JMToWin is a high-stakes tournament champion (Thunderdome, Luxury Box, Game Changer, Wildcat) who is focusing this year on single-entry/three-entry max.
WEEK 3!
I ended up pausing my watching of the Eagles // Chiefs game last night to see who KC was playing in Week 3 (I did this when thinking, personally, that Kelce actually looks noticeably better this year than he did last year, and that once they get a soft matchup, he’s going to have a good shot at smashing; unfortunately for me, the Chiefs are not on the Main Slate — but if you’re playing Sunday night, I personally think Kelce has smash potential; also, the Chiefs still look like a really good football team, and the narrative surrounding them after close losses to really good teams could have people feeling sour on them, in a spot where they should be able to do well on both sides of the ball), and after opening up the slate to see who Kansas City was playing, I ended up just going through the entire Main Slate and recording a 90-minute, impromptu voice note covering my early, game-by-game thoughts on the slate. I then ran the voice note through an AI transcription tool I use for my voice notes, and I’ll be cleaning those up and posting them over the next couple hours.
The first game is ready to go, below.
Now, onto the second.
I don’t think that the Steelers offense is quite clicking or fully figured out yet, but I think they have…They’re somewhat evenly matched with the Patriots, and I think they’ll be able to move the ball and score points. And I think the Steelers defense looked good. It was a couple drives and a handful of isolated plays that allowed the Seahawks to appear to do well in that game. And without the kickoff fumble recovery touchdown, that’s a totally different game too. It was 14-14 heading into the 4th quarter. It wasn’t like the Seahawks were moving up and down the field. The defense looked better. I think it’s a tough spot for Drake Maye.
It helps that the game is at home and Josh McDaniels will have a good plan for this matchup, but they’re probably going to need to turn this into a lower scoring game.
A tough spot for Browning against the Vikings defense, and then you would expect the Vikings to be run leaning. So it’s actually a great spot for Jordan Mason in that regard, at least from a volume and role perspective. Justin Jefferson is still capable of getting 10 or 11 or 12 targets from Wentz. He can still put up a big game, but little mini correlations of Jefferson and Chase is really the only thing that stands out to me as anything worth doing, on like 5% of builds, just in the context of how I would expect this game to play out. Maybe Mason climbs up my player pool. Otherwise, the price tags don’t really match the situations of these pass catchers, and the Vikings’ defense is too good for me to be excited about the likelihood of Chase Brown accessing ceiling.
So there may be some strategy components that lead me down different paths, but that’s my starting point for how I’m seeing this one.
I think it could actually end up being high scoring. (I’ll get back to that in a moment.) The Titans have a good defense, and the Titans are conservative on offense, while they’re going against a Colts defense that…Anarumo is going to have tricks up his sleeve to confuse a young quarterback. So I’m unsurprised to see a total of only 43.5, and it should be expected that this is not a high scoring game. The Colts defense should be one of the more attractive units.
But…I’m obviously a believer in Shane Steichen, and I’ve been saying since August that I thought Daniel Jones would be the starter and would do really well in this offense, and you add that to what we’ve seen so far against a poor Dolphins defense but then an excellent Broncos defense as well, and you just get the sense that there are timelines on which this game or this offense would do well in this spot. And if they can lead this game forward, like…the Cardinals got out to a big lead against the Panthers and then they sort of went into “don’t let them hit big plays, and wait for them to make a mistake” mode. And Bryce Young didn’t make mistakes because it was just a little bit too easy and he was able to march the field and score multiple times; and there’s opportunity for things to play out like that, or just for Cam Ward to do well against whatever Lou Anarumo is throwing at him. Like, the Titans have run outs as well. So this is not likely to be the spot where we get the Cam Ward breakout, or the Elic Ayomanor “had to play him at his price tag” week. But it’s within the realm of possibilities, and I want to at least think about accounting for those possibilities, or think about how I’m going to go about accounting for those possibilities on my rosters this week.
