Week In Confounding Fantasy Football: Week 17

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You love to read it when you somehow had the foresight to start or avoid these players, you hate to read it when it’s time to figure out how that could have happened: It’s The Week In Confounding Fantasy Football! Ja’Marr Chase exploded the slate with one of the biggest games in fantasy playoff history, while D’Andre Swift and Ronald Jones disappointed and the Pats pass game created excess value for … Kristian Wilkerson?

Ja’Marr Chase torches Chiefs secondary in slate-breaking performance

How did this happen? The thing about Ja’Marr Chase is that he’s incredibly good at football and that was obvious in college and — outside of a few idiotic weeks wasted on a drop narrative — has been obvious from Day 1 in the NFL. The only thing that’s worried me about the Bengals all season from a fantasy perspective is that Zac Taylor has slow-played this hand as much as possible. Well, down 14-0 to the Chiefs, the Bengals simply unleashed it all over those poor Chiefs cornerbacks.

Chase has made elusive moves in the open field. He has trumped defensive backs in tight coverage. He has a top quarterback throwing to him. Simply put, this is a combination of traits, skills, and situation that rarely comes together as perfectly as this has in year one. I hate to invoke the “Moss” comparison, and Chase is obviously not as dominant as Moss was in his rookie season. But that team turned throwing deep into a major, whereas the Bengals have spent a lot of the season only minoring in Burrow and Chase’s LSU tape.

266 yards and three touchdowns later, Chase pushed Tee Higgins on to the back pages.

Who can we blame for this? We can’t really blame anybody for this. It’s easy to say that someone should have stopped the Bengals from drafting Chase at No. 4, but the three teams that passed on him all needed quarterbacks. It’s easy to say that the Chiefs could have stopped Chase…