Week 11 Fantasy Football Sneaky Starts & Sleepers

Nov 15, 2023

Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports

All but the luckiest fantasy owners at some point need to find the proverbial diamond in the rough—a waiver wire or bench player capable of putting up some points in a pinch. This weekly feature is dedicated to that part of fantasy football. It's not pretty, but it's part of the game.

Our signature strength-of-schedule metric, adjusted fantasy points allowed (aFPA), is now using only 2023 data. Unlike SOS tools at other sites, we can adjust a defense’s fantasy points allowed by its schedule bias, so it provides a better “apples-to-apples” comparison. I’ll put the defense’s aFPA rank in parentheses below. The higher the number, the better the matchup.

Last week, several of my Sneaky Starts delivered moderate-to-monster games, including Sam Howell (QB4), Geno Smith (QB5), Joshua Dobbs (QB3), Kyler Murray, Jordan Love, David Montgomery (RB8), James Cook, Najee Harris (RB10), Jaylen Warren (RB7), D'Onta Foreman (RB13), Brian Robinson (RB2), Devin Singletary (RB3), Tyler Lockett (WR8), Noah Brown (WR7), Tyler Boyd (WR12), Trey McBride (TE3) and Dalton Schultz (TE9).

Let’s see who might surprise us this week.

Quarterbacks

Kyler Murray (@ HOU, 27), Brock Purdy (vs. TB, 22), and Sam Howell (vs. NYG, 22) are all appealing starts again this week.

Justin Fields, Bears (@ DET, 25)

The Bears announced Justin Fields is back. His season got off to a slow start, but things picked up in Week 4 (27.9 fantasy points), and Week 5 (33.0) before he got injured in the middle of a bad game against the Vikings in Week 6. Through the first five weeks, he was the QB5, so he can be immediately deployed against a pass-funnel Lions defense that has been pretty soft against the pass (251/1.67 allowed, on average).