Big Blue View
Rides, fades, and sleepers to help you set your weekly lineup
Welcome to Week 9, and Happy Halloween! Fantasy football has been a little like a haunted house this season. Each time I get a Sleeper or ESPN alert, I’m scared to look. Even practices are frightening, and I can’t remember a season where so many players who came out of the prior week “healthy” popped up on injury reports late in the week. As we head into the second half of the NFL season, a lot of fantasy lineups look very different than they did in Week 1. This happens each season, but it feels a little worse this year.
Injuries aren’t the only thing altering the fantasy landscape. Rookies (and other players) have emerged, while other players have faded or seen their roles diminished. Backup QBs have energized a few offenses, and there are defensive matchups that have gotten either more or less favorable as the season has progressed – in some cases by a lot.
I want to focus for a second on that last one. One of the metrics I like to use when evaluating matchups is fantasy points per game (FPPG) allowed to each position, as it’s a good (albeit imperfect) measure of how generous or stingy defenses have been, in general. After eight weeks, the sample size is plenty big, but looking at raw numbers doesn’t show trends. Example: The Eagles, Lions, and Commanders were three of the very best passing game matchups for most of last season (put another way, they were among the very worst pass defenses), and they picked up right where they left off to start this season. That was then, and this is now. All three of these defenses have been much tougher matchups for opposing QBs and WRs of late. Take the Commanders for example. In the five games since Joe Burrow threw for 300+ yards and three TDs against them in Week 3, they’ve allowed just three TD passes total, and only one quarterback (Lamar Jackson, 323 yards) has thrown for more than 150 yards against them. On the flip side, the best passing game matchups right now are the Ravens, Jaguars, and Buccaneers. We’ll see if these trends continue. The point is that things change during the course of the season.
Stats of the Week:
Lions leave carcasses: Teams are 0-5 so far this season the week after playing Detroit.
Lamar Jackson is on pace to be the first QB to lead the NFL in passer rating and QB rushing yards in the same season since Steve Young in 1994.
Derrick Henry is on pace to become just the fourth running back in the Super Bowl era, and the first in more than 40 years, to lead the NFL in carries, yards, yards per carry, and rushing TDs in the same season. The other three are all Hall of Famers: O.J. Simpson (1975), Walter Payton (1977), and Earl Campbell (1980).
Kyren Williams has scored a TD...
