Everything you know about fantasy football just changed. And if you're still playing by the same rules as a few weeks ago, you're going to fall behind.

Because this one week just flipped a ton between backfield changes, new players returning from injury or suspension and what it means for the landscape of fantasy football.

So today we're breaking everything down with the 10 top takeaways you need to know if you actually want to win your fantasy league.

And we're going to start with perhaps in probably the biggest news in terms of like overall fantasy upside, Rashi Rice, whenever a top 20 overall player and some people would even suggest a top 12 to top 15 overall player is going to return from either an injury. In Rashi Rice's case, he's returning from not only an injury, but also a six game suspension. That's going to lead to a lot of questions of what happened. Well, pretty easily, early and often in this game, Rashi Rice was the priority in the offense, a team high seven catches, 42 yards, multiple touchdowns in the red zone in this one, short touchdowns, led the team with 10 targets, nobody else on the entire team. Travis Kelsey, who had a nice start to this game, had like 50 yards in the first quarter. Xavier Worthy, who despite being banged up this year is having a good season, nobody else on the entire team saw anywhere near 10 targets. He had double the amount of targets as everybody else. Worthy, Kelsey, you can keep going. Now, when you look at the snaps and everything in here, this is what it looked like. It was Rashi Rice playing 33 snaps, right? He was basically playing a slot-wide receiver 40 to 50% of the time. This is according to the PFF's data here. 19 routes run was second on the team, but this starts to get a little bit skewed. Xavier Rory stayed in the game a little bit longer. During the blowout, basically when Mahomes got pulled in the third quarter, so did Rashi Rice and a lot of other guys, which is why you're going to see rashi Rice running the same routes as guys like Hollywood Brown, similar routes to guys like Tyquin that was not the case early in this game. Just in general, Rashi Rice returning from suspension and injury wasn't going to be playing 100% of the snaps. He also plays a lot out of the slot as well. So he's naturally going to come off the field. This was a little bit exaggerated because of that blowout. But despite the blowout, I just want to call out once again, nine targets, ten targets, depending on your source, was a team high, 29% target share. 29% target share would have ranked top 10 amongst all players last year. You could see that kind of emphasized right here. Rashi Rites in his first game since injury, 39% of the snaps because of the blowout. Nobody held 10 more than 5.

This is the summary here, 10 targets for Rashi Rice.

23.2 fantasy points. This is from Michael Florio over on Twitter. I felt all of those. And a matchup against Avery and the flock league. If you watch the flock league, the flock league is a separate YouTube channel where we're basically reenacting the league or at least it's the most watch YouTube channel for fantasy football, if you want to just put it that way. Better way to say that

is the most watched fantasy football league in the world, from what I can tell. I was going up against Rashi Rice, Jemar Chase, Devont, the Smith, and that one you would think I had no chance. As of right now, I have 222 points, currently favorite to win. It's an insane matchup. Check it out if you haven't, but I felt, I felt that insane first half that Rashi Rice was having. Every single minute,

it seemed like he was scoring points. Because the dude literally was, and he was, and he It's an insane matchup. Check it out if you haven't. But I felt, I felt that insane first half that

Rashi Rites was having. Every single minute, it seemed like he was scoring points. Because the dude literally was, and he wasn't even at full strength in terms of like playing all of the snaps. Obviously, the blowout was part of that, but even in the first half, he was coming off the field a little bit. But the role was awesome. He was right back into that vintage end of 2023 beginning of 2024 rashi writes out of the slot role the same role that we saw

