Fantasy Football Outlook For Mac Jones, Mike Gesicki, and JuJu Smith-Schuster in New England

Rob takes a look at what to expect from the new-look New England Patriots passing game this year in fantasy football. They signed Mike Gesicki and JuJu Smith-Schuster to help out.

The New England Patriots' offense should look significantly different than it did last year. It came as a surprise to no one, well except maybe Bill Belichick as hard as that is to believe, that an offense with co-offensive coordinators Joe Judge and Matt Patricia directing it failed miserably. It is truly hard to believe arguably the greatest NFL coach of all time actually needed to see that play itself out before being able to acknowledge the simple and what seemed to be, an obvious fact that everyone else seemed to know. Luckily, it only took him one season to see the error of his ways.

Previous Fantasy Football outlook articles based on some of the biggest NFL free agency moves this offseason

• DJ Moore's Trade to Chicago
• Derek Carr's Signing in New Orleans – How Does This Affect Carr and Chris Olave?
• Miles Sanders Signing with the Carolina Panthers
• Aaron Rodgers Trade to the Jets and the Impact it has on him and Garrett Wilson

O'Brien isn't the only new face in New England for the 2023 season, however. The Patriots were unable to re-sign their best receiver from last season, Jakobi Meyers, but managed to replace him with former Dolphin, Mike Gesicki, and former Chief, JuJu Smith-Schuster. There are a lot of moving parts and any time you have a lot of change, it can be difficult to predict what will happen in the future. How will O'Brien change the offense? How will Gesicki and Smith-Schuster fit in? Who will play in the slot? What will be the tight end split between Gesicki and Henry? Let's see if we can't answer some of those questions.

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Addition by Subtraction

The Patriots' offense struggled mightily across the board last season. While they managed to finish 17th in points scored, they were just 26th in yards gained. Their offense finished 24th in total DVOA, 23rd in passing DVOA, and 21st in rushing DVOA. The Judge/Patricia offense was a complete failure across the board. Those are some pretty ugly numbers. Below you'll find just where O'Brien's offenses ranked in some of the same categories.

As you can see from the table, by no means has O'Brien been a savior, but he has been historically better in every single category than the Judge/Patricia combination last year. To make this easier to see, any marker in green indicates where O'Brien was better than the Patriots last year and red indicates his team was worse. You'll notice if you eliminate the Brock Osweiler season, there is a whole bunch of green, which for anyone thinking about investing in the Patriots' offense is a good thing.

It's not just that O'Brien has historically been a more productive offensive coordinator, however. While I typically try to stick to the numbers, the chemistry and environment are almost guaranteed to be better. The cohesiveness of the offense will be very much improved. Why do I say that? This article in the Boston Herald will tell you everything you need to do. I'm not sure I've ever read such a scathing article on any coach. Below is just one excerpt from the article that is sure to make you more optimistic about Mac Jones and their passing attack moving forward...

“A lot of guys were getting worried because when we were in the middle of camp, we were wondering what the plan was for our offense. Because we hadn’t put enough install in,” a source said. “We had a couple protections, a couple core run plays, but our pass game didn’t have much in it.”

As I read the article, I kept thinking to myself, "Man, wow! It can't get any worse than that." and then you know? It did. It just kept getting worse and worse. Here is just one more quote from the article that you'll have to read for yourself to believe and get the full scope of the Judge/Patricia experiment.

“A lot of guys would ask, ‘Well, what’s going to happen if (the defense) does this?’ And you would see they hadn’t really accounted for that yet,” one source said. “And they’d say, ‘We’ll get to that when we get to that.’ That type of attitude got us in trouble." Eventually, the staff’s approach ran counter to the reason they had pivoted in the first place. “By the end, they were just making 1,000 adjustments instead of building them in at the beginning,” one source said.

