Tua Tagovailoa finished a little bit outside of the top-12 at
the quarterback position in 2022, but the fact that he even came
close to that number is pretty impressive. In a season marred
by multiple ugly concussions, Tagovailoa finished eighth in fantasy
points per game among QBs who played in at least 10 games. The
former Alabama QB looked good in his third professional season,
completing nearly 65 percent of his throws, including a league-leading
8.9 yards per attempt. That high efficiency also helped two of
his wide receivers (Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle) finish inside
the top seven scorers at the position at season’s end.
Now heading into his fourth professional season, Tua will again
be surrounded by those superstar wide receivers and while the
Dolphins didn’t do much to add to the offense, they really
didn’t lose much either. Tight end Mike Gesicki was the
only notable player who left during the offseason and even he
quietly played fewer than 50 percent of Miami’s offensive
snaps in 2022.
Another year in the Mike McDaniel system should help the offense
become more efficient, but what’s most important for Tagovailoa’s
fantasy outlook is his health. We’ve now seen him suffer
a brutal hip injury just before coming to the NFL, along with
broken ribs and multiple scary concussions since turning pro.
It’s too simplistic to say that a player is “injury
prone,” especially when the damages are largely unrelated,
but Tua has certainly had more than his fair share of setbacks.
His lack of rushing floor means that Tua will need an exceptional
touchdown rate to ever provide true difference-making fantasy
production, but he’s currently being drafted as a borderline QB1,
which seems like it’s closer to his floor than his ceiling, provided
that he’s able to stay healthy.
The Dolphins backfield was an absolute trash pile heading into
the 2022 season and we really didn’t get much clarity throughout
the year. The situation hasn’t changed much as the team is currently
looking like it’ll roll into the 2023 season with two former 49ers
backs, Raheem Mostert and Jeff Wilson, competing for the top spot
yet again.
Mostert is the player who conservative fantasy managers seem
to have the most confidence in, but this situation is far from
decided. He and Wilson finished with almost the exact same number
of carries, very similar reception totals, and were within 30
snaps played of one another for the season in 2022. Neither player
is a reliable fantasy asset, but Mostert’s status as the perceived
No. 1 back on the depth chart to start the season has meant that
he’s being selected significantly higher than Wilson, and sometimes
even higher than rookie Devon Achane.
One thing to remember during early drafts is that the Dolphins
have remained one of, if not the odds-on favorite to sign free
agent veteran running back Dalvin Cook. Cook would provide a completely
different skillset from the other backs in this offense and would
almost certainly command the lead back role, so drafting any of
the current Dolphins running backs comes with some serious risk.
However, if you look closely at the types of backs who have been
brought in by the current Dolphins staff, Cook doesn’t fit
the mold all that well. Sure, he’s still got some juice,
but he never had the 4.3 speed that the coaching staff tends to
favor. Certainly, they could decide that it’s worth it to
shift their offense around a bit to bring in a proven star back
like Cook, but they’ve also shown that they can have a successful
overall offense even without a highly productive rushing attack,
in no small part due to opposing defenses having to account for
such impressive speed coming out of the backfield.
There are so many reasons to avoid Mostert in fantasy this season,
but the truth is that there will probably be at least a few weeks
where he emerges as an RB1 for fantasy. Unfortunately, those weeks
will be incredibly difficult to predict, as they have been throughout
his career in the NFL.
Currently going undrafted in many leagues, it’s weird to
look back to the second half of the 2022 season and realize that
Jeff Wilson actually led the Dolphins in carries after Week 8.
This is despite the fact that he “started” just one
game over that stretch. The numbers between he and Raheem Mostert
were extremely close, with Mostert averaging 10 carries per game
after Week 8 and Wilson averaging 10.4 carries per game over that
same stretch. However, the discrepancy would’ve been even
higher if Wilson had not been removed early in multiple games
due to various injuries.
Mostert technically “started” all but two games he
played in during the 2022 season, but that seemed more ceremonial
than anything as it didn’t result in him being a much better
fantasy player than Wilson. Still, the 31-year-old Mostert is
being projected by most experts to be the better fantasy asset
in this committee to start the season, compared to the 27-year-old
Wilson.
What’s most likely to happen is probably another ugly committee
with both players seeing between eight to 13 touches per week,
as long as they’re healthy, and neither one really claiming
a strong enough role to be reliable for fantasy purposes. Add
in the fact that the team brought in another speedy young back
in rookie Devon Achane and there is just a lot to be worried about.
Still, considering that he’s currently the lowest-drafted
back in this offense, Wilson might actually provide the best pure
value if things go similarly to 2022. He’s a Mostert injury
away from potentially seeing 15 or more touches per week in one
of the league’s most high-powered offenses and that’s
intriguing for a player you can select late in fantasy drafts.
While veterans Raheem Mostert and Jeff Wilson are likely to enter
the season as the biggest parts of this Miami backfield committee,
it’s third-round NFL Draft pick Devon Achane who is really
the most intriguing player from a fantasy standpoint.
Undersized at only 5’9” and under 190 lbs, Achane
was an impressive all-purpose back in college. He rushed for over
1,100 yards with 11 touchdowns and caught 36 passes in his final
collegiate season at Texas A&M. He then blazed in the testing
process leading up to the draft, checking in with a 4.32-second
forty-yard dash time. This running back archetype is exactly what
the Dolphins have been acquiring clones of over the past two offseasons
and there’s an outside chance that the team will opt to
move on from either Mostert or Wilson if they see enough from
Achane during camp.
