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 Cincinnati Bengals players heading into their matchup with the Pittsburgh Steelers to help you craft a winning lineup.
Joe Flacco, QB
Can he keep doing it?
The obvious answer is no, but how much regression do we build in, and what does it look like?
Joe Flacco’s 17-Game Pace As A Bengal
- 5,330 passing yards
- 47 touchdown passes
- 9 interceptions
- 736 pass attempts
Realistically, it’s the last one that’s fueling this house of cards. We saw Flacco spin his magic in this matchup in Week 7 (47 passes, 342 yards, 3 TDs), with the majority of his completions (16) and targets (23) going to Ja’Marr Chase.
That’s a pretty simplistic game plan that is hard to rely on as it is, not to mention trying to run back the exact same plan against the same unit.
In Week 7 specifically, Cincinnati was trailing for each of its first 26 offensive snaps, and things got ramped up after halftime with five straight scoring drives coming out of the break.
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Everything was working for both teams, and that allowed the environment to get out of control. In that game, Pat Freiermuth turned six targets into 111 yards, Jaylen Warren and Chase Brown ran for 235 yards on 27 carries, Noah Fant caught every target thrown his way with a touchdown, and that’s even without bringing the Chase game up.
We saw the Steelers slow down a Colts offense that felt unstoppable in Week 9, a reminder that there is a natural wide range of outcomes in this league week over week. The Bengals, coming off their bye, are a plus, but their defense will continue to struggle. Still, no reputable projection is going to spit out 76.8 points in this game — the average from Cincinnati’s three games pre-bye.
As the pace slows, the volume declines, magnifying any natural drawdown in numbers. League-wide over the past five seasons, we’ve seen defenses put a cap on pass upside, forcing opponents to beat them via papercuts.
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For whatever reason, we haven’t seen as much of that against Flacco up to this point. In his four starts, five of his 27 completions past the sticks (18.5%) have resulted in touchdowns, well ahead of the league average that annually hovers in the 11-12% window.
From a macro standpoint, I think we see a shift in the defensive approach now that the Flacco renaissance of this offense has lasted a month. In his four weeks with the team, the Bengals are the eighth least blitzed team and allow pressure at the second-lowest rate.
We have a blueprint for what doesn’t work, and I expect, for better or worse, to see a complete shift in the approach to handling this offense. The low blitz rate is very much how Cincinnati was defended last season, with a fully healthy Joe Burrow calling the shots.
I’m projecting more aggression from the Steelers (a top-10 pressure rate when blitzing), and that puts Flacco on the fringes of viability this week, something that might seem crazy if you’re simply tracking box scores.
Is he that much different than fellow gray-beard Aaron Rodgers in this spot?
Chase Brown, RB
Chase Brown has scored 65.6 PPR points in Joe Flacco’s four starts, a massive improvement from the 49.5 he scored in the five games prior, his efficiency driving the ship.
- In Flacco starts: 1.13 PPR points per touch
- Pre-Flacco: 0.60 PPR points per touch
The ability to find holes and hit them for big chunk gains seems to be much easier with this offense opening up, and I think we can bank on that sustaining (20.9% of his carries have gained 10+ yards, up from a pathetic 1.5% prior).
It’s been a season of ups and downs for the Pittsburgh defense, which widens the range of potential outcomes, but I’m not hesitating to start Brown in this spot. These teams last met in Week 7, and Brown picked up yardage on 100% of his carries in his only game this season, reaching triple-figure rushing yards.
Expecting that level of production might be a bit optimistic, but 100 total yards is reasonable on a role that figures to see 12-14 carries and five-ish targets.
You drafted Brown as a weekly starter, and after a brutal start, I think that’s what you have for the remainder of the season.
Ja’Marr Chase, WR
Ja’Marr Chase has cleared 90 receiving yards in five straight games and is averaging a cool 15.5 targets since Joe Flacco took over a month ago.
Yep, he’s back.
There was a lot of underneath stuff in Flacco’s first three starts, but he averaged 18.5 yards per catch in Week 9 against the Bears, highlighted by a 36-yard grab. We entered the season thinking that Chase would offer an elite floor/ceiling combination, and he might well be WR1 in both of those categories for the remainder of the season.
Chase has cleared 2.00 yards per route in all four Flacco starts, a run that includes a 16-161-1 win over these Steelers. I’d be surprised if that volume carries over for the rematch, but fading him, even at the high price tag, is dangerous in DFS contests of any kind.
Tee Higgins, WR
Tee Higgins has seen 8+ targets in three of four Joe Flacco starts and has scored four times as the veteran QB has vaulted him back into the top 20 after he wasn’t a top 50 receiver in three of four September games.
There are levels to this.
Flacco is leading a concentrated offense, but not one lacking hierarchy. Ja’Marr Chase seems to have double-digit targets preloaded at this point, and while that still leaves meat on the bone for Higgins, it’s not bulletproof (Week 8 vs Jets: two targets on 33 routes).
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In the Week 7 meeting, Higgins posted his second-best yards per route rate of the season and saw 17.7% of his routes come out of the slot, his second-highest mark of this season.
Higgins has been a top-15 receiver in two of his past three games, and I think his mean projection is less impacted by any Flacco regression than Chase. I’d bet that his Week 9 performance against the Bears in that crazy back-and-forth game (7-121-2) is easily his best of the season, but I do think there’s a strong floor at play here.
Bank on 7-9 targets and 70-ish yards, understanding that an elite athlete like this in a pass-happy offense always has the potential to post top-shelf numbers.
Noah Fant, TE
Noah Fant is a fine player with a theoretical role, but this is the most concentrated pass game in the league, and he’s simply not a part of it enough to rank him as a viable starter.
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Fant hasn’t earned five targets once during this Joe Flacco heater, and if we dial back some of the per-pass value for Flacco’s bottom line moving forward, his primary tight end moves from streamer into the abyss of options that I don’t spend much time looking at in anything but the perfect matchup.
And considering that Fant can’t face the Bengals, the number of optimal opponents shrinks by one.