Week 14 was a great one for exciting games. The Dolphins delivered a miracle victory over the Patriots. Patrick Mahomes somehow brought the Chiefs back from the brink against Baltimore. The Raiders pulled off a last-second upset over the Steelers. The Cowboys outlasted the Eagles in an overtime thriller.
That’s all well and good, but we all know what really matters is how our fantasy teams did, particularly if you play in one of the many leagues where Week 14 is the start of the fantasy playoffs. If you’re reading this, the chances are better than 50-50 that you’re still alive. Otherwise, you’re a glutton for punishment — or just really intent on figuring out what went wrong and how to get an edge for next year. All are welcome here, so let’s jump right into what we learned this week.
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Amari Cooper is a different player in Dallas
Derrick Henry led off Week 14 with an utterly ridiculous fantasy performance on Thursday night, but he was on the bench (or the waiver wire) in most competitive leagues, so it was Cooper’s dramatic performance that decided far more fantasy playoff matchups. Cooper hauled in three touchdown catches in the fourth quarter and overtime, finishing with over 200 receiving yards as the Cowboys knocked off the division-rival Eagles. It’s become abundantly clear that the move to Dallas has transformed Cooper into a far better fantasy asset.
Cooper now has at least 180 yards and two touchdowns in two of his last three games, demonstrating that his ceiling is as high as any WR in football. But his increased fantasy value has at least as much to do with his week-to-week consistency as it does with his blowup games. We saw huge games out of Cooper when he was in Oakland, too — last season he had 210 yards and two touchdowns in an October victory over Kansas City. The difference is that Cooper also had five games with 10 or fewer yards for the Raiders last year, and two more of them this year, whereas he has at least 75 yards or a touchdown in five of his first six games in Dallas.
It remains to be seen whether Cooper can consistently provide WR1 production while playing for a run-first team, but the simple truth is that both his ceiling and his floor are higher in Dallas. I guess that’s why they say everything is bigger in Texas.
George Kittle doesn’t need your silly records to prove he’s elite
Kittle caught seven passes for 210 yards and a touchdown against Denver in the first half. His services weren’t needed as the 49ers milked a lead in the second half, so he ended up not catching any more passes and finishing just four yards shy of Shannon Sharpe’s record for most receiving yards in a game by a tight end. I’m sure he won’t mind.
The massive performance put Kittle over 1,100 yards on the season with three games to go, trailing only Travis Kelce among tight ends. Zach Ertz has nearly 100 fewer yards than Kittle, and no other tight end is even close.
What’s remarkable is that Kittle has done this with C.J. Beathard and Nick Mullens at quarterback, and the scary part is that Kittle still has room for growth in the touchdown department (he has just four TDs this year). If Kittle is able to develop a strong rapport with Jimmy Garropolo next season, he has a decent shot to overtake Kelce as fantasy football’s number one tight end in 2019.
It’s time to take Josh Allen seriously as a runner — and streamer
It’s been an interesting year for fantasy QBs. While Patrick Mahomes has taken the league by storm, many of the brand name QBs like Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, and Carson Wentz have failed to deliver for fantasy owners, while guys like Matthew Stafford and Blake Bortles have completely fallen apart. But the most intriguing late-season QB story has been the rise of the running rookies.
Most of the attention has centered on the Ravens’ Lamar Jackson rather than the Bills’ Josh Allen, and for good reason. Jackson rushed for over 1,500 yards in each of his last two seasons at Louisville, while Allen barely broke 200 rushing yards in his final year at Wyoming. Jackson also plays for a team that fantasy owners trust to put some points on the board, whereas Allen is the QB of a team that was until recently considered the worst offense in football.
But after the last three games, we have to wake up to the new reality. Allen has rushed for at least 99 yards in all three of those contests, and while the Bills are still far from an offensive juggernaut, they are scoring about five more points per game than they were earlier in the season. Allen’s passing abilities are still a work in progress, to put it mildly, but he has nonetheless finished as the overall QB2, QB3, and QB6 over the last three weeks.
That is elite fantasy production that is hard to ignore, especially if you are struggling at quarterback. It is going to be very interesting to see how many fantasy owners have the courage to play Allen over a more established QB with their seasons on the line.
Matt Ryan is the king of garbage time
Anyone who has been watching Falcons games knows that Ryan has not been playing good football during the team’s five-game losing streak. But if you just look at the box scores, Ryan has been just fine for fantasy purposes.
With an awful defense and basically no running game to speak of, the Falcons have created all sorts of opportunities for Ryan to collect garbage time stats late in games. Ryan had at least 285 yards passing in every game from Week 3 through Week 12, and even as Atlanta reached a new low in Week 14 by getting annihilated by a bad Packers team, Ryan ended up throwing three touchdown passes.
It hasn’t been pretty to say the least, but Ryan is the number four overall QB for the season. And if you have him and you’re still alive, you’re probably starting him at home next week against Arizona.
