Fantasy football strategy, rankings, and podcasts

Every week there are certain surprises and disappointments that can really throw us off guard as fantasy owners and strategists. But I am a firm believer that keeping on top of these with good analysis and projecting what results will be down the line can be the difference for your fantasy team and propel you to the playoffs. Each week we'll find a couple such instances during the games and point out the important things that you may have missed along the way.

Being a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, of course I'm going to bring up what was quite an amazing performance by the Steelers on Sunday against the Colts. Despite the medicore showings that the Steelers have had in the first several weeks of the 2014 NFL season, Week 7 and 8's match-ups have shown that their offense is clicking and the defense is starting to figure out who they are. First, Ben Roethlisberger enjoyed what was easily his best regular season performance of all time.. putting up 522 yards and 6 TD's. That's just a few yards shy of the best statistical performance from an NFL quarterback in the history of the league. We know that Le'Veon Bell and Antonio Brown are every week plays for fantasy owners, but does this mean that Roethlisberger should be looked at as a top 10 QB going forward? He's currently the #7 QB overall in standard scoring leagues after this Sunday and I think he'll end the year at the bottom of the top 10. The only QB to have thrown for more yards than him this year is Andrew Luck. Markus Wheaton was a popular pick as a WR sleeper before the season started and is still a part of the offense, but the chemistry between him and Big Ben has yet to impress. With 6'4" rookie Martavis Bryant finally healthy and involved in games it looks like he'll move into the WR2 role in Pittsburgh which comes along with plenty of redzone targets and loose coverage opposite Antonion Brown. Bryant is immediately in the waiver wire discussion (owned in 10% of leagues but finishing as the #9 WR in Week 8 with 20.30 fantasy points in a standard league).

Tom Brady has quickly eliminated any doubt that we had about his 2014 season. True, he started out the year underwhelming fantasy owners even to the point of dropping him before his breakout game against Buffalo, but has since improved dramatically along with other key components of the offense. It has long been known that Brady's recent successes can be tied to good games by Gronkowski - and that certainly was the case against Chicago on Sunday when The Gronk scored 3 touchdowns on 9 receptions for 149 yards. The running back situation in New England has always been up-in-the-air, and especially this year with Stevan Ridley out and Bolden not being used. It looks to me like we can safely say that Vereen and newcomer Jonas Gray will be the primary options from here on out (until injury or ball-control issues, at least), with Gray taking on Ridley's responsibilities including goal-line carries. Keep in mind that Gray nearly scored a touchdown on Sunday, and if he had (along with his 17 rushes for 86 yards) he would certainly be in the discussion for the #1 waiver wire pickup this week. The real enigma as of late has been Julian Edelman: trending down over the past few weeks, we have to wonder if his role (so crucial last year to the Patriot's success) has been cannibalized by a healthy Gronkowski and the emergence of Brandon LaFell (at least 4 receptions over the past 3 games including 3 TD's, last game was 11 for 124 and 1 TD). LaFell is also definitely in the waiver wire discussion this week (only owned in 35% of leagues, #11 WR in Week 8 with 18.40 fantasy points in a standard league).

Admittedly I was down on Mark Ingram a bit for several reasons.. first, I don't like playing players when just coming back from injury and second, the two defenses that Ingram performed well against at the beginning of the season (Atlanta and Cleveland) have graded out to be absolutely terrible against running backs over the course of the year so far (giving up over 1000 rushing yards each and a combined 20 TD's on the ground). Ingram turned out to be a terrific fantasy asset on Sunday night, rushing 24 times for 172 yards and 1 TD and adding 1 reception for 3 yards. So, should we be slotting him into lineups each week from here on out? First of all, he should be owned in all leagues.. he is currently owned in only 69% of Yahoo fantasy leagues and if he is available he should be your first pickup this week without question. Let's temper ourselves a bit, though, and look deeper into the situation: Ingram is currently without any competition in the backfield because Khiry Robinson and Pierre Thomas are both out with injuries. According to the most recent news, both should also miss Friday's contest against the Panthers leaving Ingram with the unquestioned primary role once more and making him a RB1 for the match-up against a soft Carolina rushing defense. Travaris Cadet is an intriguing player who is also getting more time on the field now as the passing down specialist (4 receptions for 40 yards on Sunday night) but is no threat to Ingram's job and should fade back into the background when Pierre Thomas is able to resume play. The one thing that I want to caution about after all of this good news, is that the Packers were also bad against the rush.. which means that although I think Ingram will be great against the Panthers on Thursday, he still has yet to play a team of any real skill against running backs. In weeks 10-13 the Saints will face up against the 49ers, Bengals, Ravens and Steelers.. all teams that are much better equipped to stifle his production. When Thomas and Robinson return (as early as week 10), we'll also see a return to the Saints' 3-headed RB committee. What does all of this mean? Well.. play Ingram this week, but try as hard as you can to push him in a trade before his fantasy production falters in the coming weeks.