So while you may have looked at the table above and thought maybe O'Brien's numbers weren't that much better, this change goes far beyond what the numbers can indicate. I'm typically not a fan of points I cannot corroborate with numbers, I am completely making an exception to that rule here.

Too Many Square Pieces

While fantasy managers can expect a professional approach this year for the New England offense, it’s hard to picture just how all the new pieces are going to fit together. Mike Gesicki, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and Hunter Henry all of these players lined up in the slot on a good deal of their snaps last season.

According to PFF, Gesicki was lined up in the slot on 51% of his snaps, Henry was at 43.3%, and Smith-Schuster was at 42.6%. This isn’t a new phenomenon either. In 2021, Smith-Schuster played 77.0% of his snaps in the slot. Gesicki was at 62.5% and Henry was at 61.7%. 2020 was more of the same with Smith-Schuster taking 84.7% of his snaps from the slot, 67.4% for Gesicki, and 48.1% for Henry. We can take this all the way back to when all three players came into the NFL if we want to, but the results remain the same. All three players have been used out of the slot a great deal, which begs the question, where are they all going to play this year?

The worst part about that question is the answer will determine the fantasy value of all three players. The most likely answer is all three players will split the slot duties for the Patriots, pretty much crushing all of their fantasy values.

It’s not a mystery that playing in the slot tends to come with a lower average depth of target and yard per reception average. We saw this last year with all three players. What that means is that for any player to be fantasy viable in this kind of role, they need volume.

As you can see from the table above, none of them have been overly efficient in the past four seasons. The best yard per route run average we have is 1.70 from Smith-Schuster last year when he was playing under Andy Reid and had Patrick Mahomes throwing him the football. O’Brien and Mac Jones are a long way off from that. Short of his 2022 season, we have just two other seasons where any player had a yard per route run average of higher than 1.50.

Again, you can see the high slot percentage from all three players. More importantly, you can see the dangerously low average depth of targets for all three players and the lower yard per reception. If you want Smith-Schuster to have 1,000 yards, he needs 84 catches at his 2022 YPR average. To have 1,000 yards at his 2020 and 2021 YPR average of 8.6, he needs 116. Now think about how many targets he needs to get those 84 or 116 catches.

Let’s do the same thing for Gesicki and Henry, except we’ll lower the bar to 700 since they’re both tight ends. For Gesicki, at his 2022 YPR average, he’d need 62 receptions. At his career 66% catch rate, that’s roughly 94 targets. Henry would need 57 catches. He has a 72% catch rate, which means he’d need 81 targets. For the record, Henry had 59 last year.

Final Verdict

The Patriots finished the 2022 season with 540 pass attempts, which ranked 21st in the NFL. While O’Brien could have a slightly positive impact on that number, fantasy managers shouldn’t be expecting a large change to that number. New England’s offensive makeup still seems best suited to run the football, play with good ball control, and lean on their defense. Any recipe that calls for Jones to sling the ball around with his weapons will likely fail.

For this exercise, we’re going to assume that O’Brien’s history is going to result in a slight uptick in overall passing volume and that the Patriots will finish with around 570 pass attempts. This would’ve placed them just below the league average.

Over the last four years, Smith-Schuster has had target shares of 18.3% (2019), 19.6% (2020), 14.5% (2021), and 17.4% (2022). The 2021 season consisted of just five games, but looking at the other three seasons, we see a target share that is pretty consistent. It has ranged from 17.4%–19.6%. The median is 18.5%, which is what we’ll give to Smith-Schuster for 2023.

An 18.5% target share on 570 pass attempts would equal 106 targets. If we give him a 70% catch rate, which is his career average, he would have 74 catches. His career yard per reception average is 11.9. He was at 12.0 last year, but over 21 games from 2020-2021, it sat at just 8.6 yards. Jones is not Mahomes, which we all very much know. If we give Smith-Schuster an 11 YPR, he’d finish with 815 yards. At 12 yards a crack, he’d have 888. If we give him four touchdowns – he had three last year with Mahomes – and 850 yards, he’d finish with 146 half-PPR points or 8.6 per game.

