Last week, “you like that” gave way to “woo-eee” (your guess is as good as mine), and Kirk Cousins’ fantasy football owners this week will be saying one of those two things after his performance this weekend against Green Bay. Throughout most of the season, Cousins has been a low-level QB1, high-level QB2. He never exceeded 20 fantasy points and averaged closer to 15 for the first six weeks of the season.
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However, in the last few games, Cousins has taken advantage of matchups against the Bengals, Lions and Vikings to turn in two 20+ point performances and an 18-point effort last weekend. That snagged him two top-six performances in that span. The lone “bad” performance was against Minnesota, who have allowed the fourth-fewest fantasy points per game to quarterbacks this season. In fact, Cousins’ 18.38-point game was the second-highest point total the Vikings have yielded this season (by a whopping 0.04 fantasy points by Aaron Rodgers in week two). While Cousins can be seen as a matchup play, putting up an admirable effort against a tough Vikings pass defense shows that he is worthy of use as he rides the hot hand. The hot hand, in no coincidence, coincides with the rises of Jamison Crowder and Vernon Davis. There’s a definite reason for his rise to fantasy football usefulness, which makes this being a continued trend likely.
This week Cousins takes on a Green Bay defense that is a middling opponent for quarterbacks on its surface (literally in the middle, sixteenth in the league). However, the rank comes with a sweet, sweet 1.96 fantasy points from Brian Hoyer and his 49 passing yards. If you take that game out, their average raises to 19.99 fantasy points per game. For the sake of argument, we’ll call that 20. This points them sixth in the league in fantasy points against, between the Bengals and the Panthers. Looking just at the overall rank does not tell the true story for the opponents of the Packers.
Cousins is a great fantasy play this week, especially since he’s out there in 25% of fantasy leagues. This makes him a decent stream option in shallow leagues this week. However, if you have Cousins in a platoon with, say, Eli Manning, you want to go Cousins this week. In a week with a plethora of good quarterback options, Cousins will have trouble cracking the top eight, but if you are using him as part of a streaming platoon, it’s time to fire up your Kirk Cousins shares.