Daniel Kelley's Articles

The Cleveland Browns were dealt a blow Wednesday when it was announced that QB Deshaun Watson will miss the rest of the season with surgery to repair a broken bone in his throwing shoulder.   The 28-year-old Watson was in his first full season as the Browns’ starting quarterback. He missed three games and played […]

Struggling to find production behind No. 1 WR Amon-Ra St. Brown, the Detroit Lions addressed the position ahead of Tuesday’s NFL trade deadline, trading for now-former Browns WR Donovan Peoples-Jones. The move gives the Lions the unofficial league lead in receivers with hyphenated names. Peoples-Jones had a breakout 2022, with career bests in targets (96), […]

Coming off the loss of starting quarterback Kirk Cousins to a torn Achilles Sunday, the Vikings made a last-minute pivot ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline, trading for former Cardinals QB Joshua Dobbs, per NFL.com’s Ian Rapoport.   The 28-year-old Dobbs was a fourth-round pick of the Pittsburgh Steelers back in 2017. He’s bounced around the […]

The last of the biggest names at running back hanging around in free agency appears to have landed a job, with reports coming Monday morning that veteran RB Leonard Fournette has agreed to a deal with the Buffalo Bills. The deal is pending a physical, per Tom Pelissero. The 28-year-old Fournette joins Buffalo after spending […]

Sequencing is everything in sports analysis. A player has 400 yards through Week 8 then 1,000 the rest of the way, he figured things out. Another has 1,000 through Week 8 then 400 after, the league figured him out. When things happen dictate a lot about how we talk about them.   So with that […]

The interminable Cam Akers saga has apparently ended in Los Angeles, with ESPN’s Adam Schefter reporting late Wednesday that the Rams had agreed to trade their fourth-year back to the Minnesota Vikings in exchange for a 2026 pick swap. The 24-year-old Akers had 29 yards and a touchdown in Week 1 before being a healthy […]

Wednesday, Aug. 30 Howard pulls the sixth pick in his fantasy football home-league draft for 2023. PPR, 12 teams, pretty standard. He’s done his research. He’s ready.   First Round Yeah, he got hurt in the preseason, but reports are he’s improving and will be ready to go. So Howard takes Cooper Kupp. Have you […]

Our not-so-long national nightmare has been resolved, as the San Francisco 49ers reportedly agreed to trade 2021 third overall draft pick QB Trey Lance to the Dallas Cowboys for a fourth-round pick, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter.   Lance played eight games (four starts) over two seasons with the 49ers, passing for 797 yards and 5 […]

Finding fantasy football sleepers is hard. Maybe you’ve heard that there’s no longer any such thing as a sleeper in fantasy football. In a sense that’s true — someone like Tony Pollard finishing as the RB8 would have been a sensation in, say, 1998, but 25 years later, he was just a guy the entire […]

So much fantasy football analysis focuses on the ceiling. “Can Justin Jefferson go for 2,000 receiving yards,” “Can Lamar Jackson repeat his MVP-level season,” that sort of thing. And ceiling is of course crucial to a fantasy team reaching its full potential. Sometimes we have to be wary of floors, though.   You don’t necessarily […]

Drafting players, setting lineups, working the waiver wire … it’s all hard. But the hardest part of the fantasy football season might be the first part: Your team name.   You want to be interesting. You don’t want to be too esoteric. You don’t want to have the default (my brother-in-law’s team name has been […]

Every fantasy football draft season, some storylines coalesce and some narratives take hold. There’s a reason for that — fantasy analysts, fans and players alike come to an agreement on a storyline because it makes sense, because the data point to a conclusion.  But nothing is guaranteed.    Just because everything is pointing toward a […]

A year ago at this time, if you knew that Jamaal Williams would end the season with 17 rushing touchdowns, or even 28 inside-the-5 carries (8 more than any other player, 12 more than any other running back), you would have known a lot about the season. Yes, you’d have known Williams would be a […]

Only a few hours after Ezekiel Elliott found a new job, former Minnesota Vikings RB Dalvin Cook did so as well, reportedly signing a one-year deal with the New York Jets, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter.   Cook, who turned 28 Thursday, spent his first six career seasons with the Vikings before the team cut him […]

Another running back free agency domino finally fell Monday with the news that longtime Dallas Cowboys RB Ezekiel Elliott agreed to terms on a one-year deal with the New England Patriots.   The 28-year-old Elliott heads to New England after spending his first seven years with the Cowboys, during which he had four 1,000-yard seasons […]

