Fantasy Football 2018 - The TRUTH About Fantasy WRs in 2017, Part 1

duty to. That's how much he believed in Nagy. And the Andy Reed coaching tree kind of speaks for itself. The great philosophy. So I think this is a positive hire for the Bears. Yeah, this is the McVeigh hire trying to. We've got Trubisky. We need to get away from the old school coach and get an offensive mind in who's young, who's, you know, given a chance with a quarterback. See if you have something there in Trubisky. He'll be really interesting. You're not going to draft.

Trubisky next year, but he'll be interesting to watch early on the same way you didn't draft golf this year, but you kept an eye on it and you go, he actually looks legit. Right. All right. Kirk Cousin said he would sign his Tinder if the Redskins have signed in the franchise tag for a third year and a row. That's another way of saying I would accept $30 million. $30 million. Yeah. There was another report that came out. Jay Gruden wanting essentially to get the long term situation a quarterback figured out. Kind of.

putting the pressure out there, whether that's to ownership, whatever. We need to make a decision on Kirk Cousins. We need to either cut ties if he's not the future or get him locked up so we're not talking about this forever. Obviously, huge fantasy implications if he ends up on another franchise. We're going to talk a lot about free agency. We're going to talk a lot about coaching changes. Another coaching change, the Patriot defensive coordinator, Matt Patricia. Obviously, they're still in the playoffs, but he's expected to become the next head coach of the Lions. Yes.

So we have dedicated shows once these things are finalized to talk through the implications. Today is about the truth of the wide receiver position. So I don't want to linger there too long. And then Pat Shermer, Vikings' offensive coordinator, he had been a head coach for Cleveland. There's talk of him bringing in Case Keenum wherever he goes, potentially. So that could be an interesting thing to follow as well. Any other news that you guys want to discuss?

discuss before we get into the truth the only the only news i would say is as you were describing kirk cousin's situation it dawned on me like i i've ran through all the different scenarios where is he going to end up it has never once crossed my mind that he could actually maybe sign a long-term contract with the redskins i just feel like they hate him so much yeah that they're they're not going to commit multiple years do they hate him or is he willing to sign that contract maybe

his situation is strangely like tyrod taylor's has been in the sense that like it seems like all those around you in the organization don't necessarily want to see great success from you right but they should because they want to win it's like they only want to win with a certain player brooks is not you agree with that brooks yeah it's weird right very because i would just want to win i don't care who it's with

At least with Kirk Cousins. The Chiefs accepted winning with Alex Smith. Look at the Jaguars. Yeah, that's a really good point. The Jaguars at the end of this season, they, you know, Super Bowl champion, Blake Bortles. I got his big snake. Oh, no. Oh, no. You know what's funny is we, much like what you just said about Kirk Cousins. Brooks, you're still here in the studio.

You need a timestamp. Much like we said with Kurt Cousins, you didn't consider the fact that they could potentially sign them to a long-term deal. Anybody considering the fact Jacksonville and Tennessee could be playing for a chance to go to the Super Bowl? No. Please. I mean, that would be incredible. All you need is a road victory. From each of them. From each against the assumed victors of the Patriots and Steelers.

That's all you need. All right. Let's talk about the truth. You want answers. I think I'm entitled. You want answers. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. Okay. Not even talking about Eric Decker. All right. He's not in the list. How interesting. He did make a big play. Big big play. After a big drop. That's what he's known for. All right. Where do we want to start, guys? At the top. We're going to be going from.

Number one, as far as we can go on today's show. And then we'll finish up wide receivers on the next one. We need to kind of define what we're talking about when we talk about consistency. And so that's where we're going to start. We're going to start with talking about DeAndre Hopkins. But all of these wide receivers, and I'll give you a chance to elaborate too, Jason, but all these wide receivers, we've looked at the numbers, the game logs, the performance is week to week. And...

Here's a couple things we need to say out of the gate. One, we're looking at consistency in the games that they played. So we're not holding it against players that they missed a game here or there. We're saying when you started them in your fantasy lineup, how consistent were they? How consistently did they give you a great game? Now, what's a great game, Jason? So what we've done this year?

is we've kind of tried to improve the process to make sure it's more accurate to what's really helping and hurting. And we changed from, you know, what used to be like a top five performance to actually how many points you're scoring. And we put the threshold here for the great game. That real weak winning. Yes, exactly. Top five type of performance on average. We put that at 20 points and all of this is half point.

PPR scoring. Usually when you score 20 plus points, you're going to be in the top five at the position. But there's certain weeks, you know, you look at week six this past year. Mike Evans was a top five wide receiver, even though he only scored 17 points. He didn't win you the week. That was just, there's buy weeks involved, not as many players playing. So it's easier to get a little bit higher up there. So essentially we're saying we're looking at on average where they would have finished.

