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.

16 Point Fantasy Floor

This season, only 3 players in the NFL have a solid fantasy floor. The always reliable Patrick Mahomes, even when his team scores a scant 13 points, has not scored less than 18 fantasy points all season. The other two guys are a bit more surprising. Kyler Murray and Gardner Minshew II. Murray notched his first win on Sunday against the hapless Bengals. He had his best day statistically as a fantasy QB, not turning the ball over and gaining 93 yards on the ground to go with a TD. Murray ended the day as the QB6 to Minshew’s QB8. Both guys are rookies, one was the first overall draft pick and the other is clearly a future hall-of-famer and worthy successor to Blake Bortles in the eyes of Jason from The Good Place. Minshew had a tough matchup against fellow rookie phenom Kyle Allen on Sunday. Unfortunately for Minshew, he doesn’t have Christian McCaffrey on his team. Speaking of the guy leading ALL fantasy players and the MVP race at the moment…

866 Yards from Scrimmage

Christian McCaffrey had himself a game on Sunday. His 237 yards from scrimmage and 3 TDs were actually only good for the 3^rd best point total on a day with huuuuge points, but more on them later. McCaffrey is now on pace for 2770 yards from scrimmage this season, smashing the record of 2509 set by Chris Johnson in 2009. So far, McCaffrey leads the league in rushing yards and, second in receiving yards among RBs. He is the top point scorer in all of fantasy football, with 128.60 points, just nudging out QBs Lamar Jackson and Russell Wilson. Next up, the Buccaneers, the only team that has managed to hold McCaffrey to under 23.9 points this season. I expect him to have a much better performance this time around.

6 Players Above 30 Fantasy Points

This week was all about big performances. The early games, and there were a lot of them (10!), had the Texans hanging 53 points on Atlanta. Along the way, Deshaun Watson threw 5 TDs and notched 41.74 fantasy points, a season high at the position. Three of those scores were via the hands of Will Fuller V, who had his own monster day of 217 yards and 3 TDs for 39.70 points. This was more than double his season points total so far, having not exceeded 6.9 points in a game all year. Falcons QB Matt Ryan continued his excellent, but quiet year. His 32.9 points on Sunday was excellent for fantasy players, but a terrible losing effort for his team. Ryan also gets an honorable mention in regards to my earlier stat about QB floors – his lowest game this year is 15.68. Michael Thomas put up a ho-hum 30+ point game, showing that he’s good no matter who’s throwing him the ball. I already mentioned Christian McCaffrey, who was sitting on top of the RB list this week until Aaron Jones had something to say about it. Jones basically beat the Cowboys all by himself. Putting up a whopping 42.2 points, he had 182 yards from scrimmage and 4 TDs on the ground. Aaron Rodgers owners may not be thrilled, but clearly, we all see who the real A-a-ron is in Green Bay right now.

35 Fantasy Points

But wait, there was one more entry to the 30 points and over club! A D/ST had a huge day and surprisingly it wasn’t the odds-on favorite New England Patriots against the hapless Washington Redskins. The Philadelphia Eagles just dismantled the New York Jets, limiting them to only 9 first downs, putting up 10 sacks and scoring TDs on both an interception and a fumble recovery. They added another interception just for fun and because, apparently, it’s easy to pick on Luke Falk. The Jets need Sam Darnold back as soon as possible. Maybe Darnold can get tips from Jason Witten on how to rehab one’s spleen. I don’t really see this performance as indicative of the Eagles getting better, but rather it just shows how bad the Jets are. The Eagles play Minnesota, Dallas and Buffalo coming up, and I see no advantage to keeping them around this week. Continue streaming, friends!

