NFL Week 2 fantasy sleepers: Zach Charbonnet, Troy Franklin in line for bigger roles

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Week 1 is over. Time to overreact to everything. A.J. Brown, Ja’Marr Chase and Dak Prescott are busts! Keon Coleman is going to the moon! The Lions will never win another game now that Ben Johnson is in Chicago. The Bears won’t win any games now that Ben Johnson is in Chicago.

Or … maybe we stop hyperventilating, step back, and realize that it’s just one game. Remember last year when the Saints were amazing after the first two weeks? How did that work out? The good news is that we saw a lot of really encouraging things in the first slate of games. A lot of our rookie expectations were met or even exceeded. (Hello Emeka Egbuka!) And even the things that didn’t go as planned still have a silver lining. (Hello Harold Fannin Jr.!)

But now it’s time to move on to Week 2. There are more data points to be input. More information to learn from. It still may not completely solve the issue of whether to start Egbuka over Jameson Williams — we can dive into that another time. What we’ll do here is dig into some of the fringier players on your roster to decide if they should get a spot in your lineup.

Get ready for Week 2 of the roller coaster. After which, we certainly won’t have a wild emotional swing in the other direction. In the meantime, here are some names.

VS.

A few years ago, we wrote Smith off. Famously, he didn’t write back. This season, we didn’t fully dismiss Smith. But we also weren’t excited about him, either. After a couple of lackluster seasons in Seattle, moving to Las Vegas didn’t seem like a boost in fortune. But a funny thing happened in Week 1. The supposedly run-heavy Raiders … weren’t. Chip Kelly’s offense ran 38 pass plays compared to just 24 run plays. That led to Smith throwing for 362 yards — the most by a Raiders’ quarterback in his debut.

So maybe the brain trust of Carroll and Kelly won’t be the ground-and-pound attack we anticipated. It’s certainly hard to imagine Vegas leading with the run game against the Chargers. The Bolts were tough on running backs last year and limited the Chiefs to 98 rushing yards (57 from   Patrick Mahomes   ) in the season opener. Look for a Silver and Black air attack in Week 2.

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