Welcome back to Lucid Streams. Our goal here is to help you find emergency help that’s potentially available on the waiver wire or on the back of your bench when you’re scrambling for options due to injuries or plain old poor drafting at wide receiver and tight end. We also want to equip you with the tools to go out on your own and find the best fantasy football sleepers yourself in case the options listed here each week aren’t available to you. Our goal is to find WRs who have at least a reasonable chance to contribute 10+ PPR points to your lineup this week and TEs who can chip in at least seven points in PPR.
We had plenty of hits in last week’s column, nailing three of our five WR picks and four out of five at TE. At WR, Marquez Valdes-Scantling was the WR22 and Elijah Moore checked in at WR15. Our TE recommendations for the week included the TE3 (Jonnu Smith), the TE5 (Will Dissly), and the TE7 (Zach Ertz). With six teams on bye this week, the difficulty of finding quality options goes up, as does the pressure on the waiver wire, as many teams will be forced to make claims just to fill out our rosters. Challenge accepted.
The Process
What we are looking for each week is to find the players most likely to pop for one of several reasons. They may have an increased role in their offense due to the misfortune of a player ahead of them on the depth chart, or they may be facing a defense that will have trouble defending them due to a positional mismatch. Maybe that’s a chronic problem of the defense, or maybe it’s due to injuries in the coverage units, which will allow a unique opportunity for success by our streamer. At the intersection of high opportunity and low rostership is where we want to pan for gold in the stream. Remember, these are recommendations for those who are really in a bind for a starter and should not be played over anyone you’d normally start.
We’ll use a variety of tools to help us, including schedule-adjusted fantasy points allowed to the WR and TE positions. If you’re not familiar with this metric, it removes the variance that can skew fantasy points allowed by a defense due to the quality of the passing attacks they’ve faced. For example, if Defense A has faced four top-tier passing offenses in the first four weeks while Defense B has faced only weak passing offenses over that same period, it could appear that Defense B is better at defending WRs than Defense A, when in reality, Defense A might be the tougher matchup. The further we get into the season, the more relevance this analysis has.
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Streaming Wide Receivers Week 12
Elijah Moore, Cleveland Browns
It’s hard to lean into a receiver facing the Pittsburgh Steelers’ excellent pass defense, but Jameis Winston isn’t afraid to keep throwing to his WRs. Operating primarily from the slot, Moore will provide plenty of checkdown opportunities and quick hitters to counteract a fierce pass rush. Averaging nearly 10 targets per game since Winston took over at QB, Moore has a solid floor.
Kendrick Bourne, New England Patriots
As Drake Maye continues to progress and impress as a rookie QB in a tough situation, the Patriots are also working diligently to get the best WRs on the field with him. Over the past 2 weeks, Bourne has started to emerge as a trusted option, earning 11 targets in that time.
Xavier Legette, Carolina Panthers
The Chiefs have a stifling defense, but Bryce Young has progressed from being an utter train wreck of a QB to being merely well below average. In a week where options are thin, I’ll bet on the physical tools of Legette shining through at some point during the game, like a brief ray of sunshine in a small window high above a dark, musty prison cell.
Alec Pierce, Indianapolis Colts
Speaking of train wreck QBs, Anthony Richardson emerged from the doghouse last week to lead his team to victory against a clown-show Jets team. This week, the bar is raised significantly higher as the red-hot Lions come to town, but give me a speedy receiver, a big-armed QB with deep accuracy, and significant amounts of garbage time in a week where options are thin.
Honorable Mentions
- DeMario Douglas: Every rookie quarterback needs a safety-blanket WR, and that’s the role Douglas plays for Maye and the Patriots. The ceiling is low, but the floor is high.
- Adam Thielen: We’ve seen Bryce Young lean heavily on Thielen in the past. With Diontae Johnson no longer on the team, Thielen is a steady veteran target for the overmatched Young.
Streaming Tight Ends Week 12
Just a quick reminder that to qualify for recommendation in this column, players must be less than 30-percent rostered on most major fantasy platforms. If for some reason there is a Hunter Henry, Jonnu Smith, Zach Ertz, or similarly talented TE available to you, they will all be better options than what you see below.
Luke Schoonmaker, Dalls Cowboys
With Jake Ferguson suffering a concussion on Monday night, he’ll be hard-pressed to suit up this week against the Washington Commanders. Schoonmaker stepped right into Ferguson’s role when he went down and basically didn’t miss a beat, earning 10 targets and turning them into six catches for 56 yards. He should have a big role in the Cowboys’ passing game again this week.
Ja’Tavion Sanders, Carolina Panthers
Yes, I’m recommending a third player from the Panthers’ passing “attack,” but Sanders is getting more volume as an easy outlet for Bryce Young to hit on a team that’s short on quality options in the passing game. He’s gotten at least five targets in four of his last six games and fellow TE Ian Thomas was just placed on IR.
Theo Johnson, New York Giants
The Giants have canceled the Danny Dimes Experience and announced a sequel to last year’s surprisingly entertaining Tommy Cutlets Show. I’d love to tell you all about Tommy DeVito‘s propensities regarding the targeting of TEs in his limited-run engagement last year, but he didn’t have any TEs of consequence available to him as his run as the Giants’ starting QB coincided almost exactly with Darren Waller‘s streak of missed games. What we DO know is that Theo Johnson has gotten 16 targets over his last three games and has become a more reliable piece of the offense.
Noah Fant/AJ Barner, Seattle Seahawks
Hopefully this is the week that Fant overcomes his injury and returns to the Seahawks’ starting lineup, in which case we’ll recommend him with some level of enthusiasm. If Fant can’t make it back, we’ll rather unenthusiastically recommend Barner as the best remaining of all the lightly-rostered options at TE.
Honorable Mention
- Dartboard and Tequila: If none of the above options are available, your best course of action is to print out a list of all the available TEs, affix them to a dartboard, and make your selection via dart. If consumed beforehand, the tequila will not improve your results at all, but it can make the results of your selection easier to tolerate if applied in moderation afterwards. Please toss your darts and drink your tequila responsibly.
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