| | | | Monday, December 11, 2023 | | If you're still here on the verge of the Fantasy Football playoffs, hopefully that means you've still got a lot to play for in the coming weeks. You should be proud of that. | | Because it's been a wild Fantasy season. Probably the most difficult season to navigate I've ever experienced in 13 seasons of writing about Fantasy Football as a full-time gig. At any given point in time, it felt like half of the starting quarterbacks in the league were injured, and that actually isn't' an exaggeration – nine starting quarterbacks have either been on IR, had surgery, or missed at least four games due to injury so far, and another four have been benched for various reasons. With Justin Herbert suffered a fractured finger on his throwing hand and Joshua Dobbs getting benched Sunday, we're almost at half of the league there. | | Quarterback injuries obviously have the most wide-reaching impacts on the Fantasy landscape, but let's not forget significant, multi-week injuries to the likes of Justin Jefferson, Austin Ekeler, Nick Chubb, Jonathan Taylor, Cooper Kupp, Mark Andrews , and plenty of other early-round picks. It's just been an incredibly challenging Fantasy season, and if you've made it to the precipice of Week 14 with something to play for, you've surely overcome a lot. | | | | And, of course, we've got even more obstacles in our way as the playoffs loom. In addition to Herbert, C.J. Stroud also left Sunday's game with a concussion, putting his status for Week 15 into question; Josh Jacobs (knee) and Alexander Mattison (ankle) were the two latest starting running backs to suffer injuries Sunday; and, of course, Justin Jefferson (chest) left in the first quarter of his first game back from IR, while Nico Collins (calf) became the second Texans WR in as many weeks to leave in the first quarter with an injury. | | It was another absolutely brutal week of injuries, and I wrote about everything you need to know about in my early look at the Week 15 Waiver Wire for CBSSports.com And, of course, I'm sure we'll learn about a few more lineup-shaking injuries in the next day or two. The good news is, if you made it this far, you're a hardy sort. You're the Fantasy Football equivalent of Furiosa from Mad Max, wandering the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the 2023 NFL season, leading your battered and bruised team to survival. | | One way or another, your season is going to come to an end in the next three weeks, but we're going to try to get you to a Fantasy championship first. Tomorrow, we'll have our first look at the Week 15 rankings, plus Jamey Eisenberg's top waiver-wire targets, plus updates on all of the injuries you need to know about. Before then, let's take one last look at Week 14 to see what we learned that we can carry over into the Fantasy Football playoffs: | | | Biggest winners and losers
| | | | Here's who has the arrow pointing up or down coming out of Sunday's action: | Winners
| | Matthew Stafford, QB, Rams | | Sometimes the regression Gods bless us at the right time. Early on in the season, I thought Matthew Stafford was playing extremely well, and unfortunately, he had little to show for it for Fantasy, with just eight touchdowns to seven interceptions in his first seven games before a thumb injury, averaging just 15.7 points per game in six-point-per-pass-TD scoring. After three touchdowns Sunday in the rain against a brutal Ravens defense, Stafford now has 10 touchdowns over his past three games and has his touchdown rate up to 4.5% for the season, right in line with his 4.6% mark for the season. With Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua playing well at the same time and some key contributions from role players like Demarcus Robinson and the tight ends of late, Stafford looks like a really strong starter heading into a Fantasy playoff schedule featuring the Commands, Saints, and Giants. | | | | James Cook, RB, Bills | | As someone with Cook on my roster in a league I needed to win, this was actually kind of a frustrating game, despite 141 yards and a touchdown … because it should have been an even better game! Cook was the Bills' best playmaker in this one, and somehow had just three carries in the first half and then wasn't targeted in the second half on 17 passes. Cook's usage remains more frustrating than it should be, and it nearly cost the Bills in a close game. I have no real reason to think that usage is going to be what we want down the stretch, but it's also hard to complain too much about a guy with 15 or more touches in three straight games, even if we'd like to see more of him in the red zone, or more consistent volume in the running game, or whichever specific nit you'd like to pick. Let's not get (too) greedy. | | Breece