Fantasy football Week 4: Start or sit Brandin Cooks, DJ Moore?

Each Friday during the 2022 NFL and fantasy football season, Eric Karabell will bring his always-reasonable perspective to highlight the biggest fantasy football storylines heading into the weekend's games.

Houston Texans WR Brandin Cooks and Carolina Panthers WR DJ Moore entered this season having combined for a notable nine seasons of at least 1,000 receiving yards between them. So far, each has played in three games and neither looks much like a 1,000-yard receiver. Cooks had 22 receiving yards in Week 3. Moore had one catch for 2 yards. It's actually a bit impressive that neither shows up yet on the most-dropped list among wide receivers.

That might soon change if Cooks and Moore don't get going this week in home games against the Chargers and Cardinals, respectively, and even if we acknowledge this might not be their respective faults, it doesn't matter. Fantasy football managers don't care about reasoning. Either you're helping their fantasy teams or not. Neither of these proven wide receivers with multiple top-20 PPR finishes on their recent records enter Week 4 among the top 50 wide receivers in PPR formats. They are on the proverbial hot seat.

With Cooks, impressively a 1,000-yard receiver for four different NFL franchises (Saints, Patriots, Rams, Texans), second-year quarterback Davis Mills is off to a rough start, completing less than 58% of his passes, which is even more troubling considering he's barely throwing the football downfield. His average yards per attempt is down from 6.8 as a rookie to 6.2 this season. Cooks is still getting half the wide receiver targets on his own team, but there's little efficiency here. Nico Collins emerging as a second WR might be a positive thing. Cooks remains a WR3 in our