XANDAMERE’S SHOWDOWN SLANT
At long last, the NFL season begins and it kicks off with the Cowboys visiting the defending Super Bowl champion Eagles. This game has a healthy 47.5 total with Philly favored by 7.5 (an important line when it’s over a touchdown). As has become a tradition, I will begin this article as I always do in Week 1: we know very, very little about how this season is going to play out. There are always teams that surprise us every year in both good and bad ways, and so while I’m going to write this from the perspective of “what’s most likely to happen,” just recognize that what’s most likely is less likely in Week 1 than it will be in later weeks. What this means is that if you have a strong take on how a game will play out and it’s different from the norm/how the field is seeing it, early in the season is the best time to take stands on those takes. Good luck!
Philadelphia
We’ll start with the Eagles and their backfield as Saquon Barkley returns after an absolutely monstrous season in which he rushed for 2005 yards (!), carrying the ball a whopping 345 times and averaging . . . AVERAGING 125 yards per game on the ground. He added another 33 catches for 278 yards through the air and scored 15 total touchdowns. He was a beast, and he played for one of the league’s best offenses in a clear 3-down bell cow role (even if his receiving role was smaller than we’ve seen in the past for him, with fewer catches than any full or nearly full season he’s played so far in the NFL). Now for the downside: Saquon passed the 1,500 career carry mark last season. That’s a LOT in running back terms. He’s 28 years old. It’s very rare to see 28-year-old running backs with 1,500+ carries on them continue to play at an elite level. Can Saquon still be elite? Of course he can. And the offensive environment he’s in is an elite one as well. But don’t be surprised if we see the dreaded running back cliff arrive this season. There’s no way we’ll be able to predict exactly when it hits, but Father Time is undefeated. I hate saying negative stuff about such an amazing player, but it’s going to happen at some point. Kenneth Gainwell is gone, so Will Shipley should be in the undisputed RB2 role (AJ Dillon has been really bad and pretty sure he’s only around as a depth/emergency piece). Last year, we saw Gainwell handle only a few touches per game, making Shipley largely uninteresting except for two things. First, he’s dirt cheap at $2k (Gainwell was usually $3k – $4k), putting him in the price range where it’s feasible that five carries and a catch or two result in enough yardage to make him relevant. Second, the Eagles aren’t idiots, and it’s possible they decide to pull back a bit on how they used Saquon last year – at least early in the season – to try and make sure he’s fresh for their inevitable playoff run. Is that the likeliest scenario? Probably not, as they didn’t really do it last year, but it’s at least a possibility, and if you want to think Shipley gets more like 10-12 touches than 5-7 touches, I think that’s a reasonable position to take.
Showdown Ownership Projections!
Ownership updates automatically
In the passing game, the Eagles top wideouts, A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, are both nursing Q tags, but everything indicates they should play without restrictions. Also relevant to their outlooks is that Trevon Diggs, the Cowboys top cornerback, appears on the wrong side of a questionable tag. Diggs avoided the PUP list as he’s coming back from last year’s season-ending knee injury, but it looks unlikely he’s ready to go just yet. The matchup is already good and Diggs’ absence would just make it better. We’ve also heard rumblings out of camp about the Eagles tweaking their offense to not be quite so run-heavy, which, if that holds true, would (obviously) be good for Eagles pass catchers (and bad for Saquon). It’s hard to put a lot of trust in coachspeak during camps, but it’s worth noting that all of the Eagles pass catchers are relatively inexpensive. A couple of years ago, it looked like Brown and Smith were 1A/1B with little room between them, but in the last two seasons, we’ve seen daylight between them with Brown clearly looking like the alpha. Over the past two years, when they’ve shared the field Brown has led in target volume, catches, yards, and also by a long margin, yards per reception. Brown is not only seeing more targets, but the targets he’s seeing are also more valuable. Smith is always a fine play, but when they’re priced just $1k apart, I’m going to lean Brown’s direction, especially with Dallas missing their top corner, who would be likely to shadow Brown were he healthy. Philly got Jahan Dotson to be their WR3 last year, but we’ve seen how the WR3 role is largely ignored in this offense. Outside of a Week 18 smash when the main guys sat, Dotson saw a grand total of just 22 targets the entire season. Yep, under two per game on average. You’re really hoping for a fluky touchdown to make him pay off.
At tight end, Dallas Goedert is super talented but has had a tough time producing in this offensive scheme when everyone else is healthy. Goedert had one explosion game last year but otherwise did not exceed 15 Draftkings points once last season and only reached 10 on four occasions. He’s also been used more between the chains, with just three targets inside the 10 yard line last year. Goedert is one of the guys specifically talking about a bigger role in the offense – that’s part of the whole “bigger passing game” stuff I mentioned earlier – but it’s kind of hard to buy it until I’ve seen it, and Goedert’s name brand tends to attract ownership in Showdowns no matter what. I’m not that excited to play him but will of course have exposure in MME – probably under the field, though. TE2 Grant Calcaterra makes for a viable punt option, as while most of his games were mediocre, he had four games last year that would have paid off his salary. He actually saw more regular season targets than Dotson despite being on the field far less often. Is he a great play? No, but he’s a reasonable one.
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