Fantasy Football Saturday Mailbag for Week 4
Welcome to this weekly mailbag series! This article will take selected questions from The Footballers’ Discord server that you can join here. In it, you can find a dedicated channel for start/sit questions, public fantasy advice, and a general channel for all things fantasy football. There are also exclusive channels only available to Footclan members. Discord members are great at answering questions and you never know when your questions will appear here.
Week 4 starts one of my favorite times of the year for fantasy football. Managers start to get complacent, which means more active managers can gain edges even if their teams have struggled up to this point. This is also a great time of year to get trades done to balance out rosters. Good luck this week!
Question #1 – Start/Sit
No clue who to start today for flex between Jaylen Warren, Gabe Davis, Devon Achane, and Jerome Ford. I feel like Jaylen Warren has safe floor? – Neev
Answer: This is an interesting cast of characters for this week. TL;DR – Achane, but I think the best way to attack this is by looking at each player in question individually and thinking about their floor and ceiling.
Jaylen Warren – He’s been given more carries each week this year and he’s seen at least four targets in every game so I can buy the floor argument, especially in a choice matchup against Houston, but Pittsburgh still loves to feed Najee Harris. They just haven’t had much of a chance to do so with a blowout against San Francisco and close games against Las Vegas and Cleveland. His floor is safe, but I don’t think it’s the best in the group and his ceiling is capped with Najee in the picture and an offense that hasn’t been able to put up big points.
Gabe Davis – I like Gabe Davis this week. It’s likely that he will get targeted a ton if/when this game becomes a high-scoring affair. Does that mean his floor is safe? I really want to say yes, but Davis is about as volatile as they come. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a three-TD game with 100+ yards, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if he had one reception for 12 yards on eight targets. I love his ceiling, but don’t love the floor. He’s a great DFS player and I wouldn’t hate throwing him in the flex if I had to but I like some other options in this group better.
Devon Achane – Unfortunately, last week will likely be Achane’s best fantasy scoring of his career and most people had him on their bench! Barring injury (knock on wood), there’s just no scenario where Achane fails to slice out a role in this fantasy points rich pie of a game.
The one vulnerability the Buffalo defense has had is in the run game. It’s masked because they did manage to completely shut down Josh Jacobs before Las Vegas got down and were forced to abandon the run game, but Breece Hall peeled off a few long runs in Week 1 and the Washington RBs managed a healthy 87 yards on only 12 rushes before they also had to abandon the run game.
If Miami gets up early, Buffalo will have a hard time stopping Achane and Raheem Mostert. If Josh Allen and Buffalo do put the pedal to the metal forcing Miami to become pass-happy, Achane will still get work as a receiving threat. Either way, Achane has a nice floor. Last week was probably the outlier of outliers, and no one would complain if Achane’s ceiling is half of what occurred last week.
Jerome Ford – Even in the worst of worst matchups against Tennessee’s defense, Ford got 10 carries and notched a couple of receptions. Baltimore isn’t too much easier being one of only a handful of defenses that hasn’t given up a rushing TD yet this year. I think Ford’s floor is arguably the safest in this group. He’s going to get double-digit carries and get targeted, but there isn’t much of a ceiling here and there’s a chance Cleveland’s fifth-round rookie QB Dorian Thompson-Robinson gets the start with Deshaun Watson questionable this week.
Question #2 – Jonathan Taylor
I’m trading Kyren Williams and Jonathan Taylor for Tony Pollard? – Glock 17
Answer: Kyren Williams has locked up the primary role of being on the field in an unbelievable 65%, 95%, and 100% of snaps in the past three weeks. He has four TDs on the season and has amassed 31 targets, but not all the news is good. All that time on the field has produced only 142 yards rushing and those 31 targets turned into eight receptions for 76 yards. The Rams’ schedule is also full of tough defenses. I don’t see Williams continuing to be on the field this much with how inefficient he has been.
