You spent countless hours researching for your fantasy draft. Or maybe you just tailed all of my “Exodia” plays and felt amazing about it. Either way, now is the time when fantasy championships are secured or fumbled. The instant gratification of your draft has passed, and we’re now faced with the avalanche of information that cascades from each week of NFL football.
Luckily for you, I’m here to sift through all of it, separate the signal from the noise, and show you how to continue managing your rosters for a full season of success. Welcome to “The Week 3 Everything Report.”
This would be an impossible task if not for the army of ball-knowing film charters and the Fantasy Points Data Suite powered by their insights at our disposal. This is our edge.
Among the best tools for our task are “Expected Fantasy Points” (XFP). This metric tells us how many fantasy points a perfectly average player would have scored given perfectly average luck, taking into account the volume, location, and depth (among several other factors) of all their targets and touches. While your competition will primarily be tracking a player’s fantasy points (or perhaps their raw touch total), we can precisely identify both positive and negative regression candidates by comparing a player’s XFP to their actual output.
But it isn’t always that easy. Some players and offenses are just very good, making them capable of consistently outperforming their XFP over the entire season. The reverse is also true. Some players or teams are just bad, and will continue to fall short of their volume-based expectation all year. Over the course of the year, many players’ roles will grow, and others’ will shrink. Some power-law offenses will provide unexpected explosions of fantasy production, and others will sputter. To make sense of it all, we’ll reach deep into our toolbox of data to paint you the most complete picture possible, covering every relevant situation each week.
Let’s get into the takeaways.
Top-30 XFP Leaderboard
5 Key Takeaways
1. It’s so over… We’re so back!
A number of our Exodia players who stumbled out of the gate in Week 1 bounced right back in Week 2.
You really do love to see it. I kept telling you (but also having to remind myself): don’t overreact after one week of football. Even now, we’re still only ~12% of the way through the 2025 fantasy season.
Drake Maye balled out against the Dolphins. He went 19 of 23 for 230 yards, 2 touchdowns, and 1 interception — good for a 137.3 passer rating (2nd-best of the week, behind Jared Goff). On the ground, he added 7 carries for 34 yards and a touchdown, with three designed runs (2nd-most on the week, up from just one in Week 1). Altogether, Maye finished with 26.3 fantasy points — 3rd-most among all QBs (behind only Goff and Russell Wilson).
To be fair, the Miami Dolphins might have the worst defense in football. But as a Maye owner, you couldn't really have asked for anything more in Week 2.
Is Cam Skattebo already the Giants’ RB1? Already?! My preseason timeline didn’t have him leading the backfield in snaps until Week 5, and then becoming 2025 Javonte Williams / 2019 Leonard Fournette / Marshall Chalk until about Week 9. Instead, it looks like we’re well ahead of schedule, baby!
