Fantasy Football: Roddy White and Valuable Players Who Do Not Have Great Stats

Woe is me. Woe is my fantasy team. I've stated multiple times that fantasy football is 85 percent luck after your draft. All you can do is work the waiver wire and try to start the best lineup that you can. You have no control over:

1. Fantasy League Scheduling: There's a big difference between playing a team at full-strength or playing a team with four normal starters on a bye week.
2. NFL Scheduling: For the most part, NFL schedules don't affect fantasy draft position. So there's nothing that you can do when you discover all of your players have horrible matchups in any given week.
3. Performance: You can't control how your players perform. Nor can you control how well the players on you opponent's team perform.
4. Coaching Decisions and Injuries: Players get injured, and players get benched. It happens all the time. The best you can do is try to avoid drafting players with extensive injury histories and RBs who play for Mike Shanahan.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating. IF YOU PLAY AGAINST THE TEAM THAT SCORES THE FEWEST POINTS IN A WEEK, YOU CANNOT LOSE! It's really that simple. If you happen to go against the team that scored 190 points and got 27 from their kicker, congratulations. You just got screwed, and nobody even bought you dinner.

So what's the point? The point is that you need to be able to view your fantasy team with as little bias as possible, which means really examining players' performances, not just whether you won or lost in a given week. Here are a few quick examples:  

Ray Rice

Rice broke a long run off and was tackled at the Texans one-yard line. Rice came out for one play, and Ricky Williams, of course, scored the short TD.

Rice still had a nice game, especially in PPR leagues. But adding those six points could have been the difference between victory and defeat for your fantasy team.  

Mario Manningham

He had a nice bounce-back week, finally outscoring Victor Cruz. But it could've been a far better game. Manningham drew a pass-interference penalty when he beat his defender and had nobody between him and the end zone. The defender grabbed Manningham, preventing an easy TD.

Later in the game, Manningham appeared to have scored a TD, but the TD was overturned and Manningham was ruled down an inch short of the goal line. Ahmad Bradshaw scored on the next play. If you owned Manningham and were playing against Bradshaw, that was a 12-point swing. That's how you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Roddy White

Boy, were we expecting more from White with Julio Jones out. Instead, the Falcons leaned heavily on the run. But White did his part. He drew not one, but two pass-interference penalties IN THE END ZONE. The Falcons scored both TDs from the one-yard line, and White got nothing.

He helped the Falcons win and was targeted heavily in the red zone. But that's little consolation to fantasy owners who lost by less than those 12 points White could have easily had.

These examples came easily to me because I own all of these players on my team. And I was paying very close attention to what happened to each of them. (God bless the RedZone Channel)

I know that these players had better games than their fantasy production would suggest. The point isn't to focus on your "bad beat" stories, not matter how intricately you got screwed.

The point is to find players who are outperforming their current fantasy value. There will be some Roddy White owners who start to panic this week, but they shouldn't. White was incredibly close to adding two TDs to his Week 6 total. Eventually, he will catch those TDs, pass interference or no pass interference.

Before you run out and try to sell a player because he's performing poorly, really check out what he's actually done in games. On the flip side, if you have a player who is performing well, check out what he's actually done. If a player has scored 40 percent of his fantasy points on two long plays where defenders just missed a tackle or fell down, you can't count on that happening again. So you might want to sell before other owners realize that he's just gotten lucky.

There's nothing you can do to change the first six weeks of your fantasy season. You can't un-draft Jamaal Charles. But you're not dead. In most leagues with 13 or 14 regular-season games, a team with six losses can make the playoffs. So even if you're 0-6, you're not dead yet. So have fun with it. Take some chances, and swing for the fences.

Do you have any examples I missed from Week 6? Let me know. Please use the comments or reach out to me on Twitter if you have anything to add to the discussion. Good luck to all on Monday night and in Week 7.