Fitz’s Week 14 Rankings, Tiers & Start/Sit Advice (2022 Fantasy Football)

Before we get to the Week 14 tiers, let’s talk about luck for a moment.

This is the final week of the regular season in most fantasy leagues — a time of year when fantasy managers are inclined to curse their luck if they haven’t secured playoff berths. The ones cursing the loudest are the ones whose records aren’t commensurate with their season-long point totals.

This is also the time of year when you’ll hear people touting the merits of the all-play format, in which you play against every team every week so that your point total is more closely correlated with your record. Some people believe all-play is the perfect way to minimize luck and therefore the purest and best form of fantasy football.

I hate all-play.

Let’s face it: There’s no way to completely airbrush luck out of fantasy football. All-play addresses one type of bad luck — the misfortunate of not having a lofty point total reflected in your record. It doesn’t eliminate bad luck with injuries. It doesn’t eliminate other types of bad luck in fantasy football — and there are some wild stories about things going wrong for fantasy managers in spectacularly bizarre ways.

Here’s one. In a home league where we use kickers, I was starting the Cardinals’ Matt Prater in Week 4. Arizona was playing Carolina, and with 7:37 left in the fourth quarter, the Cardinals scored a touchdown to go up 26-10. The extra point would give Arizona a 17-point lead, making it a three-score game midway through the fourth quarter. But Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury elected to try for a two-point conversion, which failed. Why? I have no idea. But I lost by half a point that week, and a Prater extra point would have given me the win.