Week 5 Streamer Stock Watch

Hello folks,

Before hopping into a JAM-PACKED stock watch this week I just wanted to make a couple notes:

First off, my apologies for not doing a dynasty rankings update this week. In fairness to myself, I did only commit to weekly updates for the first two weeks, followed by bi-weekly updates, but I did one in Week 3 and am likely going to err closer to weekly for the rest of the season whenever I have time to do so. At this point we are close enough to the games that I will just do my next update early next week.

Second, I’ve debuted a new column which is running exclusively at The Athletic. I’m doing monthly redraft trade value tiers over there, which is a fun redraft version of the way I’ve been doing dynasty rankings on Thinking About Thinking for a few years. If you’re an Athletic subscriber I suspect you’ll enjoy this project, and if you’re not — I think you’re missing out on some fantastic content from the entirety of their staff and I would encourage you to subscribe!

My redraft trade tiers are loosely based on Fantasy Points’ WAR model, which is created by my Dynasty Points co-host Lucas Gilbert.

With all that out of the way, I want to be very clear that what I’m doing for The Athletic is a new project I’ve never offered prior, and this newsletter will remain the exclusive home for all my dynasty content, dynasty rankings, best ball content, off-season content, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide. I am never going to cheat you.

Now let’s get into the Week 5 Streamer Stock Watch — which is easily the most impactful week for streamer running backs yet!

The Streamer Stock Watch

You can check out my additional thoughts on each back’s outlook short-term and rest-of-season in the Sunday Drive.

As always, the idea here is to give you start/sit advice in the near term for teams relying on these backs, along with a longer-view dynasty stance. Often once contingent plays start to rank at the top of the board, these backs are core decision-points in DFS lineups. The steamers are ranked in order of my preference in starting them in the coming week, both by tier and within each tier.

For the early-weeks I’m also going to include some key rookies who were drafted in the top-72 but who folks may be questioning when to start until / unless their roles grow over time.

The categorizations listed below each player are taken from the format of my pre-season annotated RB tiers. Refer to the legend below for what each term mean: (or ask in the comments if you need more clarification)