Eagles (

25.25) at
Hawks (

21.25)

XANDAMERE’S SHOWDOWN SLANT

Monday Night Football has the Eagles visiting the Seahawks for a game that currently has the Eagles favored by 2.5 with a total of 45. All of that is meaningless at this point because not one but both starting quarterbacks are questionable . . . good grief. I expect I will have to update this article tomorrow at some point, but yeah, both Jalen Hurts and Geno Smith are legitimately questionable to play. We could feasibly see Marcus Mariota against Drew Lock here. For now, I’m going to assume both starting QBs are in but will try to put some if/then stuff to share what I’m thinking if one or both miss. If we get any news in time, I’ll update the article (if we don’t get news until inactives come out, hop in the OWS Discord where we’ll be talking through how to handle things). 

Seattle

We’ll start with Seattle. Kenneth Walker made his return last week and played 56% of the snaps against 42% for Zach Charbonnet. The bad news is he only saw 13 running back opportunities, but clearly part of that was game flow driven as the Seahawks were whomped by the 49ers. The good news is five of those opportunities were targets, tied for the most he’s ever seen in a game. The matchup here may not be as bad as it looked earlier in the year, as the Eagles have slipped down to 14th in run defense DVOA, but he is very game-script sensitive. $7,800 is a very fair price, though. If Jalen Hurts plays, Walker is a very fragile play who could be game scripted out of a role in a hurry (especially if Geno Smith is out), but if Hurts misses, Walker looks like a much stronger option, as that significantly increases the chances of the game staying competitive throughout. Charbonnet held on to a solid role with 10 opportunities of his own, and in the last games we saw Walker and Charbs together, he had 7, 5, and 11 opportunities including eight targets. At $4k, he’s playable and doesn’t necessarily need a Walker injury to pay off. 

Showdown Ownership Projections!

Ownership updates automatically

In the passing game, we saw Drew Lock throw for 269 yards and 2 touchdowns last week against a tough 49ers defense. He also threw two picks, but the point here is that I think Lock can at least support some semblance of pass catching success for Seattle in a good matchup against an Eagles secondary that is 23rd in pass defense DVOA. Geno missing would be a negative to the Seattle guys, but it’s not necessarily a death sentence. Seattle will trot out DK Metcalf, Tyler Locket, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba at wide receiver, with Jake Bobo playing a modest role. We’ve seen JSN come on lately, leading the team with 18 targets in his last two games against 14 for Lockett and 13 for Metcalf. Metcalf had his huge explosion game against Dallas, but overall I think he’s wildly overpriced at $9,600 when compared to Lockett at $6,600 and JSN at $5,600. If Jalen Hurts is in, we could see very low ownership on Metcalf as people will likely flock to AJ Brown and Devonta Smith at similar price points, so we could get an opportunity to pay up to be contrarian (as we did in the Dallas game!), but in a vacuum Metcalf is the worst on-paper play of the Seattle receiving corps. 

At tight end, Seattle uses all of Noah Fant, Colby Parkinson, and Will Dissly in a rotation, which renders them all very fragile plays. Fant can get up into the ~60% snap range but despite that is averaging only about 2.5 targets per game, so these guys along with Bobo are all MME punt options. I’d take Fant as my preferred punt because he’s on the field the most, but they’re all pretty fragile options.

Philadelphia