Making the right lineup decisions in the opening week can set the tone for your entire season. Know more about one of the league’s most intriguing offenses to help you navigate your fantasy football choices, and uncover which players are poised for a big start and which ones might be better left on your bench.
C.J. Stroud, QB
The fantasy season was over, and if you entered the season counting on Stroud, your season had been over for months. Still, if you remember, Stroud reminded us during the “real” postseason of the talent we saw during his standout rookie campaign.
Against the Chargers and Chiefs, two above-average defenses, including a Los Angeles unit that ranked sixth in our Defense+ grading scale, the former Buckeye averaged 8.6 yards per pass (2024 regular season: 7.0).
CJ Stroud Wild Card Highlights 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/A3TMz3hW8z
— Michael Parsons (@Michael_Pars0ns) March 19, 2024
What a healthy Nico Collins does for a signal-caller is funny, right?
The Rams’ defense took a step back last season, something that was expected to occur in Year 1 A.D. (After Donald). With their offense upgraded this offseason, this could be a weird shootout spot that catches the public off guard.
I have Stroud ranked as a top-5 pocket passer this week, which puts him on the QB1 radar for me in all formats, a level of optimism that most across the industry seem not to share.
Joe Mixon, RB
Mixon battled an ankle injury throughout the summer, and his track record doesn’t inspire confidence. The veteran back has missed three games in two of the past three seasons, not to mention that he’s carrying north of 2,100 NFL touches on his body. That makes him challenging to trust in any capacity for the short term.
The situation got worse on August 25th when Houston announced their starting back had been transferred to the Reserve/Non-Football Injury List. That ruling eliminates him from consideration for at least the first four games of the 2024-25 season.
The 29-year-old presents additional concerns beyond just health. Mixon has averaged more than 4.1 yards per catch just once in his career, making him more of a volume-based fantasy asset than someone who can impact your lineup with limited work. However, his consistency tells a different story. With over 1,200 scrimmage yards in four straight seasons, Mixon stands to be a weekly option once healthy, but you’re playing the long game.
The schedule adds another wrinkle to consider. Houston goes on bye in Week 6 and faces some difficult matchups sprinkled throughout their schedule over the first two months. But if we get a bellcow version of Mixon as winter approaches, he could become a popular name on rosters playing for fantasy glory.
Those Week 15-16 home games against the Cardinals and Raiders look particularly appealing for championship runs.
Nick Chubb, RB
With Mixon’s ankle injury sidelining him through September at the very least, Chubb becomes a roster-worthy player for now. While it would be great to see Chubb succeed this season, it is wise to view him as more of a bandage than a long-term solution for your backfield. He has missed 24 games over the past two seasons, averaged just 3.3 yards per attempt in 2024 with the Browns, and is coming off a broken foot he suffered in December.
That said, he projects for about 15 touches this week, which can be useful if you waited to address the running back position with a Zero-RB build. In that case, this is exactly the profile you want access to as you wait for your late-round dart throws to work their way into more routine roles.
Chubb being healthy when Mixon is not gives him a chance to earn more trust. Until he proves otherwise, however, consider him a flight risk. These early-season touches, while valuable, might not lead to enough work as the season progresses to demand he remain rostered in standard-sized leagues.
Christian Kirk, WR
My boss loves it when I do this.
Pull up a chair. I’m going to empty the research bucket here on a deep dive that you didn’t know you needed. I’m higher than your favorite fantasy analyst on Nico Collins, and I might also check that box when it comes to the Week 1 outlook for the Robin to his Batman.
Let’s start with the C.J. Stroud thing. If we knew he would be the Rookie of the Year version of himself (QB5 in our QB+ metric), not whatever last season was (QB33), you’d likely be more in on Kirk. Is that fair to say?
I’m high on Stroud for the season, but we are only talking about this first week. Last season, on non-Collins targets, Stroud saw his yards per completion drop by 18.9%, fueled by underwhelming after catch numbers (down 9.1% despite a tanking aDOT, something that is supposed to boost the YAC numbers, not hinder them).
We know that Christian Kirk has YAC potential, and if you insist on unpeeling this onion, you’ll notice an interesting trend.
Peak – down – down – down – peak – minor tick down – down
If you were a four-year-old learning to code patterns, you’d be tempted to think another down year is coming, but you’re better than that. You can think critically. What changed ahead of 2018 and 2022? The organization.
Kirk was the 47th overall pick ahead of the 2018 season and then signed a four-year deal with the Jags in March of 2022 after posting career highs in catches and yards in Arizona. The counting numbers looked different, but look at the chart above, and you’ll see that his YAC numbers tanked.
