Week 16 Matchups + Injury Concerns, Big Play Big Day

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This is Melvin Gordon from the Los Angeles Chargers, and you're listening to the Fantasy Footballers podcast. To the Fantasy Footballers podcast, coming to you from pristineauction.com studios with your host, Andy Holloway, Jason Moore, and Mike Wright. Welcome in, a special day of the week. Apparently we're on the cusp of...

Christmas Day. I didn't even... It's so... My son told me this morning, we were five days away. I said, ha ha ha ha ha. Stupid boy. No, Andy. It's ho, ho. Because he is correct. We are five days away. It's December 20th. Yeah. I'm feeling a little bit disappointed only in a... Like, I didn't soak up enough Christmas spirit. You know what I mean? Like... I told this... I don't know why it's felt like we've been so busy. But I'm still waiting for the two weeks that are right before Christmas.

where you go out and look at Christmas lights and watch movies. Yeah, like I'm looking forward to that time. It's going to be good. You only got a couple days left. I mean, how early did you guys start celebrating right after Halloween? Yeah, you would think that that would have gotten it done. Still not enough, Brooks. Maybe that's a problem. Maybe we need to examine our philosophy. No, how dare you? All right. Friday, December 20th, welcome into the show.

We got Foot Clan Friday today. We got the rest of the fantasy forecast. Some news to catch you up on. Ballers on a budget. A big weekend. Three Saturday games. A Sunday slate. And then some of you, your title's going to come down to Monday night football. That's a good game. Green Bay, Minnesota. A lot on the line. Yeah. And you've got the Dalvin Cook to Madison to Boone. Boone likely starting. I mean.

Mike Boone's going to. Boone will win championships for people. That's what I'm saying. That's the truth. I believe at the end of the day, there will be people who win their championship with Mike Boone. Just like we said at the beginning of the year, nobody listens. We told you all, pick up Mike Boone if you're the Dalvin Cook owner. If you're the Alexander Madison owner, because you're the Dalvin Cook owner, pick up Mike Boone. Always handcuff your handcuffs. That's one of the big philosophies on this show. It's super successful.

Jay Grizz is here as well. It's Friday. Foot Clan Friday. Taylor Bradford, congratulations. Taylor Bradford, Foot Clan supporter from Jointhefoot.com. You win. A $55 gift card to shopballers.com. Taylor, I hope you're a champion because there is a brand new Foot Clan title T-shirt. Actually, there's a hoodie. There's a shirt. There's some mugs.

Uh, multiple ways to brag. If you don't win your championship, you can still buy those things for whoever did with. Oh, yeah. Or you can just get yourself like a ballers t-shirt. I can't imagine you would ever buy me something. If you beat me in a championship, I can honestly say I would never get you. I have the time hop app on my phone. Yep. That gives you the whatever happened a year ago, two years ago. One year ago today, do you know what you did, Jason? Probably celebrated a championship.

Oh, was that when I got Brooks Pizza? You bought Brooks a pizza before your matchup with him and delivered it to him in your weird, superstitious way of trying to pre-congratulate him for his title in order to win a title yourself. Which I did. I love pizza. As you say, you accepted the pizza with open arms. It has a consolation gift. Congratulations. You can't buy pizza on the website. Not our website.

but you can buy a full clan title shirt at shopballers.com. Let's talk news. News and notes from around the league presented by Sleeper. Dalvin Cook, not expected to play. Alexander Madison didn't practice on Thursday. After the show yesterday morning where I, you know, all but guaranteed Mike Boone starting. There was this Mike Zimmer quote about Alexander Madison, quote, has a chance. How do you interpret that situation?

I interpret that as he has a chance to do something someday. I mean, when Mike Zimmer talks about his players, you look at the history of what he said about Adam Thielen, got a lot of people excited for Thielen a whole lot of weeks, and it never came to fruition. So there's certain coaches, you know, if Bruce Ariens says something, you can usually go with that. He's like, oh, his hamstring looks bad. He's probably telling the truth.

But yeah, with Zimmer, I look at what's going on in the practice field, what the beat reporters that are close by are saying. It looks like a high ankle sprain for Alexander Madison. He didn't participate at all last week. So far not at all this week. I will be scared if he gets in a full practice. But even if he's limited on the sidelines or something, I'm not worried about Madison. All right. We have confirmation that Julian Edelman will be playing this week.

Never the best thing to have a player that needs confirmation like that that you're counting on. Last week, it was the same type of story, and he had a very bad performance. He's expected to play, but really troubling snap counts last week, an amazing bill's secondary, really a primary option in Edelman, that if you stop him, you slow this offense tremendously because we haven't seen a rapport with Mohamed Sanu.

or Nikiel Harry or Philip Dorset in recent weeks, Brady's been bad. Yeah. So I heard Brady, Brady had a quote that Edelman, like, he's basically almost called Edelman out. He's like, he needs to have a good game this week. He's like, dude is playing through some major, his shoulder, his knee. I'm worried about Edelman, but if you're in a full PPR league and he's who got you here, it's going to be, you're going to have to have a really good option on the wire.

or on your bench to end up benching Julian Edelman after one bad game. All right. Gerald Everett is going to play. Yeah, this is bad news for all of the Higbee owners. I think it does have an impact. I would prefer to not play Higby despite the fact that he has been on fire now with Everett back. I would pivot to Jacob Hollister if I was the Higby owner. Yeah, I think there's a big risk because Everett had.

what, eight reception games in the past before going down with the injury. If you're betting on a, you know, lower tier, tight in to give you big numbers, I mean, it's Henry Hollister, Hooper, Howard, Cook, Howard, probably got it. Henry, Hollister, Hooper, Howard, do you have to have your name starting with an H to be a championship worthy? Holloway. Whoa. I'm a tight in.

