Wide Receiver

Michael Thomas - New Orleans Saints

Current ADP: WR10 | 30

This is a rather obvious one. We're a year removed from one of the greatest WR seasons ever and a fantasy WR1 finish from Thomas. 

Last year can pretty much be explained away by the high ankle sprain suffered in Week 1. It cost him a bunch of games, led to other injuries and him being a decoy for the handful of games he did play in.

Let's get one thing straight, Thomas is very much the same separator he's always been

Even in an injury-filled szn.

His target share in games he played was 27.8%, 4th in the NFL. His air yard share ... 42.5%.. #1 in the NFL.

Nothing about Thomas last year says he's not still Michael Thomas, one of the game's premier WRs.

He has this target and air yard share among the elites and what do they do with their pass catchers, nothing besides get rid of Emmanuel Sanders .... 19% of their targets and 26% of their air yards.

The big question of course is what happens at QB. I still think it's very much Jameis' job to lose which is good for Thomas, as we don't really want to rely on Taysom throwing the ball more than 20 yards downfield, but if it is Taysom, Thomas was still great in the 4 games Hill started last year:

A healthy Thomas is a healthy Thomas.  An elite opportunity share and there's no reason Thomas shouldn't finish inside the top-8 fantasy WRs again.

 

Mike Williams - Los Angele Chargers

Current ADP: 118 | WR49

This is absolutely the first year I'm buying into Mike Williams.

His rookie year, was a bust bc of a knee injury. His sophomore year saw 10 rec. tds. His junior season saw 1000 rec. yards in 15 games. Last year, he was decimated by an invisible undertake every time he went up for a jump ball. 

It led to him missing multiple games with injury, and super limited due to in-game injuries for another like 3-4 games. Just a completely band-aided together year for Williams. 

And there's no definite bounce byke for Williams this year, there's a chance another WR emerges as the WR2 behind Keenan Allen, whether it's rookie Josh Palmer, Tyron Johnson, whatever, but here's what we have. A very late ADP, attached to an exploding offense, for a WR who had either 10 tds or 1000 yards in 2 of his first 3 seasons and is projected by new OC to have a very significant role in this offense. 

I'd imagine this team will be top-5 in pass attempts this year. They just simply don't have a running back group equipped to carry the ball at a high rate. Williams doesn't even need to have a high target share to have high raw volume numbers and we know a lot of his volume will be valuable downfield targets.

And Hunter Henry is gone, who led the team in 10zone targets last year.

A lot of positives on the good side of the ledger for Mike Williams. You have to weight the good and the bad when you start getting into the later rounds and Williams certainly has more good going for him than bad. 

 

Michael Gallup - Dallas Cowboys

As a sophomore, Gallup went 113-66-1107-6 in 14 games. 14 games....

That number dropped off significantly in 2021 - He played a full 16 and went 

He's like the Dallas version of Antonio Brown in an offense that we can project to pass way more.

• 2nd most routes run in the NFL (might be a bad thing) what did he do with other QBs

• I mean... 
• With Dak back under center, again this offense is a well-oiled machine - I talked about it in yesterday's video on bounce back running backs - DAL averaging 32.8 PPG in dak's 5 starts would've been highest in NFL. Single most pass attempts/game
• Gallup doesn't even need more than a 16.5% target share to see like 110 targets in this offense tbh.

Gallup just straight up is disrespected as a receiver, too

annually ranks really highly as a seperator, they just him as the X receiver so teams always put their #1 against him.

 

Courtland Sutton - Denver Broncos

He's simply too talented not to believe he's going to ball. 

Remember how good he as in 2019: 125 targets, 72 catches, 1112 yards and 6 touchdowns. And I know, people are gonna be like but did u see what Sutton did when it was Drew Lock. Yeah did u see what your mother did in 1972 bitch.

We gonna act like JOE FLACCO AND BRANDON ALLEN MADE COURTLAND SUTTON. Drew Lock might be bad, but he's not worse than 2019 Joe Flacco or Brandon Allen. Sutton will be good because he's good, end of story.

Idk who the QB is going to be. If it's Bridgewater, as much shit as we give him, he supplied us with 3 top-25 fantasy WRs last year, one of whom (Spaghetti) had 140 targets. DJ Moore with 120.

 

AJ Green - Arizona Cardinals

Antonio Brown