Sunday Six Pack: Week Three
From a routine injection gone wrong, to a cursed playing field, to — you won’t believe it — the Eagles losing another skill player, injuries dominated NFL headlines in the second week of play. This is, by any measurement, a disappointment, as fantasy teams’ seasons get thrown into jeopardy and the loss of several superstars makes games just a bit less entertaining.
However, I would like to at least provide some silver linings: Owners with superior waiver and depth-building skills will be rewarded for those prowesses more than usual; with fewer established presences in various offenses, there’s a refreshing level of unpredictability in how fantasy seasons will unfold this year; finally, disasters can be beautiful, too, and I expect nothing less from next Thursday’s primetime showdown between Jeff Driskel and the New York Jets. That last point is getting ahead of ourselves, but altogether, there’s plenty to still be interested in and excited about in our still-young season. Here is what I’ll be paying closest attention to this week.
1. The obligatory injury section
At a general level, the most important story to pay attention to this weekend is what every team’s real replacement plans appear to be. The Broncos’ and Giants’ may be the most important for fantasy purposes.
We’ll start off with Denver, who are left picking up the pieces after losing Courtland Sutton for the season and Drew Lock for what will be several weeks. Lock’s replacement, Driskel, looked passable last week versus Pittsburgh, but one shouldn’t take much away from less than a single game’s worth of sample size. This week, we will see him matched up against Tom Brady instead of Ben Roethlisberger, making it two consecutive weeks with an amusingly difficult task for Driskel to try to accomplish.
Meanwhile, Sutton’s injury leaves… DaeSean Hamilton and Tim Patrick as the elder statesmen in Denver’s receiver corps? Still, this scenario would be much bleaker for teams who hadn’t spent the last two off-seasons acquiring Jerry Jeudy, Noah Fant, Melvin Gordon, KJ Hamler, and others. I look forward to seeing Gordon and the three promising young receiving talents gaining more experience and seeing more work for the rest of the season. It won’t always be pretty with suboptimal quarterback play and youth at the skill positions, but there will be plenty of exciting flashes as well.
In New York, on paper, the Giants will probably look to some split of Dion Lewis and Devonta Freeman to replace the godly Saquon Barkley. But running back replacement procedures have frequently taken unexpected turns, so I think there’s so much more that could happen here. After all, Freeman will be catching up to everyone else’s speed, and we’ve already seen how poorly players’ bodies have held up without any tune-up games. Further, Lewis doesn’t appear to be a highly valued NFL back, and even if he maintains a workload in the offense, his 5’8” stature doesn’t allow that workload to ever be particularly big. Maybe Wayne Gallman will give I and seven other dynasty scouts our long-awaited year-four breakout? Quite possibly, the Giants will bring in another significant player off the street, and we simply have to wait to see who that is. Either way, this weekend’s game against the also-hobbled 49ers will be our first indication of how that goes.
2. Ad-justin’ our expectations
Last week forced a drastic change of plans for both teams in our Sunday afternoon Chargers-Panthers matchup. On one side, we’ll see Justin Herbert’s second career start, following an awfully impressive debut for a guy suddenly thrust into the starting role against a Super Bowl-winning defense. I’m not counting on his stats to look quite as nice as last week’s — it’s a hard level of performance for anyone to keep up — but thus far, he looks to be on or ahead of schedule. This next game will give us a better sense of where his development really is, though against a Carolina defense that’s given up 65 points in two games to start the season, he may look quite good no matter what the rest of his season looks like.
On the other side, Christian McCaffrey’s injury presents an entirely new paradigm. Some situations see a star player be replaced fairly seamlessly in an offense by his backup, but McCaffrey’s footprint in the Panthers offense is far too significant to merely plug-and-play the next guy. Consider how Carolina has shaped its offense around McCaffrey: In recent years, he has been the team’s leader in receptions and in rushing, to a comical extent — the Panthers have hardly handed the ball off to backup running backs since McCaffrey’s emergence. This offense will look fundamentally different to some degree, and while it may not work out particularly well, it’ll be interesting to see just how it looks, at least.
3. Is this it for Baker Mayfield?
After closing the second half of his rookie season strongly, all signs were positive for the 2018 first overall pick. He looked ready to turn that level of performance into an every-week reality, boosted even further by the off-season additions of Odell Beckham and Kareem Hunt. Instead, Mayfield’s play took a step back throughout 2019 en route to a disappointing 6-10 Browns finish.
Despite the additions of Austin Hooper and Jedrick Wills and the switch to a Kevin Stefanski offense this time around, Mayfield’s first two games look closer to 2019 than 2018: He managed just 4.9 yards per attempt in a miserable six-point performance in Baltimore, then put things together a bit better in a small sample of attempts against the lowly Bengals last week. For the sake of those owning Mayfield, Beckham (whose production has taken a noticeable hit since joining Cleveland), Hooper, Jarvis Landry, and more, we’ll need to start seeing more of those week two performances with some of that 2018 consistency.
4. Selected watch parties
Picking breakout weeks or even seasons for players is not at all a talent of mine, but there are a few exciting receiving prospects I’ll be keeping my eye on in this week’s slate of games.
Jerry Jeudy has been one of my absolute favorite receiving prospects in the last half-decade, and I’ve believed his NFL success isn’t a matter of if, not when. Not exactly a controversial opinion, but the ‘when’ looks a lot closer than it once did. With Sutton missing the rest of the season, Jeudy has game-breaking speed and route-running today, which the Broncos may lean on particularly heavily given the offense’s lack of experience and likely need for big plays.
I’m not one to overreact to single games, but N’Keal Harry is checking all the boxes for an impending breakout. The 2019 first-rounder put up 72 yards on a robust 12 targets last week, and given his current target competition, that workload should stay as long as he’s moderately effective. Even better, the Patriots’ future with Cam Newton at the helm looks quite bright. Against quite the leaky Raiders defense, this might be the week for Harry to really emerge.
After being drafted to the Bengals this off-season, I was ready to write off Tee Higgins’s first couple of NFL seasons, as a receiving corps of AJ Green, Tyler Boyd, John Ross, and others looked quite hard to break into. But, to his credit and others’ demerit, Higgins has come onto the scene immediately, featuring in nearly half of Cincinnati’s offensive snaps thus far. We’ll have to keep waiting for those snaps to turn into production, but still: Green looks like a shell of his former self, and Ross isn’t keeping him off the field. Higgins’s role looks to only be growing, well ahead of schedule, so maybe this is his week to burst onto the scene?
5. What kind of offense can an aging star quarterback create by himself?
We can call this upcoming Sunday Night Football a Packers-Saints matchup, an Aaron Rodgers–Drew Brees matchup, but unfortunately, not a Michael Thomas–Davante Adams matchup. Neither receiving corps has many particularly interesting supporting options, meaning Rodgers and Brees will largely be left up to their own devices to generate points. While that won’t lead to quite as much yardage, it’ll be interesting nonetheless to see how much two 36-plus-year-old quarterbacks can do on their own.
6. It might be a good week to watch football on Monday night
Baltimore and Kansas City meet on Monday Night Football for a delicious early-season showcase game, featuring: The regular-season AFC champion versus the post-season AFC champion; one sophomore-season MVP-winning quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, against the other, Lamar Jackson; two of the fastest players in football in Tyreek Hill and Marquise Brown; and two top-tier rookie running back prospects in Clyde Edwards-Helaire and JK Dobbins. We all deserve this game as a reward for putting up with last week’s carnage. I’m going to enjoy it, and I encourage you to do the same.
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- 2021 NFL Draft Prospect: Elijah Moore, WR Ole Miss - April 2, 2021
