There’s no panic like the kind that fantasy football managers feel after Week 1. The overreactions hit hard after a bad day at the office, so for people who roster either of Drake London or Kyle Pitts, it’s quite possible they’ve already entered panic mode because of Cooper Rush.
The Atlanta Falcons’ quarterback situation is among the worst in the NFL right now, which dragged the star wide receiver and tight end down in the season opener. Are Drake London and Kyle Pitts still fantasy must-starts with Cooper Rush at quarterback in Week 2?
Are Drake London and Kyle Pitts still fantasy must-starts in Week 2?
Heading into the vast majority of 2026 fantasy football drafts, Drake London emerged as a standout option in the second-to-third round as a potential cornerstone piece of rosters. While Kyle Pitts wasn’t drafted nearly as high, he was still a mid-round option who was taken with intentions of slotting in as the main tight end on a week-to-week basis. Just two weeks into the season, it’s tough to tell whether the two standouts should even be in lineups.
One quiet performance in Week 1 doesn’t doom a fantasy stud to irrelevance for the rest of the year; in fact, the first game isn’t typically very predictive of how a player will perform for the remainder of the season. However, it’s understandable that people are hitting the panic button on London and Pitts for as long as Cooper Rush remains the starting quarterback. For the moment, it’s unclear how long he’ll be under center. What we do know is that he’ll once again start for the Falcons in Week 2 against the Carolina Panthers.
In Week 1 against the Pittsburgh Steelers, London finished with just two receptions for 29 yards on his five targets. That meant a finish of just 4.9 fantasy points in PPR formats, far from anything close to a helpful outing in lineups. As for Pitts, he fared even worse. He finished with a donut, going scoreless while failing to catch his lone target of the day. Rush wasn’t on the fantasy radar, but a 12-for-22 performance with 143 yards, one touchdown and two interceptions was far from supportive for multiple other players.
The beneficiary in the opener was Bijan Robinson, who saw a whopping 10 targets with eight catches for 90 yards and Rush’s lone touchdown. Will he siphon much of the work away from the other skill-position players again this week? It’s clear that he’s the checkdown option for the quarterback, who isn’t mobile enough to get out of the pocket when pressure comes. The Panthers don’t have a standout pass rush, but even still, it’s clear that getting the ball into the hands of the halfback by any means necessary is a focus for this offense.
Drake London and Kyle Pitts Week 2 fantasy outlooks
That may change in Week 2. Limitations of the backup quarterback be damned, the Falcons lost last week and the game plan didn’t work. Five targets for London and just one for Pitts are far from what those two talents are accustomed to, and given what they’re capable of, it would be shocking if Kevin Stefanski didn’t make more of an effort to get them more work moving forward. Atlanta should still run the ball plenty against a Carolina defense that was gashed on the ground last week, but many of those targets that went Robinson’s way are likely to head elsewhere this time around.
The upside case for both London and Pitts is clearly limited by the play of Rush at QB. If his passing volume remains low, it’s very unlikely that both of the pass-catchers hit their ceiling in Week 2, and still tough to project even one of them getting there. The best-case scenario for fantasy managers is that this game turns into a shootout that sees Rush slinging it 40 times, but that’s probably not a likely outcome, either.
Even still, look at the talent on the table and the larger body of work from both players. London finished as the WR8 in per-game fantasy production last season with 16.8 FPPG and was nearly a 1,000-yard receiver in just 12 games. Pitts was the TE5 on a per-game basis with 12.4 FPPG and is coming off a career-best campaign. Fantasy managers drafted both of them as foundational pieces of their lineups and Week 1 was more of a one-off fluke an a true sign of things to come for these guys.
Good players and good coaches figure it out and make it work. Unless you clearly have a better option at either wide receiver or tight end, both London and Pitts are players you should continue to start in Week 2 – don’t panic just yet.
