The NFL season has finally gone underway after a long and crazy offseason for many teams in the league. While some teams got drastically better through trades and free agency, some teams have also heavily declined. Many star players across the league decided to have a change of scenery this offseason and it has led to some pretty stacked rosters. Some of these players include Saquon Barkley leaving New York to go to the stacked Eagles roster, and Derrick Henry, leaving the poverty franchise of the Titans to go to the home of MVP Lamar Jackson, the Baltimore Ravens. However, some of these trades have caused worries about fantasy points and ball share for these players.
A player’s fantasy points in a week are heavily determined by how often they are getting the ball and how efficient they are when they get the ball. Based on this, the best players in fantasy football are those who do just that, players who get the ball the most on their team and are most efficient when they get the ball. This is why it can get worrisome for some fantasy managers when a player of this status gets traded to a new, better team. That trade to a better team means that they could be getting fewer chances to get the ball. An example of this is Keenan Allen on the Chicago Bears. Last season, Keenan was a top-10 fantasy Wide Receiver with the Chargers because he was the most dominant player on that team and got an insane amount of target share compared to the rest of the team. Now, after he got traded to the Bears, he is alongside other young stars such as rookie Rome Odunze, and DJ Moore. This proves that while still being an extremely good player, he only put up 6.9 points in week one, a very lackluster amount. The same can be said for Running Back Josh Jacobs. Jacobs was one of the best fantasy backs for the past 3 years because he was the bell-cow back for the Raiders his whole career. However, now that he has gotten traded to the Green Bay Packers, since there are so many mouths to feed in that offense, he only put up 12 points, which still is a respectable amount, but nowhere near his prime numbers.
Now shifting gears, players who put up insanely good numbers in week one were very nice to see and very surprising. The highest scorer of the week, Jayden Reed, came out of absolutely nowhere and was very surprising as he put up 33.1 points according to ESPN. This could mean many things for Reed and this Packers offense, while it is possible that it was a fluke of a game, I believe that Reed is the clear-cut Wide receiver for this high-powered Packers offense and could be getting the same if not more targets every game. Another extremely surprising boom for this week was Saquon Barkley. Many thought that after getting traded to the Eagles who have many star players on their roster Barkley would take a step down in his fantasy points, but he instead proved everyone wrong, putting up 32 points in a very close game against the Packers. While many think it is going to stay this way, he did have 3 touchdowns in this game, which account for a large portion of these points. It is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to keep that pace for the entire season with how many stars are on the Eagles roster. Lastly, the most surprising boom of the week, Cooper Kupp going back to his 2021 self put up 32 points in his Monday night game against the Lions. This in large part is due to Puka Nacua going down in this game, but even while they were both in the game, it seemed like Kupp was still the first Target for QB Matthew Stafford in this game as he got a lot of the target share even early. I would not be surprised if these numbers continue to stay strong for at least the next couple of weeks while Nacua is still out.
