Week 1 scouting notebook: Targeting Kenneth Gainwell, tipping the cap to Jordan Love and more

Publish date: 2024-06-08

The Athletic has live coverage fantasy football rankings, projections, advice and injury news ahead of Week 2

Week 1 is mostly in the books. Was it what we hoped? Was it mostly a toxic mix of boredom and disappointment? Yes, it was. But there are some lessons to be learned and some player projections/expectations to revisit. Here we go…

The big news is the season-ending injury to J.K. Dobbins (Achilles). If Kareem Hunt can be picked up immediately since he was inactive, do so. I’m just guessing he’ll be the guy as I think he’s better than Leonard Fournette. And why make a trade if you’re Baltimore?

Maybe Gus Edwards gets a chance. He has averaged over five yards per carry in his career but has been a role player and seems to be, at best, the short-end-of-the-committee back. If Hunt isn’t signed by the Ravens by the time waivers run, be aggressive with Edwards.

Remember all the Tweets about how Todd Monken was going to turn the Ravens into a passing offense? Hilarious. Good coaches go players-to-system not system-to-players.

GO DEEPER

Fantasy Football Waiver Wire Week 2: Streamers, Gus Edwards, Puka Nacua and more

If Kenneth Gainwell is somehow on waivers (he shouldn’t be because the noise most of the summer was a bigger-than-expected role), empty the vault. He’s the possible league winner of the first week of waivers. He’s the starter, period. Rashaad Penny didn’t even dress and D’Andre Swift had one carry. Gainwell is also the third-down receiver much of the time. If snaps are your thing, Gainwell had more than twice as many as Swift.

I’ve blasted Tua Tagovailoa, but he was fantastic, including a beautiful bomb to Tyreek Hill on a dead run that was the key play in the game, or at least one of them (the Dolphins, and the Chargers for that matter, made so many).

Hill is the best receiver in football. Justin Jefferson doesn’t cause defensive coordinators to lose sleep, or at least not nearly as much sleep as the fear of Hill does. The Chargers (I know, it is the Chargers) had no answers.

We all should have been drafting Joshua Kelley after that 75-yard preseason TD jaunt made it clear he was the handcuff/complement to Austin Ekeler. I thought he got short shrift last year, but this new staff wants to have a power-running component and Kelley has proactive usage. Kelley is not going to turn your team around, but he has the highest floor of anyone on waivers. He’s what we’ve imagined A.J. Dillon to be, a handcuff who you can start in a zeroRB structure.

I was never in on Cam Akers. I was way out on him. Should you all be out on him now? Well, he had 22 carries. The bad news is that they netted 29 yards. He looked bad. Kyren Williams looked much better, but not exactly good, either (though definitely worth a hefty FAAB). It’s a miracle Akers even came back from the Achilles injury. Expecting him to be a good player even with the shocking late-season production in 2022 was wishful thinking. But if you bet that way, you have to give yourself a chance to be right and hold tight.

Puka Nacua is the waiver wire choice for me over Tutu Atwell, who is fine as a consolation pickup. I mean, 15 targets for Nacua is just insane. This is a little like Anquan Boldin coming out of nowhere as a rookie a million years ago. We really have to tip our cap to Matthew Stafford. Just… wow!

Bijan Robinson played 65% of the snaps. He looked good. But Tyler Allgeier had 54% and seems to be the goal-line back. So the story is more about how playable Allgeier is.

Arthur Smith is the worst coach for high draft capital/highly skilled position players in the HISTORY OF FANTASY FOOTBALL! There should be Arthur Smith fantasy dart boards. I may make them. Yet people think he’s a good coach. It’s just laughable. Leveraging talent is the main job of a head coach.

One target for Drake London? Wut?

Miles Sanders looks like a primary back and received six targets on top of that. He’s a good value where he was drafted, but Bryce Young is going to have to play a lot better.

Adam Thielen is washed. He was washed last year, honestly.

The Bengals’ offense was unfathomable. No one could have predicted this. Maybe the chronically underachieving Cleveland defense is actually good, but there is no excuse. Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins combined to average 2.3 yards per target (0 yards on eight targets for Higgins).

Joe Mixon is actually an ordinary Joe.

So much for Nick Chubb having the backfield to himself. Jerome Ford was very involved with 15 carries. Why?

