Fantasy Football Week 12: Cardinals vs. Jaguars, Bears vs. Steelers, and other matchups to exploit
Each week of the 2025 NFL regular season, I’ll use this space to highlight teams facing various funnel defenses and fantasy options who could benefit.
What’s a Funnel Defense?
A funnel defense, in case you’re wondering, is a defense that faces an unusually high rate of pass attempts or rushes. I’ll take a close look at how opponents are playing these defenses in neutral game script — when the game is within a touchdown either way — and how good or bad these rush and pass defenses have been of late.
Identifying funnel defenses is hardly an exact science, and whacked-out game script can always foil our best-laid plans. It happens. I’ve found it useful in recent seasons to analyze matchups through this lens to see if there are any useful additions to the always-agonizing start-sit process we put ourselves through every week.
With more data, this analysis will improve. It happens every season. We are eyeball deep in data headed into Week 12.
Patrick Daugherty▶ Pass Funnel Matchups
Cardinals vs. Jaguars
Someday this glorious, fantasy-rich run from Jacoby Brissett and the Arizona offense will come to an end. We will remember it fondly, all these lovely air yards and real yards and drop backs and pass attempts and wildly negative game script that leaves the Cardinals no choice but to feed us our fantasy points. We’re gorging ourselves. It’s great.
Week 12 is not that week. Brissett and the Cards take on the NFL’s preeminent pass funnel defense this week: Jacksonville opponents this season have passed the ball at a 65 percent rate in neutral situations (when the game is within one score). No team is even close to that mark. Eight of the ten teams to face the Jags in 2025 have been over their expected pass rate. Only the 49ers — last week’s Arizona opponent — have seen more air yards against them than the Jags since Week 6.
The Cardinals, meanwhile, are 7 percent over their expected pass rate since Brissett took over for the fantasy-irrelevant Kyler Murray.
Brissett, who has dropped back to pass 110 times over the past two weeks, is certainly a viable 12-team starter in Week 12 based on volume alone. Trey McBride is a smash play, as per usual, and Michael Wilson has every chance to stay hotter than my feet in dress shoes in a matchup against a Jaguars secondary that has allowed the third most receptions and the fourth most receiving yards to boundary wideouts. Marvin Harrison, Jr., in case you haven’t kept it locked to Rotoworld (shame on you), has been declared out for Week 12.
Greg Dortch’s Week 12 outlook is slightly less appealing. The Jaguars have shut down opposing slot guys all season, allowing a league-low 58 percent completion rate on passes to the slot. Dortch, who operated from the slot on 80 percent of his routes last week against the 49ers, could still be fantasy viable based on the Cards’ drop back volume.
Bears vs. Steelers
The Steelers for a while vacillated between run funnel and pass funnel status. Over the past five weeks they’ve landed firmly in the pass funnel camp. No defense, in fact, has seen a higher neutral pass rate against them (66 percent) over the stretch. Since Week 3 — when teams really started leaning toward the pass against the Steelers — no team has faced a higher pass rate over expected.
Teams are letting it rip against Pittsburgh.
The Bears could be forced out of their stubbornly run heavy ways if they join the teams that have attacked the Steelers via the pass in Week 12. It would be a marked change for Chicago, which has the fourth lowest neutral pass rate (49 percent) since Week 5. The Bears have been especially run heavy inside the 20 yard line. It’s very much limited pass volume for Caleb Williams and the team’s pass catchers.
A boost in drop backs and pass attempts against the pass-funnel Steelers would be a boon primarily for Rome Odunze, whose air yards profile is gleaming, as I wrote in this week’s Regression Files. The air yards could flow here for the Bears: Chicago opponents have averaged 265 air yards per game this season, the ninth highest rate. If Caleb could ever throw a catchable downfield shot to Odunze, Rome might cook.
