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Three Players You Can Count On

Three Players You Can Count On

Week 18 is here...

Peter Overzet
December 31, 2025

Week 18 is always the weirdest week on the fantasy calendar. 99% of leagues are already wrapped up (and if yours isn’t, please tell your commissioner to seek help) and the playoff action is still a week away.

Still, we know you guys are playing DFS and making bets, so we can’t leave any stone unturned.

One of the biggest questions surrounding Week 18 is motivation—both team level and for individuals.

Matt LaMarca has put together a comprehensive guide for players with contract incentives heading into the final week, but I wanted to trim it down further to the players who also play on teams that have a lot on the line.

We have a short list …

Three Players With Extra Incentive in Week 18

Sam Darnold—The Seahawks must beat the Niners to secure the bye, so there’s no questioning the motivation there. In addition to that, he can earn an extra $500K for hitting 28 passing TDs (currently at 25) and/or 4,000 passing yards (currently at 3,850). Three TDs and 150 yards is certainly in play against a Niners defense that just gave up 2 TDs and 330 yards to Caleb Williams.

Baker Mayfield—The Bucs must win for a chance at a playoff berth and Mayfield has a handful of incentives he can hit to unlock $500K bonuses (LaMarca outlines them all here). Mayfield has looked rough of late, but he’s got every reason to deliver at home vs. the Panthers on Saturday.

Rico Dowdle—Speaking of that Bucs/Panthers game, the Panthers have to win for a chance to make the playoffs (if the Falcons beat the Saints on Sunday, it will ultimately not matter). As for Dowdle, he can make $1M with just 7 more scrimmage yards and unlock another $250K bonus with 1 more TD.

Welcome to Wild, Wild Week 18

It’s the last week of the football season, and fantasy champions have already been crowned. Yet we still have an itch to play DFS or Pick ‘Ems, even though this week is the Wild West. How wild? Playoff teams rest their stars. Non-playoff teams sit their starters. It’s a week that Miles Sanders can be the RB5 (yes, true). Huh?

The Xfinity Best Projections are here to help you make sense of a senseless week, giving you a snapshot of who’s playing so you can make winning picks. These projections are so accurate that we put the Xfinity name right in the title. Go ahead, try it out. See who this year’s Week 18 stars will be, and cash in those wins!

Imagine all your football, all in one place. Easy. Xfinity. Imagine That.

Fantasy

Roundtable: YOLO Plays and Week 18 Shenanigans

Just because the vast majority of fantasy football leagues saw their championship conclude in Week 17 doesn’t mean our merry band of football nerds doesn’t have thoughts on Week 18.

Jake, Cooterdoodle and Pete Cash Game King are diving into the deep end of the most chaotic week of the season in our latest roundtable discussion …

What’s your best Week 18 fantasy-related story?

Jake: Nothing specific, but I always enjoy when a random player pops off in Week 18 and then my leaguemates spend the whole offseason trying to convince themselves said player is an ascending superstar instead of the result of pure attrition and/or studs resting for the playoffs. (But cheers to last year’s WR5 on the week, Greg Dortch.)

Cooterdoodle: Back in the early 2010s, I used to commission a league where I would send a leaguewide “Weekly Recap” email to everyone in an attempt to boost camaraderie and keep the league interested. Yes—email. This was before group texts.

And everyone loved it. I would highlight the losers each week and create fun narratives about what failures had occurred (dropping players they shouldn’t have, setting terrible lineups, etc). Well, there was this one leaguemate—we’ll call her Kelly—who was doing much worse than everyone else. It was so bad that Kelly made it into the “roasting” part of the e-mail every single week. But it didn’t stop there. The league would “reply all” and keep the Kelly trash talk going all week long. It was brutal (just like her team).

Finally, after 17 long weeks of giving Kelly hell via Gmail … She responded! Sure, it was Week 18, but it was her first “reply all” to the group! We were so excited! Here’s what she had to say: “I don’t know how you guys got my email, but whoever you are … PLEASE stop with whatever this is. I don’t know who Jay Cutler is. I don’t know what waivers are. I don’t know you. Please just leave me alone! This is weird.”

Turns out … We had the wrong e-mail address for the “bad at fantasy Kelly” by one digit. It was a different, more innocent Kelly with the same first and last name, receiving our weekly degrading emails all season long. Whoops!

Pete: Two years ago, during Week 18 Cash Game Week, the man who had just won Underdog’s Best Ball Mania for $3,000,000 (Farid Shaheed) sent me a H2H invite for $1,000 where he intentionally built a bad lineup with a bunch of meme players. I won in a landslide. I’d like to normalize millionaires finding creative ways to donate money to me.

DFS

Your Week 18 DST Streamers

Championship week has come and gone, and I hope you have a fantasy championship to show for it. While the traditional fantasy football season may be over (unless your league has a Week 18 championship), there are still a handful of DFS slates left for those of you looking to grind every advantage before the offseason.

The DST equation in DFS is a bit different because we have to account for the salary constraints that don't exist in traditional fantasy football. Rather than sorting by rostered percentage like I have been all season, this week's article will feature high-priced and low-priced options for you to consider depending on how you fill out the rest of your DFS lineup.

At this time of year, motivation is just as important as matchups. With the most important games scheduled for prime time slots, the Sunday main slate is missing the teams with the most to play for. As the week progresses, we should gain more clarity on which teams are taking Week 18 seriously and who is using it as a glorified bye week to rest up before the playoffs. Be sure to pay attention to roster moves throughout the week to figure out which teams will be down to third- and fourth-string options.

Buffalo Bills ($3,500)

One of our high-priced trio is the Buffalo Bills team that is coming off a last-second loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. If Buffalo had won, that would have kept them in the hunt for the division title.

Theoretically, the Bills do still have seeding to play for, but they are locked into a Wild Card slot and a road playoff game, so it remains to be seen how many of Buffalo's starters will play in this game. However, this is the rare case where it might not matter how many starters Buffalo plays or how motivated they are because they are playing the Jets.

The Jets have been playing their third- and fourth-stringers for weeks, and Brady Cook is now up to 7 interceptions and 18 sacks taken in just four appearances this season. This team gave up on the season weeks ago, and I expect most of their players to be thinking more about vacation plans than game plans heading into this matchup.

On paper, this is the best matchup for any DST, but we will have to wait and see which, if any, of Buffalo's defensive starters are slated for meaningful playing time in this game. That reality makes Buffalo an intriguing DST option, but we will have to pay attention to news throughout the week, as well as ownership projections, to determine if they are a good leverage play or not.