5 things to care about from Week 10: The Titans may have arrived while Bengals fade away
So much happens on any given Sunday of the NFL season. It’s hard to keep track of it all. More importantly, it’s quite a lot to decide what we should value as signal and what we should just ignore as noise. In this space, I’ll go through all that I watched in Week 10 and give you the five things I care about coming out of Sunday, along with five things I can’t muster up the emotional energy to care for.
Five things I care about
The Titans offense I always wanted
Ever since they crossed the pond during a late-game loss to the Chargers, the Titans have looked like a different team. They’ve scored 28 and 34 points in back-to-back wins over the Dallas Cowboys and New England Patriots. Honestly, they’ve looked like the team many of us expected to see all season. I’ve shown no ability to be objective, and therefore correct, about projecting the Titans offense but it sure looks like this unit turned a corner.
Tennessee’s quarterback can finally grip and feel the football, which feels important. Marcus Mariota has five total touchdowns over the last two weeks. Dion Lewis had 20 carries in his revenge game. Despite Derrick Henry’s two scores, Lewis is still the featured back. Corey Davis looked like the monster No. 1 he should be. Jonnu Smith perfectly filled Delanie Walker’s trusted middle of the field role. Will it stick? Let’s hope but I’m, once again, optimistic. On a side note, I buy into Mike Vrabel…for whatever reason.
Byron Leftwich
We all knew Arizona would lose by double-digit points. It came to pass but there was plenty to get excited with in Arizona’s offense, namely David Johnson’s usage. Johnson scored twice, once through the air and on the ground. He was the PPR RB1 coming into Sunday night’s action. His seven catches for 85 yards and a score looked like something out of his legendary 2016 season when Byron Leftwich’s mentor Bruce Arians was at the controls. Johnson now has 48 touches with 126 yards and a score on 11 catches through the air. With two weeks of a sample, it looks like Leftwich gets it and continues to do what makes sense with his current roster. The Cardinals won’t be good in 2018 but Leftwich looks like he’ll get the offense pointing in the right direction to close this year.
The Bengals offense sputtering
A.J. Green is a difference-making presence. He’s a Hall of Fame-type player and clearly the best talent on the Bengals offense. You don’t just remove a player like that and not lose a step. On the contrary, you remove a player like that and the ripple effects extend far across your offense. The Bengals barely possessed the ball with the Saints thumping their defense. When they did, it went poorly. Andy Dalton has long proven to be a quarterback dependent on the talent around him. With Green out, defenses can spread out and work to plan around slot receiver Tyler Boyd. A No. 1 role is not what suits him. With the passing game broken and the defense incompetent, the team cannot remain in game scripts to establish Joe Mixon (season-low 13 touches). It’s not too early to call this a season-changing loss for Cincinnati.
Chicago’s decision to get their best players healthy
The Bears took all the time needed for both Khalil Mack (ankle) and Allen Robinson (groin) to get healthy. That duo is clearly their best players on either side of the ball. Few NFL teams would have the guts to remove both from the equation for multiple weeks, but the Bears were confident enough to do it while recognizing their clear superiority over teams like the Jets and Bills. It paid off as Chicago didn’t trail for a single snap during either of those two games. They accomplished the same feat with both healthy for a dominating win over the Lions in Week 10. Robinson looked better than he ever has in a Bears uniform Sunday. Despite the myriad of weapons in the Bears offense, he’s at the top of the totem pole for a quarterback that, despite his many detractors slow to admit it, continues to get better with more experience.
Lessons learned from Nick Chubb and Aaron Jones’ late-season breakouts
Nick Chubb and Aaron Jones were among the best fantasy backs in Week 10. I didn’t draft them on a single redraft team back in August. However, there are teams where I have them on rosters here in November. I do not believe in “trust the talent” when it comes to making decisions with immediate consequences. Neither Jones nor Chubb had paths to clear playing time to start the season and while you could stash them based on your opinion of their talent, it took until midseason for them to return startable weeks.
More often than not, fantasy players will give up the ghost and drop or sell-low on these types of players when the inevitable chaos of injuries and bye weeks hit their rosters. People need players to score points. It’s a reminder that just because you’re out on drafting a Jones or Chubb-type player in redraft leagues, doesn’t mean you avoid them all season. You reap the rewards of these players and their theoretical talent when the fog clears and the price comes down as the season wears on. It almost always does, unless the player was just never going to hit.
Five things I don’t care about
What decisions Dirk Koetter makes
No matter what name fills the top spot of the quarterback depth chart in Tampa Bay, our process for predicting the team should remain the same. The player behind center for this team will be highly volatile, capable of putting up top-five quarterback numbers or completely going in the tank. Matchup won’t matter. The player will have a number of highly desirable weapons to use in the passing game. We can try and project which particular skill-position player may benefit more from each passer by picking at different hints from the past. It’s all folly, they’ve each shined in spurts with both quarterbacks. There’s just so many of them that all cannot get proper volume with these rocky passers riding the roller coaster drive-by-drive.
We didn’t even name the two options at quarterback for Tampa Bay because whoever it ends up being each week just doesn’t matter. Dirk Kotter will make another decision, perhaps several, before the last speck of sand hits the bottom of the hourglass on his time as the Bucs head coach.
The Bills 41-point eruption
The Bills defense deserves our respect for never once flinching in a season where they’ve far outperformed their offense. You can’t completely slander this team without feeling some twinge of guilt given what their defense puts out. That said, don’t believe a second of what we saw today from the Matt Barkley-led offense. LeSean McCoy enjoyed his best rushing output of the season, with 113 yards and a pair of scores on 26 carries. What we know of 2018 McCoy clearly alerts us that’s an outlier. Other offensive heroes included the undead version of Zay Jones becoming the latest slot receiver to whoop the Jets inside and offensive tackle Dion Dawkins. Not much about this feels sustainable and the outcome speaks more to the Jets status as a dead team that may well have a new head coach come Monday night.
The Raiders offense
The Oakland coaching staff doesn’t care about the 2018 version of this team anymore, so why should we? Brandon LaFell and Doug Martin are playing major roles for this team. Again, it’s the year 2018. We just have little proof that the Raiders will offer anything of utility on offense the rest of the way. Jalen Richard will continue to add popgun-type receptions. He tacked on four more today. Outside of that, there is nothing here. No one feels bad for fantasy football analysts or players, but it’s a challenge keeping all 32 teams in the discussion through the entire regular season. We can’t close the books on clear non-contenders. The advice for those perusing Oakland’s weekly projections: stream players against their defense and look right past the offense.
Golden Tate’s limited role
It’s a little disconcerting that Golden Tate was a near non-factor for a team that just traded a third-round pick for him to be a much-needed spark despite having a bye week to get integrated into the offense. The dud looks even worse with Amari Cooper on the other side of the field in this Eagles loss, fully immersed-in and making the Cowboys offense better. Tate ran just 14 routes Sunday night and played 29 percent of the team’s snaps. That will have to go up in future weeks. The Eagles have officially dug themselves a rough hole to climb out of to make the playoffs this year. If it’s going to happen, Tate must be a part of their plans. There is too much at stake for Philadelphia and they sacrificed too much to get him.
Chasing the Seahawks backfield
The Seahawks backfield continues to turn. With Chris Carson down for the count, Mike Davis led the way with 15 touches while Rashaad Penny smashed in a change of pace role with 12 carries for 108 yards and a score. Who the hell knows what this backfield will look like in Week 12 or much less throughout the season. Any running back getting touches in a viable offense is worth discussion in fantasy. However, making definitive statements on how the split of this highly unpredictable team will unfold on a short week seems unwise.
