Week 16 Booms and busts

If fantasy football is your true passion, the game is a 12-month assignment.

You watch every snap of the NFL playoffs. You carefully observe every free-agent move like a pre-op surgeon. You grind tape for the NFL Draft, even rewatch the mediocre Kevin Costner movie. You keep your ear to the ground for minicamp and summer camp news. You scout the preseason games, in case one of your players actually plays for 15 seconds.

You mock draft, and you best-ball draft. You learn the backups, and the backups of the backups.

You do everything to look for that key, that secret, that winning ingredient for playoff glory.

And then it winds up being Joe Flacco, journeyman off the couch.

Joe Flacco, the fourth Cleveland quarterback of the year (the fifth if you count summer camper Joshua Dobbs). Joe Flacco, a man who seemed retired for good, a man who went 1-8 in nine mediocre starts for the Jets over the last three years.

Roll the Sunday tape, Flacco throwing dimes to Amari Cooper and David Njoku. It’s a beautiful thing.

To be fair, Flacco’s glorious one-month run is more valuable to many fantasy leaguers as a conduit, as a way to unlock Cooper and Njoku. And what an amazing unlocking it’s been. Cooper went ballistic at Houston on Sunday (11-265-2), setting a team record and posting the best wide receiver game of the Yahoo fantasy season. It’s just the eighth time anyone has cracked 40 points this year; Cooper rang up 46 in default Yahoo scoring as the Browns handled Houston easily.

Flacco percolated to the top of his position for Week 16, too, chucking for 368 yards and three scores. He did throw two picks, which is par for the course. He’s had a turnover in all four of his starts. But he has the arm and the experience to push the ball downfield (and the confidence to throw some 50-50 balls), and it’s turned Cooper back into a star. We’ve come a long way from Deshaun Watson, P.J. Walker and Dorian Thompson-Robinson.

Cooper’s been a standout before; he’s been to four Pro Bowls. The Njoku emergence is more surprising, given that his sleeper case felt dated before the year. Njoku finished as the TE8 back in 2018, his second season, but he’s been more unfulfilled promise than anything since. When we reached Halloween, Njoku was sitting on 28 catches and one piddly touchdown for the year.

Flacco and Njoku didn’t click in their first game, but they’ve been copasetic ever since. Njoku posted a 6-44-1 line Sunday, and now has 22 catches, 239 yards and four touchdowns over his last three games. He was the TE2 in each of the past two weeks, and he currently sits there with four games left to go. Keep laughing if you keep starting The Joker.

Flacco isn’t an automatic start for Week 17, when the Browns play the Jets; that’s the first plus defense they’ve drawn during this stretch. No Cooper or Njoku manager is going to back off, but Flacco supporters have a discussion on their hands, especially in deeper leagues and in Superflex formats. Is Flacco too hot to sit? Does it matter to you that the Jets were carved up by Jacoby Brissett in the second half Sunday, briefly blowing a big lead?

Is there such a thing as a Joe Flacco revenge game?

We’ll worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow. Today, let’s eat, drink, be merry. Let’s watch those Cleveland highlights on a loop. Let’s appreciate what we just saw, and try to remember that the future remains unwritten.

Note: This story will continue to be updated with more fantasy football analysis from Sunday.