Trades You Need To Make In Fantasy Football Before Week 5
Trade Targets For Fantasy Football Week 5
If you’re going to win a fantasy football championship, you have to be trying to find ways to make your team better week in and week out. One of the best ways to do that is to shop the trade market. Be active with making trade offers, updating your trade block, and engaging in conversation with your league mates. It’s also important that you make quality trades. The best way to make sure you don’t get taken advantage of by your league mates and that you are offering fair deals is to utilize our fully customizable redraft fantasy football trade calculator. Now here are a few buys and sells to consider building your trades around in Week 5
More: Fantasy Notebook: All The Usage Data From Week 4
Buy Xavier Worthy
RIP Rashee Rice. That one hurts, man. He was on his way to a league-winner season for all of us who were eating up the value in draft’s this summer. But one man’s misfortune is another man’s opportunity. The door is now wide open for rookie first rounder Xavier Worthy to become a significant figure in the Kansas City offense. He’s certainly not going to match Rice’s production, it would be silly to think that. He’s not even going to play the same role—Rice was dominating the middle and short areas of the field while Worthy makes his money out wide and deep. However, that doesn’t mean that Worthy won’t get more looks. With a target commander like Rice suddenly out of the offense, the targets are going to be distributed elsewhere. Worthy will surely be atop that list.
Worthy scored extremely well in our rookie wide receiver prospect model at YardsPerFantasy.com. He’s a great young player. The Chiefs recognized this when they drafted him in the first round. We can expect him to be more involved in the game plan moving forward. Again, he’s not going to do the things that Rice did. But, in the absence of Rice, Andy Reid and company will be looking to scheme up new ways to move the football. That will mean an increase in screens, jet sweeps, etc featuring their explosive rookie. But Worthy is not just a manufactured touch guy or a straight line vertical threat on the outside. He can run real routes. That’s why we loved him so much coming out of Texas. Hopefully the Chiefs recognize this and tap a bit more into his route tree.
So far, Worthy has been hit or miss from a fantasy perspective. He scored two touchdowns and more than 20 fantasy points in his NFL debut but followed that up with two stinkers of 4.2 and 5.0 fantasy points. Then in Week 4, he found the end zone again on a 54-yard bomb. Worthy has been boom or bust which is what we expected coming into the season. But if his volume goes up, that will only enhance the chances of him having a “boom” week and it will make the “boom” weeks a bit more “boom-a-rrific.”
Don’t buy Worthy expecting him to be the next Rashee Rice or Tyreek Hill, but if Rice being out can get his target share up to 20%, he can be a more consistent contributor and of course we know he possesses a massive ceiling.
Buy Dontayvion Wicks
Christian Watson suffered a pretty serious ankle injury in Week 4 and is in line to miss considerable time. That opens the door for Dontayvion Wicks to become a regular part of the Packers offense. If you remember, I talked about Wicks as a sell a couple weeks ago, citing the fact that he is just not running the routes or commanding the targets necessary to be a reliable fantasy contributor. What I maybe failed to fully recognize was the contingent value that he provides. There are so few “handcuff” wide receivers in fantasy football, but Wicks is one of them. When one of the starting three go down, Wicks becomes very usable. That was reflected in his Week 4 performance when he stepped in for the injured Watson.
Wicks ran 80% of the routes and he commanded a team-high 24% target share. That’s what we need! And if you remember back to last season, Wicks finished the regular season with four top-36 fantasy performances in the final six weeks. That included a WR5 finish in Week 18. He’s a playmaker with size and speed and he has the trust of Matt LaFleur and Jordan Love.
Watson is expected to be out a while so Wicks should be a good play for at least the next several weeks. Looking ahead to the Packers upcoming opponents, their next five matchups are against the Rams, Cardinals, Texans, Jaguars, and Lions. It doesn’t get much juicier than that.
Buy Jordan Mason
It seems like the majority of fantasy managers are treating Jordan Mason as if Christian McCaffrey’s return is imminent. Maybe it is, I don’t know, but I would bet that we get more starts from Jordan Mason rest of season than we do from McCaffrey. I mean, McCaffrey just got back from his doctor’s visit that took him halfway across the world to Germany. That doesn’t scream ‘guy about to return’ to me. I am deeply concerned about the availability of McCaffrey for the rest of the season. Last week, Kyle Shanahan admitted that McCaffrey is dealing with achilles tendinitis in both legs. Then we got the report from Ian Rapaport that suggested we might not see McCaffrey again until November.
