Fantasy Football Outlook: Brock Bowers & Noah Fant (2024)

This article aims to identify players and situations with the most uncertainty entering Week 1. Knowing these players will help us hone in on which usage to pay the closest attention to and whether to treat it as gospel or dismiss it as noise. Below you’ll find breakdowns of players that have the most to gain (or lose) from usage early on in the season.

Fantasy Football Week 1 Situations to Monitor

It’s only one week. Yes, but it’ll be the first week we’ve had new NFL data since mid-February. After Week 1 concludes, the fantasy football world starts to analyze, dissect and decode the new data we’ve been graced with to answer one question: Does it matter? Of course it matters — all data is good data (well, most of the time, that is). But, the challenge becomes identifying what data suggests we should move off of our pre-season priors and adjust players based on just one (or two) weeks of usage.

Last year, Puka Nacua was going undrafted in a lot of leagues. Then, he grabbed everyone’s attention by getting 15 targets, catching 10 of those targets for 119 receiving yards. He eventually went on to break the rookie record for receiving yards. If we look back, though, he had a very fluid situation that should have called for a quicker adjustment to his rest-of-season standing in fantasy football rankings rather than how he was being treated during draft season.

First, he was a rookie. Usage for rookies is difficult to project, especially those drafted outside of the first couple of rounds, according to average draft position (ADP). Second, and more importantly, Cooper Kupp wasn’t in the mix (until Week 5, that is). While Nacua’s usage certainly shifted with Kupp’s return, he had enough time to cement his role in the offense and continue to go gangbusters for those who scooped him up off of the waiver wire following his first game. This analysis comes with loads of hindsight bias, but when that happens we should do our best to learn from it.

Tight Ends

Brock Bowers (TE – LV)

Brock Bowers has about everything that makes for an unknown situation. The Raiders have a new quarterback in Gardner Minshew, Luke Getsy is now calling plays and they have a steady circulation of potential targets. Not to mention, Bowers was drafted 11th overall as the highest-drafted rookie tight end since Kyle Pitts.

Davante Adams will also be turning 32 towards the end of the regular season and, while he’s a very solid player, Jakobi Meyers doesn’t have the same target gravity other players do. Because of this, I think Bowers has one of the higher ceilings for tight ends going in this range. If we get early indication he’ll be used often, I will be doing what I can to get him on as many teams as possible.

Noah Fant (TE – SEA)

The bull case for Noah Fant is primarily around the coaching changes that happened in Seattle. Shane Waldron (as mentioned, now the offensive coordinator for the Bears) was well known for deploying a rotation at tight end and utilizing multiple tight ends at a high rate. While the number of vacated targets Seattle has isn’t large, they all come from tight ends Colby Parkinson and Will Dissly leaving the team. If you go with the tight end streaming approach in your league this year, Fant is someone I’m keeping a close eye on.