| | | | Monday, October 4, 2021 | | So, here's the point I'm at when it comes to projecting what to expect moving forward. When it comes to team pace, efficiency, and usage -- the real guts of any projections process -- I'm at the point where I'm weighing what we've seen so far this season about equally with last season/my preseason expectations. | | There's no perfect answer or formula there, but I feel like at this point, we've seen enough to really start altering our preseason expectations. That isn't to say that I think Sam Darnold is a better Fantasy option than Lamar Jackson the rest of the way just because he has been so far; but it does mean that what I've seen so far from Darnold carries a lot of weight in how I view him moving forward. In fact, in his specific case, it probably carries more weight than most, given how obviously disastrous Adam Gase's offense was for Darnold. He's better than that, even if he may not exactly be as good as he's been so far. | | It doesn't apply equally across the board, of course -- veterans will continue to get more of a benefit of the doubt that rookies who are off to slow starts, for one thing. But, generally speaking, I view this as a pretty pivotal point in the season. I'll try to explain more of my thoughts on that when we preview Week 5 beginning tomorrow, but for now, let's take a look back at Week 4 one last time. | | In today's newsletter, I've got the biggest winners and losers from Sunday's action, and I'll be taking a look at the biggest storylines coming out of Week 4 with Heath Cummings' Believe It or Not column. And, we'll take another look at my top waiver-wire targets ahead of Week 5 , in case you missed it last night. | | And, if you've got any questions, as always, make sure to send them my way at Chris.Towers@CBSi.com. I'll be looking to answer some waiver-wire questions tomorrow, some trade questions Wednesday, and all of your other questions throughout the week, so make sure to send them my way with the subject line "#AskFFT" to have them included. | | And now, here's today's newsletter. | | | | Biggest Winners/Losers | | | | I wrote about the biggest winners and losers from Week 4 here, with 10 choices on each side. Here are the top five from Sunday's action: | | Winners | | These 10 players come out of Week 4 looking better than they did coming in. | | Cordarrelle Patterson -- Patterson was arguably the start of Week 4, how could he also not be one of the biggest winners? He actually had his lowest carry total of the season with six in this one, but he continued to play a big role in the passing game, hauling in five of six thrown his way for 82 yards and three touchdowns -- including a 42-yard touchdown where he lined up as an outside receiver. Matt Ryan has been hesitant to pull the trigger on deep throws and hasn't been successful at them so far, but he hit Patterson in stride for that long touchdown. Patterson is a clear and obvious winner from this week, but the way to turn this game into a huge win for your Fantasy team is to start to shop him right now. For as good as Patterson was, he played just 21 of the team's 71 offensive snaps -- including a route run on just 12 of the team's 44 pass plays. Maybe his success begins to convince the team to make Patterson more of a featured part of the offense than Mike Davis, but I think the more reasonable takeaway from this is that Patterson is one of the most obvious sell-high candidates in the league. The question is, who is buying at a price that makes it worth moving him? If you could get Robert Woods for him, I would do that, but I might try to make a run at Amari Cooper if someone is worried about him.Ezekiel Elliott -- Much to Fantasy Twitter's collective dismay, it does not appear as if Elliott is going to give his role up to Tony Pollard anytime soon. Elliott had his best rushing game in a long time Sunday, rushing for 143 and a touchdown on 20 carries and is now averaging 19.3 touches per game over the last three. And even in Week 1, when he had just 13 touches, he played a massive role in a game where the Cowboys abandoned the run early. There may be game scripts where Elliott struggles to make a difference for Fantasy, but it's hard to envision any where the Cowboys use Pollard more unless they are involved in a blowout. Elliott gets elite usage, including the majority of goal-line carries, and he's also running the ball more effectively than he did a year ago. He's one of the 10 or so best running backs in Fantasy again, and he's probably not No. 10. Daniel Jones -- It's worth giving Jones some credit, because he's playing legitimately well to start the season. He hasn't been incredible, but he is averaging 296 yards per game on 8.2 yards per target in addition to 47 rushing yards. He won't sustain those paces -- yes, I'm taking the under on 5,000 passing yards and 800 rushing yards -- but he just passed for 400 yards against what we