Welcome to the fifth weekly edition of “Raiding the IDP Waiver Wire” for 2021! For those returning for another installment of defensive player recommendations, your interest and support are appreciated!
This weekly column will help you, the reader, plunder your league’s waiver wire for real value where it counts: in your line-ups. We’ll dig into the past week’s top performers among available options for repeatable production.
“Raiding the IDP Waiver Wire” is written for fantasy football gamers in leagues that require a full complement of 11 defensive starters in leagues of 12 to 16 teams. Recommendations rely on scoring settings from FantasyPros.com, even though their value for passes defensed is a bit low. We’ll look for options at both conventional and true defensive positions as they arise. Players qualifying for this column are those rostered in no more than a third of IDP leagues on MyFantasyLeague.com (MFL). These recommendations further assume you, the manager, have finite roster space with challenging cut decisions to add new names.
Week 5 of the 2021 NFL season was particularly tough on health on both sides of the ball. While the severity of injuries was more merciful on defense, several starting linebackers went down. The Browns seemingly ran out of bodies to compete with LA’s supercharged offense, but MLB Anthony Walker was able to return to play, and rookie LB Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah approached a full workload (91% of defensive snaps) while his special-teams role decreased (17 to 5 snaps).
Fantasy gamers who built rosters focused on winning in September are in for a rude awakening in Week 6. The first wave of NFL byes hits just as injury attrition wears fantasy rosters thin. Successful navigation of the waiver wire is a vital component of a productive, resilient fantasy team. This week’s edition of “Raiding the IDP Waiver Wire” focuses on replacement production at linebacker to meet pressing needs.
Pete Werner, Saints LB
There are rarely easy answers on the waiver wire. The last player your author can recall who earned an opportunity in October and looked good enough to hold the job all season was Alexander Johnson of the 2019 Broncos. Saints rookie linebacker Pete Werner could be the best pick-up at the position since then.
The mild surprise as a second-round pick has played progressively more snaps since his first action on defense in Week 3, up to 99% of the team’s snaps in Washington this past Sunday. He piled up 13 tackles in 82 snaps after a 10-tackle outing in just 40 snaps the week prior. He’s allowing a QB rating of just 77.1 in coverage versus twelve targets.
Based on his production, Werner will be horribly expensive for those spending free-agent acquisition budget (FAAB) dollars this week! The risk is that Werner’s workload is a fluke. The Saints haven’t regularly deployed two full-time linebackers under their current defensive coordinator Dennis Allen. Werner’s Week-5 workload could have been match-up specific. The Football Team was perilously thin at wide receiver after Curtis Samuel tweaked a hamstring early in the game. QB Taylor Heinicke threatens defenses more with his legs than his arm.
A true test of Werner’s value might not come until Week 8 when the Saints host Tom Brady and the Buccaneers. New Orleans has a bye next week and draws the Geno Smith-led Seahawks in Week 7. Dates with the Falcons, Titans, and Eagles in November should also be attractive for Werner’s deployment.
Kamu Grugier-Hill (& Kevin Pierre-Louis), Texans LBs
Tyrell Adams’s name might have occurred to those reading the first paragraph under the heading “Peter Werner.” Adams played a lot on a bad defense that couldn’t get off the field, he was targeted a lot in coverage, and he ate into the snaps of Zach Cunningham. Adams bumbled his way to the 22nd most fantasy points among linebackers last season.
Tyrell Adams signed with the Bills in free agency but was cut before the 2021 season began. The Texans, meanwhile, brought in a bunch of other warm bodies to compete at inside linebacker. It took the new coaching staff just four weeks to also see that Cunningham is replaceable as an NFL player.
Kamu Grugier-Hill emerged from the preseason as the fourth off-ball linebacker in the Texans’ rotation. Zach Cunningham emerged from the COVID list in Week 5 to find that he’d been supplanted by the journeyman and 27-year-old Hawai’ian native from Eastern Illinois University. Grugier-Hill’s steadily increasing workload this season hit 100% versus the Patriots this past Sunday.
Houston beat writers identify Grugier-Hill as quite possibly their best linebacker this season. It’s all relative, of course. Grugier-Hill missed three tackles in Week 4 and allowed a QB rating over 100 in coverage during Weeks 2 and 5 per Pro Football Focus.
Grugier-Hill might hold this full-time role. If he doesn’t, it will be because fellow LB Kevin Pierre-Louis will return to play after a stint on IR to start the season. Of the warm bodies Houston just signed to man the middle – Grugier-Hill, Christian Kirksey, and Pierre-Louis, the man who has yet to play in the regular season is the only one on a multi-year deal.
