Each Friday during the 2022 NFL and fantasy football season, Eric Karabell will bring his always-reasonable perspective to highlight the biggest fantasy football storylines heading into the weekend's games.
It is hardly a secret that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers don't currently have the look of a Super Bowl contender, as they enter Week 10 with more losses than wins and having been outscored for the season. Curiously enough, fantasy managers continue to whine about Hall of Fame QB Tom Brady and excellent WR Mike Evans, but neither of them really has been that bad. Only 10 quarterbacks have more fantasy points than Brady this season (two of them barely), and the same goes for Evans at wide receiver. He is 11th at the position. It's actually fine.
Things are not fine lately for RB Leonard Fournette, who carried fantasy managers to championships a season ago and, again, the magic number is 11. Fournette was the No. 11 RB selected in ESPN average live drafts. The issue, of course, is that fantasy managers can still count on Brady and Evans. It's not so bad. Alas, Fournette appears more on the hot seat than his colleagues for this week's matchup in Munich, Germany (Sunday morning at 9:30 ET, set your lineups early!) with the Seattle Seahawks.
Fournette is actually the No. 9 RB in PPR scoring this season, so he ranks better at his position than his QB and top WR do, and he is also rostered in more leagues, a near-perfect 99.3%. He is Tampa Bay's top fantasy scorer for the season, though he scored 35.9 PPR points in Week 5, roughly a quarter of his season total.
Lately, however, things are different, as he has averaged only 10 PPR points over the past three games and lost touches to rookie Rachaad White. The rushing numbers are nearly hard to believe; after totaling 127 rushing yards at Dallas in the opener, Fournette's next best game is 65 rushing yards. He's averaging 3.3 yards per carry this season, but only 2.7 YPC since that impressive Week 1.