Start or Sit Ryan Fitzpatrick in Fantasy Football Week Four?

Start or Sit Ryan Fitzpatrick

Through three weeks, fantasy football quarterbacks are certainly going as we all expected. Your top two after the first three weeks of the season are Ryan Fitzpatrick and Patrick Mahomes. Aaron Rodgers is QB12, Russell Wilson is QB17, and Tom Brady is QB22. Just like we all thought would happen. That doesn’t even account for my beautiful boy, “Handsome” James “Jimmy G” Garoppolo’s untimely demise. So far, quarterback has been a tumultuous position, with 23 different players posting QB1 weeks so far this season. With that many quarterbacks flying in and out of the startable ranks each week, the decision as to who you start becomes a hard one. Well, I guess it becomes an easy one if any random joker can become a starting caliber QB in any given week. Here at Football Absurdity, we want to help you work through your difficult start/sit decisions in any given week. This week we tackle the age-old question: start or sit Ryan Fitzpatrick as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers travel to Chicago to take on the Bears?

Ryan Fitzpatrick showed his full Jekyll and Hyde act on Monday Night Football, posting three interceptions and three touchdowns and his third-straight 400-yard passing game. He’s a fun guy to want to follow, a gunslinger with a giant bushy beard. He’s like a bad Brett Favre if Favre never got into the pockets of Big Grooming. As his numbers show this season, he’s on an absolute tear so far. So far being the operative phrase here. He’s extraordinarily inconsistent, and his unique ability to start off great and fall off an absolute cliff literally has a name: The Fitzpatrick Cycle.

Outside of the Fitzpatrick Cycle, he has a far more difficult test this weekend than the ones that he’s faced thus far in 2018. He gets the Chicago Bears this week, who allow the eighteenth-most fantasy points to quarterbacks on the season. Aaron Rodgers completed the insane, one-kneed comeback in week one, but since then, the last two starting QBs combined to score just two points more than Rodgers did in week one. The Bears are monstrous. And before you get at me about the Eagles being just two slots higher than the Bears… The Eagles held Matt Ryan and Andrew Luck to just 23.7 fantasy points combined. So we’ve got a lot to consider when deciding whether to start or sit Ryan Fitzpatrick.

Fitzmagic has been a fun ride, and he’s given us literally never-before-seen highs. He also showed us Fitztragic, with his three picks in the first half against the Steelers. Now, he takes on his toughest task of the season with Jameis Winston waiting in the wings. There are plenty of quality quarterbacks potentially on your waiver wire (Andy Dalton, anyone?), and it’s going to be hard to trust Fitzpatrick to not repeat his week three first half (though I wouldn’t rule out his second half). It’s been a tenuous question every week if you should start or sit Ryan Fitzpatrick. The wind started to come out of his sails last week, and he’s volatile enough to see that as enough to sidestep him. Sit Fitzmagic this week.