Each week during the 2022 NFL season, Field Yates will help fantasy football managers by providing the precise intel needed on the most important, fantasy-relevant storylines, with some help from friends at ESPN, who offer the best and freshest insight into what matters most. You'll hear from our incredible team of NFL Nation reporters, our national reporters -- including fantasy football-obsessed Adam Schefter -- and our fantasy analysts here at ESPN. Field's rolodex is vast; he'll dial up whomever he needs. This is the Field Pass.
Cooper Kupp is inevitable.
That's the only thing that I am certain of through two weeks of the 2022 NFL season.
All right, so it's not the only thing, but Week 2 was a reminder of the perils of reading too much into Week 1. Things change in a hurry, and the vibes -- good or bad -- can shift dramatically in the span of a few days.
Players who flashed in Week 1 came back down to earth, while those who stumbled out of the gates in Week 1 reminded us that they are still, in fact, good at football (Mike Williams always has been, always will be).
This is the roller coaster that we call the first month -- maybe a little more -- of the NFL season. We get so excited to finally have information to process after Week 1 that we make the entirely understandable mistake of assuming that Week 1 is the beginning of trends, rather than potentially a week full of exceptions.
The sample size has now doubled after two full NFL regular-season weeks, which certainly helps us feel a bit more confident in some things. But I could go through a million reminders of early-season strong performances that were worth their weight in dust; I'm old enough to remember when Sam Darnold was tied for the lead in rushing touchdowns nearly a quarter of the way through last season.
So those of us here at Field Pass HQ are here to remind you that we, too, remain in information-gathering mode this season, a process that will continue for the remaining 16 weeks of the regular season but certainly feel much more refined and reliable as our reference points grow.
Our goal is to contextualize as much of the information that we already have and help you make the best lineup decisions you can.
Let's get to it!
You can't bench legends, right?
Tom Brady is the greatest player in NFL history. Aaron Rodgers is -- in the estimation of some respected football minds -- the most talented quarterback the game has ever seen.
Their teams square off on Sunday, and in a 10-team fantasy league, I wouldn't have either of them in my lineup.