10 Fantasy Football Takeaways from Week 6: A.J. Brown returns, Eagles lose Jalen Hurts

Week 6 was a weird one with roles changing all over the place and supposed superstars dropping the ball. These are the 10 takeaways from Sunday’s games you need to know before Week 7.

A.J. Brown returns to the lineup

Brown returned from IR last week and ran 97 percent of the routes. He earned a 34 percent target share and accounted for 41 percent of New England's air yards. This was as alpha as usage gets for a receiver. Surely it wasn’t the worst game of his career?

It was. Pro Football Focus assigned him a receiving grade of 37.3. It’s easily the lowest grade of his career and only the second time he’s dipped below 50 after his rookie season. Two drops, a fumble, and a handful of uncaught targets that were drops by any other name will do that. PFF has it as the second-worst game by a wide receiver (min. 30 routes) of the past five years. I am choosing to put my blinders on regarding the performance and focus on the fact that Brown saw WR1 usage in his first game back. He strikes me as a clear buy low.

Kyren Williams’ new role

Williams was not pleased with how Sean McVay used him in Week 6’s loss to the Cardinals.

Has anyone told him how valuable targets are in PPR leagues? Williams has a 16 percent target share this year. That’s a career-high and double his target share from 2025. He currently leads all running backs in receptions (30) and targets (38). Equally as notable: Williams leads all running backs in air yards. His 110 air yards are almost 50 more than Ashton Jeanty, who has the second most. Williams might not be happy with his role, but fantasy managers should be.

Tanner McKee takes over

McKee’s first of many starts this year wasn’t great, but it could have been worse for fantasy managers. Like Jalen Hurts before him, McKee knows his job is to get the ball in the hands of the fantasy options. DeVonta Smith set a new career high in targets at 14. He caught seven of them for 75 yards and a score. Dallas Goedert reeled in 6-of-8 targets for 61 yards. For our selfish fantasy purposes, this change might be for the best. McKee had a dropback conversion rate (the percentage of dropbacks that result in a target for a pass-catcher) of 90 percent. Hurts’ DCR this year was 77 percent. On top of that, Pro Football Focus has deemed 25 percent of his passes as uncatchable. McKee’s uncatchable rate is 21 percent. McKee isn’t better than Hurts at winning football games, but he might be better at putting fantasy points on the table.

Jalen Coker is a problem

For my Tetairoa McMillan bags, of course. Over their past 10 games, Coker has scored nearly 30 more fantasy points and is just two targets behind.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that McMillan's career game came in Coker’s only absence of the year. McMillan is averaging 12.2 fantasy points per game with Coker active over the past year and a half. That soars to 17.5 when Coker is out. I’m not ready to crown Coker the WR1 of this team just yet, but I’m willing to admit that he’s no less than a 1B.

Jaguars’ usage patterns

Starting in the backfield, Chris Rodriguez was back in full force last week with 11 carries to Bhayshul Tuten’s 12. Rodriguez also saw the team’s only goal line carry, though he did not score, per usual. Tuten dropped to a season-low 52 percent carry share, but he buoyed the loss in attempts by an uptick in receiving work. Tuten caught a career-high four passes, which he turned into four catches for 48 yards and a pair of scores. Tuten’s 57 percent route rate was also a new high-water mark.

At receiver, the Jags finally fully gave up on Brian Thomas Jr. He did not play a snap in the second half. By routes, Josh Cameron was the biggest beneficiary of his absence running a route on 65 percent of Trevor Lawrence’s dropbacks in the second half, but he was not targeted. Like BTJ, Cameron has run the majority of his routes from out wide this year. Also like BTJ, Cameron isn’t being targeted at a high clip. His .17 targets per route would not rank inside the top 40 receivers if he had enough snaps to qualify.

Travis Hunter, on the other hand, ran just four routes after the break, but he was targeted on three of them. Add in one first-half catch and Hunter finished the day with four grabs for 59 yards and a score. The Jags will likely trade BTJ before the deadline, potentially during their Week 7 bye. I don’t think Hunter sees enough routes even after BTJ is gone to be a weekly fantasy starter, but the two-way dream is not dead yet.

Rookie wide receivers emerge

Through five weeks, 2026 had been a dreadful year for rookie wideouts. There were two 20-point games and four 15-point games by rookies. Over the past 20 years, the medians for spike and usable weeks at that point were four and nine. As of Week 5, this receiver class was giving us half the usual amount of fantasy production. Things finally turned around in Week 6 with spike weeks from:

• Germie Bernard - 11/87/1
• Omar Cooper Jr. - 6/103/1
• Carnell Tate - 6/70/1

A few points stick out for the latter two receivers. Tate currently ranks seventh among all rookie wide receivers in target share (27 percent) since 2000. In the past 10 years, Malik Nabers, Drake London, Puka Nacua,Justin Jefferson, and Tetairoa McMillan are the only rookies to earn a target share north of 25 percent in their first season. Target-earning as a rookie is an incredibly strong predictor of future stardom.

