Drew Sample Week 11 Outlook - Bengals at Commanders

By Mike Tagliere (FantasyPros), Thu, Nov 19th 2020, 8:19am EST

I mentioned last week that Sample was far off the radar against the tough Steelers defense, but I also mentioned that Sample has done well in three games. Those games were against the Browns (twice) and Jaguars, two teams that ranks as bottom-10 teams at stopping tight ends. The matchup this week is against Washington, who ranks as the No. 31 ranked defense against tight ends in Football Outsiders' DVOA metric that factors in level of competition. Despite T.J. Hockenson's poor performance last week, 22.7 percent of the production that Washington has allowed to skill-position players has gone to tight ends, which is the highest mark in football. It surely helps that teams have targeted their tight ends a league-high 25.5 percent of the time, but there's likely a reason for that. There have been five different tight ends who've finished with 10.3-plus PPR points against them, and two of them did that with less than five targets. Sample is nothing more than a hail-mary TE2 but if you're desperate, the matchup is about as good as it gets.