We're basing enough points, not on where they actually finished in the ranking. Exactly. And then the next category we have are good games, really solid games. That's going to be on average about the top 24 wide receivers, but that will be any game over 12 points in half point scoring. Right. And then essentially we, then the last category is bust games, and that is where you would have finished on average outside the top 50 at your position. Obviously, for these players of this caliber,

That's a very relevant stat because that not only, it's not a null situation. It's a hurt your team situation. Yeah, so there is this in-between area where we're not really factoring in, where you scored, you know, around nine or ten points. Those, you know, those games happen for everybody. We're just looking at, were you really helpful or did you really hurt my team? And then we have kind of created a custom score based on taking those.

12 or more games plus 20 or more games, and then subtracting out the busts and figuring out a rank for who are truly in 2017 the most consistent, what are their consistency scores and ranking them top to bottom. So we'll tell you who's the best, who's the worst amongst the top 24 wide receiver. Yeah, and then Brooks hooked up just kind of interesting, the difference in fantasy points between the wide receiver 1 to the wide receiver 5. Huge gap. 54 points on the year.

That's a pretty significant guy. The big guys, they always come through with monster performances. Because like you said, but the difference between wide receiver 1 and wide receiver 5 over 54 points, then you go wide receiver 6 through 24. That's also a difference of 54 points. And then the difference between wide receiver 3s is about 19 points. And then the other guys.

through wide receiver four. You're talking about 40 points right around there. It's just interesting. Yeah. I'll start it off here before we jump into DeAndre Hopkins, just wanted to point out this wide receivers as a whole. This was a down year. If you felt like your wide receivers weren't scoring as many points, that's because they weren't. You had, this year, we had five wide receivers with 150 plus targets compared to nine last year. Five wide receivers with 100 plus receptions.

compared to three. So that actually went up. Here's the big difference. Only 13 wide receivers had 1,000 receiving yards seasons compared to 23 last year. You say 13. That is correct. Wow. There was only two wide receivers that had more than 10 or more touchdowns compared to 5 last year. So scoring across the board for wide receivers did go down. Wow. I guess that's crazy. That makes a little bit of sense if you consider the fact that quarterbacks

So this year we didn't have a single quarterback with 600 or more attempts. I mean, last year you had, last year you had six. I have those numbers too, Jay, if you were one of those numbers. So I want to hear that. Last year, we had six quarterbacks over 600 attempts. Last year we had four quarterbacks over 400 completions. This year, zero for both of those categories. We only had eight quarterbacks throw for over 4,000 yards. And we only had three quarterbacks with over 30 passing touchdowns.

And I looked up just kind of scoring as a whole. This was the first year since 2008 that we didn't have a team averaging over 30 points a game. Now, I mean, the Rams were very close. It would be there 29.9. And then when you average all the teams scoring, in recent years it's been about almost 23 points a game for everyone. This year it was under 22. That's interesting. So scoring just as a whole was. So the question is,

Is this an outlier or a trend? Is it slow the game down, run the ball more, or is this just... You also, I mean, I have to say this. I know it happens every year, but maybe if it's a little bit more severe this year, but no, David Johnson, no, Oda, Buck Jr. No, Aaron Rogers, right? Aaron Rogers got hurt. Andrew Luck didn't play. You're missing some top-in talent. Certainly. You know, someone like T. Yilden didn't have somebody to throw him the ball. It was...

When you look at the, you know, we brought up the difference between the wide receiver 1 and the wide receiver 5. When you lose those top options, you're losing points, you know, in the NFL and in fantasy. So all interesting stuff to figure out the truth. And number one is. And number one is coming in a second, but first, we want to thank today's sponsor, RX bar, a new sponsor of the show. Love them. I've had RX bars for years. They are a whole food protein bar. They're made with a few simple.

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So right now for $30 off your first week of HelloFresh, visit hellofresh.com. Enter the promo code Footballers 30. Hellofresh.com. The code is Footballers 30. All right. The number one fantasy wide receiver on the season was DeAndre Hopkins. But, Andy, just because he's number one, does not mean he was the number one most consistent. The number one most consistent wide receiver on the season was DeAndre Hopkins. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. Now he didn't play week 17, but he ended the year with 96 receptions for 1,700, or I'm sorry, 1,378 yards and 13 touchdowns on 175 targets. Ooh, boy. He was the unbelievable year when you consider and factor in the quarterback situation. That target to reception number is not generally what you want to see. I mean, you want to see 174 targets.