What a great week. We all thought we knew what was going on, but we don’t know shit. It’s fabulous. Joe Flacco. Great fantasy QB. Wait, no, he’s Aaron Rodgers without the ability to throw off-platform or move at a speed above jaunt. Jaunt Flacco. Wait, that sounds pretty awful, actually. Welp, glad it’s not my problem. My problem is… shit, my problem is every position except for flex every other week. That sounds bad, too. Friends, I haven’t won since Week 5, haven’t even come close as far as I recall (and I have no intention of looking back).
But if you think Joe Flacco is bad, wait until you see groin-pull Jordan Love or CJ Stroud without his best two receivers or Jameis Winston when the defensive backs are allowed to use their hands. I can’t wait for the hot new defensive meta to be “blitz the shit out them.” That’ll be a fun throwback to simpler times. Greg Schiano will have a job in the NFL again. That’s how ridiculous the shift from two-high to engage-eight will be. Greg. Schiano. Basically if you didn’t get sacks or interceptions this week, your IDPs didn’t produce. These dudes are tired. Daylight savings kicked some serious ass this year. Which is also to say: don’t use this week as a barometer for the rest of the season for IDPs.
But I would read into it for QB play. I would fade the QBs who aren’t standing up to the blitz because frankly it’s easier to blitz. Defenders prefer it. It is easier to be right when your job is as simple as beating the man in front of you. So Stroud, Jameis, Caleb, and Flacco are dead assets. The Colts would have been better off sticking with Richardson. I get the whole tap-out thing; I just don’t care. We can’t hold Gen Z to the Millenial standard any more than we could hold Millenials to the Gen X standard. Maybe the kids are soft. The game is definitely soft. But on every level, you should prefer Richardson to Flacco. He’s a better person, and he’s more fun to watch play football. Most importantly, he would have beat the blitz on Sunday night. He would have gotten the Colts into the red zone, even if Joe Flacco would have to come in for a key third down in that red zone. It’s fine. Get over your macho bullshit and play your best players. Build the plane out of Taysom Hills.
We know one thing for sure: Coleman is our daddy now.
Not that Coleman was wavering, but he didn’t start the season so utterly dominant. Since losing to Brian in Week 5, Coleman has four straight games above 160, and his last two have been above 200. Back-to-back 200-point games. Anecdotally, it’s never been done before. I’m not going into the archives to find out for sure, so we’re just accepting it as fact. Coleman is doing what’s never been done. All of his players have high floors and high ceilings, and what’s terrifying is he has yet to hit an all-ceiling game. There was about an hour on Sunday where Coleman was projected to go over 240, which must have made Cameron smile a little since even that mega-production would have been ten points shy of Cameron’s Mortydome record 250.
But yeah, Cameron got trounced, and there’s not a lot of hope left since all three of his QBs crapped out. He missed the window to trade Dak, Joe Flacco is bad, and Jordan Love is about to go on bye. Jordan Love is still the best bet, but groin injuries linger for years. If his future opponents embrace the blitz, it’s pretty over. Not eight points per week over, but the 40-point ceiling is dead, and the 30-point ceiling might happen like once. Outside of the QB position, Cameron had a good week, but it’s only playoff fringe good. I’m not sure it’s even one-player-away good. CeeDee Lamb hurt his shoulder, and the teeny boys are getting such heavy usage that there’s no way they finish the season. Cameron is trying to be the first team to fire sale, but the trouble (as Max pointed out) is it’s too early for anyone to offer their best assets. Injuries are such an obvious risk that it just doesn’t make sense to pay up when you have to hope that dude survives eight more games. We’d rather wait for the deadline and only have to survive four games. You could sell now and sell at basically an injury prorate. (For my trade with Sean, we agreed to knock the pick down a round; yes, I almost got a 2nd for Kyler.) Or you could take on the injury risk yourself and get the highest picks and follow that Coleman blueprint for 2025.
The important thing to remember is that your season is cooked based on one week losing to the best team in league history. You should definitely give up, and you should consider this failure at fantasy football a reflection of your personal worth. Your own family is probably like, I wish Coleman were my dad. And, you know, elinghtened Millenials that we are, we should be understanding and honor those feelings. The most important thing is you don’t kill yourself because we need you to contribute to the GDP until all the Zoomers are of full-time working age.
It’s great that Brian got Jayden Daniels back because apparently Jayden Daniels is his only good player. The Diontae-Etienne trade resulted in four points for Brian and zero points for Spencer, all on their benches. Eventually Spencer will have a high-end late keeper. Brian will end up with nothing unless one of the other Jags RBs gets hurt. It’s a full-blown committee right now, and the Jags aren’t even good. I guess Brian can hope Etienne gets traded. That would rule. Well, maybe. My first thought was Dallas, where he could do a decent Tony Pollard impression. That was whatever last year. Denver could be cool. Otherwise I don’t think there’s a market. I guess you just hope the Jags turn it around and condense the offense to their studs, but that would only happen if Doug Pederson and Press Taylor got fired, which… well, I would do that after the absolute garbage decision to throw a jump-ball to D’Ernerst Johnson in the end zone on 1st down when they were down 6 in the red zone with 1:40 left in the game, instead of, like, I don’t know, fucking running the ball one time?! Idiots. Fucking. Idiots. And you can’t even argue that they were in the game because of the coaching because they were only in the game because somehow Saquon Barkley wasn’t called down by contact on a play where he was obviously touched before going down. The Jags would have lost by nine anyway if the Eagles had just kicked their extra points, would have lost by a solid two scores if that Barkley play were called correctly. Fire them, if only for Brian’s sake. We need another team in this championship mix.
