College Football Best Bets of the Week: Week 9
Walter Waddell
Absolutely beleaguered by injuries so far this NFL season, the Kansas City Chiefs have been rumored to be in the market for a receiver most of the way. Those rumors came to fruition Wednesday morning when the team traded for veteran DeAndre Hopkins of the Kansas City Chiefs, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter.
With Hollywood Brown out for the year from a preseason injury and Rashee Rice done for the year as well, the Chiefs were diving into the JuJu Smith-Schuster/Mecole Hardman ranks of receiver to run alongside rookie speedster Xavier Worthy, and Smith-Schuster is now dealing with an injury as well. Enter Hopkins, owner of seven career 1,000-yard seasons, including one in 2023.
It’s been a slow start to 2024 for the 32-year-old Hopkins, though, after a knee injury in training camp. His workload has slowly increased, though, from 23.0 snaps a game in Weeks 1-4 to 42.5 in Weeks 6-7 after the Titans bye. Through six games, Hopkins has 15 catches for 173 yards and 1 touchdown.
Asking Hopkins to become his prime version — he averaged 1,380.5 yards and 9.3 touchdowns from 2017 to 2020 with the Texans and Cardinals — is almost certainly too big an ask at this point in his career, but at 6-0, the Chiefs don’t need a receiver to come in and take over games, they just need someone who can be reliable and trustworthy as they already look ahead to what is planned to be a deep postseason run.
The upshot of that is that, while Hopkins immediately becomes comfortably the best healthy receiver in Kansas City, fantasy managers shouldn’t expect him to climb back anywhere near the WR1 ranks. The team already has a 2.5-game lead in the AFC West and appears all but a lock to make the playoffs, so like with Travis Kelce, don’t be shocked if the Chiefs don’t lean on Hopkins on a weekly basis. This is a team gunning for its third straight Super Bowl, and Hopkins will be far more important to that venture in January and February than he will in October and November.
For fantasy, Hopkins is a weekly WR3 with upside, but not much more than that. His presence renders Smith-Schuster (when healthy) irrelevant again, and Worthy was already showing to just be a big-play threat without much weekly consistency, at least at this early portion of his career. Hopkins should help Patrick Mahomes a bit, though Mahomes has yet to top 17.4 fantasy points in a game of have a weekly finish better than QB14, so unless Hopkins comes in and torches the field (unlikely, to say the least), it’s still not going to vault Mahomes back into fantasy starter territory.
Back in Tennessee, the wide receiver cupboard is increasingly bare. Treylon Burks landed on IR last week, and with Hopkins’ departure, the team only has four healthy receivers on the depth chart — Calvin Ridley, Tyler Boyd, Nick Westbrook-Ikhine and Jha’Quan Jackson, the last of whom has only worked as a kick/punt returner so far this season. Westbrook-Ikhine should see more work now, but then he only has 6 targets on the season so he’d have to. Ultimately, Ridley, RB Tony Pollard and TE Chigoziem Okonkwo are likely the biggest beneficiaries of Hopkins’ departure, but given the struggles of the Tennessee offense (only the Giants, Patriots and Dolphins have scored fewer points), this doesn’t really move the needle that much. Going forward, Pollard is likely the only Titan worth starting in fantasy on a weekly basis, with Ridley hanging out on the fringes of lineup consideration.