I guess this would also help DJ Moore, though his low targets per route run (16 percent) suggest Moore is simply not a real part of this passing offense. Luther Burden is far more interesting a week after he (finally, at long last) took over slot duties for the Bears.
Burden ran a route on 62 percent of Caleb’s drop backs and was targeted on 23 percent of those routes. An unusually pass-happy approach for the Bears in Week 12 could create the sort of inflated environment Burden will need to be a startable fantasy option. A mere six defenses have faced more slot targets this season than the Steelers. That could also be meaningful for Cole Kmet or Colston Loveland, who’s still running behind Kmet for reasons that cannot be explained by science.
Panthers vs. 49ers
I’m going to be bold and say Bryce Young won’t throw for 448 yards this week against the Niners like he did in Week 11 against the lifeless Falcons. But he could come close!
That’s because the Niners — one of the worst, most injury-marred defenses in football since mid-October — are a pronounced pass funnel. Since Week 5, San Francisco opponents have a 64 percent neutral pass rate. Six of their past seven opponents have been well over their expected pass rate.
The Panthers in Week 11 abandoned their run-first, run-always offensive approach and went a whole percentage point over their expected pass rate. That led to 45 pass attempts for Young. He wasn’t terribly efficient but he got the job done thanks to that sweet, sweet volume.
We could very well see that again against the 49ers. It should open up a path to another ceiling game for Tetairoa McMillan and makes Xavier Legette — who had eight targets in last week’s high-volume outing — interesting for deep-league purposes.
I’m not sure this means much for anyone besides McMillan and Legette. Jalen Coker ran a bunch of routes last week but managed a target on just 10 percent of those routes. Coker, however, plays primarily from the slot and this week goes against a 49ers defense allowing a league high 95 receptions to slot guys. So maybe he has some appeal if this game goes off. Meanwhile, Tommy Tremble and Ja’Tavion Sanders are splitting tight end routes and targets, making neither of them fantasy viable.
▶ Run Funnel Matchup
Vikings vs. Packers
The Packers have faced the fourth lowest pass rate over expected through Week 11 and the Vikings are finding new and inventive ways to hide their rookie quarterback who only plays reasonably well in fourth quarter drives against the Chicago Bears.
That would seem like a good recipe for a run-heavy approach for the Vikings if they can keep things halfway normal against Green Bay in Week 12. The Packers since Week 6 have been one of the NFL’s most extreme run funnels, seeing a 50 percent neutral pass rate. Just last week the Giants had their run-heaviest game of 2025 against these Packers. The G-people were 18.5 percent below their expected pass rate and had a 45 percent neutral pass rate. It’s the kind of thing you might see in a Tuesday night MAC matchup.
Look for the Vikings this week to give a big workload to Aaron Jones and — to a much lesser extent — Jordan Mason. Jones has out-carried Mason 25 to 10 over the past two games while dominating pass-catching work out of the Minnesota backfield. Green Bay’s rush defense isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great either. They allow the league’s ninth highest rate of rush yards before contact and a middling rushing success rate. Jones is something close to a must-start against the Packers.
If the Vikings are determined to establish it against Green Bay, pass volume will once again suffer and trim the ceilings of both Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison. The Vikings, led by JJ McCarthy — also known as Nine — have averaged just 27 passes per game over their past three outings. The Vikings are a low-volume offense in general, averaging 52 plays per game, the fifth lowest in the NFL. It’s enough to create a miserable fantasy environment for Jefferson and Addison (and TJ Hockenson, who is not startable in 12-team leagues).
I’d be remiss — and I’m never remiss — if I didn’t mention that the Vikings defense has become a reliable run funnel over the past month and a half. Probably that means Emanuel Wilson is in for a solid workload, maybe a fantastic one, if the Packers stick with their run-first ways without Josh Jacobs. Wilson checks a lot of nerdy analytics boxes and he’s facing a Minnesota defense that has seen opponents run the ball at a 51 percent rate in neutral situations since Week 6.
