Preseason Week 2 Take Away
Here is an NFL Preseason Week 2 recap and analysis from a fantasy football perspective. With the second week of the NFL Preseason in the books, here are some important items that you want to know before you have your big draft day!
Wide Receivers
For Starters, DO NOT draft Green Bay WR Jordy Nelson. During the official 2015 Fantasy Couch Fantasy Football Draft this past Sunday, Jordy suffered a season-ending ACL injury just minutes after he was drafted. Jordy Nelson has big shoes to fill, but you know what they say in the injury-ridden NFL, “next man up” or “next men up”. Randall Cobb gets a boost in fantasy value and is now considered the Packers’ WR1. Davante Adams gets the biggest boost moving him from a 9th round draft pick to a 4th round draft pick. Jeff Janis and Ty Montgomery are the top candidates to play the WR3 role.
Two other key wide outs that have made their way onto the injury list are Kelvin Benjamin and Mike Evans. We’ve known for awhile about Kelvin Benjamin’s being out for the season with an ACL injury. More recently, Mike Evans suffered a hamstring injury and will be out until Week 1 according to head coach Lovie Smith.
Nelson Agholor had himself quite an eventful day; he was target seven times and brought in four for 49 yards. Minus mental errors and also missing out on snagging a ball while falling out of bounds, the rookie is coming along nicely in Philadelphia. Lastly on the wide outs, there was T.Y. Hilton. although he is still a bottom-end WR1 he looked like a first round fantasy pick catching two passes for 52 yards. Hilton and Andre Johnson lead the team in targets, with three each that game.
Running Backs
Although there were a good amount of injuries on the second week of the Preseason, that doesn’t mean that there can’t be positive notes as well. For instance, someone who stood out the second week was Doug Martin, rushing for 59 yards on just 6 carries. But the most fascinating part was his first rush, which went for 15 yards, but he had to break through a plethora of tackles to get there. Another back that stood out to me was Carlos Hyde; he showed some great moves that really shocked me. He was supposed to be in a committee for the running back slot but if he continues to play the way that he did this past week, I would say he has that spot locked up and secure. DeMarco Murray made some noise of his own by finishing with 17 yards and a touchdown. Darren Sproles did come on the field on third downs, so don’t yell at the television when you see DeMarco jogging off the field on third downs.
Quarterbacks
The quarterback play was also on and off as well this week. Jameis Winston looked like he’s more than ready to be an NFL QB, and we saw improvement from last week. The bad news for this stud was that he had to leave the game early with an ankle injury. With that aside, he did end up running for yet another touchdown. Colin Kaepernick also got some playing time this week, although it wasn’t a big improvement from last week, he got to add another drive to his game. In his two drives combined he went just 2-of-5 for 13 yards and a 9-yard scramble to top it off. He targeted the same usual players as he did for the first Preseason game. Granted he didn’t get that many chances to throw, he made a big mistake by taking a 10 yard sack.
Andrew Luck looked ready for Week 1 of the regular season in his second preseason game against the Bears. While they did take a loss, Luck went 5-of-9 for 71 yards. As his passes were starting to be dropped, he decided to take matters into his own hands and go on for a rushing touchdown. Cam Newton had a fairly slow start for the beginning of the game. He looked like he really missed Kelvin Benjamin but he did manage to hit his stride when and hit his tight end, Greg Olsen over, and over, and over. However the man of the Preseason thus far has been… Matt Ryan. Matty Ice has quite an interesting statistic going; he has more starts than incompletions, last week completing 4-of-5 passes and this week 6-of-6. To add more to his overwhelming list, already he nearly had two touchdowns but one will have to do; the other was an interference call on Julio Jones (his only target of the game). However, if Matt Ryan continues his dominance, he could find his name on the short list of elite quarterbacks. Drew Brees went nearly flawless, going 8-of-10 for 159 yards and two touchdowns in only a quarter and a half of play; indicating that he should be worth of his Top 5 QB ADP in fantasy. The main reasons why Drew Brees had great success was because of Brandin Cooks, the second year wide out put up unreal numbers! He had 117 yards and a touchdown in just a half of action.
Overall there were a lot of great performances for Week 2 of the NFL Preseason and all this excited will resume on Friday starting off with the Patriots and the Panthers at 4:30 PM PT. Watching the preseason helps us predict what’s going to happen when the games really count, but take this all with a grain of salt, after all it is just Preseason.
Top banner photo credit: Kyle Engman