Xavier worthy dominate from towards the end of last year when they moved him into it. The same role that we saw Hollywood Brown have to be forced into in week one when he saw something absurd like 16 targets in that game when Xavier Worthy got hurt, right? This is the role that Patrick Mahomes is just making kingmakers out of right now. Tyreeko is even in this role in this offense. Out of the slot. Totally different player in terms of him and Rashi Rice's skill sets. But it's pretty clear right now that rest of season, if you wanted to tell me that Rashi Rice was a top 10 to top 12 player, I probably couldn't argue that much. Coming into this game, he was a top 15 player rest of season for me in my rest of season rankings in the fantasy blueprint. Check them out if you want to at join the blueprint.com. But right now it looks like we're going to get vintage Rashi Rice. He looked healthy off of that injury. This is a guy who last year came out and in just four games last year came out here, three of which of those was completed was second in the NFL amongst all wide receivers and fantasy points. If you look at this all the way over here, 16.2 and those four games, but that's skewed because he left one of them early. Second, only behind Malink neighbors. He led the chiefs during that stretch. And even when you factor in the end of 2023, led the chiefs during that stretch and receiving yards, receptions, all of that stuff. And yet, it also helps

that Patrick Mahomes looks the best he's had ever since this Rashi-Rice era, dating back to 2022 when Rice wasn't on the team. This is the best Mahomes is look, 286 yards, three touchdowns in basically two and a half quarters of play in this game before getting pulled. He looks like MVP Mahomes. and if that's going to continue, Rashi Rice has to be a

slam dunk, obvious start every single week. But if you had any questions about what the role would look like with Worthy now there and Kelsey playing good football this year, there should be no questions. Now, I am sure there was a lot of questions heading into this week because it was my personal biggest question on what is going to happen with the Carolina Panthers backfield now that Chuba Hubbard was returning from a calf injury.

We were getting a lot of reports that Chuba Hubbard and Rico.

All are expected to split the carries. We were getting reports before the game started that the Carolina Panthers coaching staff and Dave Canales was studying the backfields of like the Detroit Lions, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to see how they split up their two great running backs,

right? Just all this weird stuff that we're getting reports about it. I mean, the fact that

they were doing that is not weird. It makes sense, but the fact that we're getting reports about it is just strange. Anyways, we got exactly what they were saying that we were going to get. A split backfield. 17 carries for Rico Dottle, 14 carries for Chuba Hubbard, who did start this game, but he was highly inefficient, just 2.2 yards per carry.

Rico Donald twice is efficient with 4.6 yards per carry.

Okay, let's scroll down to their passing game usage. One catch for 17 yards for Dotto, two catches for 24 yards for Tuba Hubbard. So both of these players saw 16 plus touches in this game. Both of them were active as both receivers in terms of Routes Run and in early down situations as well. So this was a pretty clear backfield split. Nowhere near the 200 plus yard games Rico Dotto was getting the two previous weeks, and it's kind of gross. But very quietly still, Dottle had almost 100 total yards in this game. If we look up the exact snap count, you can see Chuba Hubbard played 38 snaps. That's this number right, compared to 33 snaps for Rico Dotto.

In terms of routes run, 18 routes run for Chuba Hubbard, 9 for Rico Dotto. So he's getting a little bit more usage there. Let's scroll down now to the actual usage in general in terms of where these snaps were coming from for each running back from PFF here. here if we scroll down basically if you were to read this and i won't make you read this of course

but the panthers took and opted for a simple rotation by drive. So that's basically what it was. So if Chuba Hubbard was in there to start the game, he might have gotten an extra drive in this one. If you see that he ran a couple more routes, it might have been because he was on the drive that just happened to be the two-minute offense route, things like that. So In terms of like the usage of these backs, nobody was being subbed in at the

goal line. Nobody was being subbed in for passing down situations. At least in the first game back with Chuba Hubbard there, they just said, Chuba you're getting this drive, RICO, you're getting the next drive, and that's what it was the whole game. In general, that is pretty disgusting, right? We don't have a clear starting running back here. If you look at Chuba Hubbard's first four games of the year really his his first three before injury, 67%, 73% and 63% of the snaps. During this time, Rico Dotto is playing somewhere between 20 and 40% of the

snaps. During this time, Chuba Hubbard was seeing 16 carries, 10 carries, 17 carries, and in the

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