Each week in the NFL brings new surprises and disappointments to our fantasy teams. Staying ahead of this stuff is one way to forge and maintain a quality team and get them to the all-important playoffs! Here are some important blurbs along with their associated analyses that may clue you in on some important information before your opponents!

Joe Flacco secured a spot in the record books when he passed for 5 touchdowns faster than any other QB in NFL history. He may have thrown some more later in the game if it hadn't devolved to a blowout against the Bucs, finishing with a score of 48-17. Including this week's stats (21 for 29, 306 yards, 5 passing TD's), Flacco is now the #8 fantasy QB overall in standard scoring leagues. Looking ahead to his Week 7 match-up with the Atlanta Falcons, Flacco provides a tantalizing value for a QB that is still only owned in 51% of Yahoo leagues. The Falcons have consistently had one of the worst passing defenses in the league so far this season, allowing an average of 278 yards per game so far. Interestingly enough, they've only allowed 6 TD's through the air this year though.. I believe this can be explained by the 12 TD's that they have given up on the ground - seems it's no problem for teams to pass the football down to the redzone against the Falcons, and then most of them tend to run it in. So, will Flacco finish the year as a top 10 QB? With Torrey Smith's breakout game last week will the Smith & Smith combo stay productive on a weekly basis? Is Flacco a good play in Week 7 against the Falcons, or will most of the TD's stay on the ground?

Andre Holmes had a standout performance against the San Diego Chargers (who had previously had one of the league's best passing defenses and been one of the more consistent fantasy defenses) with 4 receptions for 121 yards and 2 TD's. With that game, he leads the Raiders with 20 targets over the last two games. New interim head coach Tony Sparano seems to have put a spark into the Raiders' offense and Derek Carr has been playing fairly well by limiting turnovers (though he could have a better completion percentage - last week he was only 18-of-34). The other relevant receiver from the Raiders is James Jones, who caught 5-of-7 targets for 56 yards and 1 TD in Week 6. He has quietly put up consistently good numbers all year, cementing him as the #24 WR overall in standard scoring leagues while only being owned in 38% of Yahoo leagues. The only receiver who has performed better overall while being owned by less teams is Malcolm Floyd at #20 overall and owned by only 24% of teams. Pretty impressive performances by each of them so far this season and they don't look to slow down anytime soon. Both are solid grabs on the waiver wire this week before people realize what's going on!

Knowshon Moreno just went on the IR, after apparently tearing his ACL during the game against the Packers in Week 6. We knew that he was a dicey start, but didn't catch anything about this while watching the game until it popped up on Twitter. Ouch, Knowshon.. Well, moving on - right? With Moreno out for the year (and maybe moving on to a new uniform next season), Lamar Miller will keep his spot as the Dolphin's lead back. He's been no slouch in that role, either, grading out as the #14 RB overall in standard scoring leagues with 400+ all-purpose yards and 4 TD's so far. Owned in 88% of Yahoo leagues, you probably can't scoop him up of the wire at this point but he should be an every-week RB2 start now - especially going up against the Chicago Bears and Jacksonville Jaguars in Weeks 7 and 8, respectively. Both teams are giving up over 100 yards rushing per game.

Every week there are a few surprises that make us rethink what we know (or think we know, anyway) about player and team values going into the rest of the season. Because it's so early in the season a lot can still change but it's important to stay on top of it. Let me help out with a little analysis from this week's surprises..

- Joe Flacco put up 327 yards and 3 TD's against Carolina.. that makes him the #10 overall QB in standard scoring fantasy leagues so far this year. Their next few matchups are against the Colts, Bucs and Falcons - all of which are in the bottom 3rd of passing defenses so far this year. Great bye week fill-in, or possible week-to-week starter for the rest of the season? Doesn't matter, really.. if you need him for a bye week, grab him now. Otherwise, hold on to him for the next few weeks and sell him as high as possible (this holds mostly true in 2 QB or very deep leagues)!

- Jerick McKinnon breaks out with 18 carries fro 135 yards and 1 reception for 17 yards against the Falcons. Matt Asiata is still the starter, but is averaging less than 3.4 yards a carry through the first 4 weeks. We're likely to see some sort of split between Asiata and McKinnon now with Asiata being the more desirable back on passing downs and McKinnon the clear winner between the tackles. Jerick is an athletic freak and should be picked up for upside in just about every league.

