Today’s Thursday night game is a bit of a change of pace from the last few showdowns that I’ve written up. Tonight we have what Vegas expects to be a pretty close game. The two teams aren’t world beaters by any means but both have shown flashes, in different ways, of being formidable teams.
The Colts come in with a strange offensive makeup when you start thinking where in the point of their careers many of the skill position players are. A Quarterback and WR1 that are on the wrong side of their prime but are still serviceable. A whole stable of running backs on their rookie contracts and some wide receivers on them as well. This has contributed to some inconsistency offensively, but in contrast, the defense has been rock solid for them. Rivers tosses the ball around a lot, spreading it to all the different options. It’s become difficult to pin down exactly which one is going to see the bulk of the work on any given week or if anyone is going to see the bulk at all. We’ve seen weeks were he’s tossed it to what seems like the entire roster with no one exceeding 4 targets. Then you have the 3-headed running back by committee that only further makes this offense one that’s difficult to figure out. Surely there’s at least clarity in the tight end position right? Nah, they have three of those as well… seriously. For this game, they may only have 2, and quite possibly 1 giving us one less grouping we have to decipher. Jake Doyle is out with a concussion and Mo Alie-Cox is questionable. If he doesn’t play then I’m locking Trey Burton into many builds. Even if Alie-Cox is active I’ll have a healthy share of Trey as we’ve seen Rivers throughout his career toss passes to the tight end position in the end zone regardless of who is playing that position.
The Titans side of things is a bit easier to put together. There’s one Running Back worth playing, Henry. Only a handful of Wide Receivers that are viable even when they’re all healthy, which they aren’t tonight. However when it comes to the tight end position they’ve seemingly fallen in love with running Anthony Firkser out there for just enough plays that he can’t quite hit value, but enough to take away from the ceiling that Jonnu Smith flashed at points early in the season. Adam Humphries is out which should mean more targets for AJ Brown, more targets for Corey Davis, and maybe even a couple for Kalif Raymond.
With the game total, a healthy 48.5 and a mere 1 point spread I think it’s safe to say the way to build this game if we’re going simply by the numbers we should be constructing our lineups pretty evenly. 3-3’s, 4-2’s, 2-4’s are going to be preferred distributions. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an edge in building 5-1’s if you think this line is off and one team is going to win by a significant amount.
Colts Captains
Given everything mentioned earlier there just aren’t any clear-cut attractive Colt player options for the Captain slot tonight. Phillip Rivers has the largest projected score by almost 9 points. His ownership and ceiling present the best mix of floor/ceiling/ownership of anyone from either team.
After that, there isn’t much. We have a log jam with guys like Jonathan Taylor, Pascal, Hines, Hilton, Burton, and Wilkins.
My approach to this grouping is going to be figuring out who has the two-touchdown upside. That leaves me with all 3 of the running backs and Trey Burton. Burton is going to provide the largest ownership leverage, but all of the Colts players project low in terms of the Captain Slot.
Titans Captains
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the first player that came to mind was Derrick Henry. There’s something about Derrick Henry on TNF that seems to hit a bit different. I might be wrong on this, but I’ll never forget the Jacksonville game they played a few years back where he just went absolutely nuts. Back then D4U was on live from 7-9 pm. So we’d cover TNF showdown in the first part of the show and then get to watch some of it live on air. During that show, we had talked about Henry being a great Captain option, someone that could break the slate. To that point he hadn’t really had his breakout yet, in fact, I think that Thursday night game with the 99 yard(?) run was the spot where he transcended into a marquee back. So of course it’s a situation where I want Henry in my lineup but if he ends up in the flex who else could I use in the CPT slot?
Ryan Tannehill comes to mind. After an MVP-like start he’s had his own cooldown similar to that of Josh Allen. 2 of the last 3 games came against the Bears and Steelers so it was to be expected. The Colts aren’t a slouch of a defense though. Who else?
AJ Brown- Of course, he’s viable. He makes plays that aren’t there. Plays that other guys wouldn’t have made. That’s what makes him so valuable. I love Brown as a CPT tonight and I’ll have a few lineups with him in the 3 dollar 20max.
The Last guy for me is Corey Davis. His brother just passed and this could be one of those games where the athlete plays out of his mind in the wake of tragedy. I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t the case as well. If he had a terrible game, no one would blame him. In that case, though I suspect either the Titan’s have been throttled or one of the other two skill guys have gone off.
Off the board plays.
Pricing is pretty tight. There aren’t really many guys that are super cheap that will help you stuff 5 studs in. Not that most of the Colts are priced in a fashion that you would need to though.
Kalif Raymond @ 1k is an option with Humphries out. I’ll probably try and be pretty light on him though.
Jeremy McNichols-200 and D’ontae Foreman-600 are the two super cheap guys that might find their way into my lineups. At those prices, you don’t really need much. If it helps me upgrade a position somewhere else that will actually have a role in their team’s game plan I’m for it.
Foreman has had 5 carries in the past two games and McNichols has had 23 carries and 7 targets so far this season. Again neither of these guys will get you more than 3-8 points, but still at that price tag I might be a buyer.
