Every season has one week where everything seems to go wrong on the injury front. If we’re lucky, it’s one week. Sometimes there are two or three.
Of course, it depends a bit on your specific players. If you have a lot of Malik Nabers and Lamar Jackson, this feels like the end, but it also feels a bit like the end if you have some players who were injured earlier. This was the week that Ja’Marr Chase settling in as more of a fourth- or fifth-round value, as opposed to the 1.01, started to feel inevitable.
After two lackluster starts in 2023, Jake Browning averaged 23 PPG over his last six starts.
Browning’s past success provided at least some ammunition for Chase enthusiasm, even though the superstar did not function well when Browning was under center.
Of course, context matters. Our Strength of Schedule Streamer has the Bengals with the third-most difficult WR schedule over the first month of the year. The Vikings and Broncos are certainly not favorable matchups, as Denver demonstrated again on Monday night.
These aren’t great defenses to face with a poor offensive line. The Bengals’ offensive line ranks dead last in points-above-average per play, which means they also rank last in wins above replacement.
As a result, this was the matchup heading into Monday night.
Denver’s combination of limiting receiver separation and frequent blitzing leads to a lot of pressure. Cincinnati ended up gaining a total of 159 yards in the bloodbath.
Although the next two matchups (DET, GB) aren’t great either, there’s a bit of buy-low here. But for Chase redraft managers, the damage has both been done and is ongoing.
The opposite situation was playing out in Dallas, where CeeDee Lamb managers lamented what might have been as George Pickens went off for 161 air yards and caught eight of 11 targets for 134 yards and two scores. Dak Prescott attacked the Eagles vertically in Week 1, but his throw depth had collapsed in Weeks 2 and 3 without Lamb. Those numbers bounced back in Week 4 as Prescott averaged an 8.7 aDOT and still threw catchable passes on 97% of his attempts.
Of course, both of these situations pale compared to that of Nabers, which we’ll return to in a moment. First, a note about Christian McCaffrey and positionless football.
Even as a 29-year-old back with an extensive recent injury history, McCaffrey continues to fuel reality innovations and/or force fantasy to evolve. Through four weeks, McCaffrey has taken advantage of WR injuries to average 10.8 targets per game. That translates to an average of 17.4 reEP/G.
For context, this is the second-highest reEP number through the first month for any RB this century.
Although the rest of season numbers declined substantially for this cohort, they remained robust outside of Melvin Gordon in 2018. However, Gordon continued to score over 21 PPG as the receiving workload underlined his overall talent impact that season. (The incomparable Marshall Faulk continued to score 30-plus PPG back in the NFL environment that was 2001.)
For McCaffrey, the receiving opportunities are obviously a bit of an outlier even for him. He averaged 5.8 targets per game across the 2022-23 seasons, 4.8 targets per game during the injury-delayed and subsequently truncated 2024 season, and now is up to 10.8 targets per game in 2025.
McCaffrey has struggled as a runner, averaging only 3.3 yards per attempt, and secured only 31 of 39 catchable passes. That’s led to -3.7 fantasy points over expectation (FPOE). And yet he’s still scoring 23.5 PPG. That’s more than Jonathan Taylor, Bijan Robinson, and James Cook . . . even though all of them are averaging more than 4.0 FPOE. Giving up more than a TD per game in efficiency to this crew, McCaffrey leads the league in scoring.
The mini-scare right before Week 1 created some opportunities to grab McCaffrey at a discount, and I selected him deep in Round 2 on a squad where I picked . . . Nabers in Round 1. Perhaps the fantasy gods have a sense of humor and are evening the playing field a bit. (If there’s a silver lining, this is an FFPC Main Event where I ended up in the same league with a team managed by the elite trio of Blair, Kevin, and Hasan. They’re 4-0 and have already gapped the field by 50 points.)
The loss of Nabers casts a pall over the season. We were about to see the young star play with rookie Jaxson Dart. Would the youngsters have risen to greatness together? For at least one season, we’re robbed of the opportunity to see. Succeed or fail, it would be good to know.
Dart drew some surprisingly robust FAAB bids in FFPC leagues a week ago. In a broken offense with a single playmaker, it would require an impressive level of rushing to reach startable status in all but the most desperate of situations. He managed that in his first start, carrying 10 times, many designed, for 54 yards and a TD.
Unfortunately, Dart threw only 20 times and hit a bleak 111 yards, the lack of options highlighted by the 14 lackluster targets to Darius Slayton, Wan’Dale Robinson, and Theo Johnson. Those passes went for a total of 75 yards . . . in a victory.
