Week 10 Field Pass: Potential impact of Josh Allen injury, how to value JuJu Smith-Schuster (2024)

Each week during the 2022 NFL season, Field Yates will help fantasy football managers by providing the precise intel needed on the most important, fantasy-relevant storylines. Field's Rolodex is vast; he'll dial up whomever he needs. This is the Field Pass.

The best player in fantasy football this season has been Bills quarterback Josh Allen. Despite having played just eight games this season (the Bills have already crossed their bye week), Allen has scored 8.42 more points than any other player in the league (Tyreek Hill is second) and is averaging 26.9 points per game, 1.4 more than the closest player, Patrick Mahomes.

Now, it stands to reason that a quarterback will be the highest-scoring player in fantasy, but that should not mitigate the brilliance of Allen's work.

He is currently day-to-day with an elbow injury suffered near the end of Buffalo's Week 9 game, leaving his status in a heavyweight matchup against the Vikings on Sunday uncertain for now.

For fantasy purposes, the equation is simple: If he plays, you play him.

But replacing Allen is an impossible task under any circ*mstances, and given how mediocre quarterback play has been this season in fantasy, it's especially tricky. We've belabored the point about how unspectacular usual fantasy QB stars have been (think Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, Matthew Stafford, etc.), and there really haven't been that many signal-callers who have overachieved this year, either.

There was a clear and obvious priority add for anyone who has Allen: Justin Fields, whose rocket ship ascension over the past five weeks has him as the eighth-highest-scoring quarterback on the season at 18.3 points per game. More pertinent to the matter is that over the past four weeks, Fields has more fantasy points than any other player in the league. He was the highest-scoring quarterback in the league in Week 9, when he set the NFL record for the most rushing yards in a regular-season game by a quarterback with 178.

He was available in more than 52% of leagues when the week began, but that number shriveled during the first run of waivers, as he's now available in just 20% of leagues. If you're in one of the leagues that let him slide through, go grab him now.

For those of you who missed out on Fields, Daniel Jones and Jimmy Garoppolo are my next two favorite adds specifically for Week 10.

The other side of the Allen equation is what his health means for the value of his teammates. Wideout Stefon Diggs has been among the best players in all of fantasy this season, ranking second among wide receivers in fantasy points per game at 23.5. Diggs is too otherworldly to ever consider benching him, even if his stock is likely to take a dip with Allen off the field. The good news is that Case Keenum -- Allen's replacement -- is not only a solid backup but a quarterback with whom Diggs has chemistry from their season in Minnesota together in 2017 (Diggs had 849 yards and eight touchdowns that season). Diggs remains in the top-10 wide receiver conversation for me.

Beyond Diggs, fellow wideout Gabe Davis loses some of the ceiling that comes with playing with perhaps the strongest-armed quarterback in the entire league, as Davis' size and speed mesh seamlessly with Allen's rocket arm. The trouble is that Davis has been an up-and-down player this season in fantasy: He has three games with at least 16.4 fantasy points but four games with 6.7 or fewer points. He hasn't had four catches in a game since Week 1. Davis is still a fringe top-30 play, but the boom game is less likely without Allen.

I'm not sure any other Bills player sees his fantasy outlook change dramatically with this news. Tight end Dawson Knox has only one game with 10 or more fantasy points this season, and no other wideout or tight end has more than 182 yards for the season beyond Diggs, Davis and Knox.

No matter what way you slice it, any timed missed for Josh Allen would be a major, major bummer. He's as good as it gets in the NFL right now and here's to hoping that he's on this field this Sunday against Minnesota.

Let's take a spin around the NFL for more thoughts for Week 10's Field Pass.

The unstoppable Dolphins duo

We've written about Tyreek Hill's season in Miami previously in this space, but it feels like it's worth a revisit. Specifically, in conjunction with his teammate and fellow wideout Jaylen Waddle, as the two of them are more than halfway through what could be a historic season.

Let's look at where they stand right now in four major statistical categories:

Tyreek Hill
Catches: 76 (1st)
Targets: 100 (1st)
Receiving yards: 1,104 (1st)
Fantasy points: 206.9 (2nd overall, 1st among WRs)

Jaylen Waddle
Catches: 47 (T-10th)
Targets: 70 (T-13th)
Receiving yards: 812 (5th)
Fantasy points 163.9 (5th among WRs)

There are many things that we have learned since the start of the season. Among them is that this offense quarterbacked by Tua Tagovailoa is more than capable of keeping these two players afloat in fantasy -- it's allowing them to dominate.

Not only is Hill atop the NFL in the aforementioned categories (note: he has played one more game than players who have had their bye, such as Cooper Kupp), but he is currently on pace to break the NFL's receiving yardage record for a single season. While he has one extra game at his disposal than Calvin Johnson did when he set the mark of 1,964 back in 2012, Hill is averaging just 0.1 yards per game fewer than Megatron did. He's on track for 143.5 catches this season, which would shatter his own personal best of 111 from last season. Many -- and I'll be the first to admit that I am a part of this group -- forecasted that Hill would dip from an elite WR1 to a lower-end WR1 (he was WR8 on my preseason board) with the transition from Patrick Mahomes to Tagovailoa. Such is not the case at all, as Hill is -- on a per-game basis -- better than he's ever been, as his 23.0 points per game is superior to his previous career best of 21.9.