Smith-Schuster is currently being drafted right around WR50 right now. The cost of admission isn’t so bad, but there are still players behind him I’d rather have. Skyy Moore (WR56), Tyler Boyd (WR57), DJ Chark (WR67), Jalin Hyatt (WR55), and Romeo Doubs (WR65), among others. With a lower passing volume in New England and the fact he’s unlikely to be the full-time slot receiver, there’s very little upside with Smith-Schuster. Fantasy managers are best passing on him altogether and targeting someone with more potential.

Last year, the new coaching staff in Miami clearly didn’t feel they had a role for Mike Gesicki. He finished with a 9.7% target share and just a 45.7% snap share. However, starting in 2019, he finished with a 15.3% target share and 69.5% snap share. It was 16.3% and 62.9% in 2020 respectively and 18.6% and 71.7% in 2022. Assuming he has a role more similar to his 2019-2021 seasons than his 2022 one, which is fair to assume because no one is signing the 2022 version of Gesicki, we should expect a target share of around 16.5%. That would give him roughly 94 targets. We might actually have something here with Gesicki.

He has a 62.5% catch rate, which would result in 59 receptions. His YPR average for his career is 11.3. He’d finish with around 667 yards. Over the last four years in Miami, he’s averaged 4.5 touchdowns per season. If we give him four touchdowns with 59 receptions, and 660 yards he’d finish with 120 half-PPR points or 7.05 per game. That’s in the same range as Juwan Johnson, Gerald Everett, and Cole Kmet.

He’s currently being drafted as the TE20 on Underdog. If you’ve largely punted the tight end position, I’m okay with his cost and taking a dart throw. Gesicki’s target share history vs his target competition in

New England actually gives him a chance to be the leading target earner for the team. That gives him a real shot at being a semi-worthwhile tight end. If we get lucky with slightly better touchdown luck than four, you might just have yourself a top-15 tight end, although I wouldn’t hold my breath. However, at his cost, it’s worth the gamble. He’ll likely finish as a TE2, but there’s a chance he finishes on the upper quadrant of that group where he’s a worthwhile streamer most weeks.

Henry should be completely off draft boards. His last two seasons in New England have resulted in target shares of 11.5% (2022) and 14.5% (2021). We’re talking around 75 targets. The bigger issue for Henry is that Gesicki and Smith-Schuster are both best suited to play in the slot and if there’s an odd man out for that role, it’s going to be him. He’s a better blocker than Gesicki, which means he could be the guy that finds himself in more of an in-line role this season. Outside of a Dawson Knox, 2021, or Robert Tonyan, 2020 kind of touchdown luck season, Henry is nothing more than a touchdown or bust-TE3.

Jones is currently being drafted as the QB27, which is basically free. Due to the fact that he doesn’t run and his team isn’t likely to air it out in high numbers, his ceiling is pretty much capped as a low-end QB2 starter. His current cost is cheap enough that fantasy managers don’t feel they need to avoid him, just understand there isn’t much upside.

They’ve added some decent pieces to their offense with Gesicki and Smith-Schuster and their second-round pick in last year’s draft, Tyquan Thornton should be healthy this year, which will help. With a better offensive system in place via O’Brien, it’s not out of the question Jones plays himself into the QB2 streamer.

If he has 570 attempts and completes passes at a 66% clip with a 7.1 YPA, both of which are his career averages at this point, he’d finish with 376 completions and 4,047 yards. His career average touchdown rate of 3.7% would result in 21 touchdowns. If we used his 4.2% from a rookie, he’d have 24 touchdowns. As you can see, we could be talking about a regular QB2 streamer especially if O’Brien is able to get more out of Jones and this passing offense, which wouldn’t be a surprise. Still, however, it’s hard to see Jones finishing as anything more than a backend QB2.

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