Texans at Jags is almost unplayable. The Texans defense is so good; the Jags offense has not looked like it’s ready to produce yet; and the Texans have downgraded to an offensive scheme that is not doing a good job scheming guys open and that hasn’t fixed the offensive line issues from a pass blocking standpoint or from a standpoint of passing off stunts and communicating — the same problems they were having last year. And they’ve essentially downgraded the talent on the line, thinking it would be a better “unit.” And so far the talent is lower than last year, and the unit is as bad as last year, and the scheme isn’t getting guys open downfield the way that Bobby Slowik was. At least that’s how it all looks to me.
And this Jags front four is really good, and has been playing really well, and the Jags back end has been playing well. Now, the Jags got torched by Ja’Marr Chase, and…Nico is not Ja’Marr Chase, but he’s one of the first guys below that tier of the top two or three or four wide receivers — though his specific strengths and what makes him difficult to stop are in a lot of ways different from Chase’s specific strengths and what makes him difficult to stop. So I could see the Nico game here, and there is a bizarro world in which the Jags do well here against this great defense. They put it all together, it clicks. Everybody gets on the same page. Trevor Lawrence makes his step forward in this offense. It all happens here in this game. But it feels like what’s likelier, in a game that is important in the context of this division that the Colts are probably going to stay in control of (coming off a game against the Titans), is there’s going to be some big punches thrown, sure, but in terms of these coaches thinking about how they want to win this game, there’s also going to be an understanding of how good both of these defenses are, and that you don’t want to give the upper hand and be fighting uphill. In terms of how the coaches will be thinking about how they want to play this game, I don’t think they’ll see it as a back-and-forth, lots-of-points-being-scored game, more than likely.
Now, having said all that, this does seem like the type of game where you could get a random blow up.
It’s probably not from the Texans rushing attack.
I don’t see it being the Jags keeping the Texans off balance with their own rushing attack and having a big game that way — though that’s probably within the realm of possibilities. It’s just not the way I like to attack the running back position. So it’s harder for me to see it playing out that way. And I tend to weigh “matchup” at the running back position more heavily than I do certain pass catcher spots or situations. So it could happen, but it’s the sort of thing that I’m content in my DFS play with just not being there when it does.
But probably the likeliest way for us to get one of these is for one of these offensive coordinators to find something that’s working and to hammer that for stretches of the game.
So for the Texans side, because the Jags aren’t scary talented on the back end, it could literally be Nico Collins that the Texans figure out a way to get him going and the Jags just aren’t able to stop him. There’s also potential for Campanile to throw his defense at stopping Nico Collins, recognizing that the run game is not a huge concern and if you can take away Nico, it’s going to be much harder for them to beat you. So that would be where a secondary pass catcher from the Texans would have potential to pay off.
On the Jags side, probably the “defy logic” type of play where it’s just like, “Oh, they’ll throw Stingley at Brian Thomas Jr., but maybe this is where he breaks out with Trevor Lawrence when that hasn’t really happened through their entire time together yet.” And it’s going to happen eventually. Brian Thomas Jr. is so good, he’s going to have a huge game at some point. But this is an unlikely spot for it.
So then it becomes Travis Hunter, Dyami Brown, Brenton Strange.
I guess just the physicality of the Texans makes me feel like it’s less likely to be Brenton Strange running open over the middle when A) they’ll need some blocking help, and B) the middle’s a tough place to go against the Texans in terms of just the hits that you’re taking and what you’re having to fight through all game.
So Dyami Brown would seem to be the one that I can see the most clearly where it’s like, look, the Jags could easily still have 250 passing yards here, and if there’s a busted play, there could be more than that. So If Brian Thomas Jr. Is getting slowed down, then you have these yards going somewhere, and given the routes Travis Hunter has been running so far, it would seem unlikely to be him. So then you have Dyami Brown and Parker Washington, and this is the type of random situation where you could see one of these guys getting a random target spike to eight or nine targets and everybody’s chasing them next week when they come back down to where they will typically be. I don’t know yet how attractive any of this is, because we’re kind of going down less likely paths in terms of getting tournament winners. The ownership would have to line up for these stories to make sense to chase down, but it’s at least interesting to keep in mind at this point in the week.
