Fantasy football strategy, rankings, and podcasts

Not all that glitters is gold. We're all familiar with the adage, but often as fantasy football team managers it's all too easy to get caught up in the momentum of a player and/or his circumstances without looking forward into how things will progress throughout the season. For these specific examples below, fantasy points may well follow for a couple more weeks but all are headed to a place closer to a benchwarmer on your roster than a starter. Why not take the advantageous route of offering these overperforming players to other managers in your league and getting some more consistent, higher-floor players back in return? That's my plan. Either way, good luck out there!

• Sammy Watkins - Here we go again with Sammy. Drafted this year as WR 89, the ‘Week 1 Wonder’ put up 11.6 fantasy points as WR37. He led the team in targets (8) and yards (96), and looks very much to be the Ravens #1 WR going forward. This may be a hit or miss kind of situation based on how much of a shootout the Ravens are involved in from week-to-week, but this is a player that - when healthy and featured - will have fantasy value throughout the season as a flex start. That said, I think those situations will be few and far between so I’m not buying into Watkins this year.

• Melvin Gordon - Gordon finished as the RB6 in Week 1, with 19.3 points. But take away the 70-yard TD run that he had in the fourth quarter and that number drops to only 6.3 points. In fact, Gordon actually had less carries during the game than rookie RB Javonte Williams. Those team managers that didn’t pay attention to the specific stats of this game may be clamoring to start Gordon but I think we’ll see his usage wane as the season progresses.

• Ty’Son Williams - Williams rushed 9 times for 65 yards and 1 TD on Monday Night Football making him the RB9 in Week 1. He also caught 3 passes for 29 yards and a total of 16.9 points. I don’t want to take a single thing away from his performance because he looked great, showcasing good speed and breaking a few tackles - but this is not likely the usage that he’ll continue to see over the course of the season. Newly signed veteran RB Latavius Murray took the majority of the carries in the second half (in fact, Williams only had two), and Williams missed a blitz pickup in overtime that led directly to Lamar Jackson’s fumble and the Ravens’ subsequent loss. No doubt Williams is talented, but those kinds of mistakes on top of Murray’s already split usage and Le’Veon Bell likely headed to the active roster to assist in 3rd down pass protection situations will result in much less fantasy production going forward than many are expecting.

• Deebo Samuel - An impressive outing from Samuel, he finished as WR3 with 27.4 points. That’s 9/12 for 189 yards and 1 TD. Yeesh. Clearly Samuel is not a ‘flash in the pan’ player as he totaled more than 800 yards receiving in his rookie year with the 49ers, but there are a few things to note here: 1) Brandon Aiyuk (hamstring injury) will be eased into this offense and take some targets away from Samuel as the season progresses and 2) The Eagles defense that he will face in Week 2 profiles as much better than the Lions - Calvin Ridley only chalked up 51 yards on 5 catches. Samuel and Gronk (who I’ll get to next) are clearly the best of tonight’s fantasy fool’s gold segment, but I think it’s important to understand that they have likely played their best games of the season already and we should expect regression. I expect 5-6 catches for 50-80 yards this week, which aligns more closely with the WR2/3 numbers we should anticipate on a weekly basis from Samuel. Consider week 1 a lucky spin.

• Rob Gronkowski - TE1 with 25 points. Is Gronk back to his glory days? In a way, yes. Same relationship with Brady, same kinds of plays and mismatches we’ve seen in the past, etc. But we know that Gronkowski’s gears were already getting rusty and that injuries tend to crop up over the course of a football season that prevent the big guy from playing at 100%. I will admit that it looked like Gronk drank some water from the fountain of youth out there against the Cowboys secondary, recording 8 grabs for 90 yards and 2 TDs but - like plastic bags - that’s simply not sustainable. We will see a major drop-off from Gronk going forward, but we may not see it this week against the Falcons. Their less-than-stellar secondary gave up plenty of fantasy production to the tight end position last week. So trot Gronk out there as a TE1 once more, but that will change starting with the Rams in Week 3. Mark my words!