Fantasy Football Start em, Sit em: Baker Mayfield, Bucky Irving, Darnell Mooney (Week 5)

Start em or sit em? Fantasy football start or sit decisions can be excruciating. While it feels great to make the right call and cruise to fantasy glory, it hurts just as much when you have someone erupt while on your bench. You can use our Who Should I Start? tool to gauge advice from fantasy football experts as you make your lineup decisions. And you can also sync your fantasy football league for free using our My Playbook tool for custom advice, rankings and analysis.

Let’s take a look at a few polarizing players and what fantasy football expert Derek Brown advises. And you can find all of DBro’s fantasy football outlook in this week’s fantasy football primer.

Fantasy Football Start em, Sit em Lineup Advice

Baker Mayfield (QB)

Mayfield is humming along as the QB4 in fantasy points per game. Among 36 qualifying quarterbacks, he is 11th in yards per attempt, fifth in passer rating, and 12th in highly accurate throw rate. Atlanta has been a middle-of-the-road matchup overall as a pass defense. They have held quarterbacks to the seventh-lowest yards per attempt and the 11th-fewest fantasy points via passing, but this secondary also has allowed the ninth-highest CPOE and sits at 15th in passer rating. Mayfield should return strong QB1 numbers again this week with plenty of time in the pocket to deliver accurate passes. Atlanta is 15th in time to pressure and 18th in pressure rate.

Bucky Irving (RB)

Last week, Irving saw his role in the Bucs backfield increase. He played a season-high 42% of the snaps with 11 touches and 55 total yards. Irving had a 50% snap share on rushing plays and a 34% snap rate on passing downs, and he led the way for Tampa Bay with a 67% snapshare inside the 20-yard line. White was dealing with food poisoning last week, so maybe we can attribute this to that. It’s equally possible he is eating into the workload of one of the NFL’s most inefficient rushers. Irving has been explosive when he has gotten opportunities. Among 55 qualifying backs, he ranks seventh-best in explosive run rate, 12th in missed tackles forced per attempt, and 11th in yards after contact per attempt. Irving has a tough task on early downs this week. Atlanta hasn’t been an easy team to run on this year, allowing the eighth-lowest explosive run rate and the fifth-lowest yards after contact per attempt. The lone sliver of hope for Irving is that Atlanta has also given up the second-highest success rate to gap runs (Irving 54% gap).

Darnell Mooney (WR)

Mooney is the WR44 in fantasy points per game with two top 36 weekly finishes (WR18, WR36) this season. He has drawn a 19.3% target share with a 32.9% air-yard share, 1.97 YPRR, and a strong 24.3% first-read share. Tampa Bay has utilized single high on 55.7% of their defensive snaps. Against single-high, his target share has dropped slightly to 17.6%, and his YPRR has cratered (0.94). Mooney is best left on the bench this week. Tampa Bay has allowed the fourth-lowest PPR points per target and the ninth-fewest receiving yards per game to perimeter wide receivers. Mooney will run about 58% of his routes against Zyon McCollum (37.5% catch rate and 43.0 passer rating) and Jamel Dean (68% catch rate and 95.8 passer rating).

If you want to dive deeper into fantasy football, check out our award-winning slate of Fantasy Football Tools as you navigate your season. From our Start/Sit Assistant – which provides your optimal lineup based on accurate consensus projections – to our Waiver Wire Assistant, which allows you to quickly see which available players will improve your team and how much – we’ve got you covered this fantasy football season.