By Scott L. - SL Sports Staff
People will freak out about their Week 1 NFL Fantasy Football lineups right up until game time tonight when the National Football League season kicks off in Kansas City.
Stop it!
It's Week 1. Most of you just drafted, so you need to trust your draft.
For tonight, if you have any of these guys, you play them:
Patrick Mahomes
Lamar Jackson
Travis Kelce
Mark Andrews
Rashee Rice
Zay Flowers
Isaiah Pacheco
Derrick Henry
There. Fixed it for you.
The only potential question there would be if you went wide-receiver heavy in your draft and there's a debate about Flowers as a Flex option. And if you took Xavier Worthy, hopefully you aren't in a position where he is someone you are considering for the starting lineup. Let's see if the hype is real and analyze how he plays when the bullets are real before anointing him a fantasy football starter.
While that is the strategy for players in tonight's game, a similar mindset should prevail as you set the rest of your lineup for Week 1.
There are people out there in Fantasyland who will posts all kinds of charts and talk about matchups and defensive schemes and personnel packages. You'll see Start and Sit columns written by people who pretend to have more information that the rest of us. There will be videos that talk about zone vs. man numbers, and you'll hear discussions about cover one, cover two, cover zero, shell defenses, blitz packages and disguised blitzes and how various coordinators, quarterbacks and receivers handle those schemes. Then you will see and hear talk about press defenses, receiver breaks and which guys run the best routes vs. certain types of defenses.
The bottom line is that "experts" and analysts in Fantasyland need to produce content to make a living, and heading into Week 1 they really don't know much more than we do.
Yeah sure. Some of them conned their bosses into paying for them attend training camps to see players in person and have an edge over the rest of us peons in Fantasyland, but it's 2024. There are a plethora of beat reporters, bloggers and national NFL analysts at every training camp. All of those folks have phones. Every phone has a camera.
Our social media timelines and all of the daytime network sports talkshows were littered with live reports and videos from all the camps to the point that most of us got sick of it. At the end of the day we can, if we want to, see and learn as much about the teams during training camp as those who attend the camps in person. Without the sunburn.
While there may be a few nuggets of helpful "insider" information floating around Fantasyland as Week 1 of the National Football League season approaches, the reality is that fantasy managers had the entire summer to read, research and scour the web for any information that would help them with their drafts. We've all put in the time and done the work, and very little - other than if there is a surprise long-term injury during the first week of practice - will change in the week leading up to the start of the season.
Week 1 is when we sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor.
NFL football is back! Your fantasy lineup should be plug and play. You did all the legwork to ensure that you made the best possible decisions on draft day, and it's important to trust that process and put your best players in the lineup. You used the most valuable inventory of your draft capital on certain players for a reason. Week 1, when everything you see, read and hear is pretty much conjecture, is not the time to second guess all the effort and energy you put into preparing for your draft.
Assuming that your draft didn't go completely off the rails, the only real decision you should be confronted with this week might be who to play in one of your Flex spots. If you went wide-receiver heavy in a draft or played hero or zero ball with your running backs, there might be a couple of virtual coin flips, but even these decisions aren't as hard as they may seem.
When in doubt, just flip the coin. No, just kidding.
When in doubt, go with the highest-volume players. Early in the season it's always best to play the guys who are guaranteed to get the most touches.
This should be the approach through the first three weeks or so of the season. It's extremely important not to panic, but also just as an important to keep an eye on your league's waiver wire. We call the Monday after Week 1 Overreaction Monday for a reason.
For our betting service, it takes three or four weeks of gathering data before the algorithm we use will provide any meaningful information that we are comfortable providing for public consumption. With that in mind, why would we want to rush to any conclusions about fantasy football performance without an appropriate amount of data at our disposal?
Several things are guaranteed to happen this week:
At least one manager in every league will panic about a terrible Week 1 performance and waive a player or players who will help another team win a championship. This also is likely to happen in Week 2 and Week 3.
Several players, and possibly a rookie or two, will have mind-blowing performances, and someone will overpay for one or more of those players on waivers. That, in turn, might release more potential season-altering players into the waiver pool.
There will be a major, potentially season-ending injury to a top player that will turn someone's roster upside down. If this happens to you, remember Rule 1. Don't panic. The most enjoyable fantasy football seasons often are the ones in which you rebuild a roster that appears to have little or no hope into a contender.
One or more of the managers in your league will play the role of the smartest person in the room and bench high draft picks based on "matchups," their "research" or having "inside information" and get burned. Another manager will do this and some unknown player will blow up and validate that owner's self-proclaimed title of "Fantasy Guru."
Our advice to you is to sit back, enjoy the show and enjoy the first week of the 2024 NFL season.
Each week the goal should be to maximize your chances of scoring the most possible points. In Week 1, you don't maximize those odds by playing Xavier Worthy over D.J. Moore because you heard that Caleb Williams has a connection with Rome Odunze and has been told to spread the ball around and check it down whenever he's unsure about what he's seeing.
Of course, Worthy may burn the Ravens for 150 yards and 2 TDs, but that doesn't make your decision to play one over the other wrong. The outcome would just be unfortunate.
No championship is won during the first three weeks of the season; championship teams are built throughout the year. The key, just like in real-world sports, is to strive to improve your team throughout the season, to find your way into the playoffs and assemble the best lineup you can by the time the postseason starts.
You can't accomplish this by panicking.
Instead, take a look around the league for signs of panic from others. All the time you spent preparing for your draft this summer also has prepared you for the inevitable Week 1 overreactions and ensuing roster carnage. You will know immediately when other managers make mistakes because of knee-jerk reactions.
If there was a player you were disappointed not to get in your draft who is unceremoniously placed on waivers after Week 1, trust your research and pounce on him. We all draft players at the end of the draft who are either longshots or place-holders. Don't fall in love with those guys. They are expendable, especially if someone you coveted becomes available. Trust your research and don't let a subpar Week 1 performance scare you away from a player you believe can be a difference-maker.
If your league's resident "Fantasy Guru" benched a top draft pick or two and came away with a Week 1 win because of his or her superb "managing," take note of that and don't be afraid to swoop in and make an early season trade offer.
Look for the teams that get off to fast starts that may not be sustainable. Maybe they have produced some huge weekly point totals utilizing players whose performances are likely to decline as the season progresses. Perhaps they have fallen in love with a lineup that is due for regression and will be willing to part with players you really like who can help your team win or improve your depth. Shoot your shot.
Managers of these teams tend to get lazy and assume that their fast start will carry them all the way to the postseason. And it may, but the teams that advance and win championships are run by managers who stay calm and trust themselves early in the season while pursuing only pieces to the puzzle that improve their lineup of depth.
Football is a war of attrition in real life and in Fantasyland.
The managers who never sleep on the waiver process; who watch a ton of games while closely observing usage patterns, playing time and other shifts in a team's thought process; and who are continually tweaking the ingredients of their recipe to create the most appealing dish possible, are the ones who ultimately will bake a championship pie.
It's really pretty simple.
Championship managers trust their draft process and don't panic during the first month of the season. Instead, they prey upon other panicking managers as well as those who get complacent because of unsustainable early season success with the goal of continually building a more talented and deeper roster that can withstand the rigors of the NFL season.
The goal simply is to get invited to the prom, but it doesn't end there. When those managers show up for the dance, they want to stroll in with the best-looking roster at the ball.
Patience + diligence - complacency = the winning formula.
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