think is a pretty good Saints defense without two of his top five targets. Is Jones a must-start Fantasy option? Oh, goodness no -- he just disappointed against the Falcons in Week 3! But he doesn't deserve to be a laughing stock anymore, and he's playing well enough to keep his weapons like Kenny Golladay relevant. Saquon Barkley -- And Barkley! Barkley still isn't doing a ton in the running game, but he scored another goal-line touchdown Sunday and also had his best day as a receiver, hauling in five of six targets for 74 yards, including a 52-yard touchdown. Most of his touches are still leading to short gains, but the explosiveness is still here and his yardage total has increased with each game along with his usage. He's right in that same range of must-start Fantasy RB with Elliott, and I think his best days are still ahead of him.Darrell Henderson -- I expected Henderson to play a smaller role in his return from a rib injury, but that's not what we saw Sunday -- he played 57 of 64 offensive snaps, while Sony Michel played just seven. Whether that was the plan or not, it became clear that was the Rams best chance to win, as Henderson averaged 6.4 yards per carry while Michel lost a fumble on one of his three early touches. Henderson ended up with 89 yards on 14 carries and added five receptions for 27 yards on six targets, his second game in a row with at least five targets. When Henderson is healthy, he's playing 90%-plus of the snaps and seeing a similar share of the RB touches, and that remained true even coming back from the injury. Sean McVay talked in the preseason about needing to limit Henderson's workload to avoid injuries, but once the games started, he went away from that plan. I don't know if Henderson will be able to hold up to this kind of usage, but I think at this point we kind of have to expect this kind of usage. | | | | Losers | | It's hard to feel better about these players coming out of Week 4 than you did coming in. | | Alvin Kamara -- How can Kamara be a loser when he just rushed for 120 yards? Well, to start with, those 120 yards resulted in just 12 PPR points. Once one of the most efficient Fantasy players in the game, Kamara has kind of been turned into a pricier version of Antonio Gibson or Joe Mixon so far. He was held without a target for the first time in his career Sunday, but even before that, he had just 13 in his first three games. Now, that did come out to a 23% target share, so it's partially a result of the Saints just refusing to throw the ball. However, Sunday saw them throw just 26 passes with none of them going to Kamara, so it was the worst of both worlds. This isn't a good offense right now, and Sean Payton's game plans have been baffling so far. If this is going to remain the lowest volume passing game in the league and Kamara isn't going to be the focal point, his ceiling just isn't as high as it has been in the past. That's bad news for all of my Kamara shares.Justin Fields -- Fields and the Chicago offense were, on the whole, a lot more effective in Week 4 than his first start, but it's hard to know exactly how much of that was just because they played a Lions defense that sure looks like the worst in the NFL right now. In that context, the showing -- that resulted in no passing or rushing touchdowns for Fields -- looks significantly worse. Fields had just one actual run Sunday -- he knelt two times to end the game -- and it wasn't a designed run. Maybe there were a few read-options thrown in where the defense keyed in on Fields and he handed it off, but I think we can remain confident that Matt Nagy just isn't particularly interested in designing an offense around Fields' considerable talents. It's a waste, but at this point, it's hard to get excited about Fields if he's starting here.Allen Robinson -- The Bears offense really did play better in Week 4, but that didn't really translate to better production for Robinson. To be fair, he did catch all of the passes thrown his way for 21 yards per target; the problem is, it was just three targets. The Bears only threw the ball 17 times, but watching Darnell Mooney go off for five catches and 125 yards on seven targets while Robinson was almost entirely silent was especially disappointing. The Bears aren't going to have many better matchups than the Lions, and I don't have a lot of faith in Matt Nagy re-working his offense to take advantage of Fields' skills, as said before, which means I'm necessarily pretty pessimistic about Robinson's outlook right now. As much as it pains me to say it,Robert Woods -- Woods ended up with a respectable 14.8 PPR points, but this might have actually been his worst game yet -- Woods had just one catch on three targets when the Rams got the ball down 24 with less than four minutes in the game. He had three catches for 30 yards and a touchdown to make his game look a lot better than it actually was. You'll take those points, but