Year after year fantasy owners take out their player rankings sheet and gather around a table or log onto a computer in order to assemble their definition of, THE GREATEST FANTASY FOOTBALL TEAM EVER! Sadly, year after year, fantasy football owners tend to also buy into the hype from a team or a particular player and draft THEIR NEXT SUPERSTAR, higher than they should be chosen.

Fantasy football is a game of emotion, which does not exclude crying when you lose a big game. You need to be able to bypass those emotions if you want to put yourself in the best position, statistically, to win the league. Now let me tell you about one of the most overhyped NFL player being drafted this year, Colts receiver T.Y. Hilton.

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T.Y. Hilton’s Beginnings

In Hilton’s youthful NFL career, the receiver has impressed many. The 92nd overall pick in the 2012 draft has made other NFL teams that bypassed the 5-foot-9-inch receiver out of Florida International regret not selecting the (now star) wide receiver. Hilton could have not landed in a much better situation for his rookie year, as fellow rookie Andrew Luck, was set to lead the Colts into the future.

Luck and Hilton connected for 861 yards their rookie years as chemistry began to form between the two. Hilton followed up an impressive rookie season with 1,083 yards and the next season with 1,345 yards. On the surface, you would like these find these numbers as a positive. Every year of Hilton’s NFL career, he totaled more yardage than the year previous. But the more you look into Hilton’s value, the more ill it becomes.

Numbers Lie Occasionally

While it is a positive that Hilton has improved his receiving yardage every year in the NFL, can Hilton continue to catch 40-yard plus bombs? The 10th ranked fantasy wide receiver in ESPN standard leagues for 2014 would be mistaken if he did not admit his fantasy success in 2014 to be a product of his explosive plays. In fact, Hilton should attribute all his fantasy success to these explosive plays.

Here is an interesting stat, since 2012 T.Y. Hilton is behind only DeSean Jackson and A.J. Green in 40-plus yard plays as Hilton has hauled in 17 during that time period – via NumberFire. While Jackson is considered to be a ‘boom-or-bust’ type of fantasy player, Green on the other hand, is considered as a safe and consistent player. Weirdly enough, I believe Hilton fits more into the category as ‘consistently unpredictable,’ meaning someone who is hard to trust week in and week out. Courtesy of Numberfire and ESPN; let us look at Hilton’s performances and where he ranked each game (PPR on left) (Standard on right) last season:

If you have ever been on a roller-coaster, you may have just scratched the surface as to knowing what it is like to have T.Y. Hilton as your WR1 for your fantasy team. During the 2014 NFL season, the fourth year wide out ranked as high as one in the wide receiver rankings for a certain week, and as low as 52nd and 112th (I do not believe he played much for the game in which he was ranked 112th). For a lot of Hilton’s bad weeks, his season average was restored by the weeks in which he, for lack of a better phase, “went off.” Hilton’s numbers can be deceiving. If you total up and average out Hilton’s fantasy points per game (in PPR), Hilton totals around 17 points per game. In ESPN’s standard league, Hilton averaged only 11.5 points a game.

In an ESPN standard league, Hilton recorded single-digit fantasy performances in six of his 15 games he played last season. DeSean Jackson, the 18th ranked fantasy wide receiver in 2014, has a current ADP of 68th in a 12-team standard league. Jackson recorded seven games (only one more than Hilton) with single-digit fantasy weeks. Jackson ended the season averaging just over one point less than Hilton per game with 10.3 points a game (Hilton averaged 11.5 points a game). Jackson, like Hilton, offers you weeks in which you can win your game from his production alone. Jackson, also like Hilton, also has weeks where you lose your game because of the lack of production he presents that week.

Expectations for T.Y. Hilton in 2015

Just like in a roller coaster, the highs are high, but the lows are low. For a guy that is being drafted as the 10th best wide receiver in the second round, he is not consistent enough for me. Hilton is reliant on big plays, and that is something that scares me too much to draft Hilton in the late second round (his current average draft position, ADP).

Let me throw a couple more numbers at you. Passes attempted to Colts wide receivers have consistently gone down in the last three years with 72% in 2012, 61% in 2013, and 57% in 2014. Also, since Hilton has taken over as the top receiver on the Colts in 2013, he dropped from receiving 24% of Luck’s targets in 2013 to 19.8% in 2014. The receivers that are currently around Hilton, in terms of ADP, are receiving an average of 25.6% of their team’s attention in the passing game - via Numberfire.

With Indy bringing in Gore, Johnson, and Dorsett into the lineup, Hilton is most likely going to see his target percentage on passes drop. The reward is just not there to warrant the risk to draft T.Y. Hilton in the 2nd or even third round this year. With so many mouths to feed in Indy, Hilton will have fewer opportunities to make big plays, which keeps his fantasy value alive. The inconsistent wide-out in Indy will not be able to reach the pinnacle of fantasy wide receivers as a top-10 guy with his decreasing amount of opportunities in the near future.

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