Achane will likely will start the season on the bench, but could
be the player who possesses the most upside in the entire backfield.
We’ve seen enough from Mostert and Wilson to know that both
players are likely to cannibalize one another’s touches
while also being high injury risks. The Dolphins didn’t
really “feature” Mostert or Wilson in 2022, so they’re
obviously not sold on either of them being a true bell cow, which
means that the opportunity is there for someone like Achane to
impress and potentially become that guy.
We also know that head coach Mike McDaniel likes to rotate his
backfield and keep players fresh, so there’s a real possibility
that Achane sees some playing time very early and he might be
the team’s best pass-catching weapon out of the backfield
right away. Achane is the back with the lowest floor of this trio,
but he’s also the player who has the highest ceiling. If
you’re taking him as your RB4 or RB5, then you’re
likely solid enough at the position that you don’t need
him to be a starter right away. In that case, he’s a great
lottery ticket-type back who could hit big for you, but could
also just fizzle out without costing you much of anything on draft
day.
There’s been a longstanding history of superstar wide receivers
struggling when they join a new team, but one player who absolutely
did not fall into that trap was the Dolphins’ Tyreek Hill.
Hill left the friendly Patrick Mahomes-led Chiefs offense and
it made all the sense in the world that he would have some struggles
when playing with a quarterback like Tua Tagovailoa who hadn’t
shown himself to be much of a deep passer. Hill proved those concerns
to be overblown as he set career highs in receptions (119) and
targets (170) while shattering his own previous career best with
a whopping 1,710 receiving yards. Hill finished as the WR3 on
the season, exceeding even the loftiest goals that fantasy managers
had hoped for him heading into the year.
Now with an entire season in the McDaniel offense under his belt
and a connection locked in with Tua, Hill can focus on the stated
goal he set for himself: to become the NFL’s first 2,000-yard
receiver in a single season. That seems almost silly on the surface,
but with defenses seemingly unable to gameplan and account for
his explosiveness, it’s really not out of the question.
Keep in mind that Tyreek was without Tua for a good portion of
the season and while Hill still performed well for the most part,
it’s hard to believe that his fantasy production wouldn’t
have been even greater if he had his starting QB for the entire
season.
Hill is currently being selected near the middle-to-end of the
first round in most drafts, which means that the market also believes
that the 29-year-old receiver has at least one more elite-level
season in him. Fantasy managers would be wise to make him a target
at this range in their drafts.
He might not have quite the speed of his teammate Tyreek Hill,
but Jaylen Waddle is still absurdly quick and is really proving
himself to be one of the league’s most dynamic weapons as
he heads into his third professional season. Waddle improved on
his breakout rookie season in just about every conceivable way
this past season, but the way he was utilized in the McDaniel
offense was night and day from what we saw from him as a rookie
under the previous regime.
The Dolphins used more pre-snap motion than any team in the league
and that helped fuel Waddle to one of the most ridiculous yards-per-reception
improvements in recent memory. Many were comparing Waddle’s
2021 rookie season in which he caught 104 passes for 1,015 yards
to that of players like Jarvis Landry, who are primarily underneath
possession receivers who don’t offer much explosiveness.
That completely shifted when McDaniel came to town, as he started
scheming Waddle in a totally different way, allowing him to utilize
his speed and shiftiness to get open down the field. This meant
fewer total receptions as he caught just 75 balls, but the receptions
he did make were enormously more valuable as he went for an impressive
1,356 yards. That’s an improvement of over 350 yards despite
catching 29 fewer passes. This meant that Waddle’s yards
per reception total nearly doubled from 9.8 as a rookie in 2021
to a league-leading 18.1 in 2022.
Certainly, some of this improved efficiency was due to factors
other than Waddle himself getting better, but so what? Even if
Mike McDaniel and Tyreek Hill are to thank for much of it, they’re
still going to be here in Miami this season, so there’s
really no reason to think that things will change substantially
for Waddle in 2023. Of course, an 18.1 yards per reception number
is unlikely to continue no matter the situation given that it’s
such a high number, but even a bit of a regression in YPR could
be completely negated by Waddle simply seeing a bit more volume.
Waddle finished as the WR7 in 2022 and with the Dolphins failing
to bring in any notable competition for him in the offense, there’s
plenty of reason to be optimistic that he can again finish as
a WR1 for fantasy this season. It’s tough to project that
two wide receivers in the same offense can do that in back-to-back
seasons, but this duo, in this offense, seems like the strongest
bet to do it that we’ve seen in recent history.
The tight end position in Miami opened up this offseason when
former 700-yard receiver Mike Gesicki left for New England. This
means that the current projected starter is veteran Durham Smythe,
whose career high of 357 yards in a season came back in 2021.
While it’s significant that Gesicki is gone, many fantasy
analysts might be overrating the impact it’ll have on Smythe.
The tight end quietly already out-snapped Gesicki in 2022. More
importantly, however, the Dolphins as a team tied for the league’s
fewest total targets to the tight end position in 2022. Their
offense is dynamic, making use of some innovative concepts, and
part of that seems to be leaning much more heavily on their wide
receivers to catch passes than it does their tight ends or running
backs.
All of this should lead fantasy managers to avoid this situation
in anything other than deep leagues where two TEs must be started
per week. Smythe, or any other Dolphins tight end, is unlikely
to see more than 50 targets this season and that’s just
not enough to justify a roster spot in normal fantasy leagues.
