This season definitely hasn’t gone according to plan for the Los Angeles Rams, who were one of the Super Bowl favorites entering the season. Among other issues, the team has had multiple important players go down due to injury, and they’re dealing with significant injuries, especially at wide receiver. With Puka Nacua (knee) landing on IR this week, and Davante Adams (hamstring) still weeks away from returning, the team has a huge gap at the position. Can either Konata Mumpfield or Tutu Atwell step up and take a large enough role to be worth a fantasy football start this week when the Rams head to Arizona and take on the Cardinals? Plenty of targets should be available, but will either receiver do enough to be worth starting?
Let’s take a look at the latest on the Rams’ pass-catching situation and figure out whether Mumpfield or Atwell is worth starting in Week 10.
Konata Mumpfield or Tutu Atwell Start or Sit Advice for Week 10
Both receivers have shown upside and big-play potential in the past, but neither receiver has been consistently involved while Adams or Nacua are healthy. While Nacua missed Week 2 and Week 3, Adams was available for those contests. He played through his Week 6 injury, but Nacua has been available in the Rams’ three games since then. This week’s game in Arizona will be the first with both receivers unavailable.
Mumpfield has been the slightly more productive of the two receivers this season. Mumpfield’s best game of the season came in Week 3 against Denver, when he caught four passes for 93 yards and a touchdown while Nacua was sidelined. He had four catches for 93 yards in Week 3 against the Broncos, catching a long walk-in touchdown in his team’s defeat.
He wasn’t able to build on that momentum, though, and didn’t even get a single target in Week 5’s loss to the Bills when both Adams and Nacua were healthy. Since the injury to Adams, Mumpfield has played the second-most snaps at the position behind only Nacua, but he has only gotten two targets per game. He had two catches against the Commanders for 20 yards last week, while Nacua drew a massive 19 targets.
The Rams have been running one-receiver sets in “13 personnel,” but the question is now whether Mumpfield will move into that role as the one receiver on the field, now that Nacua is out. If he is and he gets anywhere near a similar workload, he has an extremely high ceiling and the potential to be a starter in almost all formats. There is lots of uncertainty, though, since this will be the team’s first game without both Nacua and Adams.
If not Mumpfield, the only other apparent option is Tutu Atwell, since Jordan Whittington (back) also landed on IR this week. Atwell had more targets than Mumpfield in each of the last two weeks. He caught two of four targets for 52 yards against the Chargers and two of five targets for 16 yards against the Commanders.
Atwell also played more snaps in Week 9 than Mumpfield for the first time since Adams’ injury. If he takes over as the No. 1 receiver, he also has a high ceiling, even though he only has seven catches for 99 yards and zero touchdowns all season long.
The reason that both receivers are intriguing this week is that the potential for workload is definitely present, and the matchup is a very favorable one. The Cardinals have allowed a massive 19 passing touchdowns this season in nine games, and wide receivers have averaged 146.3 receiving yards per game against them.
While the Rams will continue to utilize multiple tight ends and Kyren Williams as a receiver out of the backfield, both receivers have enough upside to make an impact as well.
Both of them are high-risk, speculative plays in Week 10 since neither has great numbers this season. Both have enough upside to be FLEX options in deep leagues, though. Mumpfield has shown a higher ceiling recently, but Atwell may be a little safer since he did get more work last week. Mumpfield is a swing-for-the-fences pickup, while Atwell is a good flier pickup as well. Playing either is high-risk, but I would lean slightly towards Mumpfield as my preferred option.
For DFS contests, Mumpfield has a salary of $4,000 and Atwell of just $3,700 on the main 10-game DFS fantasy football slate this week, like the NFL $2.5M Fantasy Football Millionaire [$1M to 1st]. Both will be popular value plays with the potential to go off and return awesome value if they get a big play, score a touchdown or both. They are high-risk for DFS but do offer upside.
