NFL Fantasy Football Matchup Projections for Week 1 (2015-16)

The first weekend of the NFL season is finally here. No more speculations about what teams and players will dominate the league and compete for the Super Bowl. For instance, the Green Bay Packers face their longtime rivals, the Chicago Bears on Sunday afternoon. Plus the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants face off in the Sunday nightcap. Teams and coaches will need to prove themselves on the field. Sure fans care about wins and losses, but what about the competition within the competition–fantasy football leagues. Our fantasy draft has come and went and now we can publish our first fantasy football projections for Week 1. We’ll see if all that hard work in the draft will make sense. Let’s take a look at ESPN’s projections in our league matchups.

Who’s Number One?

One of the weekend’s marquee matchups (Bears vs. Packers) will feature the number one rated fantasy football quarterback going into the season, Aaron Rodgers. Rodgers threw for over 4,000 yards, 38 touchdowns, with only five interceptions last season. Will Rodgers and the Pack be able to get back to Super Bowl and get him that second elusive Vince Lombardi trophy?

Adrian Peterson returns from his nearly year-long suspension to lead the Minnesota Vikings offensive attack. Can he be able to put his child abuse scandal behind him and return to his All-Pro form? We don’t think so. Matthew Berry and his fellow prognosticators are wrong. We didn’t draft Peterson and if we were selecting first–we would have picked another back. Based on our research, the better selection for RB1 is Le’Veon Bell of the Pittsburgh Steelers. If you weren’t fortunate enough to select either in your draft, there are plenty of backs expected to have big fantasy seasons. For example, Jamaal Charles of the Kansas City Chiefs or Marshawn Lynch of the Seattle Seahawks.

Fellow Pittsburgh Steelers Antonio Brown is the number one ranked wide receiver coming into the season. The trio of Ben Roethlisberger, Brown, and Bell should put up big numbers in the AFC North. If you weren’t lucky enough to get Brown in your draft, Demaryius Thomas of the Denver Broncos and Julio Jones of the Atlanta Falcons are expected to be fantasy studs this season.

Who’s Winning Week 1

Team Velez is expected to be the highest scorer of our fantasy football league during Week 1. He’s projected to score over 110 points in his matchup against Team Brandi. Team Weiss is projected to also score in triple digits defeating Rich-our proverbial loser. There could be two ties in our league during Week 1, including me. Hopefully, the fantasy football gods will be kind and allow me to pull out a victory against Team Corn. Some words of advice to the fellow team managers–let’s not allow Weiss and Velez to get off to big leads. They will be hard to beat.

We know that these fantasy football projections are not 110% accurate, but they make for fun trash talk leading up to NFL Sunday. Good luck teams.