What Happened This Week in Fantasy Football
(This information is before Sunday Night Football)
Patrick Mahomes. That’s what happened this week in fantasy football. The second year signal-caller threw six touchdowns in just his third career start, leading all plauyers with 51 fantasy points (six point passing touchdowns). In fact, a whopping nine quarterbacks topped 30 points, with four getting over 40 (Mahomes, Roethlisberger, Cousins, Bortles).
Stephon Diggs leads all non-quarterbacks, getting 31 points from a 9-128-2 line. Running backs were headlined by Melvin Gordon’s three touchdown day, although Gordon only had 66 combined rushing & passing yards. Travis Kelce leads tight ends with a monster 7-109-2 day.
The surprise fantasy performance of the day belonged to Jesse James, tight end for Pittsburgh. The 9% owned Steeler had five catches for 138 yards and a score. Expect to see him on the most added list, as he and Big Ben seem to have perfected their chemistry.
Of the top 25 WR/TE/RB fantasy scorers, only three were owned by less than 48% of Yahoo! players: James, Tyler Boyd, and John Brown. For running backs, expect to see Chris Ivory shoot up from his 2% ownership , McCoy went down with a rib injury of unknown severity, paving the way for Ivory to nab a score and a 30-yard reception. Temper expectations, however, Buffalo again looked lost. Be sure to check our waiver wire advice before trying to poach Ivory.
Moving on to what happened this week in fantasy football underperformers. All of the top 20 predicted quarterbacks scored at least 13 points. Not great, but definitely not something that will lose a fantasy matchup singlehandedly. David Johnson continued to underscore fears of taking any part of Arizona’s offense. He was used sparingly in the Cards 34-0 loss to the Rams, hauling in just one pass for 3 yards and tacking on 48 rushing yards.
Another disappointing week two running back was Adrian Peterson. After his resurrection game last week, the future hall-of-famer managed just 20 rushing yards on 11 carries, with three catches for 30 yards. Also disappointing was Fournette’s last-minute “out” status, but if you’ve been following this site in the preseason, you were warned many times that even a productive Fournette is not worth the headache.
Wide receivers were pretty safe this week, with the top 15 projected wideouts scoring at least 8.90 points in HPPR. Among WR2s, Jamison Crowder and Demayrius Thomas had under 5 points each. Larry Fitzgerald left the game with an injury, so that’s something moving forward.
In all, this was probably one of your best fantasy weeks per year. Huge QB production combined with the top players in flex positions doing well means your league probably had a great week. Sorry if you were on the losing end of a barnburner. Just remember, in these early weeks when we’re waiting to see if our fantasy teams turn into pumpkins, it’s better to lose a high-scoring match than to win underwhelmingly.
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