Maybe Jonathan Taylor steps right in and continues to be a beast for fantasy. I don’t love maybes though and this isn’t the only maybe we’re dealing with when it comes to JT. Maybe he gets traded, maybe he returns in Week 5, maybe his ankle is 100%, maybe he’s physically ready to return, and maybe he’s not rusty. My guestimate is that we see the full JT around Week 8 where he’s had a solid two or three weeks with whichever offense he’ll be playing with and then we can hope he becomes a top-4 RB OR…
Tony Pollard sits at RB4 in half-PPR leagues. Even better is that it’s not a fluke. He’s put up solid fantasy numbers every week so far in the young season. I’d rather have a top RB now than both Williams and JT, even if JT returns to form in a few weeks.
Question #3 – FAAB
Can anyone explain how FAAB works? – Jacob(UGA/Eagles/Tottenheim)
Answer: FAAB stands for Free Agent Auction Budget. In traditional leagues, managers place requests for players. The manager with the highest waiver priority picks up the player.
FAAB is a bit more complex, but adds a layer of strategy. More strategy = more opportunity for better managers to succeed so I love leagues with FAAB. With FAAB, managers start off with some sort of budget like $100. They can then bid on players using as little or as much of their FAAB as they want. Devon Achane was still available in a ton of leagues last week and is obviously worth a lot to teams moving forward so it probably took bids in the $70-90 neighborhood to get him on the team. Someone who might not have a ton of value right now like Rico Dowdle (I listed several RBs with huge upside to pick up on waivers including Achane last week) might only go for $1-3.
I also chose this question for old times’ sake. I wanted one of my dynasty leagues to change its waiver format so I wrote an entire article about FAAB. It was one of my very first articles with the Footballers! You can find it here.
Question #4 – Justin Fields
What are we doing with Justin Fields? – brickhead
Answer: This depends on format. In dynasty, you’re going to have to ride it out. His value is pretty poor right now and he doesn’t offer much in the starting lineup. We still want to keep him since he has been a stud in the past and I’m inclined to think at least half of the problems are with the coaches. I’m 99% sure he’s not going to have the same set of coaches next year so hopefully, better things are on the horizon.
Redraft leagues are a little trickier. I would just drop him in 10-team leagues. He’ll have explosive weeks and it will stink if he has them on another team but we can’t trust him in our lineups. In the meantime, we can stream QBs with favorable matchups and piece together a QB1 season especially since waiver wires should be full of QBs in 10-team leagues. In 12-team leagues, I’d lean towards benching him for a few weeks and finding other QBs to stream. It stinks to clog up a roster spot with him, but streaming QBs will be more difficult and there’s a chance Chicago figures it out and actually coaches to their players’ strengths instead of insisting on jamming a square peg into a round hole.
Question #5 – Start/Sit
Would yall start Breece or Roschon this week? – Tater
Answer: I could very easily be wrong about this, but Roschon Johnson is one of my favorite sleepers this week. Roschon has seemed to play himself into a near time-split with Khalil Herbert (who I also like this week), but this matchup is so juicy for an explosive back like Roschon. If he has the talent to go along with his size and athleticism, then this week is as good as any to see it, even if Chicago’s offense is struggling.
Aside from a few carries against Buffalo, Breece Hall has been a major disappointment. The Jets really have no choice but to throw Hall and Dalvin Cook at Kansas City and hope for the best but this is a tough matchup and the Jets may simply not have the ball long enough to give Hall the opportunities he needs to break one.
As a sanity check, I looked at the RB rankings this week and the Footballers have Hall, Roschon, and Herbert ranked tightly next to each other. It’s probably going to come down to who can break a long run and my brain knows that Hall is probably the safer bet to put up fantasy points, but my gut is saying Roschon.
Comments
With Barkley listed as doubtful on Monday I have to start Jerome Ford as my RB2. Is it better for my team’s outlook to flex Amari Cooper in the hopes that I will get at least one of Cleveland’s TDs against a pretty solid Baltimore defense or spread out my options and flex Mike Evans? Standard league. Thanks