5 NFL Red Zone Trends to Monitor for Week 3
Small Sample Dominators
Looking at those small-sample players with bigger market shares than Gurley and Kamara can still find us some big touchdown upside. Sure, it's hugely unlikely any player handles a 66.7% market share for the season, but early usage like that is still a good indicator that a team really wants to feed that player in scoring range.
The 66.7% mark I'm talking about? It belongs to Ezekiel Elliott. The Dallas Cowboys only have 12 red zone opportunities as a team, but Zeke accounts for 8 of those, with 6 carries and 2 targets. Maybe even more impressive than the overall share is that Zeke is dominating both the rushes (75.0%) and targets (50.0%) in Dallas. He is one of only two players with both a red zone rush attempt and target market share above 50% so far. He has a touchdown in each of his two games, and he's likely to continue finding the end zone at a high clip moving forward.
The other player with 50%-plus shares in both the rushing and passing games is David Johnson. DJ is off to a brutal start to the season, and part of that is because of the ineptitude of the Arizona Cardinals offense. They are tied for a league-low eight red zone snaps this season, and they are the only team that hasn't run at least one red zone snap in each game so far. Looking back to 2017, though, even the league-low mark for red zone snaps was 89. That's 5.5 per game over 16, a huge increase from Arizona's 4.0. Even if they continue to struggle on the offensive end, they're going to get more opportunities in scoring range, and Johnson stands to see plenty of those.
Marshawn Lynch suffered from Oakland being the team that ran those league-low 89 red zone snaps last year. The Raiders are on a better pace this year, averaging 7.5 per game, and that should mean big things for Lynch. His 66.7% rush attempt market share ranked top-five in 2017, and he's not far off that mark to start 2018, at 62.5%. He's also seeing increased passing game work, with his three targets already topping the two he saw last year.
The other two players in the top-five are T.J. Yeldon and Adrian Peterson. Yeldon's domination stands to fall when Leonard Fournette gets healthy, and with Fournette having finished 2017 with a 23.0% market share despite missing 3 games, he could see some big work moving forward.
Peterson has the biggest sample among these five, as Washington has 16 opportunities as a team. He has 0 red zone targets, but has 8 of the team's 9 carries, good for an 88.9% share.
