Five Stats to Know: 2025 Week 6

Week 6 is (mostly) in the books! In case you aren’t an insane person like me who likes to spend his Sunday night digging through usage data, I’ve curated five stats that will help you make better decisions in all fantasy football formats for the coming weeks.

I’ll also do my best to provide buy, sell, and waiver recommendations for managed leagues where applicable, based on my findings. For a broader (if slightly less detailed) overview of usage across the league, I recommend this Twitter thread.

Stat #1: Is Brian Thomas Jr. Back?

Over the first three weeks of the season, Brian Thomas Jr. was averaging a 21.2% target share (would rank WR26), but just 38.3 receiving YPG (WR56) and 8.5 FPG (WR56). But over his last three, he’s seen slightly more volume (23.5% target share, WR19) but has been significantly more efficient on it, averaging 73.0 receiving YPG (WR13) and 15.2 FPG (WR14). And both numbers would look even better had Travis Hunter not lined up offside on a play Thomas scored a TD in Week 6.

Thomas should at least project as a top-18 WR every week for the rest of the year. But is he on his way back to being the WR1 (or ~top-8 WR) you drafted him to be?

I’m not too confident, but I actually lean toward yes. Or at least, that what you’ve seen out of Thomas over the past three weeks will prove much more predictive or “real” than his first three weeks.

Per HC Liam Coen, Thomas was dealing with a wrist injury since at least Week 2, and he wasn’t removed from the team’s injury report until after Week 4. This didn’t excuse his poor effort on several plays early in the year, but it’s not especially surprising considering Thomas’s history. The tweet below is phrased as “is it possible?”, but I think that what it suggests is quite likely.

Looking forward, while Thomas hasn’t been the screen game cheat code we were promised this year (just one designed target on the season entering Sunday), the rest of this Jacksonville receiving corps appears to be begging him to consolidate an even larger target share — like, perhaps, the 31.6% he saw through from Week 12 on last year. Brenton Strange is out for the season, Travis Hunter doesn’t know where to line up, and neither Dyami Brown nor Parker Washington was able to command more than a 12% target share in Week 6 despite all of that. If Thomas is now both healthy and the player we thought he was, there’s no reason he shouldn’t score as a top-10 WR for the rest of the season.

Of course, I’m not ranking him nearly that high. This was an incredibly banged-up Seahawks’ secondary. Thomas’s target share, even over the past three weeks, hasn’t exceeded his average across his rookie season. And I guess there’s still the Mac Jones narrative (which has never been that convincing to me, but still). That’s enough uncertainty to make BTJ just a ~top-16 WR to me rest-of-season, but we’re miles ahead of where we were a few weeks ago.

Stat #2: The Backfields That Will Drive Us Insane

I’ve said before in this space that someone in the Steelers’ backfield — whether it be Kenneth Gainwell or Jaylen Warren — should be very valuable in fantasy coming out of the bye. But instead, the team rolled out a brutal three-way committee, perhaps specifically intending to prove me wrong.

In Week 6, the backfield totaled a very strong 23.9 weighted opportunities. But it was split in such a way as to make these players non-viable for fantasy.

Warren received 48% of the backfield’s carries, including the only one inside the red zone. But his receiving game involvement was scaled back, commanding just a 6.7% target share. All of that went to Gainwell (20% target share, 2nd on the team to only DK Metcalf). And even Kaleb Johnson mixed in for six carries.

Both Gainwell and Warren are desperation FLEX plays at best now. The backfield in total remains valuable, which frustratingly makes all of these players holds (though I wouldn’t hesitate to drop Gainwell in particular if you don’t see him making your lineup; he appears the least likely to grow his role to me). If you have the bench space heading into heavier bye weeks, Johnson makes a lot of sense as a stash now that we know he’s allowed to play meaningful snaps on offense again; half of his touches came in the first half when the game wasn’t already wrapped up.