Imagine three different fantasy football things all called “bold predictions.” They’re previewing the 2023 NFL season and promise bold predictions, but what does that mean?   The first says “Lamar Jackson finishes as the QB1.” Sure, that’s kind of bold, it counts. If Jackson finishes as the QB1, that person gets the credit, but if […]

In the last few years, we’ve had some really old football players end really long tenures with teams. Tom Brady, of course. Aaron Rodgers. Derek Carr. But of the five longest-tenured players a year ago, only one (more on him later) is still there now. On one hand, it’s all very “Why the Oldest Person […]

(As we head toward training camp and the start of preseason, our own Daniel Kelley is asking — and attempting to answer — the most pressing questions around fantasy football for 2023. This is 100 Questions.)   NFC West It’s funny that, even as much of the last decade was dominated by the Patriots and Chiefs, […]

(As we head toward training camp and the start of preseason, our own Daniel Kelley is asking — and attempting to answer — the most pressing questions around fantasy football for 2023. This is 100 Questions.)   AFC West You could pretty easily argue that the Chiefs are the most dominant team in American pro sports […]

(As we head toward training camp and the start of preseason, our own Daniel Kelley is asking — and attempting to answer — the most pressing questions around fantasy football for 2023. This is 100 Questions.)   NFC East The last time there was the same winner of the NFC East was almost 20 years ago, […]

(As we head toward training camp and the start of preseason, our own Daniel Kelley is asking — and attempting to answer — the most pressing questions around fantasy football for 2023. This is 100 Questions.)   AFC East Wild Card teams aren’t supposed to win playoff games. They’re underdogs and given road games for a […]

(As we head toward training camp and the start of preseason, our own Daniel Kelley is asking — and attempting to answer — the most pressing questions around fantasy football for 2023. This is 100 Questions.)   NFC South The 2022 Buccaneers marked the fourth time a division has been won by a team with a […]

(As we head toward training camp and the start of preseason, our own Daniel Kelley is asking — and attempting to answer — the most pressing questions around fantasy football for 2023. This is 100 Questions.)   AFC South It’s easy to forget now, after the Jaguars closed the 2022 season on a five-game winning streak […]

(As we head toward training camp and the start of preseason, our own Daniel Kelley is asking — and attempting to answer — the most pressing questions around fantasy football for 2023. This is 100 Questions.)   NFC North I mentioned this in the Browns section above, but only two teams haven’t won the division since […]

(As we head toward training camp and the start of preseason, our own Daniel Kelley is asking — and attempting to answer — the most pressing questions around fantasy football for 2023. This is 100 Questions.)   AFC North Per DraftKings Sportsbook’s win total over/unders for 2023, the AFC North has (a) the highest team total […]

Remember Ask Jeeves? It was my favorite search engine, because I enjoyed performing my searches by typing an actual question. (I know nothing and assume it was a sad little rudimentary AI that just keyed in on certain words, but whatever.) Anyway, I like to know the question before I get the answer. That’s true […]

Last week, we looked at the worst draft picks of the last decade. Peyton Manning, Jordy Nelson, freaking Eddie Lacy. Guys who went early in your fantasy football drafts and not only played poorly, but played a lot, so you couldn’t even get the benefit of benching them. In short, they were the guys who, […]

Welcome to Sleepers, Busts and Bold Predictions for the 2023 fantasy football season. All summer, our analysts, two at a time, will preview all 32 NFL teams for the upcoming season. We’ll pick a pair of sleepers, a pair of busts and a pair of bold predictions. Sometimes they’ll be the same pick! Sometimes they […]

Last week, I wrote about some of the worst fantasy draft picks over the last decade. And at running back at least, the common bond was the fantasy football community overdrafting running backs who had only had a single breakout year and expecting that to continue.  I have not (yet?) done the same exercise for […]

Welcome to Sleepers, Busts and Bold Predictions for the 2023 fantasy football season. All summer, our analysts, two at a time, will preview all 32 NFL teams for the upcoming season. We’ll pick a pair of sleepers, a pair of busts and a pair of bold predictions. Sometimes they’ll be the same pick! Sometimes they […]

The saying goes that you can’t win your fantasy football league in the first round, but you can lose it. There are some (me included) who would argue the first half of that, but you aren’t gonna find many people arguing against the latter. If your first-round — or any super-early pick — craters, your […]

Welcome to Sleepers, Busts and Bold Predictions for the 2023 fantasy football season. All summer, our analysts, two at a time, will preview all 32 NFL teams for the upcoming season. We’ll pick a pair of sleepers, a pair of busts and a pair of bold predictions. Sometimes they’ll be the same pick! Sometimes they […]