James Conner had been quietly having a good year for fantasy football. The main RB for the Arizona Cardinals, a team that had been left for dead in preseason with all of their fantasy options laid out haphazardly like secondhand clothes at a neighbor’s garage sale, was a workhorse. The offensive weapons for the Cardinals went at a discount all draft season, with Conner going much later than most RB1s for a team.
And Arizona surprised fantasy managers and football fans alike by not being bad. The 1-4 record looks bad on paper, but the team has scored 108 points behind a QB who arrived in town a week before kickoff. Conner has been a big part of this offensive success.
In the first three weeks, Conner was RB24 or better, amassing 266 yards on the ground and two TDs during that time. His production dropped in Weeks 4 and 5, but he still finished as RB36 in those weeks.
However, Conner sustained a knee injury in Arizona’s Week 5 loss against the Cincinnati Bengals, and the Cardinals swiftly put him on injured reserve (IR) on Tuesday, keeping him out for at least four games. The earliest the current RB17 could return is Week 10 against Atlanta. Now the question arises: what do you do with Conner in fantasy?
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What Should Managers Do With RB James Conner?
If you are a Conner manager, you have no doubt been starting him, so losing him will significantly affect your starting lineup. Getting the obvious out of the way first, if your league has an IR spot, you are storing Conner there.
If you have horrible luck and have more players out on IR than you have roster spots available, Conner should supersede most players. He is a starting RB1, and those are hard to come by. If you are the unluckiest of them all and also have Justin Jefferson and De’Von Achane, that is the type of league you could drop Conner in.
Basically, you are only dropping Conner if your team is so stacked — thanks to you hitting gold on the waiver wire — that all your other RBs have higher value and upside.
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So what to do if dropping or stashing on the IR is not an option or on your radar? As a fantasy manager, do you feel comfortable enough to stash a player on your bench for at least four weeks with no guaranteed payoff? First of all, this depends on the size of your bench.
If you have a deeper bench, six players or above, you should be holding on to Conner. In leagues with benches that size, the waiver wires are picked dry. If you throw Conner back in, he will be gobbled up immediately.
James Connor TD! pic.twitter.com/yyH6xToIjB
— Fantasy Football Factory (@FFFpod)
It’s with smaller benches that you come into a problem. Bye weeks come into play. Sure, you may have enough players to roster a starting lineup this week, but have you checked out Week 7: the bye-pocalypse? Six teams are on a bye.
Before deciding if you can afford to keep Conner on your bench, you must see if you will have enough players to put together a starting lineup. If you will not, and it looks like you have to cut bait on Conner, attempt to trade him. You might not get much, but something is better than nothing, especially since you know that there is a high chance that if he is cut, someone will pick him up.
Start by looking at the teams in your league that can afford to have a player sitting on their roster taking up a bench spot. I am talking about teams that have had some players already have their bye weeks or, luckily, will not be massacred by the Week 7 byes. Then, see what player you can target; I would aim for a WR that hasn’t broken out yet, perhaps a Jaxon Smith-Njigba.
A player like that would probably be the next player dropped on that manager’s team for a waiver wire darling.
No matter what direction you go with Conner, keep your ear to the ground. Just because IR is a minimum of four weeks, it does not mean it might not be more. Monitor practice reports and health news. If his recovery looks to be going well, and you were not the Conner manager, look to trade for him, especially if the current manager has lost two or three games since he went down.
