Fantasy Football Six Pack: Spooky stats that'll make you shudder for Week 8
In keeping with spooky season, this week we offer a terrifying six pack of the scariest stats available. These numbers are not recommended for all audiences. You have been warned.
67 - Diontae Johnson has seen 67 targets so far this season, the fourth-highest total in the NFL. All those opportunities have resulted in 337 receiving yards and zero touchdowns. Every other receiver in the league who's been targeted at least 60 times has produced at least 475 yards and one score.
If there's good news for Johnson, it's that he's drawn 30 pass attempts over the past three weeks, so the shift to Kenny Pickett at QB hasn't been a negative in terms of volume. One piece of bad news, however, is that Pittsburgh is headed to Philadelphia this week to face a defense allowing a league-low 5.5 yards per pass attempt.
37.9 - This is the percentage of offensive snaps AJ Dillon has played over Green Bay's last three games (all losses). He's coming off a week in which he played a season-low 16 snaps and handled just four touches. Dillon had seen over 50 percent of the snaps in each of the Packers' first four games. No one is gonna suggest that Aaron Jones shouldn't be fed, but it's not as if this team has an abundance of offensive playmakers.
Dillon caught 34 of 37 targets last season and gained over 1,100 scrimmage yards, so we do have evidence that he can play a little. Buffalo's defense coming off their bye seems like a nightmare matchup, so it wouldn't be all that surprising to find Dillon on a few waiver wires next week.
27 - Bears fans are feeling understandably chirpy after a convincing Monday night win at New England, but at least one glaring problem still very much exists: Justin Fields has been sacked a league-high 27 times despite having only 198 dropbacks through seven games. It's a scandalous total. Leading the NFL in sacks in a year in which he averages fewer than 20 attempts per game is a breathtaking achievement.
Sacks are of course both an O-line stat and a quarterback stat, with a dash of receiving corps blame mixed in. So this isn't entirely on Fields, but the hits are still piling up. Micah Parsons is on deck in Week 8, which, um ... seems bad.
20.2 - Alvin Kamara is averaging 20.2 touches per game for the Saints, a team that ranks third in the league in total yardage and seventh in scoring, and yet he has zero touchdowns on the season. None. Zip. A total absence of touchdowns. This man found the end zone nine times last year and a league-leading 21 times the season before. It's wild. He's gaining a perfectly respectable 5.4 yards per touch in 2022, so efficiency isn't really the issue. Taysom Hill, however, has been a problem. Hill has scored six times on only 31 touches, which is just obnoxious.
12.29 - This is Matthew Stafford's average weekly fantasy point total in Yahoo default settings, an atrocious number for any quarterback. It's pretty incredible that Cooper Kupp remains the overall WR2 despite being attached to the QB30. Four different quarterbacks — Allen, Mahomes, Hurts and Burrow —are essentially doubling up Stafford's weekly fantasy output. Van Jefferson's anticipated return should help to some extent, but he won't fix the brutal pass-blocking. Stafford is facing a weekend matchup with the Niners, a team that sacked him seven times and pick-six'd him in Week 4.
11 - Somehow, Marcus Mariota has averaged just 11 completions on 18.2 attempts per game over the past five weeks. On Sunday, he attempted only 13 passes in a game his team lost by 18 points. Atlanta's offense has become a throwback to a style of play that may have never previously existed. It's remarkable. It also continues to be horrifying for anyone who had fantasy plans for Drake London, Kyle Pitts or any other non-RB on this team.
