August 8, 2015

Ed Gorelik analyzes three fantasy football wide receiver (WR) sleepers, Brandon Marshall, Steve Smith, and Kendall Wright, and how they can outplay their ADPs to help you win your league.

People are quick to turn away from the stars of yesteryear in favor of the "huge upside" they see blooming out of the young receivers. Is that really the right thing to do?

While other players in your league are making huge reaches on the likes of Brandin Cooks and Kelvin Benjamin, in hopes they make huge leaps forward- there's so much value to be had for the guys who have already had the kinds of production people are hoping to get of those. Let's look at some of those.

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Wide Receiver Sleepers & Draft Values - Overlooked Veterans

ADPs are from averaging all major fantasy sites for standard scoring.

Brandon Marshall (NYJ, WR) - 6.03 ADP

I'm sure no one other than Jets fans were excited about Brandon Marshall's move from the Jay Cutler ran offense in Chicago to the Geno Smith ran offense in New York, but ignoring him at this cost is going to be a huge mistake. Although the Jets offense under Rex Ryan and Marty Morwhinweg barely resembled anything to an NFL team, there's been a huge changing of the guard and with that should come a much more potent offense, relatively speaking.

First let's set the stage, the Rex Ryan led Jets played a very conservative game of football that led to few scoring opportunities and favored clock control over big offensive plays. Meanwhile, Chan Gailey has regularly turned water into wine in his past making Tyler Thigpen into a capable game manager and changing the career arc of one time backup Ryan Fitzpatrick into one of the trendiest backup QB names in the league. He was nearly capable of getting Thigpen to throw for 3000 yards and managed to get him to reach 18 touchdowns, while Fitzpatrick averaged 3411 yards and 23 touchdowns in the three full seasons he started under Gailey. Neither of these players were anything before their time with the former Bills head coach, and it's the spread-scheme that Gailey runs that helped them reach the heights they did. That scheme is also similar to the one Geno Smith ran in West Virginia, where he set college passing records.

Even in a horrific Jets offense that regularly lacked playmakers due to injury and lack of talent, Smith managed to improve from year 1 to 2 in all but volume yardage due to the games he missed but increased his touchdowns thrown, accuracy percentage, and decreased his interception rate. In that weak, conservative minded offense, Smith also led Eric Decker to a near 1000 yard season with 5 touchdowns, despite Decker missing 300 snaps and playing the first half of the season with a hamstring injury. So concerns about Smith being unable to feed a player gloss over that he already kind of did.

But what about Brandon Marshall? Marshall has only had two seasons in his career with less than 1000 yards, his rookie year where he saw little time and last year where he was injured. Marshall hadn't missed a game in 3 full seasons until then and it was also the first time he missed more than two in a season with three. Forced to play on one foot after spraining his ankle in week 1, Marshall had trouble shaking off the injury and playing through it for the first and only time in his career. It's also the first time he's ever injured his ankle going back to college. That bodes well for his chances to stay relevant throughout the entirety of 2015.

Let's look back at the seasons where he did have 1000 yards though, in those years Marshall had seen quarterbacking talents like Jay Cutler, Kyle Orton, Chad Henne, and Matt Moore, before returning back to Jay Cutler. He never once missed a 1000 yard season with anyone other than Jay Cutler. Believe it or not, Geno Smith is just as, and probably a lot more, capable than Orton, Henne, and Moore at getting production out of a high caliber player like Marshall. If worst comes to worst, Fitzpatrick has shown capable of feeding players like Steve Johnson into fantasy relevance and you don't need me telling you that Marshall is head and shoulders above Johnson.

History is on Brandon Marshall's side to bounce back, even if it's not going to be as a strong WR1. Outside of inner divisional games (and only really against the Dolphins, who Marshall might feel more inclined to play harder against, since you know...they traded him away), Marshall faces a slew of weak cornerbacks outside of the division except for those named Byron Maxwell and Vontae Davis. There's little keeping the 25th WR going off the board from severely outplaying that spot and reaching the top 15.

Steve Smith (BAL, WR) - 9.09 ADP

Steve Smith was already a surprise when he outplayed his ADP last year, this time around he's looking at a high chance of repeating even at the age of 35. Considered by many to be one of the most overlooked greats to ever play the game, Smith still possesses many of the high quality skills that made him an elite to begin with, even if his athleticism has waned. However, it's not just his skill that make it likely for him to produce it's the situation at hand. Let's take a look at that.

