Fantasy Football Outlook: Najee Harris, James Conner, Rachaad White (Week 4)

Let’s plunge into Week 4. As always, feel free to use these tiered rankings as a tiebreaker for your difficult lineup decisions. Beneath the tiers, I’ll offer a few brief thoughts on some of the borderline start/sit guys and some other interesting cases. Here are my full fantasy football rankings and tiers for Week 4. Below we’ll dive into a few notable players.

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Fitz’s Fantasy Football Week 4 Outlook

It’s understandable that some fantasy managers might be hesitant to start James Conner given his daunting matchup against the 49ers, who have allowed a league-low 111 rushing yards. But Conner is one of the few RBs in the league getting true workhorse usage. He’s averaging 17.0 carries a game and 19.3 touches a game. It’s possible Conner gets 17 carries against the 49ers and finishes with 35 rushing yards. I’d still rather bet the volume with Conner than bet on a committee back in a better offense. Although it’s hard to get optimistic about any element of this matchup, it’s worth noting that San Francisco has given up a league-high 21 receptions to running backs.

Mea culpa: I liked Najee Harris as a draft value this year. Harris got off to a slow start last year, too, but he was dealing with a Lisfranc injury and was much better in the second half of the season. He averaged 59.1 yards from scrimmage over the first eight games of 2022 and 87.8 yards from scrimmage over his last nine. I thought the Pittsburgh offensive line would be better this year after some significant offseason additions, but that hasn’t been the case. PFF has the Steelers 28th in their offensive line rankings this week. The appeal for Harris this week is a matchup against the perennially bad Texans run defense, which has already allowed five touchdown runs to RBs. Harris had 19 carries against the Raiders last week but produced only 65 rushing yards. If Harris can’t turn that sort of usage into good fantasy numbers this week against Houston, park him on your bench.

I’m shying away from Rachaad White this week in a tricky matchup vs. a Saints defense that has allowed the seventh-fewest rushing yards and eighth-fewest fantasy points to RBs. It might seem contradictory to fade White in a bad matchup but tout James Conner in an even worse matchup. The difference is that we have a solid body of evidence that Conner is a good running back. I’m not sure we can draw than conclusion with White yet. I think White is better than a replacement-level running back, but he might not be good enough to merit workhorse-type usage. One potential problem is reduced usage in the passing game. White had 50 catches last year as a rookie, and he and Leonard Fournette combined for 123 catches. White has 10 catches on 10 targets so far this season. RBs accounted for 20.3% of the Buccaneers’ team targets last season, and Tom Brady led the NFL in pass attempts. This season, RBs are accounting for 13.5% of the Bucs’ team targets, and Baker Mayfield is tied for 21st in pass attempts.

-Pat Fitzmaurice