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Diontae Johnson Injury Update Improves His Week 5 Fantasy Outlook

By Max Staley

Diontae Johnson's injury update improves his Week 5 outlook.
Diontae Johnson's injury update improves his Week 5 outlook. / Joe Sargent/Getty Images
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Diontae Johnson was a fantasy football darling this offseason. One of the most popular sleeper or breakout picks of the year, the Pittsburgh Steelers wideout somehow looked poised to deliver on all that hype in 2020.

After a monster Week 2 showing, Johnson only played 19 snaps in Week 3 before getting knocked out of the game with a concussion. He might not have been ready to play in Week 4 either, but the Pittsburgh Steelers' game was moved back due to COVID-19 concerns. Thankfully, Johnson cleared concussion protocol on Tuesday, meaning he'll be back in the lineup on Sunday.

Diontae Johnson Fantasy Outlook

Johnson has seemingly surpassed JuJu Smith-Schuster as Pittsburgh's No. 1 wideout, as he was seeing an absurd amount of volume before going down. He saw 23 targets over the first two weeks, good for a 31.9% target share. For reference, Michael Thomas had a 32% target share last year.

If he can maintain that workload, Johnson is best viewed as somewhere between a high-end WR2 and a low-end WR1. To be fair, though, that look a bit unsustainable, especially in such a small sample size.

Regardless, he'll be coming back into a pretty soft matchup against a beatable Philadelphia Eagles' secondary. This defense has been league average against the pass in most metrics despite facing some pretty lackluster quarterbacks (Dwayne Haskins, Jared Goff, Joe Burrow and Nick Mullens/C.J. Beathard).

Assuming Johnson is back to full health, you're going to want him back in your lineup on Sunday. He checks in as the WR21 in our Week 5 PPR rankings.

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Max Staley is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Max Staley also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username mstaley1212. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his personal views, he may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his personal account. The views expressed in their articles are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.