Being the top WR on a bad offense ain’t all it’s cracked up to be
We tend to think of targets as gold when it comes to wide receivers, but this week demonstrated that we can’t assume a huge target total or big production just because a player appears to be the number one receiver on his team, particularly when that team is struggling to consistently move the ball and score points.
Courtland Sutton, Larry Fitzgerald, Sterling Shepard, Kenny Golladay, and Tyler Boyd all entered Week 14 as the nominal top wideout on a struggling offense, and they all failed to do much for fantasy owners. Some of these players are more talented than others, and some of these teams had better offensive weeks than others, but it’s fair to wonder whether each suffered from being the clear focus of defensive attention. None of them have seen the massive spike in targets that might have been expected when other wideouts on their teams were injured and/or traded.
It was a big week for RB handcuffs
In last week’s Running Back Roundup, I highlighted the ascendence of Jaylen Samuels, Austin Ekeler, and Spencer Ware from handcuffs to starting running backs, observing that they all suddenly had quite a bit of value but would likely fail to equal the value of the elite RB1s they were replacing. That conclusion still holds after Week 14, but all three of these handcuffs still had very successful weeks.
Samuels did have a touchdown vultured by Stevan Ridley, but he also operated as the clear lead back in the absence of James Conner, finishing with 18 touches for 92 yards — and his day would have likely been even better if Ben Roethlisberger had not missed most of the second half with a rib injury. Ekeler, too, was the clear lead back over rookie Justin Jackson, producing 94 yards and a touchdown on 17 touches. Ware had two touchdowns vultured by Damien Williams, but he still produced 129 scrimmage yards on 20 touches against a very tough Ravens defense.
James Conner and Melvin Gordon could be back for Week 15 — and Ekeler could miss the game with a stinger — but the larger point is that this week was a good illustration of the value that the next man up can have in fantasy football.
The TD vulture is alive and well in today’s NFL
There were 22 rushing touchdowns scored by running backs on Sunday, and nine of them were scored by Brandon Bolden, James Develin, Trenton Cannon, Zach Zenner, Stevan Ridley, Damien Williams, Kenneth Dixon, and Alfred Blue. Some of those names are more shocking than others, but they were all clear backups with few touchdowns to their name heading into Week 14.
There’s not much you can do about it if you own the players who should have got these touchdowns, but it’s another reminder of the immense value of every-down bell cow backs like Saquon Barkley and Christian McCaffrey — and that NFL coaches don’t care about your fantasy team.
Washington has become a full-fledged fantasy quagmire
Washington is not a team that produced a lot of appealing fantasy options even when they were going good, but now this team is strictly hands-off from a fantasy perspective.
The one player on this team who had been delivering consistent fantasy value was Adrian Peterson, but his fortunes have been trending downward for quite some time due to injuries all around him, particularly on the offensive line and at quarterback. Peterson’s decline had been somewhat masked by a two-touchdown game in Week 11 and a 90-yard touchdown run in Week 13, but the fact is he hasn’t run the ball well at all since way back in Week 8. Peterson hasn’t even been seeing much volume lately — he has 12 or fewer carries in three straight games, as Washington keeps getting blown out — so he’s is little more than a dicey RB3/flex option at this point.
The Washington defense was also once a desirable fantasy commodity, particularly with their friendly schedule during the fantasy playoffs. But after struggling against all three of their division rivals over the last three weeks, this will be a difficult defense to fully trust, even in a highly favorable Week 15 matchup with Jacksonville.
The Steelers and their fantasy owners need Big Ben
Pittsburgh appeared to be exercising caution by keeping Ben Roethlisberger on the sidelines for much of the second half due to a rib injury, believing they could beat the lowly Raiders without him. But it backfired. The Steelers were eventually forced to bring Big Ben back into the game after Oakland took the lead late in the fourth quarter, and he promptly brought the Steelers back once and very nearly twice (if Chris Boswell had not slipped and missed a last-second field goal).
Backup QB Josh Dobbs failed to get anything going while Roethlisberger was sidelined, showing that the consequences would be quite severe for the Steelers’ skill position players if Roethlisberger were to miss more time. Thankfully, there is little reason to believe Big Ben will miss next week’s colossal contest with the Patriots after gutting through the final minutes of this game.
Elijah McGuire could be the Jets’ new lead back
While many people believed that McGuire would eventually overtake Isaiah Crowell as the Jets’ lead back, it did not appear likely to happen — until Crowell succumbed to injury.
Coming off over 100 scrimmage yards in Week 13 against a tough Titans defense, Crowell missed practice time with a toe issue and then managed to handle just three touches in Week 14 before departing with a foot injury. In his place, McGuire handled a career-high 20 touches, and though he wasn’t particularly effective as a runner (3.5 yards per carry), he finished with 83 yards and a touchdown.
Should Crowell miss time — the Jets have little reason to rush him back — McGuire would operate as the clear lead back in New York, placing him on the low-end RB2 radar even in a tough matchup next week against Houston. Scatback, Trenton Cannon would likely play a role as well, but it would probably be mostly limited to passing downs.
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Andrew Seifter is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Andrew, check out his archive and follow him @andrew_seifter.
