This season in Fantasy Fallout I’m going to get away from a position-by-position rundown of the studs/duds and do more of a free-wheeling, stream-of-consciousness column that will go up every Monday morning (just in time for you to waste a few minutes at work while you sip your coffee).
Let’s start with arguably the biggest performance of the week. If your fantasy team ran into the one-man buzzsaw otherwise known as Arian Foster (238 total yards, 3 TD), I intimately feel your pain. After touting him all August, I failed to get Foster in any of my six leagues, probably because I was expecting to get him in the 4th or 5th round on draft day. As some sort of punishment, I faced him in two leagues this week. Ouch. In August, his ADP was sitting in the 8th round before Ben Tate‘s injury and skyrocketed into the 3rd, which I thought was a bit early, but his Week 1 performance totally justified that rise. As a direct result, the Texans didn’t need Andre Johnson (3-33) or Owen Daniels (1-9). Hopefully, owners stayed away from Daniels this week (I started Todd Heap — fingers crossed — over him in my auction league), and hopefully his knee reacts well to his first game action.
In that same game, Peyton Manning completed 40 of 57 passes for 443 yards and three TD, and probably won a few fantasy games himself. With that many attempts, Manning was able to target Reggie Wayne (7-99-1), Pierre Garcon (4-74), Austin Collie (10-131-1) and Dallas Clark (11-80-1) at least 10 times each. Anthony Gonzalez (1-12, three targets) was the odd man out. The Matthew Berry-led talk of Wayne’s demise seems a little premature, at least at this point. It’s tough to tell how the Colts’ targets are going to shake out when Manning throws this many time, so we’ll just kick that can down the road. One thing seems certain: Austin Collie is the Colts’ WR3, not Anthony Gonzalez.
