nation's most accurate experts as graded by FantasyPros!


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