Week 10 Fantasy Football Sneaky Starts & Sleepers

Nov 08, 2023

Rob Schumacher/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK

All but the luckiest fantasy owners at some point need to find the proverbial diamond in the rough—a waiver wire or bench player capable of putting up some points in a pinch. This weekly feature is dedicated to that part of fantasy football. It's not pretty, but it's part of the game.

Our signature strength-of-schedule metric, adjusted fantasy points allowed (aFPA), is now using only 2023 data. Unlike SOS tools at other sites, we can adjust a defense’s fantasy points allowed by its schedule bias, so it provides a better “apples-to-apples” comparison. I’ll put the defense’s aFPA rank in parentheses below. The higher the number, the better the matchup.

Last week, several of my Sneaky Starts delivered moderate-to-monster games, including Sam Howell, Derek Carr, Gus Edwards, Kareem Hunt, Tank Dell (overall WR1), Nico Collins, Diontae Johnson, Rashee Rice, Jahan Dotson, Cole Kmet, Dalton Kincaid, Jake Ferguson, and Taysom Hill.

Let’s see who might surprise in Week 10:

Quarterbacks

Sam Howell, Commanders (@ SEA, 25)

Keep rolling with Sam Howell, who is second in the league in passing yards and seventh in touchdown passes. He’s also adding about 17 yards as a runner. Seattle has been a bit up and down against the position, but have yielded 255 yards, 1.26 total touchdowns, and 29 yards rushing, on average, to enemy quarterbacks.