Deshaun Watson was again awful. Add this game to last season and it’s seven games with a combined line of 115-for-199 for 1256 yards with eight TDs and six picks. He’s not the same player. How many more games do we give him to do something? I need to see it in September.

Elijah Moore had a bigger role than I expected but it was about what the market expected.

Anthony Richardson started out hot and finished cold.

Michael Pittman looked like we expected last year. He had 97 yards on 11 targets. The market completely soured on Pittman the past couple of weeks.

For Jacksonville, the big news is that Calvin Ridley looked like the 2020 version (at least in the first half). Travis Etienne performed about as expected, including losing the goal-line work to Tank Bigsby (who had a TD). Bigsby’s fumble was on a fluke play that he thought was blown dead with everyone standing around — not a doghouse situation, IMO.

The Vikings played to form — lots of stats and little points by Kirk Cousins, a ham-and-egg effort by our founding father Alexander Mattison, horrible efficiency from the pedestrian T.J. Hockenson (under four yards per target) and wasted greatness from Justin Jefferson.

Minnesota just gave the game away. The Vikings defense played well. I can’t take anything positive out of anyone for the Bucs offense. I don’t think Rachaad White is a good player so I would add Sean Tucker in deep leagues as a $0 bid in the second waive of waivers.

Rashid Shaheed is the story for the Saints. He made the game-winning play, and had 89 yards and a TD on six targets. He did lose a fumble, but no one cares when a WR fumbles.

You like to see 13 targets for DeAndre Hopkins. I’m shocked that Nick Westbrook-Ikhine was clearly the No. 2 WR and not Treylon Burks. Ryan Tannehill missed as couple of wide-open TD opportunities (Chigoziem Okonkwo, Tyjae Spears).

I’m going to have to take the loss on Brock Purdy. He’s won all six starts and has thrown for at least two TDs in all of them. All of this sandwiching a career-threatening elbow injury. I’m going to forget the draft capital and just figure the weight of the sample overwhelms its still small size.

The less said about the Steelers offense the better. Let’s wait for another game and chalk this up to the Niners defense. I’d be surprised if Diontae Johnson (hamstring) was back inside a month.

I’m guessing Antonio Gibson was in fumble jail. The people like me who thought Gibson over Brian Robinson Jr. were wrong. Maybe things change, but Week 1 is not just another week. Teams work the entire camp for this game and what happens by design is the design. Gibson is not a major part of the plan here. Maybe he can be a minor one but changing this is going to take four weeks without an injury. Gibson is droppable.

Have to tip your cap to what Jordan Love did with a depleted WR corps. How much of this was the Bears defense, we can’t know. But Love was productive, especially in the second half.

You can say that A.J. Dillon is no longer playable. He’s MAYBE rosterable. (Aaron Jones may have a hamstring injury, pending tests on Monday.)

D.J. Moore isn’t turning around Justin Fields. I’m not sure if anyone can, but if someone can, it’s not Moore — let’s be honest, he’s not a true No. 1 WR. The one bright spot for Fields is that he was only sacked once. That’s a big deal. But it seems like the Bears coaches don’t want to risk downfield plays that take time and require accuracy. They had a horizontal attack. Fields was visibly frustrated and that’s not a good look. We have not yet seen Fields play from the pocket like a pro QB and it’s Year 3. That’s just a fact.

Sean Payton really turned around the Nathaniel Hackett offense that averaged only 316 yards per game in 2022 under his direction. On Sunday, against a Raiders defense everyone thinks stinks, Payton was able to produce… 260 yards. That included 4.6 yards per pass play by former diva Russell Wilson.

Javonte Williams had 17 touches for 57 yards and Samaje Perine went for 78 yards on 12 carries. Williams had four catches for five yards, somehow. I think they’re both zeroRBs, honestly. I have to put them in the same bucket. Plus, given his injury, Williams is about twice as likely to get hurt again as Perine, according to the objective medical data.

The Seahawks had three yards in the second half. Yes, there were injuries, but Geno Smith is about six yards per pass attempt his past six regular-season games. The guy has been a starter basically one year, so six games is a pretty big sample. He probably is what we thought he was — a backup. The Rams secondary was supposed to be easy pickings.

By the way, not a good week for the high-cost QBs. Now we’re down to only Josh Allen on Monday Night.

(Eric Canha-USA TODAY Sports)

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Week 1 scouting notebook: Targeting Kenneth Gainwell, tipping the cap to Jordan Love and more