they don't bode well for Woods, who now has just 12 targets on 79 pass attempts over the last two games -- a 12.2% share. At least in the first couple of games you could point to a healthy target share for Woods. Now? I don't want to give up on him, but I can't feel comfortable recommending him as a starter in Week 5 against the Seahawks.Baker Mayfield -- Mayfield just wasn't good in this game, there's no way around it. He overthrew multiple potential big plays and ended up completing just 15 of 33 passes for 155 yards. He has no games with multiple passing touchdowns this season and has just two through four games. His 1.8% touchdown rate will improve moving forward, but he's still throwing it just 28.3 times per game, actually the lowest rate of his career, so there isn't much upside here even when that does improve. Really, the main concern at this point is whether Mayfield can avoid sinking Odell Beckham's value like he did Sunday. | | Biggest Storylines | | | | Every week, Heath Cummings takes a look at some of the biggest Fantasy storylines coming out of Sunday's games and tries to separate fact from fiction in his Believe It or Not column. You can read the full column here, and here are my thoughts on three of the big storylines he highlighted: | 1. James Conner and Chase Edmonds are both starting Fantasy RBs
| | Heath's verdict: Don't believe it. | | Sunday was Conner's best game of the season even without accounting for the two touchdowns and he had ... 66 yards on 20 touches. He has yet to have a game where he averages better than 3.91 yards per carry and he has three targets on the season. he does play a significant role in the offense when they get in near the goal line, having played 18 of 29 total snaps from inside the opponent's 10-yard line through four games, and that should be enough to keep the touchdowns coming. However, he'll never be someone I feel comfortable recommending as a starter, because at this point if he doesn't get into the end zone, he's going to give you next to nothing. | | I'm still very bullish on Edmonds, by the way. He has at least four catches in each game and he's the No. 11 RB in PPR despite no touchdowns. I don't expect him to score many touchdowns, but in 2020, he scored one every 30 touches, and for his career entering this season, it was one every 25 touches. If he managed that so far, he would have at least two -- and would be the No. 4 RB in Fantasy. There's still upside beyond what he's done so far. | | 2. Kenneth Gainwell is the Eagles best Fantasy RB | | Heath's verdict: Don't believe it. | | My thoughts: To a certain extent, Gainwell has been the beneficiary of some really great timing. Despite being a pretty small factor in the rushing game, he's scored two of the Eagles three rushing touchdowns so far -- Sunday's came on one of his just three carries. Miles Sanders has 37 carries to just 14 for Gainwell He's had a larger role in the passing game than Miles Sanders, but even that isn't a huge edge -- he has 18 targets to Sanders' 14. They have split snaps inside the 10-yard line fairly evenly, which bodes well for Gainwell as his role continues to grow. However, for now, Sanders is still playing the larger role overall and he's going to be the better Fantasy option as long as that remains true. Still, I can't view Sanders as a top-20 back at this point. | | 3. Noah Fant is the only Fantasy starter on the Broncos | | Heath's verdict: Believe it. | | My thoughts: I'm less convinced, at least in the long term. I think the Melvin Gordon/Javonte Williams combo are both touchdown-dependent low-end starters in their current roles, and Tim Patrick might end up being ranked around 40th at WR most weeks. But, while Courtland Sutton had another disappointing game in Week 4, his third in four games, I still have faith. With the exception of Week 3, he's consistently garnering downfield targets, and had 158 air yards in Week 4, indicating that he still has a very valuable role. If Drew Lock is starting in Week 5 against the Steelers instead of Teddy Bridgewater , I'm not sure I'll be able to trust Sutton as a top-25 WR or anything, but he'll still be a high-upside WR3 in my eyes. | | Top Early Waiver-Wire Targets | | Here's an early look at who I think we'll all be clamoring for in Week 5: | | Damien Williams, RB, CHI 49%Trey Lance, QB, SF 50%Latavius Murray, RB, BAL 71%AJ Dillon, RB, GB 66%Jamison Crowder, WR, NYJ 31% | | For the rest of my top early priorities and why I'm targeting them, head here. | | | | | | | | Destination Porto on P+ | | $100,000 Pick'em Contest | Destination Porto: The Unimaginable Journey provides an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at journalist Guilllem Balague's months-long travels across Europe amid a devastating pandemic as he covers the chase for the greatest annual prize in sports: The UEFA Champions League Trophy.
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