2024 Fantasy Football: Who could be contract-year stars this NFL season?

Special to Yahoo Sports

An old fantasy football theory is that players perform better when they are heading into the last year of their contract. Last offseason, the great Brandon Niles did an in depth analysis of this phenomenon to assess if it held up — you can read it here. Today, I will be adding the information we know about the 2023-24 season to that data in order to identify potential contract-year gems for this upcoming fantasy football season.

Recap: Does the Contract-Year Bump Exist?

Here’s a TLDR on what Brandon took away from looking at contract year data from 2015 to 2022:

Quarterbacks: Younger quarterbacks heading into contract years tend to see a jump in production, while older contract-year quarterbacks do not as they are typically journeymen or close to the end of their career.

RunningBacks: Certain running backs have excelled in contract years, but situation and volume tend to be far better indicators of success than contract status.

WideReceivers: Receivers experienced the biggest jumps in production during their contract years. Most successful contract-year receivers were in stable situations (safe depth chart position, continuity in the offense, etc).

TightEnds: There is a smaller sample size for tight ends compared to the other positions, but contract-year tight ends’ success is more closely tied to opportunity than anything else.

Overall, contract-year status isn’t a stand alone indicator of if a player will be productive in fantasy or not. It is best used as a tiebreaker when deciding between two players to draft.

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Contract-Year Players in 2023

Now, let’s take a look at how contract-year players performed last year to paint a clearer picture of if the contract-year bump exists. Note that I did not include players who were given an extension during the season or cut during or after the season ended.

Quarterbacks

2023 was a pretty successful year for contract-year quarterbacks. Cousins,…

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Author : 4for4

Publish date : 2024-06-28 18:10:54

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