Pierre-Louis earned the starting SAM job over Grugier-Hill this summer and looks set to get it back. Grugier-Hill might completely supplant Zach Cunningham at WILL and relegate the name-brand player to a strictly reserve role. Grugier-Hill must do so in order to hold fantasy value worth a significant FAAB bid this week.
Kevin Pierre-Louis’s path to fantasy relevance is longer but also instructive for IDP gamers. Your author holds the opinion that acquiring talent at the linebacker position is underrated. While it’s true that Zach Cunningham held great fantasy value on his way to the #3-overall finish among fantasy linebackers last year, the foundation of that was and is unstable. Defensive players commonly lose snaps and roles for poor play without notice to the public. Unlike high-profile offensive players that touch the ball, defensive players become irrelevant overnight without epitaphs.
The move on the waiver wire is a nominal bid on Kamu-Grugier Hill. His five-tackle performance might not attract the masses. Those in deeper leagues should make the preemptive free add of Kevin Pierre-Louis. Patience could be required of those rostering either player. A messy rotation like that of the Cowboys last month is a distinct possibility.
Kevin Minter, Buccaneers LB
Kevin Minter is a straightforward add relative to the balance of players in this article. He’ll play a full-time role next to Devin White for as long as a low-ankle sprain sidelines Lavonte David. Minter makes for a nice hedge to be added along with one of these other, longer-term, riskier plays.
Reggie Ragland, Giants LB
Buccaneers defensive coordinator Todd Bowles might make most IDP gamers long for simpler days. Reggie Ragland’s fantasy value might be the product of a more intricate, possibly modern defense and accompanying player rotation.
Reggie Ragland experienced an inconsistent workload as the Giants’ third linebacker into Week 3, but a season-ending injury to Blake Martinez moved Ragland up the pecking order. Starting strong safety and established box defender Jabrill Peppers is also hurt and has missed most of the past two games. Ragland has benefited, playing north of 75% of the team’s snaps in each.
When Jabrill Peppers returns in a few weeks, Ragland’s playing time could go either way. He could see a diminished role similar to what the second linebacker played throughout most of 2020 alongside Blake Martinez. Alternatively, Ragland could take reps from fellow LB Tae Crowder, who missed three tackles against the Saints in Week 4, when the Giants defense keys the run.
Ragland doesn’t have the upside of Pete Werner, but he has as much or more downside.
Drue Tranquill, Chargers LB
IDP gamers in active leagues might have missed the opportunity to add Drue Tranquill. A late-week practice injury to Kenneth Murray cleared the way for Tranquill to clearly take hold of a role in which he’d already made inroads.
Tranquill compiled eleven tackles including one for loss in 54 snaps (75%) against the Browns in Week 5. Like Werner, he’ll be an expensive pick-up in IDP leagues.
Watch List
Add Kenny Young to the list headlined by Zach Cunningham. Rams brass has been dying to press Kenny Young into service since curiously trading CB Marcus Peters for him in 2019. The experiment bombed in a Week-4 loss to the Cardinals. Opposing running backs and tight ends combined for 271 scrimmage yards and three touchdowns. While that’s not all on one player, one must reasonably ask what happened to the team’s one full-time linebacker in that game.
The Rams turned to Troy Reeder in Week 5. The MLB played 51 snaps (78%) to Young’s 42 (65%) in Week 5. Kenny Young drops from LB1 to line-up afterthought for fantasy gamers.
Reeder is himself a waiver-wire candidate behind Minter for hard-pressed gamers with an immediate hole at linebacker. He filled a useful fantasy role last year after another little-known prospect, Micah Kiser fizzled. The difference this year is the presence of two more possible replacements, Travin Howard and Ernest Jones.
The 2021 3rd-round pick Jones is the one to watch. The team seemed impressed with Jones’s ability to handle the on-field signal calling responsibility for the defense during the preseason. To date, safety Jordan Fuller has worn the green dot rather than Kenny Young.
Happy Bidding!
This is the week to make a move for linebacker production to sustain IDP rosters through the byes. Even those gamers whose rosters came through Week 5 unscathed should look to add a player or two from this list. Those with room for a free add should include Kevin Pierre-Louis as well, understanding that he could be expendable for the next priority pick-up in the weeks to come. The limited number of quality options in last week’s edition of “Raiding the Waiver Wire” is evidence of the depth as well as the quality of the upcoming waiver wire run.
This column drops every Tuesday afternoon. I’ll attach recommendations of widely rostered players one might consider dropping to make room for these players on Twitter. I look forward to interacting with you there!
A Clemson and Michigan alum, a fan of the Cowboys and Panthers, I try to see both sides of every debate and every fantasy football trade. Reach out to me @DynastyTripp on Twitter.