Efficiency-wise, Cooper Jr. is in a similar spot. He is averaging 4.6 yards per route run on an admittedly small sample of routes. The list of first-round rookies to average over even two yards per route over the past decade is Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase, Brian Thomas Jr., Chris Olave, London, and Nabers. It’s a long season for Cooper Jr. to keep up his efficiency numbers, but he’s off to a promising start.

Extreme play-calling at the goal line

The title says it all here. There are six teams that have run the ball on at least 75 percent of their plays inside the 5-yard line. The Vikings, Dolphins, and Chargers have all run fewer than 10 goal line plays in total, so the fact that they lean run-heavy on those very scarce plays doesn’t move the needle.

The Colts are the one team with a run rate over 80 percent and more than 10 goal line plays. Though they feel like one of the league’s worst offenses, Indy’s incredible run game has kept them marginally afloat. To no one’s surprise, they keep the rock in Jonathan Taylor’s hands when it matters most. The Bills are another obvious candidate to be at the top of this list, coming in as the fifth-most run-heavy offense at the goal line. With Josh Allen as one of the league’s best short-yardage hammers and James Cook to mix things up, we should expect them to do exactly what they are doing.

The last team over a 75 percent run rate is the Seattle Seahawks. This is at least slightly more surprising, given that they have played half the season without first-round pick Jadarian Price and the entire season without goal line specialist Zach Charbonnet. The former has at least one more week on IR while the latter should be back this week. Seattle has created the ninth-most expected fantasy points for their running backs. If Charbonnet can consolidate that work before Price returns, he could produce strong fantasy numbers.

What’s going on with Michael Wilson?

Wilson has all but disappeared from the box scores over the past two weeks with a total of seven catches for 74 scoreless yards. His cold streak coincides with Marvin Harrison Jr.’s departure. Wilson had a 10.3 aDOT over the first month of the year. That is up to 13.7 post-MHJ. Wilson is also facing press coverage at a far higher rate. He was being pressed on 44 percent of his routes pre-trade. That is up to 62 percent in his past two games. He is averaging barely over one yard per route versus press coverage. The good news is that Wilson was good against press coverage last year and elite with MHJ out of the lineup. The role is almost certainly going to be different without MHJ around, but the fact that Wilson has been worse over the past two weeks might not be sticky.

Matthew Golden is dropping the ball

Literally, he is dropping the ball with a league-high seven drops. Fantasy managers shouldn’t be all that concerned given he’s the WR7 right now. If anything, that he is leaving so many points on the field and is still an elite fantasy option is impressive. Using the aDOT, quantity, and location of every drop, we can estimate a minimum of how many PPR points they have cost the receiver this year. Golden has given up 23.5 fantasy points with his slippery hands this season. That leads all wideouts and it’s not a close race. It also doesn't account for potential yards or touchdowns after the catch.

My numbers would only count this as a loss of a catch and its 43 accompanying air yards, even though we can both agree that Golden would have gone the extra five yards and scored.

The other three players who have given up at least a dozen PPR points via drops are:

• Davante Adams - 14.6
• Jameson Williams - 13.5
• Ted Hurst - 13

Williams is the only one of the four wideouts (including Golden) who have given up as many points without dropping an end zone target. He is second in the league in yardage lost to drops at 95.

Now for the quarterbacks

This is the same data—fantasy points lost to drops—grouped by quarterback instead of receiver:

• Jordan Love - 13.4
• Baker Mayfield - 11.7
• Jared Goff - 8.6
• Drake Maye - 8

Because the reception itself is valuable to receivers but not quarterbacks, QBs lose fewer points to drops than their pass-catcher counterparts. Still, Love’s teammates have cost him north of two points per game. He’s currently the QB15 on a points-per-game basis. Mayfield is the only quarterback other than Love to have multiple end zone drops, propelling him to the No. 2 spot on the list. Goff has the aforementioned Williams dropping his passes.

Maye doesn’t have one single receiver standing out as an anchor on the offense, but no one sticks out as a major boost to the passing attack either. On top of the drops, the Pats’ pass-catchers simply aren’t offering anything with the ball in their hands. As a team, New England is 23rd in YAC per catch and 25th in missed tackles forced per attempt.