This early in the fantasy football season, you probably should not be streaming, but if your plan was to do that all along, the quarterback position is the one where you’re going to be going early on. Here are three streaming candidates for this week. All streaming candidates in the All Stream Team articles are owned in fewer than 40% of Yahoo! leagues, with one player being owned in fewer than 10% (for you deep divers).
Joe Flacco @ Cleveland (27% owned)
Joe Flacco is never considered one of the elite at the position, but he is fully capable of elite production when the matchup dictates. The problem is that he also is prone to having weeks outside the top fifteen QBs on the week. Luckily for streamers, this will be a week that Flacco will boom, rather than bust. Flacco last week showed the myriad of weapons at his disposal.
While he only passed for 258 yards, he targeted nine players multiple times (and ten overall). He has an offensive player to pass to for every occasion, with pass catchers in the TE, WR and RB corps. The Browns will have a terrible time trying to account for all those weapons, especially since they yielded 29 points to the Eagles last week who were being powered by a QB in his first ever NFL start.
Flacco will go off given the poor 2016 iteration of the Browns defense and his recent history of the Factory of Sadness: since 2013, he has averaged 21.32 fantasy points per game.
Carson Wentz @ Chicago (14% owned)
Wentz debuted with a bang, going for 278 yards and two touchdowns against the hapless Browns defense (see Flacco, Joe above). Now he takes on the team who gave Brock Osweiler two scores and 231 yards in his first (non-emergency injury replacement) start.
Now the rubber hits the road where an average of just about 250 yards and two scores seems to be what Wentz will be going for in his follow up to his debut. The Chicago defense is just about as bad as the Browns defense, so it would be reasonable to expect smooth sailing from the #2 overall pick.
At the same time, you always have to have the fear of The Rookie Bomb Game in the back of your head as you slot in Wentz. Quell your fears and make him a DFS play, instead, but he has good odds of producing a solid game for your fantasy squad.
Deep Dive
Josh McCown versus Baltimore (3% owned)
The sub-10% owned quarterbacks are full-on desperation territory, and full-on desperation is what Cleveland does best. Still reeling from the RGIII injury, the Browns turn towards the man that led their team for half the season last year. In those eight games, McCown averaged 263 yards, 1.5 touchdowns and 0.5 interceptions (for 21.66 fantasy points per game).
To put that in perspective, the 24:8 TD/INT ratio and 4218 pace puts him in the same territory as Ryan Tannehill’s 2015. Tannehill averaged over 20 fantasy points per game, and had four more interceptions than McCown was pacing for.
This is assuming that McCown hasn’t fallen off as a player, and with full realization of the Baltimore defense that destroyed the same Tyrod Taylor that just threw three touchdowns. If he is in your lineup, however, you’ve hit full-on desperation territory. Good luck and maybe stick him in a GPP or two.