If you take a Greek tragedy and remove the catharsis, are you left with the 2025 fantasy football season?
How are we supposed to react on a week where three players we have absolutely everywhere — Tucker Kraft, RJ Harvey, Troy Franklin — go off, but Cam Skattebo is lost for the season with a gruesome ankle injury?
Skattebo was the Platonic ideal of a fantasy football running back.
- Falls forward: 10/10
- Good pad level: 10/10
- Contact balance: 10/10
- Lateral agility and one-step acceleration: 9/10
- Receiver-ish: 9/10
- Only guy you would feel (morally) comfortable giving a green-zone touch: 10/10
- Speed: 1/10
For the sake of fairness, the fantasy gods had to dial down Skattebo’s raw speed to keep things in balance, because the competitiveness was off the charts. In his book Winning Ugly, Brad Gilbert talks about his plan to beat Bjorn Borg at the French Open by making him stay out there for five hours if necessary. Several hours in, Gilbert realized that Borg was willing to stay out there five days.
Over the course of the last month, Skattebo became the heartbeat of the upstart New York Giants. In a sport where masculinity is king and the try-hard ethic is deified even beyond its ability to actually win football games, no one could compete with this new whirling dervish. You can play with a feverish intensity, but you can’t out-tough a player who developed his ability to square up defenders by running into telephone poles.
A couple of weeks ago, we broke down the redraft leagues, and while Jonathan Taylor and Jaxon Smith-Njigba were our two biggest hits, Skattebo was the player separating the contenders from the pretenders.
So it goes. We mourn for Skattebo, wish him well in his recovery, and celebrate the new emerging stars on our teams.
These Guys Are Next
In today’s exercise, we’ll break down the exciting arrivals from a few of our favorite players and mine the fantasy landscape for the next breakouts-in-waiting.
