NFL Pro fantasy football preview: Week 13 insights

Matt Okada

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Twelve weeks in the books, six more to go! We’re on to Week 13 … and it’s stuffed with Thanksgiving goodness and exciting storylines! In fact, this might be the most exciting Thanksgiving slate I can remember, and you can watch all three with NFL+ Premium.

To better understand and decipher the storylines, NFL Pro has a wealth of data and insights, carefully curated to highlight what matters most in each game. And in the world of fantasy football, we need every advantage we can get.

Here are the three biggest keys — one for each of the Turkey Day games — with all the relevant NFL Pro insights and the fantasy fallout we can expect!

The Thanksgiving slate opens with an epic NFC North divisional battle that could be decided by the Pro Bowl pass rushers leading their respective defenses. Through 12 weeks, Micah Parsons and Aidan Hutchinson are tied with each other for the most QB pressures in the NFL (60). Parsons has drawn a double-team on a whopping 21.3% of his pass rushes, while Hutchinson’s 28 quick QB pressures trail only Nik Bonitto. By almost any measure, they’re two of the biggest game wreckers in the league and will be looking to wreck Turkey Day for Jared Goff and Jordan Love, respectively.

And with these particular QBs, pressure matters more than most. They are NFL Pro’s most efficient (Packers) and second-most efficient (Lions) passing offenses when not pressured , but drop to 14th and 20th, respectively, when pressured. When kept clean, both Goff and Love both in the top five qualified passers in completion rate, yards per attempt, passer rating and EPA/dropback. But when the pass rush gets home, both tend to struggle. Love’s 64.0-point decline in passer rating and 35.5% decline in completion rate when pressured are both the largest in the league — and Goff’s 55.8-point and 33.6% drop-offs in those metrics are third-largest and fifth-largest, respectively. Simply put, few quarterbacks are more negatively affected by pressure than these two — which means this game could be decided by which pass rush wins more often.

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