Last year, the Green Bay Packers went 4-1 to open the season and Aaron Rodgers was doing the usual Rodgers things. With five games in the books, he’d thrown 13 touchdown passes and only three interceptions, completing 66.7 percent of his attempts. The Packers were averaging 27.4 points per week. Rodgers had just engineered a thrilling comeback win at Dallas. He was an early MVP favorite and Green Bay was very much in the Super Bowl conversation.

And then the Barr play happened. Rodgers suffered a broken collarbone, altering the landscape in the NFC. The Packers lost at Minnesota, then dropped four of their next five games with Brett Hundley at the controls of the offense. Hundley threw more picks than touchdown passes. Things got ugly, fast.

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Rodgers is now fully recovered from the injury and talking about playing into his 40s. You can’t reasonably have a greatest-of-all-time discussion without mentioning Rodgers; he’s the NFL’s career leader in passer rating (103.8), by a wide margin. He also leads all active quarterbacks in career touchdown rate (6.4), interception percentage (1.6) and yards per attempt (7.9). Rodgers is simply brilliant, as good as anyone has ever been. He’s only one year removed from a 40-touchdown season in which he averaged 276.8 passing yards per week. It’s certainly not crazy to think he can reach those numbers again in 2018.

One of the consistent messages in the Juggernaut series this year has been that quarterback is a position of extreme depth in fantasy, which should depress prices and allow you to wait until the mid-to-late rounds before filling the roster spot. Thus, it’s tough for us to endorse Rodgers’ third-round ADP (30.1). Very few fantasy scoring systems do enough to separate the game’s elite QBs from the guys in the Bortles-Carr-Dalton range, so there’s rarely a need to reach at the position. (Of course this isn’t true of super-flex formats or 20-team leagues, but those settings aren’t the norm.) We can’t recommend that anyone pay the sticker price on Rodgers, but he absolutely should be the first QB off the board in most drafts. That’s an easy call. He’s finished as either the No. 1 or No. 2 fantasy quarterback in seven different seasons, which is just silly.

Green Bay’s receiving corps lost a familiar name in the offseason, but this team still has plenty of useful weapons.

Jordy is out, Jimmy is in

Rodgers was pretty clearly not thrilled — nor was he consulted — when the Packers released veteran receiver Jordy Nelson back in March. The pair had connected on 70 touchdowns over the years, playoffs included. Nelson was also on the receiving end of six of Rodgers’ 13 TD passes over the team’s first five games last season. At 33, Nelson may have lost a half-step, but he remains a quality player and a terrific red-zone threat.

Green Bay added tight end Jimmy Graham to the mix during the offseason, however, so Rodgers can’t be feeling too bad about his goal-line options. If preseason play can be trusted, these two already seem to have developed chemistry…

Jimmy Graham as a red zone target for Aaron Rodgers seems unfair. 📽: @NFL pic.twitter.com/hakrlPryyG — Yahoo Sports NFL (@YahooSportsNFL) August 17, 2018

It should go without saying that Graham’s numbers in a Rodgers-led offense could certainly match last year’s totals. He hogged the red-zone and goal-to-go opportunities in Seattle to an absurd extent. Graham led all tight ends and wide receivers last season in targets inside the 10-yard line (16) and inside the 5 (14). Obviously he’s in a different system this year, but it should be equally obvious that Green Bay will take advantage of his dominance in the end-zone. He may not quite be the athletic freak we knew in 2011-13, but he’s still a 6-foot-7 beast of a receiver. There’s no way Graham finishes outside the top-five at his position, assuming a healthy season. Guaranteed.

View photos Davante Adams , bankable WR1 in fantasy. (AP Photo/Morry Gash) More