Fantasy Football Week 9 lineup decisions: Starts, Sits, Sleepers and Busts to

Fantasy Football is all about the matchups. Even though you drafted your team with certain hopes and intentions, your weekly lineup decisions shouldn’t be determined by the order you picked your players in. You need to check who your players play and make sure you’ve got the right guys in — and the wrong guys out.

It’s too early to be absolutely sure on which matchups will be easy and which ones will be tough, but we can take some educated guesses based on healthy personnel, defensive schemes, track records and key details of offenses. The things we know can help us minimize the impact of the things we don’t know. This should lead to better decisions being made.

We’ll go through every game and highlight the players who aren’t obvious starts and sits (because you don’t need to be told to start Justin Jefferson). You should feel more comfortable starting or sitting players based on the information given, and feeling comfortable with your Fantasy lineup before the games start is the best feeling in the world.  

All lines from Caesars Sportsbook.

Dave’s Notebook:

• SMITH: Has five or more catches in five of his past six games but has notched 80 or fewer yards in four of those six with two touchdowns all season long.
• SMITH: His usage has been odd, earning an ADOT (average depth of target) under 10.0 in every game this year except one. In fact his season-long ADOT of 8.24 ranks 57th among qualified receivers. Making things weirder is his average route depth at 9.14, which isn’t super special but does rank top 20 among the 50 wideouts with at least 40 targets this season.
• EAGLES: It seems the team utilizes him as a short- and mid-range receiver, not as a deep threat. Only four of his nine explosive pass plays (16-plus yards) were considered deep (pass traveled 16-plus Air Yards), and only two of those four were gains for more than 22 yards.
• BLOWOUTS: Smith’s four biggest target games were 12, 11, 8 and 7 targets. Only one of those games was a close one (Week 5 at Arizona, he had 11 targets), the rest were blowouts. It’s also worth noting that the Cardinals began 2022 as one of the best defenses at stopping deep plays — Smith had a 10-87-0 stat line.
• SMITH: Averaged 17.3 PPR points in those other three blowout games but that includes an 8-169-1 stat line at Washington, a defense that grounded the Eagles run game and forced Hurts to throw.
• ODDS: The Eagles are 12.5-point favorites at Houston. The oddsmakers are expecting a blowout.
• TEXANS: Have seen the fewest pass attempts to wide receivers against them this season and as such have allowed the fewest receptions to WRs (10 per game!). However, wideouts are averaging a second-highest 14.74 yards per catch and fourth-highest 5.20 YAC/reception (yards after catch per reception, a stat that measures how many yards a receiver gets on average post-reception before getting tackled) against them with 12 completions of 16-plus Air Yards against them.

Dave’s Notebook:

• COOKS: At this point you should know what to expect — somewhere between 6 and 11 PPR points, just like he’s delivered in his past five games when he hasn’t scored. 
• COOKS: Improved his season-long catch rate to 60.4% but is still sporting the lowest receiving average over his past eight years. His ADOT (average depth of target) is also at a five-year low (9.2 yards). 
• BARELY A POSITIVE: Last week he notched his longest (44 yards) and third-longest (26 yards) receptions of the season. Both came in the final two minutes of the game. 
• EAGLES: Rank seventh in fewest Fantasy points to wide receivers. They’ve allowed 12-plus PPR points to just five wideouts in their past six games including Chase Claypool, who threw a touchdown, in Week 8.

Dave’s Notebook:

• INJURIES: We know for sure Mike Williams is out. We did not see Keenan Allen practice on Monday, and when he did play in Week 7 his snaps were…