Week 7 fantasy football preview: Believe in Matt Ryan

Let’s preview this week’s NFL action by first focusing on the games that are expected to produce the most real and fantasy points before I go around the league to highlight the key players we should be watching and why. An important note every week but especially for Week 7: check the player’s status. There is so much injury uncertainty and Friday’s practice, which occurs after this is posted, is key.

[Week 7 rankings: Overall | FLEX | QB | RB | WR | TE | DEF | K]

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Chargers at Falcons (O/U: 53.3): Matt Ryan ($39) aced all the tough tests and now gets the Chargers defense at home. Ryan’s 9.9 YPA through six games is the highest since 2000 (Kurt Warner, 11.0; 1972 Joe Namath is next at 10.5). So Ryan has earned his 15 TD passes (Warner had 17 and Namath just 12 but in 81 less attempts than Ryan’s 210). We said in August that Ryan was a sleeper QB given that his YPA last year was above average and his TD percentage was way below, but no one could have predicted this kind of passing efficiency explosion.

Philip Rivers ($39) has also been rock solid at 8.2 and thus his TD rate of 6.0 percent that normally we’d view suspiciously is quite reasonable. He’s also the best road QB in the NFL through 2015 in scoring 112 percentage of his home total when wearing the visiting colors — average is 94 percent. I’ve been disappointed in the consistency of Travis Benjamin ($28) but he does have two games of over 115 receiving yards and another with 82. The target volume (44) is light, however. I still view him as a WR3 with a chance to be a 2. I hate thinking about playoff matchups but the Chargers passing game has a perfect on-paper slate weeks 13-16 (Bucs, Panthers, Raiders, Browns).

Saints at Chiefs (O/U: 50.5): Drew Brees ($38) is merely a mortal on the road (84.6 percent of career home scoring entering this season). But this isn’t the Saints’ pass defense of last year, when they gave up 45 passing TDs. This year, they are on pace to allow just 22. And their YPA allowed is just 10th worst. In other words, do not take the bait and start Alex Smith, the poster boy of QB streaming. He’s just so bad and we know courtesy of the great work first done by Harvard’s Kurt Bullard that streaming bad QBs is a waste of time because they barely do any better against the bad passing defenses. Those bad defenses get wrecked by the good QBs. The Saints have given up 11 rushing TDs but are merely bad at yards per rush (11th). Still, Spencer Ware ($23) is the man again this week. I don’t worry about Jamaal Charles ($25), who should be viewed as a more involved backup meaning expect about 30 percent of the carries vs. the usual backup share of about 22 percent (the average starting RB gets 62 percent with the rest going to others). Ware is averaging more yards per touch this year than Charles ever did.

Redskins at Lions (O/U: 50): Is Kirk Cousins ($34) any good? I predicted he’d beat the Eagles, who remember everyone thought was a defensive juggernaut. And he had a good day that would have been great had DeSean Jackson ($18) not dropped a perfectly thrown 35-yard TD. Cousins has the Redskins sixth in yards per pass play (includes sacks), but has just nine TD passes. I expect that to correct dramatically going forward, starting here. Note the Lions have allowed a league-high 17 TDs; I believe that, as referenced above, Cousins is the good QB against the bad passing defense, so he should feast. Matt Jones ($18) had just 40.5 percent of snaps last week in a game the Redskins controlled from start to finish. That was his lowest rate since the Week 1 blowout loss to the Steelers. I want a high snap count, goal touches and third-down catches in that order from a RB and Jones, who ran great last week, fails on two of those three measures.

Notebook:

-A.J. Green ($37) was my sleeper pick as top fantasy wideout and he leads the league in catches and averages 100 yards per game. But the two TDs are killer. I still think he finishes with double-digit scores but this passing game just isn’t prolific enough. And even the yards have been poorly distributed (353 in two games). This is the ideal matchup though against the Browns.

– LeSean McCoy ($40) had the perfect setup for volume and usage. He’s the goal-line back, which was a worry, and has a running QB. Definitely hold despite his injury. Mike Gillislee ($12) would return about 90 percent of McCoy’s value if he sits due to a hamstring injury.

-Oakland-Jacksonville is going to be fun — I don’t know why the over/under dropped so much after opening at 50. I’d load up here. Even Blake Bortles ($35) will be good. Expect a bounce back from Michael Crabtree ($31).

-Doug Martin is out again. The lesson here is that guys who are hurt tend to stay hurt. Believe it when you see it and, with hamstrings, not even then.

-We have no evidence that Landry Jones ($21) is good. But the last time we saw him for real, he was so bad that Ben Roethlisberger had to crawl back on the field to win a playoff game. And this summer, he tossed four picks in one preseason game — very hard to do. Avoid Antonio Brown ($37) in daily.

-Get Devontae Booker ($13), who is flex-worthy right now. Scott Pianowski points out on the The Breakfast Table Podcast that C.J. Anderson ($22) had some big plays negated by penalty last week but the bottom line is Denver, which must run, is 22nd in yards per carry and that’s all on Anderson (Booker is 4.7 on 34 totes). Booker is the prime zeroRB target now.

-Finally. some housekeeping. Last week, some were surprised that I dismissed measurables (like height) in projecting wide receivers given that I was once a proponent of Big WR. Those who follow me on Twitter @michaelsalfino or who listen to Scott Pianowski and me on the podcast know I abandoned this theory in the summer of 2015 as a result of data that I pulled on wide receiver production when the receiver has at least a four-inch advantage on the defensive back in coverage. It turned out that the passer rating on these targets was not significantly different than the rating on all others. So if height can’t be predictably leveraged when the advantage is that pronounced, then we can’t rely upon it in projecting wideouts. And I ran the data again before the start of this year and the difference was again small (85.2 rating with the four-plus-inch advantage and 82.2 without).