So far this fantasy football season, Derek Carr has lived up to the role many (including myself) envisioned for him this draft season: QB 10-15 overall who is mostly a matchup play in a platoon. There is no more evidence of that than his good/bad splits. In his best four good games this season, he is averaging 23.27 fantasy points per game, with his lowest output being 21.98 fantasy points. In his other three games, he has averaged 11.63 fantasy points per game, with the highest being last week’s 12.4. As you can see, it’s feast or famine for Carr and his owners, with no just decent games to be found in the bunch. Luckily for his owners, this week is set up to be a good matchup for Carr.[embedit snippet=”jeff-ads”]
The Raiders are traveling cross-country to the east coast for their fifth such game this season, which has been a mixed bag for Carr, with New Orleans and Baltimore being good fantasy games and Jacksonville and Tennessee being bad fantasy games. While this is normally listed bug-a-boo among some fantasy analysts (and it does apply to some players), it seems to be inconsequential for Carr. On the season, Tampa Bay has yielded the seventeenth-most fantasy points to quarterbacks per game, but when you delve deeper into the numbers, you see that the numbers lie.
The Buccaneers have been able to play an amazingly mediocre row of quarterbacks, taking on Case Keenum, Trevor Siemian/Paxton Lynch, Derek Anderson and Colin Kaepernick. The 5:4 TD: INT ratio those guys have flopped out has pretty much undone the bad number that came from Matt Ryan and Carson Palmer torching them in weeks one and two.
Derek Carr and the Raiders fit the Ryan/Carr, Falcons/Cardinals robust passing attack (though the Cardinals have gotten derailed). There’s simply too much in the Oakland passing attack for the Buccaneers to account for. There’s also the issue that the Raiders defense has been scuffling hard. The Buccaneers are going to try to run up the score as much as possible, on top of the fact that even against the worst defenses, Winston is good for at least one pick (literally, in the case of San Francisco last week).
Derek Carr is in the perfect situation to succeed this week and is a player you should err on getting into your lineups. I wouldn’t play him against his opponent this week, but with the Bye Apocalypse (part one) on our hands, he’s well worth the start this week as a bye week fill-in.