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 standard Yahoo scoring, unless otherwise noted.

7 QBs over 30 Points

No tricks, no BS – there’s even an 8^th guy who may reach this level tonight. So far this week, there are 7 QBs that put up at least 30 points in standard scoring, led by usual suspect Mitchell Trubisky. OK, maybe he’s never even come close to these heights. Heck, his 43.46 points this season is more than he put up in the first three weeks combined. Now, I’m not sure that everyone should rush out to place claims on Trubes, but he did finally show what the Bears offensive ceiling is, and it’s actually impressive. He even broke the modern Bears QB record with 6 TD passes – nobody even had 5 of them since Sid Luckman threw for 7 back in 1943. On the other side of the ball Sunday, we saw the end of the 2018 installment of Fitzmagic – this guy’s fun, but I suspect we might have seen the last Ryan Fitzpatrick playing well as a starting QB (barring injury). Jameis Winston is ready to lick his fingers and eat some W’s (just….gross) when they return to action in Week 6. Farewell, Bucs – we hardly knew ye.

158.3 Passer Rating

Last Thursday, we were treated to real football. Part of that real football game was the most perfect passing performance, statistically speaking, we’ve ever seen. Jared Goff’s performance was the 70^th time that a QB posted a perfect passer rating. It was perhaps the best perfect game ever, featuring both the most passing attempts (33) and passing yards (465) of any perfect passer rating game in history. Goff added 5 TDs to finish with a cool 39.3 fantasy points. Goff is definitely trending up and is now a top-4 QB in fantasy through one quarter of the season. The Rams WRs were the big winners here – each of their top 3 guys, Cooper Kupp, Brandin Cooks and Robert Woods all put up over 16 points – 100+ yards and 1+ TDs each. The fantasy value on the Rams is overflowing and you should get in on it now before getting priced out of the market for trade value.

567 Made Field Goals

As promised last week, Adam Vinatieri has earned his way back into the discussion with his record breaking performance on Sunday. Vinatieri was 2/2 on FG kicks and has now passed Morten Anderson for sole possession of the all-time record for FGs made. A deeper dive into his stats (a list of all his made FGs is available here) shows that he also has 56 more made FGs in the playoffs, including a whopping 14 in 2006 alone. He’s made 40 FGs of 50+ yards. He’s made 12 FGs in overtime, including his one on Sunday. 160 of those FGs were kicks that gave his team the lead. He even has one passing TD to his name. Vinatieri deserves to be a first ballot hall of famer, and it’s been fun watching his career – heck, him playing even pre-dates my interest in the NFL. In tribute, 13 other kickers also put up 10 or more points in a week filled with offense.

240 Yards from Scrimmage

The anemic Cowboys offense got a shot of 50cc’s of pure Zeke on Sunday against the Lions. Ezekiel Elliot set a career high mark with 240 yards from scrimmage. He added 1 receiving TD, bringing his fantasy total up to an even 30 points. Those 30 are good for only 9^th most points this week – offense is increasing everywhere. Sunday, Zeke touched the ball a whopping 29 times, a trend that has to continue if Dallas wishes to win any more games this year. Their offense has looked so bad in the first 3 games of the season, that pushing more than 50% of the offense (Sunday was 29 touches for Zeke, 23 for the rest of the team) is the only path to victory. This is unsustainable over the course of 16 games, but it will result in tons of fantasy production for Zeke. He has 51% of the team’s touches and is the 4^th best fantasy RB so far this season. I expect him to continue with his 100 yards and/or 1 TD M.O. most of the season, but he is vulnerable to a dud game because of the team that’s around him.

1^st Regular Season Td

Titans WR Corey Davis finally recorded his first regular season touchdown. After finding the end zone twice in the postseason last year, Davis finally got one that counts on the regular stat sheet. Davis had a hell of a game, grabbing 9 receptions on 15 targets for 161 yards and the game winning TD in overtime. Davis had a whopping 15 points on the season going into the week, and put up 22.1. With the sudden departure (not a Leftovers reference) of Rishard Matthews last week, Davis is in line to continue getting a heavy workload. It helps that his QB Marcus Mariota seems healthy, so this connection should continue to grow. Next up is the Bills, so the 3-1 Titans should keep rolling.

