Packers (

26.5) at
Cowboys (

20)

XANDAMERE’S SHOWDOWN SLANT

Sunday Night Football has the Packers visiting the Cowboys for a 46.5 total game with Green Bay favored by a whopping 6.5 points on the road. Wowsers. We have the Cowboys, who put up 40 on the Giants but have otherwise looked mediocre on offense, versus the Packers, who manhandled both Detroit and Washington before bafflingly losing to the Browns. The Packers defense has allowed just 44 points through three games, while the Cowboys gave up almost that many just to the Giants. It’s an interesting game that can go a lot of different ways. Let’s dig in.

DALLAS

On the Dallas side, Javonte Williams has seen declining snap shares for three weeks straight, while Miles Sanders is seeing his role grow. Javonte is still the lead back, but looking less bell cow-ish than he did in the first couple of weeks. The good news for Javonte is that his passing game role has been robust, with 15 targets in the first three games, and he’s also played very well so far. I’d set his range of outcomes at something like 14-21 touches, depending on how the game is going, with clearly more upside if Dallas keeps the game competitive. At $9,000, that makes him a little on the overpriced side – he’s not a bad play, but there’s a lot of fragility at this price. Sanders got a bit of extra run due to the blowout last week, with 4 of his 12 touches coming on the final drive when Dallas pulled their starters, so he really seems like more of a threat as a spoiler to Javonte than a player with an increasing role that makes him look like a good play. 

Showdown Ownership Projections!

Ownership updates automatically

In the passing game, without CeeDee Lamb, the Cowboys offense runs a greater risk of systemic failure, just as we saw last week when they struggled to score against the Bears mediocre D. Now they get a match made in hell against the Packers defensive unit. With a full week to prepare, maybe they won’t look quite so lost. We can expect to see George Pickens and Jalen Tolbert as full-time wide receivers with KaVontae Turpin and Ryan Flourney in ancillary roles. Pickens is fully priced at $9,800 and a tough click on a really difficult matchup, but he has one of the highest ceilings of any skill position player (up there with Javonte and Josh Jacobs). Tolbert and Turpin, on the other hand, are both cheap for their most likely workloads, especially Tolbert, who at $3,800 is just not priced like a full-time WR2, even in a tough matchup. We can also expect Tolbert to be quite popular, given his price – he’s going to project as a great value option. It’s also worth noting that while Turpin played the lion’s share of the snaps left behind by Lamb’s injury last week, how a team approaches things on a full week of planning is often different, and Turpin has historically been a lightly-used gadget guy. It’s possible the Cowboys are fine letting him have more run, but it’s also possible that with more time to prepare, they return Turpin to his gadget role and give Flournoy more WR3 run. I don’t know which one happens here, but I’d aim to be overweight the field on Flournoy here, and I’d try to limit the frequency with which Turpin and Flournoy appear on the same rosters (though I would not outright eliminate them being paired together because their prices are very cheap and it’s feasible that both hit).

At tight end, Jake Ferguson is a good pass catcher, but I was stunned to see him priced all the way up to $8,400. He caught 13 receptions last week (for only 82 yards, lol) and 9 the week before in a massive shootout but it’s just hard to see that continuing. For one thing, his catch rate is well above his historical norms, and for another, predicting double digit targets for a player who has never in his career commanded that kind of target share is…aggressive. I’ll have him in my player pool, but he’s not someone I’m actively looking to get on a bunch of rosters. TE2 Luke Schoonmaker and TE3 Brevyn Spann-Ford are “cross your fingers and hope for a touchdown” options.

GREEN BAY