Waddle has seen a transformation that has me thinking back to his Alabama days -- and it's remarkable. While he was spectacular last season in setting the record for most catches by a rookie with 104, Waddle also was outside the top 100 in terms of yards per reception at 9.8. It was a byproduct of a shaky offensive line that couldn't protect long enough to set up vertical throws, in stark contrast to his college days, when he averaged over 44 yards per touchdown catch during his final Alabama season.

Of the 104 players who have at least 20 catches so far this season, Waddle leads all of them with 17.3 yards per catch, while only Hill and Justin Jefferson have more receptions of at least 20 yards. The Dolphins have unleashed Waddle in a way that is a perfect match for what he can do better than almost any player in the NFL.

We've still got half the season to go, but what Hill and Waddle are doing right now is exceptional. If they can hold this pace, they would become the first set of teammates to finish within the top five of wide receiver scoring in the same season since Emmanuel Sanders and the late Demaryius Thomas in 2014.

They're currently on pace for a combined 3,619 receiving yards. The most receiving yards in a single season by a pair of teammates is 3,174 by Herman Moore and Brett Perriman for the 1995 Detroit Lions. Their production is jaw-dropping, and this machinelike Dolphins duo is carrying squads all over the fantasy football landscape.

JuJu making his mark in KC

Prior to the season, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes issued an apology to those of us in the fantasy football world. In predicting which Chiefs wide receiver would be his preferred target, Mahomes offered an answer that closed with this: "So I'm sorry to all you fantasy football guys. It's going to come from everywhere, so you're going to have to kind of choose the right guy every week."

While we appreciated the honesty from one of the game's greats, we were hopeful that the Chiefs offense would prove its own most valuable player wrong. As of late, that appears to be the case, as JuJu Smith-Schuster has seemingly settled into a top wideout role for Kansas City. Over his past three games, Smith-Schuster has done as follows:

Week 6: 5 catches, 113 yards, TD, 22.3 fantasy points (WR7 for the week)
Week 7: 7 catches, 124 yards, TD, 25.4 fantasy points (WR4)
Week 9: 10 catches, 88 yards, 18.8 fantasy points (WR8)

While it should be noted that Mecole Hardman has also been excellent over the past three games (he has five touchdowns in that span), Hardman has a total of 17 targets in those three games, while Smith-Schuster has 25. That kind of volume in an offense that is built around Mahomes is good enough for me to make JuJu a top-25 (or higher) wide receiver in my weekly ranks.

Backfield musings

Let's take a look around the league at some of the things that caught our attention from a backfield perspective in Week 9 and what they might mean going forward.

Arizona Cardinals: James Conner returned to the lineup for the Cardinals after missing multiple games because of a rib injury. Given that Eno Benjamin had done a sufficient job in his absence, it was notable that Conner immediately came back as the clear starter: He played 72% of the snaps, rushed on seven of the 12 running back attempts and saw five targets. While Conner hasn't been the touchdown machine he was last season, he's a low-end RB2.

Kansas City Chiefs: Clyde Edwards-Helaire was breaking projection models earlier this season when he kept finding the end zone, as he scored five touchdowns in the first four games of the season. He has since cooled off, with just 119 total yards and one touchdown over his last four games, each with fewer than 10 fantasy points. The Chiefs are as "running back by committee" as basically any team in the NFL, as they have just one back with more than 10 fantasy points in a game since Week 5 (that was Jerick McKinnon in Week 9). When we suggested trading away CEH when his value was soaring early in the season, this was why. It's a backfield to avoid if you can.

Los Angeles Rams: The Rams' backfield remains a mess for fantasy, as Darrell Henderson Jr. had 5.6 fantasy points in Week 9, and that was nearly double any other back. There is minimal involvement in the passing game, neutralizing what is already a low ceiling. We've been anxiously awaiting the return of rookie Kyren Williams, who the team had high hopes for before his Week 1 injury. It sounds like he could be back this week and while I'll preserve a tiny bit of hope that Williams could command a large enough workload to be fantasy-relevant, the offensive line issues make me think this backfield will remain a fantasy stayaway.

Miami Dolphins: This one really caught my attention, as the Dolphins made a trade for Jeff Wilson Jr. that I did not forecast would spell major trouble for the fantasy value of Raheem Mostert. The early returns suggest otherwise, as in a competitive game with the Bears, Wilson out-snapped Mostert by four, had the same number of rushing attempts and had three catches to Mostert's zero. This is trending toward both players being flex considerations rather than one being the clear-cut starter; I've got Wilson ranked a tad ahead of Mostert for this week.