[NFL] Week 8 TNF Showdown: Vikings vs. Rams
A look at the week eight Thursday Night Showdown featuring the Vikings and Rams
Tracker Update
I forgot to put my two showdown lineups in last Monday Night, so the tracker hasn’t changed.
Game Analysis
We have a pretty nice Thursday Night game with the Rams being a three-point favorite over the Rams in a game with a 48-point total. There are a ton of very good fantasy players here. Cooper Kupp returns, and there are some rumblings about Puka Nacua possibly being active. We are going to proceed as if Nacua is out, because it seems pretty unlikely that he’s going to play.
Rams
Matthew Stafford ($9,000) is one of the cheaper quarterbacks you’ll find and gets a nice boost here with his favorite target returning. He has shown a horrifying floor this year, scoring fewer than seven in half of his games.
He’s thrown just three touchdowns all year and has four interceptions. The projection is around 16 points. That has to do with two things:
This is a good game environment
QB scoring is very rarely under 10 points
Any NFL QB should be expected to score more than ten points in a game, and it’s not as though Stafford is a truly poor quarterback at this point. There’s been a lot of bad luck in Stafford’s season, including a 1.51% TD%, which is second-lowest in the league (to Jacoby Brissett). I think we can take advantage of this low QB price and plug him in.
Kyren Williams ($11,200) is a tough fade with the role he’s once again found himself in. Some of the numbers on Kyren:
21.7 touches per game (second-most to Mixon and the most among running backs who have 5+ games played)
8% target share
9 total touchdowns, 8 rushing (leads the league)
31 red zone carries (tied for most in the league)
He has scored a minimum of 14 points, a maximum of 32, and an average of 18. That’s a very tough player to pass on when we’re building a lineup that is just trying to min cash.
All signs point toward Cooper Kupp ($11,000) being fully back. He could have played last week, but the Rams opted to give him one more week to get to full strength for this game. He played just one full game this year (week one) and went 14-110-1 on 21 targets in that game. He had quickly racked up six targets on 19 routes in week two before the injury.
We have three studs in this game (Jefferson, Kupp, Williams). I don’t think we can squeeze all three in. Kupp might be the odd man out. He’s priced as if he’s 100% ready to go, and while he doesn’t have an injury designation - it’s not a guarantee that he’ll be out there in his full role quite yet.
From weeks 3-7, with Kupp and Nacua out, Tutu Atwell ($4,200) led the team with 30 targets and a 20-284-0 line. The price does not reflect that here.
Jordan Whittington was the other guy who earned a good number of targets, but now he’s out - so Demarcus Robinson ($3,000) should play a good bit here. Atwell and Robinson are both very strong salary savers. Colby Parkinson ($4,400) has also been a factor in the passing game, but the ceiling is very low with his lack of YAC, and the price is about right with Kupp back.
The best price-considered Rams plays are probably:
Tutu Atwell $4,200
Kyren Williams $11,200
Cooper Kupp $11,000
Demarcus Robinson $3,000
Vikings
First, here is a reminder about how bad this Rams defense is.
They’ve allowed the eighth-highest fantasy point scoring per snap and the eighth-most yards per play.
Sam Darnold ($9,400) is also affordable for a QB, and clearly the preferred play over Stafford. He's averaged 228 yards and two touchdowns per game. He has one very poor scoring game back in week five against the Jets:
He’s very likely going to make the optimal lineup.
Aaron Jones ($9,600) is also very strong. He’s scored the 12th-most fantasy points per game at the running back position, and his workload has been trending upward. He played a season-high 40 snaps last week and went 14-93-1 on the ground. He’s averaged a great 5.2 yards per carry and has 20 catches in his six games for 190 yards and an additional score. With the soft matchup here, Jones is hard to ignore.
The big man on the Vikings is Justin Jefferson ($11,800), but you have to pay the big price. He leads the team with a 33% target share and has averaged 19.9 DraftKings points per game (8.5 targets, 5.5 catches, 89 yards, and 0.8 TD on average). We haven’t even seen the explosive ceiling game that Jefferson is capable of, and this is a pretty decent spot for us to get that in.
TJ Hockenson ($5,200) could possibly make his season debut tonight. He was the Vikings #2 guy in the passing game last year, so he’s an impact player. We cannot play him right away, but he does take away from the projection for pretty much everybody else in the passing game who is not named Jefferson. The values are all on the Rams’ side.
Let’s hit the paywall, and then we’ll look at the projections and some lineups.