We are back! The 2024 fantasy football season is officially underway. Week 1 is in the books, which means that the last 72 hours have seen fantasy managers and experts alike react to Week 1.

Week 1 reactions tend to range from overreactions to “kneejerk” reactions to reactions that tremble the doomsday clock. If you want to be successful, you need fantasy experts who deploy a calm and collected approach. Experts who remain stoic, like a stone cliff standing against the crashing waves. Experts that can see through the wilderness.

You won’t find that here. Marvin Harrison is a bust! Sam Darnold GEQBUS! Isaiah Likely to the moon!

Fantasy Games Won (FGW)

Quick primer on what Fantasy Games Won (FGW):

• FGW is a statistic that converts Fantasy Points into Fantasy Wins.
• Players get positive FGW points for outscoring average fantasy starters and negative points for below-average scores.
• A player can score up to +0.5 FGW for increasing your chances of winning from 50% to 100% or down to -0.5 for dropping your chances from 50% to 0%.
• Percent started matters — 0% started throttles your FGW down to 0.

For a longer explanation, check out the 2023 FGW launch over on my blog. The stat hasn’t changed since then.

What’s Likely And What’s…Surtain?

The year is 2012. Week 1’s opening night is on Wednesday, for some reason. Patrick Surtain II is 12 years old. And an unheralded pass catcher goes 8-114-2 on opening night.

Everyone’s going nuts over the breakout performance. Reports on Monday claimed a certain ESPN fantasy expert (who shall remain nameless) actually “punted” his Week 1 matchup in the ESPN Experts League to ensure he got top waiver priority, specifically to grab the emerging receiving star.

That player was Kevin Ogletree. Ogletree would go on to record 32-436-4 over 15 games. That total includes Week 1.

It’s hard not to get excited about a fantasy player with as much clever headline potential as Isaiah Likely. But I bring up Ogletree purely as a reminder: While Isaiah Likely’s ceiling appears to be among the trees, he has a floor that is so low it’s barely worth an ogle.

Who Won the Week?

• Saquon Barkley wins Week 1. His 0.36 FGW means he took the average fantasy team from a 50% win chance to 86%.
• The situation seems familiar. Saquon is a good bet for early-season bangers (he’s had at least one 27+ point day by Week 4 each of the last four seasons). It also feels like D’Andre Swift‘s Week 2 for the Eagles last year.
• Anyone who drafted Cooper Kupp, assuming he would reclaim the WR1 role in LA, is having a good time. The wrong Rams WR got hurt.
• Speaking of familiarity, is the Dallas Defense good again? No joke. Since the start of 2021, Dallas has had the 12th-most FGW of all fantasy players. They’ve been first-round picks.
• Another All-Time-Since-2021 update: Tyreek Hill has now scored 5.0 total FGW since the start of 2021, most of all players. No defense can…detain him.
• My biggest regret for 2024 could be not having more shares of Anthony Richardson. Even though he only completed nine passes last week, he’s the second-best quarterback in Fantasy.

Who Lost the Week?

The Christian McCaffrey situation forced me to change my percent started formula for 2024. Here is some backstory to explain why:

Sometimes, public percent-started data is useless. For example, when a player is known to be missing a week, they will still often see 10-20% started numbers because many fantasy teams are unmanaged ghost ships. Sometimes, the number 1 ranked player in a given week will only be 93% started by public data. In these situations, you want to override public percent started with expert ranking-approximated percent started rates.

McCaffrey in Week 1 was the opposite of that. At 66% started, according to Yahoo!, his No. 1 weekly ranking spot should have been overridden to 66%. My trigger for overriding back to the public data was when the public percentage was both below 50% and below the expert-rankings-approximated percentage. I had to raise that trigger to 70 percent to get McCaffrey to show as less than 100 percent started for Week 1. If only I had talked to Jordan Mason ahead of Week 1, I could have anticipated needing to tweak FGW.

• Drake London is keeping the weekly losers board warm for Kyle Pitts. I know it.
• Joe Burrow, last year’s Fantasy Least Valuable Player, according to FGW, is apparently on a quest to repeat.
• Did Marvin Harrison and Greg Dortch switch jerseys in Week 1? Dortch was all over the Cardinals’ screen time on RedZone Channel.

Week 1 Junior Varsity All-Stars

• This is the list of players with the biggest FGW reductions due to low percent started rates. They’re the fantasy performances that didn’t actually help your team win.
• Jayden Reed actually beats out Isaiah Likely for the JV MVP of the week. I feel bad for all the half-paying-attention relatives in family fantasy leagues who will start Jayden Reed for the next three weeks with Malik Willis throwing him the ball.
• Jordan Mason‘s public percent started rate (22%) is in that weird window where it’s at the same rate you’ll see players on bye get started later in the season. You can’t make an exception for him, or it’ll break the whole scoring system, so he’s getting credit for 0%.
• If this is your first time reading this column, just know the scoring system isn’t usually this flexible. It’s typically very robust, just like the Jets’ Defensive line.

Isaiah To You, Dear Reader…

Part of the reason I created the FGW statistic is to quantify those instances where players will go absolutely nuts on your bench and then stink up the joint the following week. Total fantasy points doesn’t capture the pain that fantasy managers feel when that happens. Fantasy Games Won, however, does exactly that.

If Isaiah Likely puts up a donut in Week 2, he will still be one of the higher-scoring Tight Ends in the league through two weeks. However, his FGW score will be negative. His fantasy managers will feel the pain.

If you want to commiserate when your players decide that they only want to score on your bench, the weekly FGW update is made for you. See you next Wednesday.

Follow Byron Cobalt on X @ByronCobalt or check out his blog at byron-cobalt.com.

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