Start em or sit em? Fantasy football start or sit decisions can be excruciating. While it feels great to make the right call and cruise to fantasy glory, it hurts just as much when you have someone erupt while on your bench. You can use our Who Should I Start? tool to gauge advice from fantasy football experts as you make your lineup decisions. And you can also sync your fantasy football league for free using our My Playbook tool for custom advice, rankings and analysis.
Let’s take a look at a few polarizing players and what fantasy football experts Pat Fitzmaurice and Derek Brown advise. And you can find all of DBro’s fantasy football outlook in this week’s fantasy football primer as well as Fitz’s fantasy football rankings & tiers.
- Waiver Wire Picks
- Weekly Fantasy Football Expert Rankings
- Fantasy Football Start/Sit Advice
- Fantasy Football Trade Tools
Fantasy Football Start’em, Sit’em Lineup Advice
Justin Fields (QB – NYJ)
I’m fading Justin Fields this week and recommend not starting him in fantasy this week. Fields was already working with arguably the thinnest group of pass catchers in the league, and now he’ll be forced to play without his only high-quality receiver, Garrett Wilson, who has a knee injury. Last I checked, the prop for Fields’ passing yardage on Hard Rock Bets was 173.5 passing yards, and I’ve bet the under. Veteran WR Josh Reynolds is dealing with a hip injury, so Fields top two wide receivers could be rookie Arian Smith, who’s really fast but had a 12% drop rate in his final college season, and Tyler Johnson, who has 80 career catches in 54 career games. For Fields to have even a decent fantasy day, he’s probably going to need at least one TD run. I’m well below consensus on Fields, barely ranking him inside the top 20 at quarterback.
– Pat Fitzmaurice
Jaxson Dart (QB – NYG)
There’s a lot of enthusiasm for Giants rookie Jaxson Dart, but Dart has a brutal Week 7 matchup against a relentless Denver defense that leads the league in sacks and is giving up 175 passing yards per game. Don’t play Dart if you can help it.
– Pat Fitzmaurice
Darren Waller (TE – MIA)
Darren Waller’s route share has grown weekly. In his first game, he had only a 37% route share, but last week he was up to a 75% clip. Salutations! Waller is a full-time player in the Miami offense. Waller has a 12.8% target share, 1.86 yards per route run (39 receiving yards per game), and a 15.4% first-read share. Waller has four red zone targets in his three games played and has scored a touchdown in each game. He has two TE1 weekly finishes (TE4, TE6). He faces a Browns’ secondary that has the third-highest rate of single high (61.3%). Against single high, he has drawn only two targets (5.1% target share) and had a 3.6% first-read share. This isn’t a great schematic matchup for him. He could save his day with another touchdown again this week, but I don’t project that he’ll roll up receiving yards in this game. Cleveland ranks 16th in receiving yards and 18th in schedule-adjusted fantasy points per game allowed to tight ends.
– Derek Brown
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If you want to dive deeper into fantasy football, check out our award-winning slate of Fantasy Football Tools as you navigate your season. From our Start/Sit Assistant – which provides your optimal lineup based on accurate consensus projections – to our Waiver Wire Assistant, which allows you to quickly see which available players will improve your team and how much – we’ve got you covered this fantasy football season.
