Fantasy Football Today - fantasy football rankings, cheatsheets, and information
A Fantasy Football Community!




Create An Account  |  Advertise  |  Contact      




 

Joseph Hutchins | Archive | Email |
Staff Writer


Top 10 Dropouts - Wide Receivers
Which WRs will fall from the fantasy top ten in 2016?
8/3/16
Quarterbacks | Running Backs | Wide Receivers

Ready or not, let’s take a look at last year’s leaders, along with those 2013 stars who fell by the wayside, and see if we can pinpoint potential underachievers for this upcoming season.

Note: All rankings are based on FFToday’s default standard scoring.

  Top 10 Wide Receivers - 2014
Rank Player
1 Antonio Brown
2 Jordy Nelson
3 Dez Bryant
4 Demaryius Thomas
5 Odell Beckham Jr.
6 Randall Cobb
7 Emmanuel Sanders
8 Julio Jones
9 Jeremy Maclin
10 T.Y. Hilton
  Top 10 Wide Receivers - 2015
Rank Player
1 Antonio Brown
2 Julio Jones
3 Brandon Marshall
4 Allen Robinson
5 Odell Beckham Jr.
6 DeAndre Hopkins
7 Doug Baldwin
8 A.J. Green
9 Larry Fitzgerald
10 Calvin Johnson


Who Missed the Cut (7/10): Jordy Nelson, Dez Bryant, Demaryius Thomas, Randall Cobb, Emmanuel Sanders, Jeremy Maclin, & T.Y. Hilton

Since we started tracking dropout data six years ago, 7-of-10 receivers have fallen by the wayside in every single season except one (2014). That’s pretty compelling. And yet, look at the list above and tell me there are seven obvious candidates for Top 10 relegation in 2016. Can’t do it, right? Trust me: You felt the same way last August and it still happened, for reasons we’re all too familiar with.

Jordy Nelson’s 2015 never got off the ground as he tore an ACL less than a month after we published this piece in a preseason game against Pittsburgh. His loss affected the Pack all season long and will change the way they approach pretend games this summer and, likely, into the future. Strangely, his running mate, Randall Cobb, also failed to repeat as a Top 10 performer despite seeming to be in line for lots more looks in a Nelson-less Cheese offense. Suffice it to say Cobb was a marked man most every game.

Demaryius Thomas, Emmanuel Sanders, and T.Y. Hilton failed to retain their Top 10 standing in 2015 because of injuries too, but not their own. The Broncos’ tandem watched as their HOF-bound quarterback fell apart before their very eyes. Hilton, meanwhile, ended up paired with a quarterback even older than Peyton Manning (Matt Hasselbeck) thanks to Andrew Luck’s injury. The results were predictably pedestrian.

They could have been worse, though. Dez Bryant suffered a serious foot injury AND lost his quarterback, a double-whammy that led to him ending the season as the 78th best WR. 62 spots ahead of him was Jeremy Maclin, the last of our 2015 dropouts. The former Eagle appeared to be nothing more than a schematic casualty. At least he finally broke that KC wide receiver TD jinx, though, huh?

Most Likely Candidates to Fall from the Top 10 This Year:

Allen Robinson

Robinson averaged 17.5 yards per catch last season.

Allen Robinson, JAX: We had no good reason to suspect Robinson was due for a breakout campaign at this juncture last year. The Jags were expected to be terrible again. Blake Bortles was coming off an exceedingly rocky debut season. Robinson himself had only merited the 69th overall WR slot in his debut season, right behind the dynamic duo of Justin Hunter and Harry Douglas. Simply put, he seemed like the kind of guy we could safely ignore until the later stages of drafts and maybe, depending how deep the league, completely.

Fast forward to 2016 and we’d ignore the former Nittany Lion only at our peril. Robinson’s one of the hottest wide receivers in the business now and will be flying off shelves no later than the late second round in most drafts this August, even slightly higher in PPR leagues. The question is this, however: Will he end up deserving that lofty status? See, when I look at the list of 2015 studs and try to pick out seven guys who could conceivably fail to meet expectations, he’s an obvious choice, He’s got a much shorter track record than the others. He plays for a team that still has lots of room for improvement. He clearly benefitted from injuries to several teammates last year and a running game coaches had very little confidence in near the goal line.

Add Chris Ivory, a goal-line hound, to that running attack. Now add tight end touchdown machine Julius Thomas to the mix. What’s it all mean? Well, I’m not exactly sure (we’re still talking Jacksonville here), but I suspect it means about five or six fewer touchdowns and a couple hundred fewer yards, maybe more.

Larry Fitzgerald, ARZ: Fitzgerald’s late-career renaissance was a primary driver behind the Cardinals’ wildly successful 2015, wherein they fell just one step short of Super Bowl 50. OK, so it was a pretty big step (a 49-15 drubbing at the hands of Cam Newton’s Panthers in Charlotte), but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm Arizona fans are feeling as buzz begins to build around the even better (allegedly) 2016 version of the squad. I’m buying that particular stock, by the way, and do think the Cards could easily represent the NFC in Super Bowl LI. I’m not buying that Fitz will be as integral a piece this time around, however.

Most probably forget the future Hall of Famer tallied over 60 points in the first three weeks of 2015, when Michael Floyd was recovering from a freak training camp injury to his hand. That accounted for more than a third of his total fantasy points, meaning his production tailed off significantly as the season progressed. In fact, following a 100-yard outing in Week 10, Fitzgerald didn’t reach double-digit fantasy digits again until the final week of the regular season, a meaningless blowout loss to Seattle. (I’m still trying to forget, of course, that he flame-broiled my Packers in the Divisional Playoff game.)

Floyd is healthy as a horse heading into 2016, a contract year for him, and the continued maturation of John Brown and J.J. Nelson, not to mention David Johnson, a terrific receiver out of the backfield, likely dooms the Fitzgerald-centric passing attack his owners enjoyed early last season. Even if he remains a key part of the Cardinals’ offense, which is likely, he has little chance of matching last year’s stellar totals which were still, at the end of the day, only good for 9th overall at the position.

Calvin Johnson, DET: It sure is easy to predict Top 10 dropouts when they just up and retire all of a sudden, huh? There’s no reason to talk about why Johnson will fail to repeat as a Top 10 wideout in 2016, so let’s talk briefly about why, at the ripe old age of 30 and just nine years into what could have been a record-setting career, he called it quits. Was he tired of all the losing and the culture it engendered in Detroit? Probably. Had he given up the ghost on the Lions ever winning a Super Bowl? Most likely. Are these even remotely the reasons he walked away from the game that made him famous? Not according to him.

Calvin Johnson’s done with football because, quite frankly, it was too risky and potentially harmful to continue playing and he wanted a life after the game. Simple as that. I hope that’s not a harbinger of things to come, but the number of folks who are walking away from the game prematurely is steadily increasing and will probably continue to do so until the powers that be commit to making it much safer. I know I sound like a moralist and maybe even an outright heretic, but I love the game of football. I want it to survive so I can sit in my Barca Lounger 30 years from now devoting entire Saturdays and Sundays to it. It’s time to start having the conversation about what the future of football really looks like.

Next: Quarterbacks