It's hard to believe that we're approaching the end of the first month of the NFL season already. We finally have enough games completed to start to pick up on player trends around the league. For now, I'm focused on Quarterbacks and Running Backs, but we will go over all the positions on tonight's podcast. Trending players will have a three-week fantasy performance that is either going up or going down, and we'll examine why that's the case and what we expect out of that player going forward.

Quarterbacks

Sam Darnold (Week 1: 19.06, Week 2: 20.50, Week 3: 25.26) - Darnold has the Panthers rolling with a 3-0 start. He’s only thrown 1 INT so far, and found the end zone three times on the ground, which is always something that you like to see from your fantasy QB. He’s also throwing the ball a decent amount, averaging just over 35 attempts per game with 24 completions per game. Darnold has not played the toughest competition so far, but has plenty of easy matchups coming up with games against PHI, NYG, and ATL all coming up well before his bye week. If you’re streaming QBs, you should love the floor that the QB12 on the season can give you. If you’re in a super flex league, then Darnold is easily an every week starter. Carolina’s strong rushing attack has helped him tremendously. His advanced passing stats are far better this year than they have been in his career.

Justin Herbert (Week 1: 14.38, Week 2: 16.72, Week 3: 30.84) - Herbert had a very slow start to the season after finishing last year as the ROY. He seemed unable to get the Chargers offense going in the first two weeks, scoring only 37 points on offense total. Last week he redeemed himself with 4 touchdowns through the air, one of which was on a game winning 4th quarter drive in their victory over the Chiefs. Herbert is owned in 90% of Fleaflicker leagues, meaning he’s not going to be on the streaming radar. If you drafted him, the urge to push the panic button should be subsiding. Herbert currently sits as the QB13 through three games, but you can safely expect him to finish well inside the top 10 by the end of the season with more performances like he turned in against the Chiefs.

Jared Goff (Week 1: 29.92, Week 2: 19.44, Week 3: 9.08) - Goff has displayed a classic downward trend for the first three weeks of the season. He started off very hot statistically in his first game, getting lots of garbage time points, finishing as the QB3 in Week 1 and providing some hope for Lions fans. But as all good Lions fans know, their hopes were dashed very quickly as the Lions lost the next two games as well. Goff has trended down in completions, attempts, and yardage in each subsequent game, even with plenty of garbage time opportunities in Week 2. While he hasn’t played particularly badly, it’s clear that there just isn’t much talent around him to support big games outside of some fluky garbage time stuff. Goff remains on the streaming radar, but only in great matchups. His floor is probably too low to rely on him and you certainly cannot rely on garbage time points.

Running Backs

Najee Harris (Week 1: 5.40, Week 2: 16.60, Week 3: 21.20) - This one’s for Dave. OK, not really, but I think he likes it when we talk about Steelers players. So, Harris is a rookie, so a slow start was probably to be expected. What I did not expect to see what a stat line like he had last week when he had 14 carries and 19 targets (14 receptions). Harris is lined up to be a PPR monster with action like that. He ramped up from 1 to 5 to 14 receptions, so while you can’t expect numbers like 14 receptions every week, you can assume that he is going to have a relatively high receiving floor. Harris is being used on every down, and with lots of injuries to the receiving corps, it looks like the offense will run through him. There are very few every-down backs in the NFL, and Harris was taken in fantasy drafts with the potential he could be one of those in mind. It looks like everything is going as planned for the Steelers rookie.

David Montgomery (Week 1: 18.30, Week 2: 9.40, Week 3: 6.50) - Montgomery started out the season strong, gaining 108 yards on just 16 carries against the Rams defense, but has really fallen off a cliff along with the rest of the Bears offense since then. On the season, Montgomery is now averaging just 2.0 receptions per game, down from 3.6 last season. His rushing attempts and yards per game are also down from last year. What worries me most is that the Bears appear to have an anemic offense at best and might struggle to move the ball early in games, thus turning them one-dimensional late in games.Until the Bears figure out what they want to do at QB, whether it’s running out a game manager, or developing Justin Fields, Montgomery will be a touchdown dependent RB2/3 with a relatively low floor for a guy that is going to still see a high percentage of snaps.