Hall, RB, Jets | | Hall is still splitting carries more than you might prefer, with 10 of 20 RB carries going his way Sunday. However, it was great to see Hall still playing a major role in the passing game with Zach Wilson back under center, as he was targeted nine times in the 30-6 win over the Texans. This is still likely to be a pretty bad Jets offense moving forward, and Hall doesn't look likely to get 15-plus carries in a game anytime soon – the Jets are sticking by coach Robert Saleh's criticism that Hall was leaving too many yards on the field in the running game by looking for the big play. But he's too talented to phase out entirely, and for our purposes, you'll take a shift to a more reception-heavy profile, even in non-PPR – targets tend to be more efficient than carries, even if catches don't directly count for anything. Hall has at least eight targets in three straight games and 32 total over his past four games, leading to 10.3 points per game in non-PPR and 16.8 in full PPR, despite averaging just 26 rushing yards per game in that stretch. Expect plenty of targets next week against Miami, too. | | Cooper Kupp, WR, Rams | | To put Kupp's 115 yards Sunday into context, he had just 166 in his previous six games combined. Puka Nacua has been the more productive player this season, and surely the Ravens rolled some extra defensive attention his way, and it was nice to see that Kupp is still capable of taking advantage of a good situation. He matched the team lead with 10 targets, catching eight for 115 yards and a touchdown, and he was used more down the field than he had been in a long time; Kupp's 75 air yards were his most since Week 9. It's not like Kupp was being used as a deep threat, or anything, but he wasn't just running routes within 5-10 yards of the line of scrimmage, which makes it easier to unlock some upside. He's not the No. 1 WR like I thought he would be coming into the season, but he still has No. 1 WR upside. It wasn't clear he did before this. | | Drake London, WR, Falcons | | I've written a few times this season about how frustrating it has been to watch Garrett Wilson emerge as legitimately one of the best playmakers in the NFL and only have a mid-to-high-end WR2 season for Fantasy to show for it, and we got a taste of something similar from London Sunday. He's not on Wilson's level as a talent, but he put together a pretty bonkers highlight reel Sunday , and it just makes you wonder how much better he would be in a better situation. The catch he made in double coverage around the six-minute mark in the fourth quarter is one of the more impressive plays you'll see from a wideout this season, too. London had a huge game, catching 10 of 11 passes for 172 yards, and it's just a reminder of the tantalizing upside we've only seen fleeting glimpses of this season. He deserves a lot better than his current 17-game pace of 79 catches, 1,055 yards, and three touchdowns. Let's hope the Falcons make a real attempt to upgrade their QB position after punting on it last offseason. | | Zay Flowers, WR, Ravens | | Flowers has played three games without Mark Andrews this season, and he's averaging 20.3 PPR points per game after his six-catch, 60-yard (plus a touchdown) game Sunday against the Rams. We haven't seen gigantic yardage totals from Flowers – he had 25 yards in Week 12, for example – but he's had at least eight targets in each of the three games, with a touchdown in two of them. Consistency has been an issue, but with Andrews out, I think we can say pretty confidently that Flowers is Lamar Jackson 's No. 1 target right now, and I'm going to have a tough time justifying putting that guy on my bench in the Fantasy playoffs. | | Losers | | Joshua Dobbs, QB, Vikings | | I ranked Dobbs as a top-15 QB for Week 14, but I did so with the caveat that he might have been the quarterback most likely to be benched due to poor performance in the entire league. And, well … Dobbs is still going to have significant weekly upside if the Vikings go back to him as the starter in Week 15, but after Sunday, it's going to be impossible to trust him. After a pretty miraculous start to his Vikings career where he had at least two touchdowns in each of his first three games, he has just one over the past two weeks. I'm not sure Nick Mullens is a better option for the Vikings – he led them to a single field goal on three drives – but with the wheels coming off Sunday for Dobbs, they might think a change is the best option moving forward. I hope this isn't the final chapter of one of the best stories of the year in the NFL, but it doesn't look like this one's going to have a happy ending. | | Gus Edwards, RB, Ravens | | I don't think the Ravens are ready to just anoint Keaton Mitchell as their lead back moving