Two teams remain on the coaching carousel 🎠

There isn’t a single soul out there rooting for a Chiefs/49ers Super Bowl, right? We just saw that a few years ago. A Ravens/Lions Super Bowl would feed families.

What’s in store:

• Mark Andrews looks primed to return for the AFC Championship. After practicing in full last week, he’s ready to help the Ravens make a Super Bowl push.

• Head coaching vacancies are filling up quickly. Only the Commanders and Seahawks have yet to land a hire.

• Zach’s championship weekend quarterback preview. See how Zach sees the signal callers stacking up for fantasy football on Sunday.

• Patrick Mahomes owns the AFC championship. And it’s not because he’s been to each of the last six games.

• Ravens TE Mark Andrews practices Thursday, appears on track to return to action in AFC Championship vs Chiefs

  • Andrews had a chance to suit up in last weekend’s divisional round tilt against the Texans, but ultimately elected to give himself one more week to get all the way right by sitting out Baltimore’s blowout victory. He and the Ravens will look to reap the rewards they’ve sowed in a battle at home against the Chiefs for the rights to advance to the Super Bowl. The Ravens passing attack has relied on contributions from the likes of Nelson Aghalor and Isaiah Likely to ride out the storm in Andrews’ absence, but with Andrews likely as close to 100% as he’ll be, he has a chance to retake control of the target share from his first snap. In nine full games this season, Andrews has averaged a 23% target share and 15 PPR points per game with three top-3 finishes at the position. The Chiefs have been stingy on defense all season long, but Andrews shouldn’t have too much trouble leaving his mark on the game on Sunday.

• 49ers WR Deebo Samuel limited in Thursday’s practice with shoulder injury, status for Sunday remains TBD

  • It’s looking like Deebo Samuel is trending towards being a game-time decision for this weekend’s NFC championship game against the Lions, although a limited practice on Thursday certainly is reason for some optimism. Samuel left last week’s divisional round matchup with the Packers and spent time in and out of the locker room before ultimately being ruled out, and it seems like the injury will make gauging his status for Sunday’s game as finicky as it was for the 49ers athletic training staff to determine whether or not Deebo could re-enter the game last week. If Deebo plays, any fantasy managers planning to draft him in DFS contests shouldn’t hesitate to scoop him up in a matchup with a porous Lions passing defense. If he would miss, both Brandon Aiyuk and George Kittle would be in line for expanded roles relative to their usual workloads, but in any offense that features as many weapons as the 49ers’, the upgrade will likely be limited.

• Commanders, and Seahawks remain without head coaches as vacancies fill around the league

  • This is solely speculation on the part of the author of this newsletter, but is it any surprise that two teams with plenty of offensive talent have yet to hire a head coach? The teams are likely waiting out the Lions’ playoff push in hopes of making a run at their superstar OC Ben Johnson, who has been the hottest name this offseason in regards to potential head coaching candidates. With Jim Harbaugh landing in Los Angeles and a few other notable offensive minds finding new homes (Brian Callahan in Tennessee, Dave Canales in Carolina, Raheem Morris in Atlanta), Johnson is easily the cream of the remaining coaching crop – at least among the offensive minds. Whichever teams miss out on the Ben Johnson sweepstakes will likely turn to veteran coaching candidates Mike Vrabel or Bill Belichick as potential consolation prizes, but it’s unlikely that any teams eager to swing for the fences with Johnson will hire a new head coach until the Lions’ playoff run is over.

• It’s no secret that Lamar Jackson has been on a tear like I mentioned earlier in the show. Nine touchdowns over his past two starts against quality defenses in Miami and Houston, but the Chiefs defense has been stingy this season allowing the fifth-fewest passing touchdowns in the NFL this season. The thing about Lamar Jackson, though, is that you don’t ever bet against him. Lamar Jackson has 100 or more rushing yards in three of his past five playoff games, so I like his rushing prop over 64.5 rushing yards, especially if he’s going to need to take off running more often than usual because of tight coverage on the backend by the Chiefs.

• Plus, Josh Allen just ran for 72 yards against them last week, so I’d expect Lamar to come through in this game big on the ground, too. He should be in lineups with confidence as the overall QB1 for DFS this week with his rushing upside.

• It’s pretty much a tossup behind Lamar for the QB2, 3, and 4 spots, and as crazy as it sounds, I think I’m leaning Brock Purdy as my No. 2 quarterback this week over Patrick Mahomes and Jared Goff. Now, this comes down pretty much to the matchup for each of these guys – out of Mahomes, Purdy, and Goff, Purdy has the best matchup by far. Detroit allowed the fifth-most fantasy points per game, the third-most passing yards per game, and the sixth-most passing touchdowns per game to quarterbacks in the regular season, and then they followed that up in the playoffs with two straight games allowing 300 yards and 2 or more touchdowns in back to back games against Matthew Stafford and Baker Mayfield. They’ve gone five straight games allowing opposing quarterbacks to score two or more touchdowns through the air, so you can go ahead and pencil in Brock Purdy for a big game.

• And it’s nothing against Jared Goff or Patrick Mahomes – both of them have tough matchups this week against the Ravens and 49ers defenses, who were the only two defenses in the regular season to have more interceptions as a team than touchdowns allowed. I look at the way Patrick Mahomes has produced since their bye, and I’m not too impressed – that isn’t to say I’m not impressed with the way he’s been playing in general – but in terms of fantasy football, his 17 points per game since they came off their bye in Week 11 is lower than every other quarterback remaining in the playoff field in that same time frame. And now he’s playing the top defense in the NFL in Baltimore who have put the clamps on C.J. Stroud and the Dolphins’ passing attack in back-to-back weeks? It sounds crazy, but I’m leaning towards having Mahomes as my QB4 this week at the bottom of the barrel underneath the other guys.

As we watched Patrick Mahomes this season put up his first year of less than historic numbers as a starter and the Chiefs offense sputter at times, there was this lingering feeling that once the playoffs rolled around, the Chiefs would figure it out. While the stat sheet has yet to reflect that, the Chiefs have definitely taken their offense up a notch in their two playoff games this season, and they’ll absolutely need to be firing on all cylinders against the Ravens smothering defense. The good news for the Chiefs: they have Patrick Mahomes under center.

In his five conference championship appearances to date, Patrick Mahomes has thrown for 3 touchdowns in four of them (2 touchdown passes in the other game in 2022). That puts his total touchdowns in five championship games over the years at 14, and he’s thrown just two picks against that total for a pristine 7:1 TD:INT ratio in his championship career.

It’ll be a much tougher task to replicate that kind of performance against the Ravens, but with a line on Underdog set at 1.5 passing touchdowns for Patrick Mahomes this weekend, anyone willing to take the over on that pick’em would be leaning on some very sturdy history as justification to doing so. Mahomes has thrown three touchdowns total in two playoff games so far against zero interceptions; in each of the two instances prior to this year where he entered the championship game with three or fewer total touchdown passes thrown, he threw for three touchdowns in the conference championship. 🤷‍♂️