Week 9 Fantasy Football Sneaky Starts & Sleepers
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.
I’ll put the defense’s aFPA (adjusted fantasy points allowed) rank in parentheses below. As of Week 4, we are now using only 2024 data for our signature strength of schedule metric, which makes it a great apples-to-apples comparison of each defensive matchup.
Last week’s Sneaky Starts featured Bo Nix (QB2), Kirk Cousins (QB3), Jameis Winston (QB8), Tyrone Tracy (RB5), Rachaad White (RB21), Cedric Tillman (WR3), Tank Dell (WR30), Xavier Worthy (WR28), Cade Otton (TE1), Sam LaPorta (TE9), and Mark Andrews (TE10).
Let’s see who might surprise this week.
Quarterbacks
Matthew Stafford, Rams (@ SEA, 21)
Now that Stafford has his top two receivers back, we can deploy him confidently in mediocre to good matchups, and the Seahawks qualify. Seattle has yielded multiple passing touchdowns in four of its last five games. Stafford threw for 279/4 last week against the Vikings and in his last 12 games with both Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua active, he has averaged 254/1.83 and 16.8 fantasy points per game.
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