Fantasy football 2024: One QB, RB, WR and TE primed for huge Week 1 performances

Week 1 of the NFL season is here. Let’s get your fantasy football season off to a strong start by identifying some players who are set to post strong numbers this week. These are players who are must-start options if you have them on your season-long fantasy roster and who are great anchors for your DFS teams.

You can usually identify which big-name players are primed for a major showing. No one needs to tell you that Christian McCaffrey is about to blow up, for example. Instead, let’s focus on players who might not be as high in the rankings.

Below is one player at each skill position who is set to have a strong 2024 Week 1 performance for fantasy football.

Quarterback: Jordan Love, Green Bay Packers

It’s weird that Week 1 features a Friday game in Brazil. It’s not even the Brazil part that’s weird, since the NFL has been working on expanding internationally. It’s that we have a regular-season NFL game happening on a Friday. That’s high school football night! Come on, NFL! Know your place!

Anyway, rant aside, I think Friday’s game could be a showcase for Jordan Love against an Eagles defense that consistently failed to stop opposing QBs in 2023. Philly allowed quarterbacks to average 20.6 fantasy points per game, the second-highest number in the NFL and just 0.1 behind the worst fantasy QB defense, Washington. Love did a great job avoiding interceptions last season, so a matchup with an Eagles team ranked near the bottom of the league in picks is a plus for Love to open the year. 

In his first full season as a starter, Love was a breakout star, especially down the stretch. Over the final nine games of the season, Love averaged 271 yards and 2.2 touchdown passes per game against 0.3 interceptions. With a new contract extension in hand, Love is set for a strong 2024 season, and this matchup should ensure this season gets off to a hot start.

Running Back: Aaron Jones, Minnesota Vikings

To paraphrase Lizzo, there’s a new running back on the Minnesota Vikings.

After seven seasons in Green Bay, Aaron Jones moved to division rival Minnesota this season. Despite the fact he has a lot of wear on his tires after 1,177 career carries, I’m relatively high on Jones heading into the 2024 season.

That’s because despite injury limiting him to just 11 games last season, Jones posted the best success rate of his career at 62.0 percent. His new landing spot in Minnesota features a pretty ideal situation for him. Sure, the team has question marks at quarterback with Sam Darnold there, but teams can’t stack the box when Justin Jefferson is out there catching passes.

In Week 1, Jones faces the New York Giants, who allowed the eighth-most fantasy points to opposing running backs last season as well as the third-most rushing touchdowns to the position. This is a strong spot for Jones to open the 2024 campaign.

Wide Receiver: Malik Nabers, New York Giants

Recommending a wide receiver in his first NFL game is always a bit of a risk, but Malik Nabers has a shot to make an immediate impact for a Giants team that doesn’t have a lot of talent at wide receiver. Every year, the team spends resources on the position, but every year those resources don’t work out, which is why Darius Slayton has led the team in receiving yards in four of the last five seasons. The team enters 2024 with those two plus Wan’Dale Robinson and Jalin Hyatt as their primary wide receivers, a situation that screams MALIK NABERS ROOKIE BREAKOUT.

Nabers, the No. 6 pick of this draft, is coming off a huge year at LSU, catching 89 passes for 1,569 yards and 14 touchdowns. It was the second 1,000-yard season of his college career and earned him a unanimous spot as an All-American.

He opens his NFL career against the Vikings. Minnesota struggled against opposing wide receivers in 2023, allowing the sixth-most fantasy points to the position. The Vikings were one of five NFL teams that allowed over 3,000 yards to the wide receiver position. 

Tight End: Dalton Kincaid, Buffalo Bills

There’s no passing attack in the league with more questions about who’ll be catching passes than the Buffalo Bills. With Stefon Diggs and Gabe Davis off to other places, the team will look to some combination of Keon Coleman, Marquez Valdes-Scantling, Khalil Shakir and Curtis Samuel at wide receiver.

I won’t sugarcoat this: that’s a very underwhelming quartet. So why has so much offseason talk about the Bills been dominated by discussion of which wideout will emerge as a fantasy option when the discussion should instead be about how tight end Dalton Kincaid is going to EAT this year?

As a rookie, Kincaid finished with 73 receptions for 673 yards and two touchdowns, then in the postseason he caught eight balls for 104 yards and a score in two games. 

Now in 2024, Kincaid has definitively cleared Dawson Knox as the TE1 for the Bills. He should be especially lethal in fantasy early in the season as the Bills try to figure out the receiver situation. In Week 1, he gets a juicy matchup with an Arizona Cardinals team that allowed eight touchdown receptions to tight ends in 2023, tied for the second-most in the NFL.