Fantasy Football: Identifying common themes to help avoid an early-round draft bust

Garrett Wilson was a fantasy football disappointment last season, but it had nothing to do with his play and instead the circumstances around him. (Photo by Rich Schultz/Getty Images)

Special to Yahoo Sports

As drafters, we expect our first couple picks to be automatic, players who will sit atop any fantasy football roster at the end of the season. Their contribution should be impactful, one that can be counted on every time they take the field. Of course, it wouldn’t be fantasy football without an early-round player getting injured during the preseason or the first couple of weeks of the regular season, sending them to the sidelines for a significant amount of games, or even ending their entire season before it even began.

Sadly, those premature injuries are an inevitable part of the game, something fantasy managers really can’t do anything about. But what about the guys who are drafted within the first few rounds who just don’t pan out as expected? That significant drop in points can easily be a difference-maker throughout the season, considering those players’ projections were among the top in the league. If we could somehow predict which players forecasted among the first two rounds would falter, or produce much less than their expectations, we could get an edge on the competition and save ourselves some heartache along the way.

When examining the characteristics of an early-round bust, I decided to look at players who were selected in Rounds 1 and 2 from 2015–2023, in an attempt to find any correlations in their seasons. For this article, only WRs and RBs were used, as their sample size is much larger in these rounds, plus elite QBs and TEs very rarely bust unless due to injury. In order to get candidates with true fantasy failures, all players must have been on the field for at least 10 games that season, eliminating players with significant injuries. To qualify as a bust, players must have ended the season at least 10 spots below their positional…

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Author : 4for4

Publish date : 2024-07-05 15:44:39

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