I’m taking all of this information, plus McCaffrey’s injury history and 2023 workload and aggressively trying to acquire Jordan Mason wherever I can. He is currently the RB5 in PPR formats and he has scored 17 or more fantasy points in three of four games. The 49ers have entrusted him with a full-blown bellcow workload and he is thriving. He’s not catching a ton of passes but he’s averaging 23 carries per game and the touchdown opportunities are plentiful. For as long as McCaffrey is out, Mason is a top-5 running back in fantasy. If McCaffrey comes back, Mason would become the No. 1 handcuff running back in all of fantasy football which is still incredibly valuable, especially given what we know about McCaffrey’s injury situation. Even if McCaffrey is cleared, it’s likely he misses time again with the same or a different injury.
The uncertainty around this situation means there is opportunity to get Mason at a value on the open market. If the Mason manager in your league believes McCaffrey will be back sooner than later and the clock is about to strike midnight on Mason, swoop in and get that deal done. You could end up with the league winner of all league winners. I have Mason ranked inside my top-50 players rest of season. I would take him over Travis Etienne, Tee Higgins, JK Dobbins, or Amari Cooper, just to name a few.
Buy Travis Kelce
Maybe I’m a sucker for this one because Travis Kelce has looked like a complete dust ball through the first month of the season. However, watching this team it became clear that a lot of the elements of the offense that used to be reserved for Travis Kelce were shifted towards Rashee Rice. Rice was getting a ton of those short/intermediate middle of the field looks that used to be a staple of Kelce’s game. Now with Rice out, those will likely go back in Kelce’s direction. And while he may not have the juice that he once had to be a true playmaker at the position, we should start seeing the volume go back up for ol’ 87. Given the state of the tight end position, that’s really all we can ask for from a fantasy football perspective.
And if we look back at Week 4 when Rice left early with the knee injury, Kelce was targeted on a season-high 31% of Patrick Mahomes’ passes. His seven catches on nine targets for 89 yards was a much more familiar stat line. Don’t expect to get the Travis Kelce of old, but he can still be top-5 at the position from here on out and get it done on sheer volume.
Sell Michael Pittman
One of my biggest mistakes this summer was overrating the Colts offense. I thought Anthony Richardson was ready to take the next step as a passer. Instead, he may have even taken a step back. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in Anthony Richardson. He’s young developing quarterback, it’s just not there yet and he’s farther away than I realized. Unfortunately, that carries over to his pass catchers. Michael Pittman thrived in 2023 with Gardner Minshew at quarterback. The volume of the offense was high and Pittman commanded targets like a true alpha wide receiver. The target share is still there in 2024, but the pass volume and efficiency has cratered. Like Richardson, I still like Pittman from a dynasty perspective. But I’m out in redraft.
Luckily for those of us who drafted Pittman, Week 4 opened up a nice sell window. That’s because Pittman saw a season-high nine targets and caught six for 113 yards and scored 17.3 PPR points. It was much more in line with what we saw last year and were expecting this season. However, with Richardson getting injured on the first possession, all of that production came with Joe Flacco at quarterback. Flacco was a massive upgrade for all Colts pass catchers. If he was the weekly starter in Indianapolis, I’d be all over Pittman. But with Richardson expected to miss minimal time, if any, I’m trying to cash out while I can.
Sell Kyle Pitts
Sell low, I don’t care. It’s over for Kyle Pitts. Everyone wanted to blame the coach for Pitts’s struggles over the last two seasons but it’s becoming clear that the fantasy football community has been overrating him all along. When guys like Elijah Higgins and Tyler Conklin are running over 90% of the routes in their offense in Week 4, Kyle Pitts was running 67%. He’s not getting the targets, his route participation has dropped every week, and he’s the TE16 in fantasy points. He has just eight catches through four games. Eight. At some point we have to just accept he’s not the guy he was made out to be. He’s not a good in-line tight end and he’s not a good wide receiver. We see this all the time with these “tweener” tight end types. It just doesn’t work. They don’t fit anywhere in an offense. The name value should allow you to get something back in return from whatever sucker in your league still believes in Kyle Pitts.
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