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.
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:
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.
