Week 4 Waiver Wire: Six Adds Whose Usage Is Actually Climbing

The mistake most waiver claims make is buying a box score. A player goes for 100 yards and two scores on four touches and the whole league bids, and then he sees three touches the next week because nothing about his role changed.

The thing worth paying for is a workload that is going up. Below are six players whose carries or targets have climbed across all three weeks, with the actual numbers so you can see the slope rather than take our word for it.

The priority claim

Jeremiyah Love, RB, Arizona. Carries by week: 11, then 9, then 21. He added five catches on five targets in Week 3 and finished with 26 touches for 109 yards and a touchdown.

Twenty six touches is not a committee number. That is a team deciding who its back is. Everything else on this list is a bet on a trend continuing, and this one is a bet that a coaching staff means what it just did. Spend the most here.

Tight end, where the position is a wasteland

Harold Fannin Jr., Cleveland. Targets by week: 3, 6, 9. He turned the nine into seven catches and two touchdowns. A perfectly straight line up and to the right at a position where most teams are starting someone who sees four looks a game.

Kenyon Sadiq, New York Jets. Targets by week: 3, 3, 8. The Week 3 line was 7 catches for 105 yards and a score. The first two weeks are quiet enough that the trend is thinner than Fannin's, so treat this as the cheaper of the two claims, not the safer one.

Juwan Johnson, New Orleans. Caught all eight of his targets for 53 yards and two touchdowns. His target counts read 7, 4, 8, which is flat rather than climbing, but he has scored in two of three weeks and the catch rate is absurd. This is the streaming option if you miss on the first two.

Running back depth

Jaylen Warren, Pittsburgh. Carries by week: 10, 11, 17. The Week 3 line was 127 yards, and he has added at least two catches in every game. The volume has crept up each week rather than jumped, which is usually the more durable version of this.

Receiver

Luther Burden III, Chicago. Targets by week: 5, 7, 11. He caught seven for 61 and a touchdown on Monday night, and he did it with Case Keenum throwing rather than Caleb Williams. That matters in the right direction: the role survived a quarterback change. Kalif Raymond is the other Chicago name to know, with 9, 5 and 7 targets and two games over 84 yards.

Two to be careful with

Michael Wilson, Arizona caught 11 of 17 targets for 89 yards and a score, and 17 targets is an enormous number. The catch is that his first two weeks were 7 targets and 7 targets. One 17 target game inside a three game sample is a spike, not a trend, and it came in a game where Arizona was throwing to catch up. Add him if he is free. Do not spend real money.

Konata Mumpfield, Los Angeles Rams went 4 for 8 with 93 yards and a touchdown after seeing one and two targets in the first two weeks. Same problem, smaller sample. Tyler Higbee returning to 11 targets in the same game makes the Rams target picture more crowded, not less.

How to use this

Rank your claims by how much the role changed, not by how many points the player scored. Love moved from a rotation to a workload. Fannin moved from an afterthought to a starter. Wilson had a loud afternoon inside the same role he had in Week 1.

If you are choosing between two of these and cannot decide, the schedule is the tiebreaker. Our matchup ratings will tell you which of them walks into a defense that has been giving the position up, and the full board of available players sits on the waiver wire page. If a claim fails and you would rather trade for the production, the trade calculator will price it.

Every number above is from the Week 1 through Week 3 box scores at ESPN. Check them. The point of publishing the weekly splits instead of the season totals is that you can see for yourself whether the line is climbing or just loud.