Leonard Fournette A Must-Start This Week?
Leonard Fournette A Must-Start This Week?
Picking who to start at some positions in your daily fantasy roster is much easier with only four teams playing this week. But in reality, it is a lot tougher. You no longer have your choice of good options to pick from. In some cases, you have to look at the options and decide who’s least likely to fail.
While it may be hard to pick a second running back, choosing the first should be easy—Jacksonville Jaguars running back Leonard Fournette.
Why Fournette?
He is the only remaining running back that ran for over 1000 yards in the regular season and had five 100+ yard games. He isn’t a huge receiving threat, but he did have 36 receptions for 302 yards and a touchdown. That kind of production is encouraging to daily fantasy owners.
But they have to especially like what they saw out of him last week against a tough Steelers defense. By the time the game finally ended, he had carried the ball 25 times for 109 yards and three touchdowns!
But isn’t New England’s defense tough?
They were ranked 20th against the run during the regular season. However, that stat is a little skewed since the Patriots had a very rough start on defense. But in the end, they only allowed four 100+ yard individual rushing games during the regular season.
Last week, they held Titans running back Derrick Henry to 28 yards on 12 carries.
Yes, they are tough. But from a team perspective, the Patriots have allowed over 118 yards/game on the ground. So, the question then becomes whether the Jags will give Fournette enough carries to be fantasy relevant.
Fournette only accounted for 51 percent of Jacksonville’s carries during the regular season. Does that mean the Jags take more of a committee approach, too? Not exactly. But during the Jaguars two playoff games, he had 66.7 percent of the team’s carries.
It would be nice if that number were a little higher, but it isn’t bad.
What about the other running backs still playing?
New England’s best option is Dion Lewis, but James White has been getting a lot of red zone work in recent weeks. The Patriots will want to make use of Rex Burkhead as well (if he s healthy enough to play).
As a team, the Eagles have one of the better run games in the league. But they only had someone crack the 100+ yard mark once this season.
Minnesota has a solid running game as a team as well. But while they favor Latavius Murray, Jerick McKinnon gets a fair amount of work as well.
So….
Fournette is the only one that can be counted on to get the majority of his team’s work at running back. It helps that he’s good enough to do some damage with whatever carries he gets.
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