Ezekiel Elliott (Week 1: 4.90, Week 2: 16.70, Week 3: 25.10) - Zeke has trended up in many stat categories, so he’s the perfect example for this segment. His carries have gone 11, 16, 17. His yardage is 33, 71, 95 and his TDs have gone 0, 1, 2. Zeke was obviously a first round pick and is being started regardless of his slow start, but it’s nice to see that he’s ramped his production up nicely and while Tony Pollard is going to get his share of touches, Zeke is still the primary back and will be in line for 15-20 touches on average every game. The only thing that worries me about Zeke is that the Cowboys have a tendency to go pass-heavy in some games, as evidenced in week 1, thus leaving Zeke with a very low floor for a premier RB. If he was more involved in the passing offense, I would be fine with any game script that the Cowboys are presented with. Unfortunately so far this year, he has 2.3 receptions per game, down from 3.5 just a year ago, and way down from his career high of 5.1 in 2018 when he led the league in touches. 51 touches through 3 games is not what you drafted Zeke for, so you’re going to have to hope he does a lot with the touches he does get.

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.

15 Games With 300+ Passing Yards

Justin Herbert just completed his 15th career game with at least 300 passing yards on Sunday against the Bengals. He’s only started 27 games in his career, and has more starts with 300+ yards than starts without reaching 300 yards. Herbert finished this week with 26.28 points as the QB3, and is the QB2 on the season (QB4 by points per game). His floor is great, never dipping below 12 points this year, and he’s topped the 30 point mark 4 times - in each of those 4 games, he has finished as the QB1 or 2 on the week. Outside of fantasy, he has 5 game winning drives complimenting his 5-4th quarter comebacks this season. This is a really great showing this year for a guy drafted as the QB8 (59th overall), right behind Russell Wilson, who is the QB24 on the year.

86 Receptions

Jaylen Waddle is currently on pace to break the rookie receptions record. He currently is averaging 6.6 catches per game and is on pace to smash the current record of 101, set by Anquan Boldin back in 2003. Thanks to the 17 game season, he’s on pace for a whopping 112 total receptions, but even if there were only 16 games, he would be on just enough of a pace to break it. Waddle is the WR15 on the year, helped along by much more consistent play over the last 5 weeks, where he’s averaged 7.6 receptions per game and helped his team to a 5-0 record during that time. Waddle won’t challenge for the rookie yardage record - his pace of 1,110 for the year is far from the record of 1,473, set by Bill Groman back in 1960 in only 14 games. 

35.1 Fantasy Points

For the first time this season, a tight end leads all fantasy players in total points for the week. George Kittle put together a massive 34.4 fantasy points in half PPR. He had 9 receptions on 12 targets for 181 receiving yards and 2 touchdowns. He tacked on a 5 yard rush for that little bit extra. Last week, Kittle had 1 catch for 13 yards, totaling 1.8 fantasy points. Kittle owners are sure to have whiplash from the point swing, so please be careful. Kittle got 30% of his total receiving yards on the season in week 13 (and 40% of his touchdowns, but he only has 5 total). Amazingly, Kittle has two games with higher yardage totals, and two with higher reception totals, but it’s his first career game with two touchdowns. 

12.2 Fantasy Points Per Game

Through 12 games this season, Nick Folk is averaging 12.2 fantasy points per game and is the #45 point scorer in all of fantasy football. That’s a better per-game average than DJ Moore, David Montgomery, Saquon Barkley, and the aforementioned Jaylen Waddle. Folk would be the RB11 and the WR12 on the season (if he played those positions and still kicked…it’s a stretch, work with me here). Folk has 7 games with double digit points this season. He’s only missed 3 field goal attempts on the year, all of them from 53 yards or longer. Tonight Folk has to kick in some sketchy conditions - it’s supposed to be very windy, and of course cold because it’s December, in Buffalo.

