👋 Welcome back! Week 4 is here and the fantasy season is flying by. No matter where you are in the standings, there's reason for hope.

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In this edition: We review the latest NFL headlines, offer tips to help 0-3 fantasy managers rebound, call a session of Fantasy Court to order and more.

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Today's Get to the Points! is written by Andy Behrens. For the web version, click here. To sign up for free, click here.

Alvin Kamara was a DNP on Wednesday. Let's not panic about the week's first practice session, but this is definitely a situation that demands attention. Kamara is dealing with a medley of issues (hip, rib), and his offensive line isn't fully healthy, either. If he's not available to face Atlanta, Jamaal Williams and Taysom Hill could be in for beefy workloads. Williams would be a deep league one-week flier, not a must-start.

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Joe Mixon remains sidelined. No practice for Houston's featured runner on Wednesday, and Dameon Pierce was held out as well. Not great. Mixon is reportedly week-to-week, but Pierce could be closer to returning. Still, we might be looking at a second week of Cam Akers in the lead role, this time with a much friendlier matchup vs. Jacksonville.

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A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith not practicing. Brown is still resting a hamstring injury while Smith is in the concussion protocol following a brutal hit that never should have happened. If these two are unavailable on Sunday at Tampa Bay, it could mean another zillion targets for Dallas Goedert. Philadelphia's receiving room is basically the island of misfit toys beyond Brown and Smith. 

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That's quite enough missed practices for today. Let's feed you some good news...

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George Kittle and Keenan Allen return to limited status. HECK YEAH. That's more like it. You shouldn't need us to tell you that each player is a huge upgrade to their respective offenses.

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Dave Canales: Jonathon Brooks "looking really strong ... getting close." C'mon, that's some seriously great news right there. These bullets aren't all doom and gloom. Carolina's head coach was speaking about a group of players currently IR, but he did name-check Brooks specifically. Whenever he returns, we can expect him to take over most of the Miles Sanders touches almost immediately.

If your fantasy squad sits at 0-3, welcome to Super Bowl week. You’re in it right now. Mathematically, this might not actually be a must-win, but we would not recommend losing for a fourth straight week. 

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Way back in the preseason, we mentioned the fact that fantasy teams starting 0-3 in Yahoo public leagues last year only qualified for the playoffs 12% of the time. You don’t even want to know about the odds for 0-4 teams. As you might imagine, they are, um … not great. 

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Of course, you don’t need an expert to tell you that it’s time to consider winning one of your matchups. The how-to is the tricky part. Here are a few difficult truths — and one optimistic nugget — you need to confront if you’re a winless manager:

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🤝 Maybe it’s time to lose a trade. Or rather, it might be time to take a long-term hit on a trade that improves your probability of winning in Week 4. Different managers should have different time horizons right now, depending on their placement in the standings. An 0-3 team with an injured star like Christian McCaffrey or Puka Nacua (or A.J. Brown or Cooper Kupp) on its bench needs to seriously consider any offer that increases the short-term point projection. You don’t have the luxury of patience. CMC can’t help you win anything but the consolation bracket. 

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🚫 Please note, however, that you do not want to allow the vultures to scoop up your legitimately useful and healthy players. Let’s not deal away CeeDee Lamb in exchange for two or three mid-tier dudes. As a general rule, if you find yourself trading away the no-doubt best player in a deal, you’ve been fleeced.

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💰 Empty the FAB wallet, soon. Ideally, we would have mentioned this before waivers ran this week. Apologies. Just please know that you are no longer in a great position to save FAB resources for late-season leverage. For you, it’s late right now. If a player on the wire would start for your team this week, spend whatever it takes to get ‘em. 

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🤔 In a keeper or dynasty league, it might be time to think about 2025. That’s the benefit to playing in such a format, after all. Again, different teams are focused on different timelines — and yours might stretch beyond 2024. The players you deal away now are worth significantly more in terms of future assets, because they have 14 weeks of fantasy production ahead of them. 

