Thanksgiving Fantasy Turkeys 2024

Did you know? 35% of Americans find turkey to be their least favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner. That’s more than any other individual element of the meal – more than stuffing, more than sweet potatoes, more than that weird Jello salad your Aunt Marsha insists on bringing year after year like some sort of gelatin-based crime against humanity. No, it’s the main dish that people want to punt more than any other.

It’s perfectly OK to dislike turkey for legitimate reasons, but it’s my pet theory that the major problem here is that many people have no idea to cook a turkey. For a significant chunk of Thanksgiving meal preparers, Thanksgiving is the one day a year where they even attempt to cook something that big for that long. As a result, they’re not very good at it, and the result is a plague of dried-out, tasteless birds, good only as a serving platter for gravy and cranberry sauce. Anything you only do once a year brings with it the risk of being rusty and out of practice, and leaving you in a state of regret afterwards.

Speaking of which, fantasy football!

One of the most frustrating experiences in season-long fantasy leagues is watching an over-hyped lineup fail to perform, tanking your season before it really gets started. These fantasy football turkeys don’t even go down well with stuffing. You’re just stuck watching them clutter up your bench until you can bring yourself to finally dump them. And with the fantasy football season entering the last stretch of the regular season, our rosters are cluttered with the detritus of first-round busts, rookie flops, and sleepers who apparently have taking a tryptophan nap all year long. Well, while we’re waiting for our turkeys to burn, we might as well burn a few of the players who have ruined our fantasy seasons so far.

We’re going to create a starting lineup filled with the most disappointing players at each position – one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, one flex, and one tight end. We’re not going to bother picking a kicker or defense, because if you drafted one of those highly enough to be disappointed by their performance, you’re actually the turkey, in truth. These aren’t necessarily the worst players at their positions, but just the ones that have caused you the most headaches – we’re looking at players drafted highly enough to be at least potential every week starters who have very much not been that this season.

We’re also solely looking at fantasy production today. There are plenty of players who have been bad at actual football but passible in fantasy – how’s it going, Kyren Williams? That’s for a different list; we’ll deal with the Wood Choppers of the world towards the end of the season. We’re also including a minimum six games played requirement, because we want to focus on players who were bad on the field, not players who have been too hurt to line up. Yes, Christian McCaffrey’s aching Achilles has killed more fantasy seasons than anything else, but we’re not trying to come up with an all-IR squad. Playing through injuries poorly? We’ll accept that. But not if you’ve missed half the season.