5 of the Top 10 Quarterbacks

Volatility is once again the name of the game at the QB position in week 13. Half of the top 10 QBs this week were not rostered in the drinkfive.com league, and those 5 QBs combine for an average ownership rate of just 39.2% in Fleaflicker leagues (thanks to Gardner Minshew for keeping that number low). This is the 4th time since week 8 that we have seen 5 out of the top 10 QBs not commonly rostered. This week saw a performance from Taysom Hill, which in hindsight, should have been obvious that it was coming. Even if he threw 4 INTs and ran for 100 yards (an NFL first), he’s still a good fantasy QB. Zach Wilson and Jared Goff both had their best games since Week 1. Ben Roethlisberger, the most rostered player in this group at 65%, had a stellar 4th quarter with 2 TD passes and a 2-point conversion on his way to beating the Ratbirds….errr, Ravens.. 

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.

4 Lost Fumbles

I’ve been talking up Trevor Lawrence, so it’s only fair that I talk about when he’s remarkably bad as well. He’s the first player this century to lose 4 fumbles in one game. Those 4 fumbles canceled out Lawrence’s 2 TD passes. He finished the game with 6.66 points – truly not a great sign for what I thought was a step forward in his second year. Lawrence added one pick to his total, for 5 overall turnovers – the most he’s had in a single game in his career. Sometimes I wish that there was still someone on TV to hype the Jaguars so I didn't feel so alone in this. Meanwhile, their opponent the Eagles D/ST has been having a great year – they now have 5 INTs, 5 fumbles recovered, and 16 sacks through just 4 games. They are now the D/ST2 on the season, but have 2 tough matchups leading into their bye week, so – maybe time to try and trade a D/ST? Is that even a thing?

2 Quarterbacks Over 30 Fantasy Points

…And neither of them are owned in the drinkfive.com so-called “Experts League”. Well, let’s not be too tough on everyone, here. Geno Smith threw for 2 TDs and ran in another while accounting for 369 total yards on the day on his way to leading the Seahawks to 48 total points – and they needed nearly every one of them. More on that in a moment. Joining Smith in the 30+ territory was his opponent, Jared Goff. For the second time this year, Goff threw for 4 TDs and he’s now the QB5 on the season. Goff is also tied for the league lead with 11 passing TDs. This is likely a trend that can continue for Goff, considering his team has given up the most points in the league so far this year.

140 Points Scored on the Season

The Detroit Lions are leading the league in scoring, having scored 140 points on the year so far. Unfortunately for them, they have given up 141 points – also the most in the league. This is why they have a very disappointing 1-3 record. The Lions have scored 35 and 45 points in games they lost this season. They are leading the league in passing TDs (tied), rushing yards per attempt, and total yards. Second in the league in rushing TDs, and top 10 in lots of other important offensive milestones. Unfortunately, they are dead last in defense when it comes to points, yards, first downs given up, rushing TDs, and rushing yards per attempt. It’s really an extreme experience being a Lions fan this season.

5 of 5 Field Goals in the Home of the Hotspurs

Kickers haven’t come up much this year so far, and props go to Greg Joseph of the Vikings who completed 5 of his 5 field goal attempts in England on Sunday morning. He kicked for a total of 181 yards, including one with under 30 seconds left to answer Will Lutz’s 60-yard field goal which had tied the game just minutes earlier. The fans in England were treated to a good game, one that had 5 scores in the 4^th quarter alone. Unfortunately for Joseph, he can’t claim he had a perfect day, as he did miss 1 extra point. In fact, each of the top 4 scoring kickers missed one kick this week – 3 of them missing extra points attempts. Perhaps this shows that the NFL moving the extra point back is accomplishing what they wanted. Perhaps this shows that kicking is pretty damn random indeed. Perhaps they don’t even belong in a column about fantasy football. My apologies, it’s getting late.

35.9 Fantasy Points

I tried my best, but I just couldn’t avoid talking about one more Detroit Lion. It’s not as if he doesn’t deserve it. T.J. Hockenson scored 35.9 fantasy points, the most of any TE this season – by more than 10 points. Hockenson had 8 receptions for 179 yards (lead the league in receiving yards) and scored 2 TDs. He even tacked on a 2-point conversion catch just for the cherry on top. This catapulted him all the way to TE3 on the season, even though he had only 19.2 points going into week 4. He has 65% of his points in just one game this year. Sometimes a small sample size is really fun to play with.