Fantasy Football Week 2 Waiver Wire Spotlight: Sterling Shepard Makes Some Noise in Week 1
Let me give you a quick piece of advice as we come out of Week 1 of the NFL season and into Week 2. Go pick up Sterling Shepard off your fantasy football waiver wire. Use your FAAB or your waiver claim position on him and pick him up. Trust me on this.
In Week 1, Shepard made his return from a torn achilles and finished with two catches on four targets for 71 yards and a touchdown. Of his 2 catches and 71 yards, 65 of them came on one play as Daniel Jones hit him down field for a touchdown.
Shepard wasn’t the team’s leading target man in Week 1, that belong to running back Saquon Barkley who had seven and receiver Richie James who had six but Shepard was still out there for 71% of the team’s offensive plays, the second most on the team (41), only behind Kenny Golladay (44) who lead the team in snaps played.
So, why am I so high on Shepard here after Week 1? Why not? There is no clear-cut top guy in this offense at wide receiver. The team gave Kadarius Toney just seven snaps as he continues to be in the doghouse of head coach Brian Daboll and Kenny Golladay is a shell of the player we saw in Detroit. Rookie receiver Wan’Dale Robinson left Sunday’s game with an injury and Richie James single season high is 23 receptions and 394 yards.
When healthy, Sterling Shepard has been a go-to receiver for Daniel Jones. Now, I realize the “when healthy” part of that sentence is the bigger issue here as Shepard is always dealing with some sort of injury but in 2021, he started the season with the following stat lines:
Week 1: 7 receptions, 9 targets, 113 yards and 1 TD
Week 2: 9 receptions, 10 targets, 94 yards
That is 16 receptions, 19 targets, 207 yards and 1 TD through the first two weeks of the season. In PPR leagues he puts up 24.3 and 18.4 fantasy points during that two-game stretch. He then gets hurt in Week 3, plays just 24 snaps.
Shepard returned to the Giants lineup in Week 6 and finishes with 10 catches on 14 targets for 76 yards while playing 91% of the offensive snaps. So, in three games where he was fully healthy, we have the following combined totals of 26 receptions on 33 targets for 383 yards and a touchdown.
Shepard then goes on to pull his hammy during practice in Week 7 and miss the game, in Week 8 he had seven targets over 23 plays before suffering an injury that will cost him the next five weeks and the season was essentially lost from there. He played two more games with a Giants offense that couldn’t move the football. He finished the season still with a 26% target rate and a 21% target share
His 2020 season was much of the same, when fully healthy he was a target hog, averaging eight targets a game over the final 10 weeks of the regular season and overall finished with a 25.3% target rate and a 23.3% target share.
Over the final week of drafts, Shepard was coming off the board as WR90 with an average ADP of 261.86. What this means is that unless you are playing in a very deep league or with a bunch of New York Giants fans that Shepard is more than likely to be sitting on your waiver wire come Week 2 of the fantasy football season.
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