The fantasy football landscape shifts each week, bringing fresh opportunities and unexpected challenges that separate the prepared from the pretenders. Savvy managers know that last week’s performance tells only part of the story, and diving deeper into the underlying metrics reveals the accurate picture.
This week presents some intriguing decisions. Here’s insight about key Detroit Lions players heading into their matchup with the Baltimore Ravens to help you craft a winning lineup.
Jared Goff, QB
Jared Goff has one great week and one poor one for fantasy purposes, but when you consider that he’s completed 80.6% across the two starts, he’s still the efficient passer that he was under Ben Johnson.
My hunch is that most defenses will be better than the Bears (11.9 yards per pass with as many touchdowns as incompletions) and worse than the Packers (5.8 yards per pass with an interception and four sacks), leaving us without much new information around the value of Goff in 2025.
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Last season, Goff averaged 17.2 fantasy points in road games, a bad showing, but 3.5 points fewer than his home average and consistent with his past 2+ seasons’ performance (29.2% fewer fantasy points per game on the road).
Josh Allen picked apart this Ravens defense for a quarter of Week 1, but they grade out much closer to the Packers than the Bears. While the game has the potential to shoot out, I’m having zero issues in benching Goff on the heels of a near-perfect performance in front of his home fans over the weekend.
David Montgomery, RB
David Montgomery cashed in a dive in the blowout win over the Bears, and his 11 carries picked up 57 yards, a much more satisfactory result than the 25 yards his 11 totes gained in Week 1 against the Packers.
His role in the pass game may depend on the script (four targets in the loss to open the season, but only one on Sunday), but he still appears to carry enough scoring equity to carry weekly RB2 status in most matchups.
In this one, however, he falls a tick below that and is more of a flex option for me. Since the beginning of last season, the Ravens have been the best post-contact rush defense in the league, and with their ball-control style of offense, the floor for Montgomery in this spot, if he’s held out of the end zone, is troubling.
I’m not looking to bench Detroit’s RB2 for a flier receiver, but if you feel good about 6-8 targets or 15+ touches from a similarly ranked option on your bench, I’d lean that option for this week.
I expect a conservative Lions game plan in this spot, which should give David Montgomery a boost over Gibbs, but it’s only a concern if you’re playing DFS Showdown.
Jahmyr Gibbs, RB
I’m still hammering out the open space rankings, but I know Jahmyr Gibbs’ gliding and Baker Mayfield’s reckless play are two of my five favorite viewing experiences when they have green grass in front of them.
We saw that on Sunday from Gibbs with a 42-yard run, a boost of confidence after he totaled just 50 yards in the Week 1 loss at Lambeau. We are looking at one of the premier dual threats in the sport, and while this offense looks a bit different sans Ben Johnson, maximizing Gibbs is pretty clearly high up on the to-do list.
I expect a conservative Lions game plan in this spot, which would be more beneficial for David Montgomery than Gibbs, but this’s only a concern if you’re playing DFS Showdown.
In redraft, you’re feeling privileged to get the honor of starting #0.
Amon-Ra St. Brown, WR
The 2024 Lions weren’t shy about embarrassing you, and it’s good to see that the gas-down mindset didn’t leave town with Ben Johnson.
Detroit beat Chicago by 31 points over the weekend in a game that wasn’t even that close. Amon-Ra St. Brown was having a strong afternoon at the office before adding two short fourth-quarter scores, but none of us with him rostered are complaining about the cherry on top.
Amon-Ra St Brown gets his 3rd Touchdown!!
— SportsCastProductions (@SportsCastProd) September 14, 2025
St. Brown picked up 34 yards on a crosser for the first play of the game and reached triple digits in receiving yardage before halftime. The argument could certainly be made that St. Brown’s floor/ceiling profile is as strong as any WR in the game, and while this is a tough matchup being played outdoors, I don’t see how you rank Detroit’s WR1 as anything but a Tier 1 option at the position.
Jameson Williams, WR
I suppose you want me to come here and say that everything is fixed. The panic after Week 1 was overblown, and Jameson Williams’ trajectory as a strong weekly option is back.
I can’t do that, I’m sorry.
His first two targets of the second half on Sunday went for 108 yards and a touchdown. The 64-yard catch-and-run felt like a touchdown left on the field, and his 44-yard score on the next drive was precisely what you drafted him hoping for.
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Splash plays are certainly a part of his profile, but outside of those two targets in short order, he was held without a catch, this coming after he turned five targets into 23 yards during the opener in Lambeau.
He’s going to be involved in this offense, and after the Amon-Ra St. Brown explosion in Week 2, the odds are good that he sees less attention over the top this week than last. I still think the season-end numbers will look fine. But the narrative entering this season was that he was capable of providing a reasonable floor to complement the single-play upside, and I’m not buying it until I see it.
The defensive strategy across the NFL over the past five seasons has been to limit the chunk plays, and the Ravens are prioritizing that at a high level. Since Week 11 of last season, this is a top-5 unit in both deep ball YPA and touchdown rate. If they can continue that trend, Williams could let you down in a similar way as Week 1.
He’s my WR32 this week, ranking behind Jauan Jennings and George Pickens, two receivers I often see ranked behind him, but two that project to be more stable this week for me.
Sam LaPorta, TE
The Lions suffered a loss in Week 1 to the Packers and took out their disappointment on the Bears over the weekend. We are two games into this new offensive era in Detroit, but I’m not sure how much we’ve learned from two game scripts that were a bit off.
I don’t think the Ravens do to the Lions what the Packers did, but I expect this game to be a tight one that teaches us exactly who this offense is. LaPorta was featured in the loss (6-79-0) and muted in the win (3-24-0), netting out okay numbers thus far, albeit in a maddening fashion.
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I’m still bullish on LaPorta and, given the production at the position up to this point, view him as a pretty comfortable weekly asset. Jameson Williams’ target earning remains hit-and-miss, but the gravity he provides helps open up LaPorta for what I expect to be, with time, a high-floor, low-ceiling type of role.
He’s averaging 4.5 catches and 52.5 yards through two weeks, and while I’d lean slightly over both of those numbers in this spot, I think that’s probably a reasonable baseline to start at most weeks.
