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Email from Eric S.: Since the original Duck Hands, Larry Donnell, is a tight end, can we call Coby Fleener “Duck Hands Sr.”?
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Apparently this edition of the Harris Mailbag will be nickname-heavy. On my podcast, for some incredibly stupid reason, I once proclaimed that Donnell doesn’t merely have cinderblocks where his hands should be, because somehow that didn’t seem pejorative enough. Instead I said that Donnell has “wooden ducks for hands,” and it stuck, and now every time a NFL receiver drops a pass, my Twitter feed lights up with several dozen invocations of the “Duck Hands” epithet.
Read More: NFL Waiver Wire Workout Week 11
But Eric, you can’t double down on Harris Football nicknames! Everyone knows Coby Fleener—who on Thursday night fumbled one in the red zone and had a false start in the red zone, before falling ass-backwards into a late touchdown catch—is known as the “Human Brain Fart.” And that’s because Fleener’s problem isn’t just his hands. In four years with the Colts and now one with the Saints, Fleener has proved there are so many ways to mess up a play! You can run the wrong route. You can forget there’s a football game going on and have a pass strike you while you’re not looking. You can see nothing but green grass between you and the end zone and fall down anyway. If we ever needed proof that going to Stanford on a football scholarship doesn’t mean you’re going to Stanford, here comes the Human Brain Fart to barrel past you on the way to the kitchen and accidentally destroy your pillow fort.
Ben: Is being a Human Brain Fart contagious? What if Greg Olsen contracts? Are shoulder pads enough protection? Am I having a brain fart right now???
In the end, the stat lines for Thursday’s two tight ends are galling: Fleener gets you three catches for 19 yards and a touchdown while Olsen goes 4/33/0. Which means despite a performance that made Twitter weep, the H.B.F. was a better fantasy player than Olsen, who came into the game on pace for a 1,265-yard season. This is the way fantasy works, of course: one-game sample sizes are brutal and nasty and unpredictable to the max—if they were predictable we’d all be DraftKings millionaires by now.
Cam, your chin… Photo by Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports
The offensive headline for the Panthers coming out of this game is the blocking up front: center Ryan Kalil was knocked out again, and from that moment I think Carolina might’ve had one gain of more than five yards. Olsen got caught up in the same slop that took down everyone, including Cam Newton, who went 14-of-33 for 192 yards. Remember when these guys averaged a league-high 31.3 scoreboard points per game last year? That’s gone, and our assessment of the fantasy values of all these players has to get way more realistic.
Speaking of Cam: his little beard thing—if what he’s going for is the look of a person who has perpetually dipped his chin in a bubble bath, well played!
Keith: What is Sammy Watkins’s value the rest of the year?
The trouble began with Watkins back in April, when he needed surgery for a stress fracture in his foot. We didn’t hear about the injury until June, whereupon a justifiable freak-out ensued, but the Bills cooed sweetly in our ears for a couple months and everybody decided it would still be cool to make Watkins a second-round fantasy pick.
Oops.
Right away someone began leaking to Adam Schefter that Watkins’s foot didn’t feel right; he scuffled through the season’s first two games and then went on IR. He didn’t require another surgery, and is technically eligible to return Week 12 against the Jaguars.
Trying to get back to the game like. Photo by Kevin Hoffman-USA TODAY Sports
But will he? I have no idea. The media echo chamber will probably give contrary indications for a couple weeks, but the facts are that while the Bills haven’t yet used up their one-time-only IR activation chip, Watkins also hasn’t practiced yet. It’s hard to imagine he’s in the kind of condition that would allow him to run 30 to 40 wind sprints in a NFL game with 11 polymer-clad crazy people trying to kill him.
If Watkins does come back at all, his first game back will almost certainly be hands-off for fantasy, because you’ll need to see him playing a bunch of snaps and looking like himself. So now we’d be getting pretty deep into the fantasy playoffs, and if your team is good enough to get pretty deep into the fantasy playoffs, maybe it’s best not to tinker with it like Doc Brown looking for an extra jigowatt. I think Watkins is worth stashing in 12-team leagues, but if I’m laying odds, I’ll bet we have a hard time starting him outside desperate situations.
GONG: Does Justin “iPad Mini” Forsett have any future for fantasy relevance?
No. Well, probably not. Of course, if you’d asked me that in the winter of 2014, I’d have said the same thing. Forsett’s 1,529-scrimmage-yard season in ’14—after he had totaled just over 2,500 scrimmage yards in six combined seasons—is one of the less likely running-back outcomes of our time, up there with Samkon Gado momentarily being a thing. It was cool to see Forsett deliver again and again, but he’s 5’8″ and 190 pounds—it was never going to last. The Ravens rode him into dust that season and he broke down last year; once Baltimore’s offensive line turned mediocre, Forsett had no chance and was cut by Week 5.
When reality hits and it sucks as much as the Jaguars. Photo by Logan Bowles-USA TODAY Sports
The Lions have 73 running backs and don’t seem particularly inclined to feature Forsett in a meaningful way; Theo Riddick is a younger and probably more durable version of Forsett, who turned 31 in October. It was an awesome year, but the party is over.
Email from John R.: What’s your analysis of Fat Rob Kelley?
First, that he’s not fat! False advertising, like when they told me I couldn’t eat Lite-Brite pegs and live.
I think Kelley is pretty good. He’s a bit smaller than Matt Jones, but he’s still plenty big (6′, 228 pounds) and seems to understand how to put his power in action. I think folks looking for holes in Jones’s game will complain about him trying to turn too many carries into home runs by bouncing outside—while in fact what Washington certainly cares most about is Jones’s fumbling—but that’s not Kelley’s game. He’s one of those contact-seeking missiles. He also has an impressive ability to change vectors on the dead run. He’s not fast and he won’t jitterbug around anyone, but he consistently misleads safeties coming up to tackle him with slight changes of direction as he’s getting through a rushing lane. It’s good stuff. Is he a long-term star? I tend to think not. But for as long as his team is winning and/or Jones is fumbling, it feels pretty easy to ride Kelley as a fantasy starter.
Totally not fat. Photo by Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports
Campbell: How excited are you for The Return Of East Atlanta Santa?
Yeah, sorry, Campbell. I had to Google what that is.
T.R.O.E.A.S. is, in fact, the tenth studio album by Gucci Mane, which is scheduled to come out December 16th. (I’m sure everybody knows this fact, and is annoyed by me proudly declaring it as though I’m Vasco da Gama discovering a sea route to India.) What I know about Gucci Mane is: he likes Twitter beef, he just got out of jail, and he’s on that “Black Beatles” song that my (Big Brother Big Sister) little brother won’t stop playing.
My hip-hop education is slow but underway. I interviewed Open Mike Eagle on my Juggernaut podcast, because I love his music and think he’s a genius writer. (I based a character on OME in my new novel.) But I’m pretty far behind, man. Like, I just got to J-Dilla’s Donuts last week. By the time I catch up, Gucci Mane will be in Kanye’s cabinet.
Scott: Platoon was the first film to make me really think. I was 21. Do you have a movie that did that for you?
Still waiting. I have hopes for Office Christmas Party.
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