RADIO
Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Allen Robinson will miss the rest of the 2017 season after tearing his ACL in the Jaguars Week 1 win against the Houston Texans. Robinson's absence from Jacksonville's lineups and from your fantasy lineups will change the way both games have to be played. You likely grabbed Robinson as a high-upside play at your number two receiver slot, thinking he could reclaim the glory days of 2015.
Well, the ACL tear means that dream is over. But could the Jaguars offer some other throwback to 2o15?
This article isn't going to tell you who you need to pick up to replace Robinson, unless you plan to replace him with one of the Jacksonville's other receivers. We have plenty of waiver wire suggestions for you in other places. No, this is about how Robinson's absence will affect the rest of the Jaguars, how their other wide outs and their running game will have to adjust to losing such a talented piece of the team.
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A-Rob's Impact in Jacksonville
Let's start in the most obvious place--someone has to take the targets that Robinson will no longer be getting. In his Pro Bowl 2015 season, Robinson was targeted 151 times. In 2016, his numbers were down across the board, but he still received the same amount of targets. Those have to go somewhere, and there are two receivers on the team who who could be the beneficiaries.
First, there's Allen Hurns, who you might remember as a fantasy darling in 2015 and then a disappointment last season. Hurns 2015 season saw him post 1031 yards and 10 touchdowns in 15 games. He finished that year as a top-15 fantasy receiver and a red zone threat. Hurns scored in seven straight games. He also happened to have Allen Robinson playing across from him--that won't be true this season. There were discouraging signs from Hurns in that 2015 season--in seven of his games, he had three or less receptions. His usage was fairly inconsistent. His regression in 2016 wasn't a huge surprise, though his catch percentage of 46.1% was a fairly big drop after he caught 61% of his targets the year before. Hurns didn't post a 100 yard game and only scored three touchdowns. Fantasy owners this year have to wonder which Hurns they'll see. I think this depends a lot on how well the rest of the receiving core plays--Hurns can put up good numbers as the second option on a team, but I'm not sure he's able to be effective against a team's number one corner.
That's where Marqise Lee should come in. Lee, the former second-round pick out of USC, looked like he was finally starting to put it together last year after a disappointing first two seasons. Lee ended 2016 with 851 yards and three touchdowns, encouraging numbers on a Jaguars team that struggled all year. But with Allen Robinson out for most of Week 1's game, Lee responded with an impressive one catch, seven yards performance. He'll have to do better than that if he wants to pick up the slack from Robinson.
The team also has receivers Arrelious Benn, Keelan Cole, and Max McCaffrey. Someone on this list will see an uptick in targets as the third receiver on the team, but none of them will see the ball enough to justify being picked up in a fantasy league. Dede Westbrook arguably presents the biggest upside of any WR on the Jags entire roster, but he's on IR after undergoing core muscle surgery and won't help fantasy owners this season.
As it stands now, fantasy owners shouldn't be plugging either of these players into their lineups. But Allen Hurns does have that big 2015 season as a sign that he can be fantasy relevant--the best option here is to monitor their workloads in Week 2 and see who Bortles throws the ball to. If Marqise Lee has another outing like he had in Week 1, avoid.
Tight End
This will be very short: Marcedes Lewis has not been a major part of the Jaguars offense for the past few seasons and that doesn't change this year, even with the Robinson injury. Yes, the team gave up on the Julius Thomas experiment--it looks like he can't actually be good without Peyton Manning--but that doesn't mean they'll be looking Lewis's way much. He's 33. His 10 touchdowns back in 2010 are a distant memory. Maybe Lewis sees a handful of targets when Blake Bortles can't find a receiver and needs to check the ball down, but that won't be consistent enough to matter for fantasy purposes.
The Running Game
Here's where we get the player who stands to gain the most from Robinson's absence: Leonard Fournette. Fournette saw 29 touches in the Jaguars season-opener. That. Is. A. Whole. Lot. Maybe too much--you don't want the rookie running back who is supposedly the future of your team to get 30 touches a game on a losing team, right? (Although let's pause that "losing team" part for now--the AFC South looks pretty open for Jacksonville to compete for SOMEHOW.) But without Robinson, the team will give the ball to their other best play maker. That's Fournette. Even if his touches dip a little bit, he's in line for the kind of workload that could easily lead to a top ten fantasy finish.
Behind Fournette are the Chris Ivory and TJ Yeldon. Ivory had nine carries against Houston, but that was in a game where Jacksonville got up big. Don't expect Ivory to cut into Fournette's touches too much. Yeldon didn't play against Houston due to a hamstring injury; who knows what his role in the offense will be, but I'm willing to bet it's pretty small.
Fullback Tommy Bohanon caught a one-yard touchdown against Houston. That won't happen much and he'll almost exclusively be used as a blocker.
The Quarterback
There are two different ways to think about how the Robinson injury affects Blake Bortles. There's the really reductive argument of uhh, garbage time!--that the team will be bad and Bortles will actually end up throwing the ball more because of this and he'll be fine. I don't like this argument, because A) it ignores how an underrated Jaguars defense is going to keep a lot of games really close and B) even if the team ends up bad and Bortles throws a lot while down multiple scores, the loss of Robinson hurts him more than the addition of a few more pass plays.
A better argument is this very simple one: if you lose your top receiver, you will have a worse season. Sounds...pretty self-explanatory, right? Bortles goes from throwing to Robinson to throwing to a group of lesser receivers, plus the increased usage of Fournette means that we aren't getting a repeat of 2015, when Bortles finished as the fourth-highest fantasy scorer at quarterback. He likely ends up somewhere in the mid-teens in terms of fantasy scoring now without Robinson--still a viable option in deeper formats, but not nearly worth what he's been in the past.
