Steve Smith Suspended for Two Games

Carolina head coach John Fox has suspended Steve Smith for 2 games after Smith went Rocky Balboa all over teammate Ken Lucas' face. Good for him. Its nice to see that some people are willing to take a stand and punish a star player for doing something foolish and thugish. On the other hand, if the perpetrator had been a 5th-stringer, he would probably be off the team by now.

But our job is not to make sure that NFL players stop breaking each other's noses, it is to figure out how to use this information to help us beat the snot out of our friends on the fantasy football field.

We just finished penning an article that talked about how crucial late-season performance is to getting you that fantasy championship trophy that your wife can make fun of for the rest of the year (and if you are not married, please don't display your fantasy trophy to your girlfriend, unless you want to stay single the rest of your life). Anyway, the first two weeks of the season won't mean squat once the fantasy playoffs begin. And Smith will surely be back to form by that time.

Right now, Smith is going about 26th in ESPN leagues, or early 3rd round in a 12-team league. Today's news will probably drop him about a full round, if not more. If you can get a receiver the quality of Steve Smith in round 4, jump on him. You will have live through the first two weeks of the season with a 7th or 8th rounder starting, then you get a WR1 for the rest of the season. If you grab someone like a TJ Housmanzadeh in the 3rd round, then you are going most of the season with two WR1's.

So, I would like to keep Smith higher on my draft list than most other sites. Therefore, I am only going to reduce his stats by 1/16 of my current projections (one game), instead of 1/8 (two games). That should keep Smith among the elite receivers in the league, but don't get too crazy with him - drafting him in the third round would be wasteful, but picking him up in the 4th (or 5th, if you feel lucky) would be a steal.

Who benefits from this news? Its hard to say. Muhsin Muhammad and DJ Hackett will probably both be starting now, but one of them will go to the slot in week 3. The problem is, we may not know who that is going to be when we draft. We might actually have to downgrade both players at the draft, because we won't know if we are getting a full season starter or not.