Opening Kickoff - 1 comments

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Welcome to your first taste of the Cafe’s Start & Sit column for 2011. We’ll be back with the full Start & Sit on Friday, but we wanted to give you a preview of the Opening Kickoff on Thursday night, featuring the New Orleans Saints traveling to Green Bay to face the Super Bowl-winning Packers. While you won’t be able to compare the ratings of the players in this game with the rest of the Week 1 ratings until it’s too late, I’ve included a little cheat sheet underneath the Start & Sit table to help with your lineup decisions.

Thanks to dream_017, Calyxes, tclangham and 204BC for contributing to the ratings for the NO-GB game.

Key

80-100 = Must start
70-80 = Should start
60-70 (RB) = Start at flex
65-70 (WR) = Start at flex

Notes

You’re obviously starting Rodgers and Brees in this one — don’t need us to tell you that. Our raters are shying away from the muddled running game of each team, pegging Grant and Ingram as just flex options. I personally have Grant in my league, and I’m going with Mike Tolbert and Brandon Jacobs at RB2 and FLEX ahead of him. Jennings is locked in as a starter, though I’m a little pessimistic about his fantasy value till I can see that Finley won’t drag him down. Speaking of Finley, he’s an excellent play this week, as he should be most weeks. Colston barely hangs on to a starter rating, making me think we shouldn’t expect as much from him as we normally would. Graham’s rating was sunk a bit by one ranker being very down on him — in fact, the other four raters all had him higher than that 73.8 point average. He looks like a great start. You should avoid the rest of the pass catchers, if possible.