Fantasy Football: Week 15 Care/Don’t Care

Lamar Jackson was excellent yet again, but it didn’t show up in the fantasy stats. (Photo by Courtney Culbreath/Getty Images)

Five things I care about

A signature Lamar Jackson game

Cris Collinsworth said it best late in the game when discussing Lamar Jackson and his MVP candidacy. It’s hard to quantify what Lamar Jackson brings to this Ravens offense. There are very few teams where you watch the offense and the entire vision of what the unit is even trying to do crumbles if you imagine a different man under center. The Ravens and Lamar Jackson are in that small circle.

Rarely does fake football perfectly describe how a player performs on the field and that’s definitely the case for Jackson. He has had a verifiably hilarious fantasy football season. Well, at least the folks who didn’t roster him can muster a chuckle.

Every week it seems like you’re watching Jackson avoid sacks, whip throws into impossible windows at wild arm angles and make some of the best decisions scrambling in the open field … and then you check the fantasy box score and he has a mere 15 points or so. It’s been a mystifying season.

Week 15 was another entry in that diary. Jackson was not perfect but he added so much to the offense nonetheless.

Almost any other quarterback comes out of that Week 15 game with five to seven sacks. Jackson took just three and kept a number of drives alive to help this team win. His evolution as a scrambler continues to be so impressive. He’s probably not as fast as he once was but even still, Jackson almost never runs at full speed like he did in 2019 or 2020 because he’s now far better at setting runs up, allowing blocks to develop and creating lanes with his vision. Several of his fourth-quarter runs against the Jaguars were beautiful examples of this development.

The passing stats were a little underwhelming in Week 15. If you’re trying to put him in the MVP race, it’ll be tough to measure his aerial resume against a Brock Purdy type. That’s why…

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