3 of the Top 10

Finally, a bit about kickers in fantasy football. Only 3 of the top 10 performers in Week 5 were owned in our drinkfive fantasy league. Those three kickers are owned in at least 78% of Yahoo leagues. The remaining 7 kickers have an average ownership of just about 19%, showing that nobody knows what the hell a kicker is going to do week to week, mostly because it’s not up to them! This is just my latest entry to my argument that kickers probably don’t need to have anything to do with fantasy football. Any Sunday, you’ve got an equal chance, it seems, to have a guy like Dan Bailey (10% owned) put up the same amount of points as a guy like Justin Tucker (99% owned). It’s just ridiculous that 2 of the top 5 kickers on the year are owned in fewer than 25% of Yahoo leagues, Matt Gay (22%) and Zane Gonzalez (17%).

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.

37 Completions

Thursday night, the Bengals unleashed their #1 overall pick in a prime-time game – though if you didn’t have NFL network handy, you struggled to find it. Broadcast rights aside, this Browns-Bengals matchup was better than it had any business being. In only his second game of his professional career, Joe Burrow attempted 61 passes, completing 37 of them for 316 yards and 3 TDs with zero interceptions. The 37 completions are a record for rookie passers. Now, perhaps, the Bengals would like to consider acquiring a defense so that their rookie’s arm doesn’t fall off by the end of the season.

50 years

Raheem Mostert, one of 49 (probably) players injured for San Francisco, recorded a feat that hasn’t been done in over 50 years. He became the first player in 50+ years to score a TD of 75+ yards in the first two weeks of a season. Last week, he had a 76-yard TD reception, and yesterday he opened the game with an 80-yard TD run where he was clocked at a blazing 23.09 MPH. Seriously. Get in your car and drive 23 mph and see if anyone could possibly keep up. Hell, Mostert would have been speeding on the street that I grew up on. Limited to only 10 touches since apparently injuries are more contagious than Covid-19 to the 49ers, Mostert still sits as this week’s RB14, and the RB4 on the season. Hopefully Mostert can stay on the field as he has the two fastest speeds clocked by ball carriers this season – and they’re the fastest regular season numbers since 2016.

75,000 Yards

Tom Brady became the second player, behind fellow quadragenarian Drew Brees, to reach the 75,000 passing yards mark. Brady has yet to really impress in a fantasy football sense this season, but he did lead his team to an impressive victory over the, admittedly lame, Carolina Panthers on Sunday. The question of whether Brady still “has it” is unresolved in my mind, but he does win games, so we can go ahead and give him credit for this one. He does need to stop throwing interceptions – that’s 4 games in a row including the playoffs last year. Nonetheless, we celebrate Brady’s 75,000 yards, a distance so damn far that it would take Raheem Mostert nearly 2 hours (111 minutes) running at full speed to cover all those passing yards. You can tack on another 17 minutes to include his playoff yardage.

60+ Fantasy Points

So far in this short season, 4 QBs are averaging 30+ fantasy points per game. Leading the pack is no surprise, it’s Russell Wilson, who has an amazing 82.5% completion rate to go with 9 passing TDs already. It’s the 3 players who also average 30+ per game that may have you surprised. In order, you have Josh Allen, Cam Newton and Kyler Murray. Between them they have 8 rushing TDs, obviously an invaluable asset to fantasy football QBs. Amazingly, Cam Newton has landed here with only 1 passing TD in 2 games so far this season.  Last year’s MVP, Lamar Jackson sits just outside the top 10, just a few points ahead of 2020 Rookie of the Beginning of the Year Joe Burrow.

43.6 Fantasy Points

Aaron Jones is insane. This is the note that was my placeholder and I really can’t start this section any better. Since the start of last year, he has 13 games over 15 points (and 2 more games of 14.8 points). Two of those games are over 40 points, 8 of those are 22+ points or better. On Sunday, Jones was everywhere. He carried the ball 18 times for 168 yards, good for a 9.3 yards per carry average. He found the end zone twice on the ground and once more through the air, where he added 4 catches for 68 yards. His performance in Week 2 was so dominant over all other RBs that the difference between Jones and the RB2, Nick Chubb, is an entire Raheem Mostert – 17.8 points! If you take the highest non-QB, non-Jones scorer in Week 2, Calvin Ridley, you would need to increase his output by 65% just to reach Aaron Jones’s performance. This guy is insane, and the Packers are really, really good this year.