Bjorn Yang Vaernet examines which players on the waiver wire are worth prioritizing for Week 2 and highlights others to preemptively stash.
Welcome back to Week 1 of the football season — Christmas in September. The joy of waking up and spending all day watching football on the couch is unparalleled. It also means the chaos of the NFL begins. In Week 1, several prominent players already got injured and surprising usage situations emerged. While trying not to overreact to a one-week sample, deciphering the waiver wire picks for Week 2 is crucial. A good player picked up in Week 1 can provide value for a team for the next four months.
The waiver wire is one of the most important pieces of season-long draft leagues. It is the easiest way to acquire new players and every year there are gems to be found. The goal of this article will not only be to highlight which weekly breakout players to prioritize but to find others to preemptively pick up before the breakout happens.
This article will be published once on Mondays with a quick run through my favorite pickups and again on Tuesdays with more charts and data points added in.
This article will only reference players that are less than 50% owned in ESPN leagues. The players are categorized by position group and ordered within each group according to how I would prioritize them.
Quarterback
Marcus Mariota (Available in 95% of Leagues)
Marcus Mariota could be a poor man’s 2021 Lamar Jackson. Similar to Jackson, Mariota accounts for a large share of his team’s offense (100% of pass attempts and 32% of the team’s rush attempts). As I detailed in one of my offseason articles:
During the last five years, 11 QBs started in eight or more games and averaged seven rushes per game; eight of those QBs ended as a top-10 QB in points per game.
An underrated aspect of the Atlanta offense is how fast they are playing. In Week 1, Atlanta ran 71 plays, a number that would have been at the top of the league last year.
