Cardinals @ Seahawks Week 7 Game Preview
Jonathan Fuller breaks down the Week 7 matchup between the Arizona Cardinals and Seattle Seahawks from a fantasy football and betting perspective.
Arizona Cardinals @ Seattle Seahawks
This NFC West divisional showdown will take place in Seattle with the Seahawks currently heavy home favorites despite their disappointing road loss at Cincinnati last week.
Seattle will look to get back on track against an Arizona team that has played hard this season but has just a 1-5 record to show for it.
Whether this game delivers for fantasy purposes will likely come down to whether or not the Cardinals can score enough to push the Seahawks' offense.
The Cardinals have the second-lowest situation-neutral pass rate in the league, which doesn’t bode well for this game turning into a shootout. Still, Arizona's offense has been forced to throw the ball plenty with Joshua Dobbs having attempted an average of 38 passes over their past three games.
With James Conner still on IR, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Cardinals' struggles on the ground continue, and they have to resort to passing yet again. Arizona's passing offense may very well find success against a Seattle secondary that's allowed more points to opposing WRs than any other team in the league.
Marquise Brown's 29% target share has led all Cardinals pass-catchers on the season, and while Michael Wilson and Rondale Moore have flashed at times, both have been mostly irrelevant in fantasy.
The more interesting trend in the Arizona offense is at the TE position, as Trey McBride appears to have stepped into an elevated role in recent weeks and begun to eclipse veteran Zach Ertz in target share.
Dobbs has been willing to target the TE position often, so McBride could be a breakout candidate in the second half of the season as the sophomore TE's role continues to grow. If you need help at the TE position, McBride is worth a look if available, and he could be a sneaky DFS play this week if you want to get ahead of a potential breakout performance.
On the other side of the ball, the Seahawks' offense has a good matchup at basically every position, as the Cardinals' defense has allowed a lot of fantasy production to pretty much every position except at TE. Fortunately, no one should really be starting a Seattle TE anyway (apologies to the Noah Fant truthers).
Both D.K. Metcalf and Tyler Lockett check in as top-24 WRs in the Week 7 Fantasy Life consensus ranks, and rookie Jaxon Smith-Njigba is interesting as well. He finally saw some positive usage trends coming out of the team’s bye last week with season-highs in route participation and average depth of target (aDOT) in Week 6 at Cincinnati.
It’s tough to imagine many scenarios where Arizona will pull off a road upset, but the Cardinals have played well enough this year that I believe they can keep it closer than the current 7.5-point spread might indicate.
With both teams having defensive vulnerabilities, there's a real chance that one or more of the players in this game could go off for big fantasy performances. This game is one of my favorites to take one-off players from in DFS and Underdog's Battle Royale contests this week.