Always Have a Back-Up Plan: Fantasy Football Weekly
Always Have a Back-Up Plan: Fantasy Football Weekly
(Bloomberg) -- A few things I’ve learned in my 30 years of playing fantasy football: a league is never won in the first round, always have a back-up plan and try to find ways to take advantage of weak defenses.
Perhaps it’s due to the lack of a pre-season, but I can’t recall a year in which so many star players have been taken out by injuries in the first two weeks of play. Christian McCaffrey and Saquon Barkley, the top two consensus fantasy players, were the two most prominent casualties in the second week. Barkley is out for the year and McCaffrey will miss at least three games after being put on injured reserve.
Those two injuries show the importance of drafting the backups to your star running back. Barkley and McCaffrey’s understudies, as well as newly signed Giants running back Devonta Freeman, were hot waiver wire pickups this week. If you didn’t have them already, you probably weren’t able to get them this week when you really needed them.
And my final point, look for weekly matchups against poor defensive teams. This year that means taking your shots against the Atlanta Falcons. They’ve given up 78 points, the most in the National Football League, and a total of eight touchdowns to opposing quarterbacks through two weeks.
As a reminder, with our picks we won’t be going for the Patrick Mahomes’ of the world. Instead, we’ll look for value picks: players who we think will exceed their projected output (using the PPR scoring format).
Before we get to our value picks, let’s recap how we fared last week:
Bulls
QB: Matthew Stafford: (Actual: 17.16, Proj. 16.8)
RB: Nick Chubb: (Actual: 26.3, Proj. 14.3)
RB: Aaron Jones: (Actual 45.6, Proj. 16.3)
TE: Hunter Henry: (Actual 14.3, Proj. 11.4)
Bears
QB: Tom Brady: (Actual: 9.68, Proj. 18.9)
RB: Devin Singletary: (Actual: 9.6, Proj. 12.2)
WR: Allen Lazard: (Actual: 7.5, Proj. 9.9)
WR: Michael Gallup: (Actual 7.8, Proj. 13.7)
TE: Jimmy Graham: (Actual 2.8, Proj. 7.8)
Week Three Value Picks
QB: Mitchell Trubisky: The Bears’ quarterback gets his shot at the weak Falcons secondary. Will ride opposing quarterbacks against Atlanta until proven otherwise. (Projected for 16.7 points)
QB: Matthew Stafford: Looking for Arizona to put up a ton of points on the winless Lions. Stafford could be throwing all game. (18 points)
RB: Kenyan Drake: Arizona may be sitting on a big lead and that could result in plenty of carries for Drake. (15.9 points)
RB: Joshua Kelley: The Chargers running back has been sharing the load with teammate Austin Ekeler. Will get a lot of rushing attempts if the team is trying to run out the clock against the Panthers. (9.7 points)
WR: Allen Robinson: Going to pair up the Bears wideout with Trubisky. Has been targeted nine times in each of the first two games. (16.5 points)
WR: CeeDee Lamb: Vegas is projecting the Cowboys-Seahawks contest to be the highest scoring game of the week. The rookie posted a 106 yard receiving game last week and has developed a nice rapport with Dak Prescott. (11.7 points)
TE: T.J. Hockenson: Expecting a high scoring game against the Cardinals. Could be a favorite target of Matthew Stafford. (11.4 points)
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