Maybe that team is Spencer’s. They have the nuts at QB, and the rest of the positions are coming together. You look down this whole roster and you see a lot of legitimate players. It’s better than Cameron’s team. In fact, Spencer should go all-in with the injury-risk discount and poach a couple of Cameron’s players to keep the comeback coming. 4-5 is a good enough record when the third best team in the league is 5-4 (Keeping in mind you’re not actually one game out of third place since you’re so low in the points). Spencer is two games out of third, two games out of last. That’s kind of no-man’s land, but it’s also kind of a great opportunity to buy if everyone else in no man’s land is sitting on their hands.
Yeah, so Oliver comes in dead last in scoring this week. He doesn’t have to start Caleb Williams anymore. It’s okay to take that L once and for all and keep it moving with Justin Herbert going forward. Might also be time to take the L once and for all on Olave, too. Enjoy your Mixon and move on. Otherwise, it’s the kind of week where it all falls apart and you try not to tilt. The Caleb and Olave things have been brewing for weeks. The rest of it is pretty fluky. I’d still cut Quincy Williams.
Max is all the way back. An absolute onslaught coupled with a free square. The fantasy gods have decided you’ve put in your time for whatever crimes you’ve committed. You’re free to challenge Sean and Coleman again. And with losses from every team at or above .500 except Coleman, you don’t even need to win out to do it. The only drawback is we don’t get our epic Lamar auction, but if that day comes, I want to see live bidding in the chat for Lamar. That’s going to get you the highest return, and it’s going to give the rest of the league the most entertainment.
My season is officially cooked. Starting Jameis was always kind of a gag, but in a week where he threw three picks and took six sacks, he was my third best player, which okay, QBs score points easily, but my best two players were Chuba Hubbard and Taysom Hill. I am a pile of dirt with googly eyes. I would fire sale, but what is there even to sell?
I would hesitate to say Evan is back. Going into Week 10, he’s in sixth place. He’s fourth in scoring, but one 219-point week is doing some pretty heavy lifting. Remove everyone’s best week, and Evan is sixth in scoring, too. There’s some hope here. Evan scored 130 despite getting five combined from AJB and MHJ. Then again, he got 60 combined from Ekeler, Hopkins, and Zack Baun. There’s plenty of room for skepticism about his season-long prospects. But it’s gotta be nice to be in the playoff mix after the 0-4 start.
Shelby scored 134 points. 77 were scored by her three Bengals. BUT Shelby had four starters on bye, and her worst four scores would have been replaced with those starters. So there’s a path to more wins here. Burrow can go back to scoring a normal amount of points, and Shelby can survive against another average team. Sadly, she faces Sean next week.
While this looks like a narrow loss for Kennedy, he was down just one starter, granted that one starter (Nico) would have outscored Kennedy’s worst offensive starter and propped up CJ Stroud to at least an average score, delivering a relatively easy win against a shorthanded team. But that’s not the way it went down because that’s not how fantasy football works. It was obvious two weeks ago Kennedy needed a backup plan for Stroud while Nico was out. The Diggs injury was a violent shove that Kennedy flat-out ignored, and this is the price. Here are some free agent QBs Kennedy could’ve started over Stroud and won—actually the list is shorter the other way. The only QBs Kennedy could have started and still lost were Bryce Young and Gardner Minshew. He could have started Cooper Rush. He could have started Taysom Hill at QB and won by 5. Pitiful. But Nico is back next week, so it’s a moot point.
The main event was Monday night, where Corey needed about 20 from Mahomes to take down the king. With about ten minutes left in the fourth quarter, Mahomes shoveled a TD pass to Samaje Perine and fell to the ground with a non-contact injury. He had to be helped off the field, shaking his head and grimacing the whole way. It seemed like Corey had lost another one to serious injury, and he still needed 0.7 FP just to force it to stat corrections. Miraculously (because he’s a fraud), Mahomes re-enters without missing a snap, immediately completes a pass to put Corey up 0.01, then he just pours it on, eventually throwing another TD and delivering a double-digit win. With McCaffrey returning next week and Pacheco due back before the end of the month, Corey is rolling. The jewel of this matchup wasn’t even Mahomes; it was Jaxon Smith-Njigba practically scoring as many points as Saquon Barkley.
Sean might be the only team that started Barkley this week and lost. Because my poison pill finally kicked in. With Purdy on bye and Sean opting to handcuff James Conner over starting Matt Stafford, Kyler Murray scored just four points (Stafford scored 23; Sean only lost by 11). Sean was shorthanded. Not only was he without Purdy and Deebo on bye, but Puka got thrown out of the game in the first half. Sean’s path to facing Coleman in the championship game remains unthreatened. Coleman’s using way too much gas, and Sean’s coasting. He’s still going to win it all.