forward, but I think we're clearly at the point where you can't trust Edwards anymore. Mitchell had nine carries Sunday to Edwards' six, and with Edwards usual lack of involvement in the passing game, things look pretty bleak right now. He has just 14 carries over his past two games now, and looks even more touchdown-or-bust-y than he did earlier in the season. I'm not sure he's likely to even be a top-40 back the rest of the way at this point. | | Dameon Pierce, RB, Texans | | With Stroud potentially out of the lineup in Week 15, I'm not sure there's anyone on the Texans I want to be relying on. That's especially true of Pierce, whose usage has just been all over the place of late. In Week 12, Pierce played just 18% of the snaps in his return from an ankle injury; last week, that was up to 38%, and he had 15 touches to just nine for Devin Singletary . And then, of course, Sunday, it's Singeltary who leads the team with 13 carries and three targets, while Pierce got just four and one, respectively. He played just eight snaps Sunday, and I didn't see anything about an injury. It could be as simple as a game-script thing, but the Texans are a .500 team that just lost to the Jets by 24, so I'm not sure how confident we can ever be in predicting when they will or won't be in a positive game script for Pierce. He might have a few more decent games, but I'm writing this off as pretty much an entirely lost season for Pierce, who has become yet another example of why you should probably fade Day 3 running backs who unexpectedly star as rookies. That is a player archetype that historically has very poor returns on investment over the years. | | Amon-Ra St. Brown, WR, Lions | | Look, I'm not even considering sitting St. Brown in Week 15 where I still have him and I'm still playing for something, so don't get the wrong idea here. In fact, I'm writing about St. Brown here to show how unconcerned I am, despite his first two games below 50 yards coming in back-to-back weeks. It's good to have both a short and a long memory when it comes to a player like St. Brown, because you want to both forget what he's done the past two weeks (just 70 combined yards on five catches) and remember what he had done before – at least 14 PPR points in every game before Week 13. St. Brown still had nine targets Sunday and just didn't turn them into points the way he usually does – he had at least one key drop late in the game that he knew he should have had, too. It's been a bad couple of games, but that's probably all it is. Don't overreact. | | Calvin Ridley, WR, Jaguars | | Now, it's a lot harder to say "don't overreact" about Ridley, whose production has fluctuated wildly all season. Trevor Lawrence looked okay despite playing through a high-ankle sprain, but he wasn't as accurate as he typically is, I thought, and there were a few spots where him and Ridley just weren't on the same page – most notably on one of Lawrence's three picks, where Lawrence threw to the outside just as Ridley broke inside, a clear miscommunication between the two. There have been a few too many instances this season where Ridley hasn't seemed on the right page, but he also still had 13 targets and 166 air yards Sunday, so it would be a mistake to write him off. It's been a frustrating season, to be sure, but there's definitely still plenty of upside here. | | Dalton Kincaid, TE, Bills | | It's less clear how much upside there is with Kincaid. He still had a very healthy eight targets in Dawson Knox 's return to the lineup, but he was mostly used on short-area throws, with a 4.75-yard Average Depth of Target, his lowest ADoT since Week 9 and just his third game below 5 ADoT since Week 7, when he started to break out. The eight targets and 80% snap share were promising, but Kincaid didn't really start to matter for Fantasy until he was used down the field a bit more, and that wasn't there Sunday; he had just two targets that traveled more than 10 yards down the field, and his other six targets traveled a combined 7 yards down the field. It's not impossible to be a good Fantasy option with that kind of role – it's kind of how the Vikings use T.J. Hockenson. However, because you're losing big plays and touchdown opportunities with that usage, you need to make up for it with volume, and a 19% target share like Kincaid's Sunday isn't enough to make him a star. Kincaid has that kind of upside, but for the rest of the season, he looks more like a low-end TE1. | | | | | | | | Cover 3 | | 24/7 Sports News | Cover 3 College Football Podcast is the perfect call for any die-hard fan. Join hosts Chip Patterson, Danny Kanell, Tom Fornelli, and Bud Elliott as they take you from National Signing Day to the national championship.
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