By Scotty P. – SPM Fantasy Staff
USA Today Photo
In the past I have posted an article following Week 1 of the National Football League season preaching patience and advising fantasy football owners not to panic or overreact to what they saw during the season’s opening slate of games. I like to use current Ravens wide receiver Sammy Watkins as Exhibit A.
In last year’s Thursday-night NFL opener, Watkins was targeted by Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes nine times, hauling in seven of those passes for more than 80 yards and a touchdown. He also ran the ball once for three yards.
His final numbers for the season: 37 receptions on 55 targets for 421 yards and two TDs. That 30-yard opening-night run was his only carry of the season.
In 2019 Watkins exploded for 198 yards and three TDs on nine receptions in his season opener. He was targeted 11 times during that game. His season totals: 52 catches on 90 targets for 673 yards and a grand total of three TDs. That’s right, over the remainder of the season he recorded only 475 yards and no additional touchdowns.
There’s no doubt that someone in your league and in thousands of leagues around the world dropped a player who later would outperform Watkins to pick him up off the Week 1 waiver wire in a knee-jerk overreaction to his opening-week performances.
In some instances, if a player on your roster was injured or may have been inactive and clearly overvalued by pretty much everyone in terms of his draft value, picking up a player with the hot hand would make sense. But for the most part, being patient and not jumping on the first names you see on the Week 1 waiver wire is the best course of action. If you put in the time to do research and were happy with your team on draft day, chances are that you uncovered some really good data and strong reasons to believe that the players you picked, over the course of a long 17-game season, would outperform the one-week wonders.
Remember, the NFL season is a marathon, not a sprint.
Of course, a player or two who lights it up opening week – as well as some other relative unknowns who have great showings in subsequent weeks – is going to end up being a possible season-changing pickup, but figuring out who that might be is like hitting the fantasy football lottery. How do you really know, based on the limited data available, which of the first-week surprises will be a viable, long-term option to help your team win. Is it worth giving up a player with years of built-up equity and a strong resume who had an off week or wasn’t targeted or maybe had a really tough matchup for one who came out of nowhere and leaped to the top of the NFL stats page after a single game? Probably not.
Let’s take a look at the full-season teams I drafted.
This year I participated in seven full-season drafts of varying formats that call for me to adjust my roster on a weekly basis and allow for free-agent pickups. While I wasn’t as happy with some teams as I was with others, in general I felt that I did a really good job drafting my teams and considered every one of them a playoff contender when the drafts were done. Here is how Week 1 went for me.
Team 1
12-team full-season PPR H2H money league
141.76 points – win – first place
Team 2
12-team full-season PPR H2H money league
166.25 points – win – first place
Team 3
17-team full-season guillotine PPR H2H
211.30 points – survive – first place
Team 4
12-team full-season PPR H2H
125.70 points – loss – seventh place
Team 5
12-team full-season PPR H22
128.9 points – loss – eighth place
Team 6
12-team full-season PPR H2H
115.1 points – loss (by 100) – ninth place
Team 7
12-team full-season PPR H2H
86.72 points – loss – 12th place
I used pretty much the same approach to drafting each of these teams and chose some of the same key building blocks and some of the same late-round value picks for multiple teams. You’ll see that I have three teams that knocked it out of the park, a couple that were pretty much middle of the pack and two that were downright awful. My top team outscored the next-closest team in the league by 44 points. My worst team is 14 points behind the 11th-place team.
This is pretty much fantasy football in a nutshell.
All you can do is take the information you have at your disposal and make the selections that provide your team with the best chance for long-term success give you team’s needs and player availability at that specific time. That’s what you can control. There’s nothing you can do about injuries, bad coaching, bad execution, bat officiating, bad weather conditions and many other factors that determine how players perform and the results of a given game. If you’ve truly taken that approach to building your team and you felt good about it on draft day, there is no reason to blow up the roster or make drastic changes after one bad week.
My worst team had Aaron Rodgers and Devante Adams in the lineup. Need I say more?
That’s a Hall of Fame duo that probably couldn’t have done worse if they had tried. It also had a banged-up Austin Ekeler, new-kid-in-town Julio Jones and workhorse Mike Davis, who was rendered useless when his team was blown out. No one in their right mind would have played Jameis Winston over Rodgers, but he outscored him by more than 26 points while sitting on my bench. And who could’ve known that late-round bargain Ty’Son Williams would end up starting for the Ravens and doubling Davis’ output?
One of my teams lost by more than 100 points, a first for me in more than 30 years playing fantasy football. My opponent had four Cowboys and one Buccaneer in the lineup and scored 115 points on Thursday night. As badly as I was embarrassed in that game this week, it is likely the team that crushed me will have some serious regression this week and not come close to putting up the 225 points it posted in Week 1. And my team likely will rebound.
Draft picks such as Deebo Samuel, Adam Thielen, Jonathan Taylor and the aforementioned Adams were common threads that helped my teams that won. But of course, I also drafted Brandon Aiyuk and Raheem Mostert on several teams, and they combined for two points with Mostert being lost for the season. Many will give up on Aiyuk, who scored a big goose egg and appeared to have fallen off the depth chart altogether, but Kyle Shanahan says Aiyuk is fine and will remain a key component of San Francisco’s lineup.
In addition to Williams and Winston, I also made what appears to be other solid later-round picks in Jakobi Meyers, Mark Ingram, David Johnson, Brandin Cooks, Rob Gronkowski, Will Fuller and Antonio Brown. I know how much time and effort I put into my draft research and still like all my teams. I don’t see any reason to give up on any players other than those who were injured after they had one difficult week. In the legues where I did head to the waiver wire, I looked for players who played the majority of their team’s snaps and who received a high volume of touches and targets. I recommend you do the same while being careful not to get sucked into a situation where a player might have replaced an injured teammate before or during the game and is likely to lose those touches when the player returns.
Look at the mixed results my teams got.
One of my teams lost by the largest margin in my long fantasy football career and another was by far the worst-performing team in its league. I’d be willing to bet real money that one of my worst two teams scores among the top two or three teams in its league this week.
That’s just fantasy football.
I’m not giving up on my guys, and neither should you.