- Steve Smith may be 35, but he's an absolute stud and showed it out there against his former team. Putting up 7 receptions for 139 yards and 2 TD's delivered on his 'blood and guts' promise. I still think we can expect a slowdown toward the middle and end of the season based purely on his age but this guy is a fighter and every-week WR2 from here on out. If Flacco can get both Smiths on track at the same time, the Ravens are an awfully dangerous team.

- Martellus Bennett has surprised everyone this year but his production (9 for 134 against the Packers on Sunday and the fantasy points leader with 53 to Jimmy Graham's 50 in standard leagues) may not be sustainable. We only have to look at stud WR Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffery's numbers here to see what's going on: both generally picked to be top-10 receivers in the preseason, Marshall is currently #13 (42.4) and Jeffery #22 (34.7). With Marshall slightly hobbled and Jeffery also having issues earlier this season (he looks alright now) I expect a regression for Bennett back to Earth and a boost for Jeffery while Marshall gets right.

- Cowboys look GREAT, Patriots look terrible out there.. Romo was the 7th highest fantasy scorer out there this week with 262 yards and 3 TD's. Murray is currently the best RB in the NFL and Bryant and Williams look great. Witten had his best game of the year with 5 receptions for 61 yards but still hasn't seen the end-zone.

Meanwhile, Brady and Co. were abyssmal with no one performing at their expected levels except for Brandon LaFell who looked comfortable out there and put up 6 receptions for 119 yards and 1 TD. Is the Chiefs defense back in business, or are we witnessing the fall of the great Tom Brady? He did say that he would play until he sucked.. well? Brady?

Eh, we'll expect to see him under center again this week vs. the Bengals but we no longer have faith in Brady or the Patriots in general on a consistent basis until they can show us otherwise. That said, Gronkowski is averaging a TD per game and Edelman is averaging over 6 catches per game so yeah.. keep those guys in.

So after last week surprised us with a crazy ending (both Patti stabbing herself with a shard of glass in an attempt to implicate Kevin and Jill turning up at the Guilty Remnant), I would expect nothing less of The Leftovers than to avoid the cliffhanger and throw us back into the past. It's really more of a move from Damon Lindelof's Lost, but certainly welcome here as it serves to build tension before the season finale which airs in two weeks. Anyway, on to the good stuff..

Laurie has been a bit of a mystery to us since she was introduced as Kevin Garvey's wife and one of the Guilty Remnant. Bits and pieces of information have been floating around though which you might have picked up. It is revealed in "The Garveys at Their Best" that Laurie was a psychologist before the Sudden Departure (I'm just assuming that's capitalized in this world) and, in fact, one of her patients was Patti who went on to become the head of the Mapleton chapter of the Guilty Remnant. Hearkening back (or forward, rather) to "Gladys", we gain a greater understanding of what was in the brown paper bag that Patti left on the doorstep of her [presumably] ex-husband's house. Shit. In addition, we see all of the build-up that caused Laurie to join the Guilty Remnant and leave her life in the first place. Not only was her and Kevin's relationship tumultuous to say the least, but she was pregnant with a baby that no one else knew about and who disappeared in the Sudden Departure along with the others. Not that the Sudden Departure wasn't bad enough already, but the thought of women at various stages of pregnancy suddenly losing their unborn children is a startling one. 

Elsewhere in Mapleton, we see a surprisingly lighthearted Jill (with braces, no less) who is as far as she could possibly be from the older, more jaded version of the same girl that we know now. We also learn that Tommy apparently gets loaded and heads over to his biological father's house quite often. Kevin spends the episode chasing an "unstable" deer throughout the city and trying to capture it alive, though it ends up dead at the very end of the show (and that series of events also leads Kevin to infidelity). The way that Kevin Garvey's past was portrayed in The Leftovers previously had led me to believe that he (and his family) were happy.. but it appears as though Kevin has never quite been happy, never found his true calling or reason for being. Foreshadowing all of the crazy events with Dean and Kevin Garvey Sr., at one point Kevin is on a run and sees a car with four women in it drive up to him. "Are you ready?" they ask him. When Kevin looks confused they seem to laugh and drive off only to have a sewer grate nearby blow off the street and into the air with a visible eruption of flames. This seems like the moment that the top comes off the bottle, so to speak, for Kevin. Whether the women in that car have anything to do with the more recent developments in the show or are even real at all remains to be seen.

Does the deer in this episode symbolize Kevin's sanity or how he thinks of himself? Is Laurie's baby really gone, and if so were Patti's words in the therapy session, "there's something wrong inside you" somehow related or just referring to the unsettling feelings that many characters seemed to have? When and why does Kevin Garvey Sr. go all nutty bar? Why would Laurie follow someone like Patti whom she knows is not completely well or mentally stable? Lots of questions posed here like usual.. thanks The Leftovers, I'll be not so patiently waiting until the season finale in two weeks!