Week 3 Monday Review: Big Plays on Special Teams and Defense Rule the Day

Kevin Szafraniec
September 22, 2025

Kevin Szafraniec breaks down the biggest fantasy storylines from an NFL Week 3 that featured plenty of standout performances on defense and special teams.

I know, I know. Fantasy football is all about offense.

So why highlight the defensive side of the ball? Well, because heading into Monday night’s game between the Lions and the Ravens, we have already seen five defensive touchdowns, four special teams TDs, five blocked kicks, and four game-winning field goals. While I could have chosen a different headline, it does not feel like we will be getting another Sunday featuring so many big performances on defense and special teams for a very long time.

I am not going to use this space to highlight which defense and special teams units you should be adding this week; that’s Ross Durham’s area of expertise. Instead, I will mostly be debating whether Sunday’s biggest defensive performances are sustainable enough to give us pause when setting our lineups or if they will merely be an outlier when we look back on the 2025 season.

As always, I will be relying heavily on the Monday Review app — as well as a multitude of offerings from RotoViz’s industry-leading suite of tools — to break down all of the action from Week 3.

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Kevin Szafraniec

Lead Writer and Full-time Cat Dad. Sneakerhead, Record Collector, Beatmaker, Lord of the Rings Superfan, and Jeopardy Enthusiast in my free time. Follow me on X and Bluesky @thecatdadff

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