Without any further context, that doesn’t sound good, but it was simply a result of a developing role. In all four of his Cardinal seasons, Kirk saw his percentage of targets coming 10+ yards increase, and the deeper the route, the less YAC equity is attached to it.
Texans WR Nico Collins leads all receivers (min. 175 targets) in PPR points above expectation over the past two seasons (+28.8%).@KyleSoppePFN is all-in on Collins in fantasy football this season. 👀 pic.twitter.com/EgL3pZ0hth
— PFSN (@PFSN365) August 4, 2025
He signed the big deal in Jacksonville, and, like Arizona, they used him as an underneath option, asking him to support their short pass game. As time passed, he impressed, and they elected to evolve his role.
This past offseason, the Texans, who have access to far greater data than I do, moved a 2026 seventh-round pick for Kirk, coming off a year in which their franchise QB didn’t get post-catch help from their secondary receivers.
Interesting, no?
In 2023, a defense led by Aaron Donald in Los Angeles ranked as the fifth-best unit at preventing yards after the catch per reception, but that strength evaporated in 2024 sans the future Hall of Famer (rank: 25th, behind the Bengals).
My galaxy brain thought behind that occurrence is exotic play-scheming. When Donald was on the other side of the line, offenses generally knew what to do: double or triple-team that monster.
During Raheem Morris’s tenure (2021-23), the Rams never truly unlocked the art of blitzing around their game-wrecker, ranking 27th in pressure rate when blitzing. If you can’t create pressure when blitzing and your base front is simple to scheme against, opposing quarterbacks will have time to throw.
Time to throw means deeper passes, and that means fewer YAC opportunities.
In 2024, there was no Donald to use as a crutch or Morris calling the shots. Chris Shula took over the DC reins, a role he’s walking into 2025 with, and spent seven years tied to the second level of the Rams defense.
And guess what? They were the fourth-best defense at creating pressure (46.2%, league average: 40.6%). The next logical step in that progression is to ramp up the blitz rate, increasing the pressure on opposing quarterbacks.
Should that occur in this matchup, could Nico Collins’ deep targets be limited? It’s possible. Regardless of your reading on that portion of this equation, the signs point to some short throws in this matchup, with Kirk being the primary option on those routes.
Do you remember Kirk’s reintroduction to the fantasy world following a change of address the first time?
That’s what I’m here for. Jacksonville brought him in, schemed him up, and made him the only WR in our game to reach 17 PPR points in the first three weeks of his first season in town. I’m not suggesting that the now 28-year-old comes out of the gates quite that fast. Still, with only rookies really competing with him for targets next to Collins, I think we are looking at a redraft Week 1 flex and an exciting triple stack that isn’t garnering much attention.
Jayden Higgins, WR
Higgins is an interesting profile, and you could have talked me into it prior to the NFL Draft. There’s still hope, but there is some risk of skill duplication with Nico Collins, and that’s a tough spot to be in. Splash plays will likely occur at points in 2025, though I expect them to be much closer to random than predictable.
My expectations are low for this week, but I’m bullish on this offense. It’s not as if Collins has been the beacon of health in the past. I believe this type of player could work himself into a specific role with time, more so than being a Day 1 producer.
If I’m right and he no-shows this week, watch the waiver wire. I’m bullish on the C.J. Stroud bounce-back campaign. If we get rookie-season Stroud back in our lives, this offense could breathe life into three pass catchers in addition to the natural contingent value that is at play.
Dalton Schultz, TE
There is nothing fun about Schultz. The thought process that would land someone wanting to bet on the veteran TE is almost entirely driven by the potential of this passing game to return to rookie C.J. Stroud levels of impact, and that’s fine.
In fact, I actually think it might be right.
But I need to see some proof of concept before betting on it early in the year. During the first month of the season, you have access to every team in the NFL and almost every player on those teams: bye weeks don’t come around until Week 5, and injuries pile up as the season progresses, not so much in September.
Schultz is a player you have written down on the notepad that sits on your nightstand. Maybe that’s just me because of my job, but you get the larger point.
For now, Schultz is a name to watch, not one to play. This is the eighth season of his career, and one-third of his scores came in the 2021 breakout with the Cowboys. Nico Collins will be a target vacuum, and the young receivers will get every chance to prove their worth in the early going.
It’s possible that, by Halloween, we are seeing Schultz earn 5-7 targets per game and emerge as a weekly streaming option.
I’m not opening the season projecting that to be the case.
