Welcome everyone to the PFF Fantasy podcast. I'm your host John Macri, fantasy analyst here at PFF, and I am once again joined by PFF's lead fantasy analyst, the great Nathan Yankee, Nate, how you doing?

I am doing well. I think natural with podcasts, we start having a conversation while we're getting things set up and we're like, no, we need to stop this conversation and have it once we get on the air. And in this case, we were starting to talk about how this was a weird week for the NFL and fantasy football in general. I feel like my fantasy teams, my undefeated teams all took losses, but all of my other teams ended up taking wins because there were players that haven't been doing well that did do well this week and vice versa.

Definitely an interesting week for the NFL, so plenty for us to talk about today.

Yeah, it really did. It felt like a really weird week. And sometimes I feel that way and it might just be me, but I felt like, yeah, like you said, my how my fantasy teams were affected this kind of in a similar way. And I don't know, we got some big injuries to monitor with with Anthony Richardson, Justin Jefferson's hamstring, maybe Travis Kelsey, Daniel Jones.

But then we got like the hat tricks from from George Kittle and DJ Moore and and Jamar Chase as well, which was cool to see.

Zach Moss and Tijay Spears trying to make us forget about Jonathan Taylor and Derek Henry. There's a whole bunch of stuff, but we'll get into it.

Again, we're not necessarily going game by game for this. Instead, we're going to focus on the top takeaways from this weekend's game.

Nate has all the takeaways from every single game up on pff.com. If there is something that you wanted to hear us cover today, but for whatever reason, we don't you can head on over to pff.com to check out all of Nate's takeaways from this past week's games.

So you should be able to find it there.

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All right, let's start things off with some running back talk and a couple of names that we haven't covered a lot on on this take away show in a while over in New England.

Where Bill Bella check may be buying into the feed Zeke mantra. We've got Ezekiel Elliott and Ramandri Stevenson both had eight carries each both just under 25 yards rushing so Nate was the usage really that close between the two this week.

Yeah, they were nearly identical something nice about having the bi weeks is when I was writing these recaps I had a little bit more time to dig into what exactly was going on with Elliott first Stevenson since it's been just slight changes each week where Elliott just sees a little bit more and a little bit more work and this time it was closer to 50%.

They've mostly been rotating by drive so Stevenson would get the first drive Elliott would get the second drive and so on and in previous weeks and when it was Elliott's drive Stevenson would often come in on third down or if the drive was dragging on for a bit longer but that hasn't been happening as much recently.

So it would be really Stevenson gets a drive Elliott gets a drive Stevenson gets a drive and so on and sometimes when that happens one player has longer drive drives and others and in this one just nothing with the Patriots was working that well so we saw pretty even split with Elliott and Stevenson like we saw Elliott get the two minute drill but that just happened to be because it was his turn to get the two minute drill.

Stevenson got short yardage work but that mostly was because his drives ended up running into some players where they were short yardage work so not expecting those two trends necessarily to continue it'll be interesting to see what the Patriots do in general going forward with how poorly they've lost these past two weeks and won't be surprised to see some pretty significant changes either to offensive philosophy or with the players they're using or what I would note that

Stevenson has graded better than Elliott as receiver it's just Elliott has a much higher target rate so far this season at 22% compared to Stevenson at 14% so they've been throwing the ball to Elliott more he just hasn't been any more efficient with the ball in his hands.

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