That's what I've always said. Derek Henry didn't practice on Thursday. Didn't practice last week. We expect them to be out there. It's not mentioned here, but Dionne Lewis is banged up too. Yeah. And Joe Mixon, this is actually, I think, something we have to keep our eyes on because he popped up on the Thursday injury report with a calf issue.

And this is a new injury. So if he is actually... And it's a great matchup. Oh, it's so good. I mean, Joe, Joe Mixen is a smash play. He would have been your start of the week, Andy, without a shred of doubt, if it wasn't too obvious that everyone in the world should be starting Joe Mixon. Like, it was like, oh, I would have gone Joe Nixon. He's great. He's just smash play. But now you have to pay attention. If he is missing practices with the calf, I mean...

There's risk. There's risk. But right now, it's preliminary. It's just a brand new injury, and that's what gives you concern. Yeah, because anytime it pops up late in the week and it's new, you didn't get to see it in a game, those have a tendency to end up with surprise inactive. And if that happened, you're in a situation with what, Giovanni Bernard against, no, I'm not. Why wouldn't you?

Why wouldn't I pivot? It makes no sense when you look at, like, this is the DeAndre Washington argument from yesterday. Here's... We just said it's a smash matchup. Joe Mixon's a top five running back this week. When Lev Bell went out, people wanted to play Bilal Powell. Mm-hmm. Okay. Geo Bernard is better than Bilal Powell. When, you know, Josh Jacobs goes out, you end up with DeAndre Washington, who's never been able to sniff the field except for injury. But everybody's going to play DeAndre Washington. I don't know why you wouldn't pivot to Bernard in a...

in a gorgeous matchup myself. I think the reason I don't want... And he catches passes. The reason I don't want to pivot to Bernard is because he's been so bad this year. He's just been, I mean, he's 3.4 yards of carry behind that line. Like, Joe Mixing was bad. And then they figured out how to make Joe Mixen on this bad team with a bad offense of line good. And when you watch the plays, we literally go to yesterday's show, I forget which show, because we're doing so many.

I said that Joe Mixon is making plays that no one else in the league would be able to do. And that's the only reason Joe makeson's been good. Now, the matchup is great. So maybe Geo could be an option. But I would rather, you know, all those other names that you just brought up. Bilal Powell was terrible on all of his carries before he had the opportunity. DeAndre Washington has not been good. That's all I'm saying. It's a great match. I would happily play Gio Bernard instantaneously if he had the backfield to himself.

Okay, would you play him over the D'Andre Washington or Boone's? Maybe. I would not. I'm on record. Yeah, you are. All right. Game Day alerts, join thefoot.com Sunday live answering your start-sick questions one hour before Sunday kickoff. Very likely you'll have a Jason Moore Sunday live experience this week. We'll get Mike back in here next week. News and notes is always brought to you by the Sleeper app. Let's get back in the forecast. Fantasy Forecast.

We've got a lot of shows, a lot of matchups to get through. Yeah, 10 matchups we're about to cover. One breath. One breath for all of them. Yesterday we covered six matchups, Texans, Buccaneers, Bills Patriots, Rams 49ers. Those are your Saturday games. Check your lineups. Make sure you get the players out of the flex into the positional spot so you have flexibility. A weird situation like the Joe Mixing one can come up and all of a sudden. You want Joe Mixing and your flex? Yeah.

While you've got these Saturday players who would normally be in your flex, get them into the RB and the wide receiver spot. Yeah, like Mostert or Gurley. And then the Giants, Redskins, Bengals, Dolphins, Saints, Titans. We covered those games yesterday as well. Let's jump into the Steelers' Jets matchup. The Steelers are 8 and 6. The Jets are 5 and 9. Steelers on the road here and just three-point favorites and a 37 point over under. The Steelers, while...

Look, they're defined by their defense right now. They're fighting for a playoff spot. But the truth is they can, they're going to win dirty each and every week. And they've done an amazing job coaching their way through. No Big Ben. You know, you've got Duck Hodges behind center. You've had no James Connor, no Juju. That'll change this week. It looks like it. Juju got full practice yesterday. So it appears he's going to be back on the field. You don't.

put him in your lineup. No, no, I'm not starting Juju Smith-Schuster by any means, but it is good news for Pittsburgh, which is mostly irrelevant. Because there's only one player on Pittsburgh that you can consider starting, and that's James Connor. That's correct. James Connor, they want to integrate them into every, they want to win with defense and James Connor, if they can.

If Connor's body allows them to do that. And, you know, last week, he was all right. Well, you saw a major timeshare last week, which is not, you know, you look at the weeks prior when he was healthy. You know, James Connor three weeks ago played like, or three games go was 83% of, you know, the offensive snaps. This last week was 58%. But I still think he's being given the most valuable snaps. The ones that matter, that's when Connor's out there.