They say The Masters is a tradition unlike any other, and for golf fanatics like myself, that's true, but Week 1 of the NFL season is the equivalent for Fantasy Football managers. All the players you drafted who scored a lot of points in Week 1 made you look like the smartest manager in the room. All the players -- like Terry McLaurin for example -- who didn't score led you scrambling to your waiver wire.
You might already be looking to sell these players for pennies on the dime. We're here to accomplish two things right now. We're going to parse through the key Week 1 overreactions and tell you which ones matter and which ones don't while also taking a look at some of the early Week 2 waiver wire options.
We'll break down some of the players who matter, those whose Week 1 was more of a fluke and what changes in offensive scheme, play calling and volume could define the 2026 season. But Bears head coach Ben Johnson did tell us before the season that he's looking to break the single-season scoring record and it certainly seems like the Bears have the offensive pieces to do it. On last week's Beyond The Boxscore bold predictions and flag plants show, Caleb Williams was one of my three bold predictions.
I predicted he'd finish as a top-three Fantasy scorer and he delivered in Week 1 with the most Fantasy points of any player. In part, I pointed to the fact that Williams had the two fastest GPS-timed speeds of any NFL quarterback in 2025 as a ball carrier. Williams delivered two rushing touchdowns in Week 1.
The only thing that slowed down Williams from scoring more Fantasy points was Chicago's multi-score lead. With a Bears defense expected to be leaky all season, a top-five offensive line, the best play designer in the NFL, and crazy amounts of talent around him, Williams could be primed to make my bold prediction come true. There's only two quarterbacks I would trade Williams for at this time.
Call it an overreaction but if we said the same thing about Drake Maye last season we would've been proven wrong. If Carnell Tate is on your waiver wire because of a slow preseason, that should change now. While his boxscore wasn't pretty in Week 1 (he led the Titans in receiving yards but with just 37 total), the underlying stats were.
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