Week 6 Fantasy Football Sneaky Starts & Sleepers

Oct 11, 2023

Jenna Watson-USA TODAY Sports

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 are able to 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-big games, including Jared Goff, Sam Howell, Russell Wilson, Brock Purdy, Breece Hall, Jaleel McLaughlin, Adam Thielen, DeAndre Hopkins, Curtis Samuel, Cole Kmet, Zach Ertz, Logan Thomas, Dalton Schultz, and Tyler Conklin.

Let's see who might surprise this week...

Quarterbacks

Matthew Stafford, Rams (vs. ARI, 32)

Through five games, Matthew Stafford is the QB17 and now he has Cooper Kupp back. He also has the best QB aFPA matchup in the league thanks to big games from Joe Burrow (317/3) and Daniel Jones (321/2), who have both struggled in all matchups save for the Cardinals.