NFL

Market Share Report: Sammy Watkins Returns to Relevancy

Sammy Watkins' production may not have shown it, but his usage in Week 13 says we can now use him with confidence in fantasy football. Which other players had noteworthy usage this week?

The NFL is a microcosm of how philosopher Thomas Hobbes described life without government: it's nasty, brutish, and short.

You know that dude used Colin Kaepernick in Week 13.

The NFL is nasty in that league winners can turn to dust in the span of just a few plays. It's brutish in that one simple hit can radically change a player's value, for better or for worse. And it's short in that our sample is just 16 games, meaning all of these fluctuations happen without any time to wait and let things play out.

If we want to thrive in this anarchic system without allowing the nastiness to swallow us whole, we're going to have to make some snap decisions. And looking at usage is the best way to do so, even if it can lead us into a steaming Vance McDonald death trap from time to time.

numberFire's new DFS tools can grant us a look into these usages and how they're changing throughout the season. We can check out trends in carry market shares, target market shares, and red zone market shares over the past one, three, and five games. Using this can help us spot when a player is on the rise or the decline to help us avoid a dud when it matters most.

Let's break things down for each of those three major categories to see which players had noteworthy usage in Week 13.