Week 6 Fantasy Football Primer

With 5 weeks of fantasy football behind us and the blinding future of camaraderie and fellowship in front of us, I bring you the very best news that week 6 can offer. After shining my crystal ball using the remainder of Jon Gruden’s contract papers, I finally felt confident enough to walk up to Donkey Teeth and demand that I be rewarded with one of his NFT’s of Mr. Peanut. Much to my dismay, DT told me that I had no business consorting with the elite and powerful Anthropomorphic Character Union, of which Donkey Teeth was Undersecretary of Funny Business. Now that I’ve been rejected from yet another social clique — albeit one that came with an awful lot of animal dander and weekly shellings — I return to you with nothing but my hawt fantasy football takes for your perusal. Hopefully we keep our teams afloat this week! 

Week 6 Highlights

Foremost, congratulations to our own anthropomorphic (and possibly animatronic) Donkey Teeth, who came in 4th in the Weekly Fantasy Pros accuracy contest. As you may remember, the Razzbois are doing quite well in the contest — well, Rudy and Donkey Teeth and The Joey Wright, specifically. Yours truly is conducting an experiment and I had really surprising results the first few weeks followed by expected results this past week. ENYWHEY, I’m not telling you the shenanigans that I’m up to, just making you aware to follow the rankings of one of the other guys — especially Rudy, who’s kicking ass at the Weekly Accuracy competition this year. 

As always, you can support us with a premium fantasy football membership, which will cost you like $1.30 a week for the rest of the season to get some of the most accurate projections in the metaverse. 

Quarterbacks

Lamar Jackson: Passing Lamar has been unleashed! I have long been critical of LJax’s overuse as a rusher because rushing quarterbacks are almost impossible to correlate with quality fantasy production. A QB rushing for 100 yards is nice, but it’s not useful when they’re passing for 180-220 yards, which happened too often last year for Jackson. Over the past few weeks though, the typically rush-heavy Ravens offense has unleashed Lamar’s arm: where LJax had 183 passing yards per game in 2020,  he’s up to 303 yards per game in 2021. LJax should be on your DFS radar everywhere and, of course, starting on your fantasy team. 

Running Backs

Leonard Fournette: Regular Season Lenny is back after a year hiatus, and — wait for it — has been your surprise RB15 in PPR formats so far. Or, let me rephrase that: Wayne from accounting said that he was going to try this newfangled “Zero RB” thing this year and drafted Lenny in round 12, shouting, “FREEFALLING” the whole way, as if trying to wake Tom Petty from his grave. Now, Lenny is rolling and every chump who said Fournette was “the man” in Tampa is taking a victory lap. Bruce Arians said early in the year that he was going to give Ronald Jones a long leash, and pundits thought that Giovanni Bernard might be the scatback of choice for Tom Brady, but meanwhile, it’s been Lenny guiding the Bucs through stormy waters. Whatever. Process be damned — if Lenny’s getting the touches, roll with him. 

Darrel Williams: With Clyde Edwards-Helaire on IR, Darrel Williams becomes the go-to back in Kansas City. He’s been a usable RB2/FLEX play throughout the year, even with CEH taking the vast majority of the snaps up until this week, so if you’re in trouble, call DW. 

Receivers

Devonta Smith: Massive usage recently, two games of 7 receptions with 70/110 yards…and still available in 10% of leagues? Did 10% of leagues not get past the draft? 

Jakobi Meyers: Available in 30% of leagues and has been a WR2/3 the past few weeks. Goes against the Cowboys this week and will likely get a lot of action. 

Sterling Shepard: Should be back this week. Giants will be a mess but Kadarius Toney showed last week that the system can produce a huge WR every week, and Shep has been that WR more often than not this year. Downside is he’ll either have a concussed Daniel Jones throwing to him or [shudder] Mike Glennon. 

Hunter Renfrow: Has been a WR2/3 almost every week, available in 40% of leagues, and a new head coach in charge. Are we ready for a change? 

Thursday Night Football

Are you sick of Tom Brady yet? The Super Bowl champs and their fearless and flexible leader take on the Philadelphia Eagles this Thursday. Surprisingly, the Bucs are only favorited with a -280 line at the time of writing, which means that somebody in the nuclear fallout shelters in Vegas thinks that Jalen Hurts’ arm has a 40% chance of out-throwing the Bucs defense and beating the GOAT. OK, I’m not an oddsmaker, but that seems like a safe bet. Who are the other plays for Thursday Night? 

Leonard Fournette: Lenny, Lenny, Lenny. See 400 words above or, for our readers incapable of scrolling, I’ll summarize what I said here: “Lenny Benny Fo Fenny Banana Fanna Fo Fenny.” 

Zach Ertz: His compadre Dallas Goedert is on the Covid list, leaving the pariah Ertz to man the checkdown. After failing to be kicked off the team in the preseason, Ertz has quietly taken 15% of the Eagles’ targets while also playing 50-60% of snaps. Now he’ll have a chance to play full-time and show everybody that he’s capable of [checks historical notes] top 3 TE production numbers. 

Miles Sanders: This is more of a DFS play because Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni decided he was going to mess with everybody’s expectations this year. First, Sirianni threatened to put Joe Flacco as QB. Then, he told Ertz to shove off. Then part 2, the reckoning: Sirianni decided his bench needed a muscular rear end to warm it as he took Miles Sanders and completely ignored him. To be fair, Sanders has been on the field a lot, mostly watching the ball fly over his head at a receiver. But, Sanders is carving out a small role as a scatback —  claiming 11 receptions over the past 3 games — and a couple well-timed runs could give him 100 all-purpose yards. That’s great for DFS. Of course, he could revert back to early-season usage, and get 3 rushes and 1 dump pass. For that reason, I don’t recommend Sanders in your weekly fantasy football lineups. 

Remember — there’s a Saturday Morning Football game across the pond. For our UK readers, I apologize that you have to deal with another matchup of craptacular NFL teams. After putting up with the Jets, you now get the Jaguars and Dolphins. Ugh. 

Good luck in week 6!