Stat #3: Why Everyone Has The Patriots’ Backfield Wrong Post-Antonio Gibson

Over the last 7 quarters since Antonio Gibson’s season-ending injury, Rhamondre Stevenson has received 56% of the backfield’s carries, while TreVeyon Henderson has received 44%. Work through the air has solidly leaned toward Henderson (5 targets to Stevenson’s 2), despite his struggles in pass protection.

Many across the industry are correctly observing that Henderson’s pass protection needs work (which is ironic, given that he was almost unanimously considered the best pass protector among this rookie RB class). But passing downs are not the actual reason he’s disappointed in fantasy.

Since Gibson’s injury, Stevenson has been trusted with all 5 of this backfield’s carries inside the 10-yard line. By our weighted opportunity formula, those are “worth” about 6.8 fantasy points (though Stevenson actually scored twice on them, making it 12.8 fantasy points in actual terms). Those two TDs have accounted for 73% of Stevenson’s fantasy production over the past two weeks. This is Henderson’s real problem.

That’s both good and bad news. Pass protection struggles shouldn’t (in theory) preclude an RB from designed goal-line carries. These are separate skills. Though perhaps they’re related in Mike Vrabel’s mind at the moment. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the team might separately not like what Henderson is bringing at the goal line in practice reps, and that this problem won’t be fixed with improvement in pass protection. And maybe we can’t be that surprised; both Scott Barrett and Brett Whitefield had concerns about Henderson’s ability to play through contact, vision, and toughness in the pre-Draft process, important traits at the goal line.

But I’m going to reverse on all of this by now imploring you not to drop Henderson, as I’ve seen many suggest they’ll be doing this week. It is not unheard of for rookie RBs to play poorly and fail to earn volume well into their rookie seasons, then turn out to be great players; Jonathan Taylor comes to mind, as does Omarion Hampton (in a more condensed fashion) from this year. At worst, think of rostering Henderson like you would Zach Charbonnet, but if Ken Walker were bad.

Stat #4: Still Keeping An Eye On The Browns’ TEs

Last week in this space, I said to keep watch on the Browns’ tight ends after Dillon Gabriel hyper-targeted the position in his first start (on 39.4% of his pass attempts that game). That figure remains almost unchanged at 37.7% after this weekend, and we got an interesting run-out.

David Njoku left the Browns’ Week 6 game twice with injuries. His first absence lasted only a couple of plays, but he was out for good with 13:36 left in the 4th quarter. From then on, Jerry Jeudy led the team in target share (23.8%), followed closely by Harold Fannin (19.0%) and Isaiah Bond (19.0%).

I only bring this split up because over the entire game, Fannin had a 19.2% target share (his best since Week 1), which resulted in a career-high 15.2 FPG. In other words, he was on his way to an amazing game with or without Njoku on the field. As of Sunday night, Fannin was rostered in only 25% of Yahoo! leagues. That number should be much higher.

Stat #5: Is Ladd McConkey Back?

I bookended this article with Brian Thomas Jr. and Ladd McConkey because I feel significantly less confident about the latter player.

To begin with, I’m hesitant to extract real takeaways from a game in which the Chargers’ snap shares looked like this:

I’m excited about Oronde Gadsden, who commanded 8 targets and should be added in all formats this week. But when this is McConkey’s target competition (with Quentin Johnston out and Keenan Allen playing a limited snap share, even if he was primarily resting on run plays), he’d better command a 23.7% target share. I’d really have preferred the number to be closer to 30%, given my priors on McConkey’s talent and this cast of characters.

Perhaps this is the start of McConkey getting hot, the 33-year-old Allen beginning to fade with age as the season wears on, and of an extended and lingering hamstring struggle for Johnston. But it feels just as likely that Johnston is back next week and out-targeting McConkey once again.

And more concretely, the Chargers still targeted their backfield ~13% of the time this week, despite the loss of Omarion Hampton; that isn’t down as much as I’d have hoped from the ~15% over the first five weeks of the year. I still believe McConkey is awesome as a talent, but I remain pretty scared that he’s going to continue to make me look stupid over the rest of the year for being so high on him this offseason.