What’s up everyone and welcome to Ben’s Building Blocks! If you’ve never read my content before, welcome. To those that have, welcome back. I truly appreciate everyone that reads and supports during NFL season. This article is designed for me to highlight the top plays of the week, and my overall player pool for the main slate. Obviously, things can change rapidly in the NFL with injury news on the weekends, so I would be sure to subscribe to our premium package for access to my Final Thoughts cheat sheet, our premium discord channel and my core plays. Our Core Plays product gives you the ability to tail all of our analysts in your contests each week. We do the work for you, and you simply plug and play with our premium Core Plays. With that being said, let’s hop into the three game Saturday slate…

Top Plays

Jonathan Taylor

Taylor will likely be the highest-owned player on the Saturday slate, but I’m finding a hard time avoiding him unless building 6-7+ teams for this slate. It’s only three games, and he’s far and away the top-rated value priced at $7,200. Taylor has enjoyed and up-and-down 2022 season, but it’s been way more up since Jeff Saturday took over as Colts HC. Since Saturday took the helm, Taylor has been fed racking up over 23 touches per game and over 100 all-purpose yards per game. Minnesota is an average at best run-defense, that has also allowed the seventh-most catches to opposing running backs. Coming off their bye week, Taylor should be the healthiest he’s been since the beginning of the season and we should expect another monster workload on Saturday.

Amari Cooper

The weather in Cleveland doesn’t look amazing this weekend, but it’s even worse in Buffalo and we’re going to need to get different on a three game slate. Currently, Cooper is outside the top-eight in projected ownership at the WR position despite being in one of the best spots on Saturday. It’s been widely publicized that he struggles on the road, yet everyone seems to want to jam in Donovan Peoples-Jones over him at home this week. Cooper is averaging over 21 PPR-point per game in Cleveland this season, compared to  under 7 PPR-points per game on the road. He’s also scored a touchdown in five of his six home games this season — the outlier being a 94 yard performance against the Buccaneers where we has tackled inside the five on a long gain. Deshaun Watson should continue to improve weekly, while Cooper has averaged eight targets per game in the two games with Watson. Baltimore has surrendered the seventh-most PPR-points per game to wide receivers this season.

There are other strong plays such as Justin Jefferson and Raheem Mostert who will be massively owned and tough to avoid in any cash game or small-field lineup. Mostert in particular would be a tough avoid if Jeff Wilson were to miss this weeks game.

Low-Owned Pivots

Alec Pierce

Pierce is just $3,900 on DraftKings this Saturday, but not expected to be owned with sitting outside the top-ten in receivers in terms of projected ownership. The narrative was that Pierce was fading since Jeff Saturday took over as coach, but he’s posted 20 targets through four games with Saturday for an average of five per game. He’s run a route on 70%+ of Matt Ryan’s drop-backs in the Jeff Saturday era, and this is one of the best spots he will see the remainder of the season. Minnesota has allowed some of the most explosive pass plays allowed per Sharp Football Stats and they’ve been trending in the wrong direction. They gave up multiple long touchdowns last week, and Pierce leads the Colts in aDOT at 12 yards. Targeting big play receivers against the Vikings has been our go-to and I think Pierce should be some deep looks on Saturday.

Mark Andrews or JK Dobbins

It’s only a three game slate and seeing Mark Andrews outside the top-three in projected tight-end ownership is pretty crazy. Andrews/Dobbins are both options to correlate with Amari Cooper without having to stack multiple pieces from this game. Andrews had a poor game last week, but has historically smashed the Browns and with Tyler Huntley at QB. Dobbins clearly doesn’t have his top-end speed back, but Cleveland is one of the worst run-defenses in the NFL and the Ravens didn’t seem to limit him much at all last week.

I also like Dawson Knox in the expected snow in Buffalo. Miami has been a bottom-three tight end defense over the majority of the season and have now allowed the second-most catches and fifth-most fantasy points to the position.

Bold Call of the Week

Alec Pierce scores a 40+ yard TD!

Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)