Fantasy football strategy, rankings, and podcasts

Welcome to Statistically (in)Significant, the place to find great stats that probably only matter at the water cooler (or bar). Each week I'll dig through the stats of the week gone by and deliver you some choice conversation starters. All fantasy stats are half PPR scoring unless otherwise noted.

47.6 Fantasy Points

For the second week in a row, we have a new season-high fantasy point scorer. Dalvin Cook defeated the Green Bay Packers, and he did not require a whole lot of help from the rest of his team. Cook touched the ball a whopping 32 times, had 226 yards from scrimmage, and scored 4 TDs. He led his team in both rushing and receiving on Sunday, which is impressive when you have two top WRs on your team. Of course, that’s likely to happen when you have 70% of your team’s total offense. Cook had an absurd 1.5 points per touch during the game. He was so efficient that Kirk Cousins only needed to attempt 14 passes – his second-fewest attempts in a start in his career. On the season, Dalvin Cook, the RB2, is averaging an impressive 1.14 points per touch, second only to Alvin Kamara who is the RB1 and averaging 1.16 per touch. They’re the only RBs in the top 10 who are averaging over 1 point per touch on the season.

5 of the Top 10 RBs

Using our drinkfive.com fantasy league as a metric, we see that this week, 5 of the top 10 RBs are not even rostered. It’s been an interesting week, setting aside the fact that Dalvin Cook outscored the 2^nd and 3^rd highest scoring RBs by 5.5 points. The probably-soon-to-be-rostered list contains DeeJay Dallas, Zack Moss, Jordan Wilkins, Nyheim Hines (awesome TD celebrations buddy!), and Damien Harris. On average, they are only owned in 40% of Fleaflicker leagues but definitely helped you win the week if you were bold enough to insert any of them in your lineup. It was a low scoring week, where the RB2, Giovani Bernard, only topped out at 21.3 points. In fact, our guy Dalvin Cook was only 1.5 points shy of scoring as many as the 8^th-10^th ranked RBs on the week. The waiver wire will be active with RBs this week but remember that Dallas will be replaced by returning starters, Moss is in a split backfield, and Harris is on a team that is notoriously bad at sticking with one RB. Finally, I have no clue what to make of the Indy backfield. Clearly Jonathan Taylor has angered the gods (or just Chuck Pagano) in some hideous manner.

3^rd Time as QB1 in 2020

Patrick Mahomes absolutely lit up the Jets, a minor league football team that plays its games out of New Jersey. For some reason, this game counts as an actual game in all historical statistics and for the official NFL record. Perhaps the most fun item from the game is that Le’Veon Bell, Chiefs running back, was the highest-paid Jets player on the field. He would have finished 2^nd on the team in yards from scrimmage with a whopping 37 too. But I digress - two years ago, I gushed about Mahomes in nearly every weekly column, but he’s been mostly absent this year, so let me make up for that now. On Sunday, he had his best passing performance of the year, completing 31 of 42 passes for 416 yards and 5 TDs, good for a 144.4 passing rating. The latter number, of course, making little sense since his performance was basically perfect, but his rating was not. This is the third time this season that Mahomes finishes as the QB1 for the week. What’s amazing is that Russell Wilson, who has played 1 fewer game, is still the QB1 on the season, leaving Mahomes as the QB2 in fantasy football, but the QB1 in our hearts.

7-0 Steelers

There’s not a ton of fantasy numbers to crunch out of the Pittsburgh Steelers this week. This tends to be the case when your D/ST outscores all of your position players. As a team though, they are very impressive. Their 7-0 start is tied for the best in franchise history with the 1978 team, which won the Super Bowl. This team also has recorded at least 1 sack in 64 straight games (that’s 4 seasons) and is closing in on the all-time record of 69 games which was set by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the early 2000s. The lack of fantasy dominance in a dominant team is frustrating for casual fans, but not for Steelers fans, which the drinkfive staff is lousy with. On Sunday they got the best of Lamar Jackson, forcing his first-ever pick-six very early in the game and sacking him 4 times. The Ravens now fall to 2 games behind the Steelers, who should have a very easy time next week against the Cowboys, where, I can only assume, Ben DiNucci will be musing about what horses want when they are hungry.

7 TDs by Two Players

A few fun random stats that didn’t fit elsewhere. The Vikings-Packers game saw 7 touchdowns scored…by only 2 players. In addition to the aforementioned Dalvin Cook’s 4 TDs, Davante Adams was responsible for all three TDs for the Green Bay Packers. The Chargers lost after giving up a 17-point lead for the third time this season, an NFL record for consecutive losses. Tua Tagovailoa started and won, but it was about as ugly as it could be with just 5.72 fantasy points and none of his receivers reaching 20 yards. Drew Brees again holds the NFL record with 560 passing TDs, but perhaps only for a day. Tom Brady is at 559 and plays tonight against the hapless Giants. Finally, Tuesday is a very important day. The NFL trade deadline is at 4 pm ET. Oh yeah, there’s also a bit of an election going on. GO VOTE!