While most of the fantasy football community has crowned a champion and laid to rest yet another outstanding season after Week 16, the battle wages on for some. If the NFL is going to play 17 weeks, their fantasy season extends accordingly. It doesn’t matter if players are being rested once their NFL teams clinch a playoff berth. The length of the season is what it is, and these fantasy players aren’t afraid to play it through. For those who are done, we salute you. For those who aren’t, prepare for the ugliness.
Week 17 is rarely known for its aesthetics. Teams that have clinched a playoff berth and have little hope of improving their seeding tend to keep their starters on the sidelines for most, if not all, of their final games. Teams out of playoff contention begin to audit their roster’s underlings in search of who goes and who stays for next season’s training camp. That leaves a very small handful of teams putting forth a full competitive effort for your fantasy championship.
If you’ve been riding the Ezekiel Elliott train all year, you may have just missed your last stop.
In addition to that, the rash of injuries we endured in Week 16 has left many fantasy rosters in complete shambles. Weeks 14 and 15 were rough as high-end producers such as Melvin Gordon, Theo Riddick and Julio Jones were stuck on the sidelines, but Week 16 was downright abusive.
Top-flight tight ends Jordan Reed and Tyler Eifert were held out from the onset, top-10 fantasy quarterbacks Marcus Mariota and Derek Carr suffered broken fibulas, Carlos Hyde tore his MCL, Ryan Mathews herniated a disk in his back, Robert Kelley suffered a knee injury, Donte Moncrief injured his shoulder, and if you were looking to lose your lunch, go back and watch video of the defensive back landing on top of Tyler Lockett’s ankle.
Coaches holding out their star players is the least of your concerns. In most leagues, the waiver wire has already been picked clean. Multiple weeks of injuries will do that to you. Playoff contenders with championship dreams bulked up on depth and left no stone unturned. Backup quarterbacks were rostered, running back handcuffs had been snatched up and any receiver who even sniffed a red-zone target was already long gone. And with a single-elimination playoff format, none of those players are ever coming back.
So if your season continues here and you have one more week to go before receiving that all-too-coveted championship hardware, we wish you nothing but the best. Your journey heads through even rockier terrain now.
Mariota, Zeke and A.J. Green may have carried you here, but your dreams now rest on the shoulders of Matt Cassel, Alfred Morris and Xavier Grimble.
Happy Holidays, everyone, and a very Happy New Year!
Howard Bender is a senior writer at FantasyAlarm.com and the host of “Overtime” on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio each Sunday from 11 p.m.-1 a.m. Follow him on Twitter @rotobuzzguy. For more from Fantasy Alarm, listen weekdays on SiriusXM from 4-6 p.m.