Fantasy football Week 5 is where the tough decisions live. Your early-round picks have four games of tape, your bye-week holes are opening up, and the waiver wire leftovers are starting to look suspiciously like starters. That's when a guy like Justin Boone earns his keep. His Week 5 Start 'Em, Sit 'Em column is out over at Yahoo Sports, and as always, it's worth your ten minutes before you lock a lineup.

Two names jump off the page: DK Metcalf and Michael Pittman Jr. The Metcalf call is the interesting one. You don't bench that kind of talent, but you can't ignore the target totals either, and Boone walks the line the way a good analyst should. He gives you the case for patience and the case for panic without pretending one answer fits every roster. Pittman is the steadier story, a volume guy doing volume-guy things, and volume is the one fantasy currency that never depreciates.

I've been doing this long enough to remember when start-sit columns were a single paragraph in the back of a magazine, printed in September and stale by October. What Boone does now, with usage trends and snap counts and route participation, is a different animal. I told you back in draft season that the homework starts now, and this is exactly what I meant. The league changes under your feet by Week 5. Receivers who caught everything in September start dropping targets, and backs who touched the ball 20 times a game suddenly share a committee.

The old rule still holds, though. Start your studs. Boone would tell you the same thing. Every year some fantasy manager talks himself into benching a first-rounder because of one bad week, and every year that manager loses by four points while his star goes off for somebody else. I once benched a Hall of Fame receiver in a playoff game because of a matchup fear and he scored three touchdowns. Never again. Take the advice on the fringe plays, the flex calls, the streaming tight ends. The ironclad starters stay in the lineup no matter what the matchup sheet says.

Where Boone really separates himself is the middle class of your roster. The WR3 with the soft cornerback matchup. The back facing a defense that just traded away its interior line. Those are the calls that swing weeks, and that's where you want a guy who actually watches the film instead of just sorting last week's box score by points.

My advice, same as always: read the whole column, cross-check it against what you saw with your own eyes on Sunday, and make your call by Saturday night. Nothing worse than a Sunday-morning scramble with a lineup half-set and a brunch reservation hanging over your head. Trust me on that one.