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But obviously not every winless team needs to enter full tank-mode, because …

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💪 You might self-assess and determine you can, in fact, still win this thing. For some of us, that 0-3 start is truly an accident of schedule strength. I’ve got a superflex team with two good quarterbacks and Bijan Robinson on the roster that’s still hunting for its first win, despite having scored the third-most points in the league. That squad isn’t ready to tank, and it certainly isn’t dealing away stars for other people’s scraps. 

I mean, if 12% of all the 0-3 managers are still gonna make the playoffs, why not us? (But also please note that you can still sign up for another league, just in case your luck doesn’t turn.)

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It’s an epic clash of one-win teams on Thursday night and third place in the NFC East hangs in the balance! Let’s dive into the top storylines in this Cowboys-Giants slugfest…

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What will Malik Nabers do for an encore? We shouldn’t even mess around with any other subjects on the New York side, because Nabers is this team’s only must-start fantasy weapon. He was pretty great in Week 2 at Washington, then he was otherworldly last Sunday at Cleveland. 

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Daniel Jones has never previously combined with any individual receiver to produce an 800-yard season, but even he can’t possibly hold Nabers below 1,400. This feels like a 2014 OBJ-level event.  

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Is this the week Dallas finds a run game? The Cowboys currently rank 30th in the league in rushing offense, averaging a dreadful 73.7 yards per game and 3.6 per carry. After three weeks, no Dallas back has yet reached 100 rushing yards for the season. Yikes. 

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Rico Dowdle has out-carried, out-touched and out-snapped Ezekiel Elliott to this point, but not by much. This is truly one of the NFL’s messier backfield committees. Thursday’s matchup is basically as good as it gets — New York allows 5.0 YPC and 131.7 rushing YPG — so if Dowdle is ever going to get rolling, it happens here. 

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Let’s give Brandon Aubrey a shot from 70 yards and see what happens. Dallas has a kicker with a weapons-grade right leg who drilled a 65-yard field goal last week with room to spare. He’s 5-for-5 on attempts over 50 yards this season and 15-for-15 over the past two years. Back in opening week, he had a record-tying 66-yard kick negated by a delay-of-game penalty — and the team considered giving him a shot from 71.

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Science has not yet defined the outer limits of Aubrey’s range, but it’s pretty clearly greater than 70 yards.

Every fantasy dispute can and should be resolved by a fair, firm-handed commissioner operating in the league’s best interests. Unfortunately, over the years we have learned that not every league has found its Pete Rozelle. A few of you require the services of a trained independent arbiter. As ever, I am honored to fill this role.

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*BANGS GAVEL*

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Today’s case was brought by X user Here Comes the Hammer:

After further questioning, it seems this league has also been giving substantial payouts to second-place division finishers, which is wild. 

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Personally, I have no issues with a divisional structure in fantasy leagues, because this is how the NFL itself operates. And if we’re going to have divisions, then winning one should qualify a team for the playoffs. No problem there. But second place in a division? 

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Sorry, no automatic berth for you. It’s simply not consistent with the way serious professional leagues operate in reality. It’s also not much of an achievement — certainly not one to be celebrated or rewarded. 

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I don’t actually love wading into discussions of league settings, because this fake court recognizes people are free to enjoy a variety of odd things in their fantasy lives. But I strongly condemn any situation in which sub-.500 teams are taking playoff seeds and a slice of the prize pool away from winning squads. We can’t have it. 

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Therefore, it is the recommendation of this court that the league in question continue their freshly approved playoff structure: two division winners, plus four wild cards based on record and points. If they insist on payouts based on regular season achievements, however, those should be limited to the division champs and the league’s top-scoring team (which may also be a division winner). 

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Leading the league in total points over 14 weeks is actually notable and mildly impressive — more so than finishing as a divisional runner-up. Let’s then award the rest of the prize pool to teams that rule the playoffs and finish on the podium. 

*EMPHATICALLY BANGS GAVEL*

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Have a league dispute? Email us the conflict and it could be the subject of a future session of Fantasy Court.