At the end of 2014, the Baltimore Ravens allowed offensive coordinator Gary Kubiak to leave and take the job as the Denver Broncos head coach, and replaced him with the former Chicago Bears head coach Marc Trestman. Amongst the coaching change, the Ravens also allowed Jacoby Jones and Torrey Smith to walk over to two west coast teams, leaving their cupboard barren of wide receivers. In the draft, they selected Breshad Perriman in the first round, a player very similar to Torrey Smith but far from being an immediate impact contributor. They also selected Maxx Williams, who can be given the same treatment, as both are really better athletes than they are football players at this moment in their young careers.

So what do those changes mean? Well, for one, it means Steve Smith is the only returning starter at any of the receiving positions. Perriman is already struggling to beat out Kamar Aiken in training camp, who saw some time as a limited role player last year- but neither Perriman or Aiken have ever had to carry the load like Smith has. You can expect (especially early on) for Steve Smith to be heavily leaned on as he's the only player that Joe Flacco has any prior chemistry with on the field. That's really good, even more so when you consider that Marc Trestman's offenses have favored throwing to the #1 Wide Receiver an average of 145 times a year in his last 6 seasons as a coordinator. Last year that would have tied for the 7th most targeted wide receiver in the league, coincidently the player that Smith would have tied with would be Bears wideout Alshon Jeffery.

Although a tough schedule is on the horizon for the former elite wideout, the ADP is cheap enough (WR38) that there's few reasons to forget about him altogether. It was surprising last year when Steve Smith hauled in 79 receptions for 1065 yards and 6 touchdowns, and I'm sure many will be surprised again if he pulls in similar numbers. But situation and opportunity are aligning for Smith to repeat, and maybe even do better in an offense that has few other options but still projects to be capable of moving the ball.

Kendall Wright (TEN, WR) - ADP 13.05

We've had a few pieces highlighting Kendall Wright here and we're about to add another one right now. Wright's one year removed from a breakout 2013 where he saw 94 receptions, 1079 yards and 2 touchdowns. That season came to Wright under the quarterbacking of Jake Locker and Ryan Fitzpatrick, two QBs who no longer start in the league (although Locker retired, it's very obvious from his play that he would have had to retire to the bench if he hadn't) and in 2014 featured an encore of Locker, as well newcomers Charlie Whitehurst and Zach Mettenberger. Basically, what i'm saying is that Wright was good enough to better mediocre quarterbacking but not good enough to better bad quarterbacking.

Marcus Mariota enters as this years starting quarterback and should present a strong upgrade over the previous signal callers especially for Kendall Wright. Mariota showed strong skills in the short passing game in both timing and ball placement and could be the exact kind of quarterback that helps bring Wright back to relevance, especially since he never degraded last season in anything but volume. Wright finished his 2013 breakout with 6.2 YPC per reception and 19 missed tackles on the season, both good for being top 10 amongst wide receivers. In a down year in 2014, Wright finished with 6.6 YPC per reception and 15 missed tackles, again both top 10 amongst wide receivers. This is a player who's getting better and more efficient.

Just wait though, there's more. In a myth-breaking study I did earlier this year about rookie quarterbacks and how they target players in their first year, I found that QBs heavily favor their #1 WRs more than anyone else (this isn't much of a surprise to anyone, of course, but it's noticeably higher). Wright, despite being far from the prototype of a team's WR1, is still the main starting wideout for the Tennessee Titans.

Kendall Wright also recently expressed frustrations with the Ken Whisenhunt offense for not targeting him more last year. Well, so far in training camp, that's not been the case as Mariota has been building a strong connection with the rising star. Maybe putting Wright on this list is cheating a bit, since he's not a veteran in the same vein as either of Marshall and Smith, but the fact is that after 3 years in the NFL he's being disrespected for a season that was out of his control, despite playing better. A post-hype year is on the horizon for Wright, who also faces a weak set of pass defenses within his own division and outside the division, minus some of the games in the AFC East. For someone being drafted at WR50, don't let that be a deterrent. This is a huge value waiting to happen.

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