The Worksheet: Week 5 NFL Fantasy Football Game Previews

Welcome to Week 5 of The Worksheet, Rich Hribar's comprehensive fantasy football preview.

What is The Worksheet?

The Worksheet is a comprehensive weekly fantasy football preview for each NFL game. Rich Hribar analyzes matchups for every notable fantasy player in every game, every week of the NFL season.

Things move fast in the NFL.

Although we are still in the building phase for the full season, it's already October.

Nearly a third of the fantasy regular season is already gone.

Hopefully, you're in a good place after four weeks and survived more carnage in Week 4.

Lamar Jackson, Ja'Marr Chase, D.J. Moore, Saquon Barkley, Marcus Mariota, Ladd McConkey, and Rashee Rice all left games with injuries.

Most of them didn't even register anything in the box score before leaving.

We had more offensive line injuries.

Rashawn Slater, Donovan Jackson, and Paris Johnson will miss extended time.

Lane Johnson was a surprise game-day inactive due to a personal matter, and he retired on Tuesday.

Through four weeks, however, scoring has remained up.

That is despite penalty flags coming out at increased rates.

We have been highlighting this since the start of the season, but things were so bad in Week 4 that Warren penned an entire piece on it.

Week 5 is the start of bye weeks.

We have already been adjusting and calibrating rosters to account for injuries, early-season breakouts, and busts.

Even though only the Chiefs and Panthers are off this week, those teams have some of the hottest starts this season on their rosters.

Kenneth Walker, Patrick Mahomes, Chuba Hubbard, Bryce Young, Tetairoa McMillan, and Travis Kelce have been core producers early in the season.

We also have another International Game between the Eagles and Jaguars.

Make sure your roster is updated for that early kickoff Sunday morning.

We are now fleshing out a real sample on a team basis.

We are developing trends while revealing some early-season myths.

The more information we acquire, the more robust our evidence-based approach can be.

We also have a ton of football left to go.

We'll learn a lot in the next few weeks, and we'll look back on some of the early-season myths with a side eye.

At this time a year ago, Rome Odunze was the WR3 in overall scoring.

Quentin Johnston was the WR4.

Emeka Egbuka and Keenan Allen were top-10 scorers.

Ricky Pearsall was fourth in receiving yards.

Trey McBride was being outscored by two other tight ends at this point last year.

J.K. Dobbins was fourth in the NFL in rushing yards.

Daniel Jones and Justin Herbert were top-five passers.

You get the idea.

We still have a long way to go, even if some teams started slowly and are likely feeling the squeeze.

This article will be updated throughout the week to reflect major news or injury implications.

I encourage you to use the game-by-game tables and data points here, along with the player rankings available every Wednesday.

Enjoy the games!

Click the matchups below for the individual game previews.

Week 5 Fantasy Football Matchups