How to Navigate Uncertainty in Fantasy Football | Stat Masters LIVE

Intro what's going on everybody Welcome to stat Masters I'm your host Chris bonagora and today I'm going to take you on a journey through some of life's most difficult questions questions like will Darius Tony reach his ceiling in Kansas City with Patrick Mahomes can I trust Rashad Bateman after a Liz Frank injury and a lot of failure over three years is Jamison Williams someone I can trust in fantasy football the things that keep most sane people up at night but before we answer your hard-hitting questions we're gonna come in easy with a player I really like who also has a lot of questions Calvin Ridley Ridley Tony Calvin Ridley Bateman and Jamison Williams all have one thing in common all four of these players have someone out there that's really hyping them up and all four of them have missed significant time in the last year or two and have played very little football so what do we do with them in basketball how do we invest in these players with Calvin Ridley he's the easiest one to invest in because he has the most actual NFL pedigree that we can go off of so we start at his cost of course cost is King and we look at Calvin Ridley in the superflex draft on Underdog that recently finished he was wide receiver 18 by ADP I know at the big board before that he was a little more like wide receiver 2021 and it will be interesting to see where he opens in best Ball Mania 4 set to drop Saturday when the draft wraps up I believe or early next week and I'm gonna assume it's going to be around wide receiver 18 could be a spot higher we'll see so assuming he's wide receiver 18. we look at Calvin Ridley 6-1 189 decent athletic measurables for a wide receiver first round pick profile doesn't really matter for a 28 year old receiver who's been in the NFL for years we look at his stats rookie season he was wide receiver 26 in PPR points per game with an improvement in his sophomore year to wide receiver 18 and then he had the breakout 2020 that everyone really loved where he was wide receiver four followed by a partial 2021 a personal decision to step away from the game of football and a year-long suspension for gambling while he was away from football now he enters 2023 as essentially the number one receiver for Trevor Lawrence lead Jacksonville offense and back when he was an elite fantasy football receiver he was the number two receiver for Matt Ryan who was still a good quarterback at that time in an electric Atlanta offense which was one of the most fantasy friendly offenses for years with Matt Ryan Julio Jones and anyone else fortunate enough to be on the field with them so 2019 was Julio Jones's last year as a top five receiver in points per game and Calvary Lee took an obvious backseat he was number 34 in targets only 17 Target share didn't see a lot of opportunity in terms of routes run his air yards and air yard share weren't necessarily high but they weren't off the board a lot of it makes sense for a wide receiver too across of a Hall of Famer still had a really good average depth of target with 13.6 still earned 20 deep Targets on 93 Target that's good they didn't see a lot in the in the red zone and then his efficiency doesn't really have anything to to jump at except for maybe his expected points added which was number 21. the rest is kind of just there but then you look at the 2020 season where he's wide receiver four and that year Julio Jones had missed I believe six or seven games he was very banged up Calvin Ridley was the number one for a lot of games earns 143 targets with a 25.8 Target share runs a lot of routes 2 000 air yards number one in the league that year a 41.4 percent air yard share 14.4 average depth of Target 40 deep targets right number one not a lot of yards after catch didn't have a lot of yards after catch the year prior not a yards after catch guy but not everyone has to be yards after cash to be elite we've seen it with Mike Evans we've seen DK Metcalf be really good with it two players that we looked at last week that we said were good players but their cost is going to affect how much you like them in fantasy football you look at the efficiency yards per out run is really good good average cushion is number five he had good targets but he did a lot with it yards per Target was good number 20 not necessarily amazing yards per reception was number 19. he was playing well his EPA was number nine number four in best ball points added number nine in fantasy points per out run a lot of good clearly a very good player let's see the top five a top ten receiver probably not there's certainly a lot of very talented guys but this is a guy that's really good at football takes a year away but comes out with a very honest letter kind of explaining himself and letting the public know that he does have the intention of coming in and giving it his best he's in a situation where he's probably the number one receiver in Jacksonville we've looked at Christian Kirk in the past and saw that you know he's a good player but he's not a number one we all believe Trevor Lawrence is a very good quarterback and this is a team that's probably gonna be a lot better on offense than it is on defense in a very competitive AFC it's not hard to see a scenario where Calvin Ridley can earn 130 targets or 140 targets how efficient he'll be on them is in question but if we look at 26 18 and 4 in PPR points per game number four is probably a spike you know he's maybe not that good 26 was a rookie year if we settle on 18 which is somewhere in the middle or we even go somewhere in the middle of 18 and 4 that would give you wide receiver 10 wide receiver 11. he's currently wide receiver 18. I'd say he still has a pretty good chance of finishing as a wr1 even if it's back end he could finish in the top 12 or maybe just outside of it I think Calvin Ridley at cost is a very good buy I'm not going out of my way to reach on him given that there's still the risk of not playing for a year but you should feel very comfortable with Ridley you should be happy to stack him with Lawrence and frankly of the Jacksonville players he's the one that you want his presence makes Christian Kirk a little more risky etn there's a lot of question marks around what he can do with the large workload Zay Jones is obviously just a fringe player and Evan engram is a good tight end but he's expensive now where last year he was cheap Ridley's probably my favorite player to draft on Jacksonville despite the unknowns around him now that changes when we look at our other unknown players Tony is a player who we know Kadarius Toney very little about in the NFL he's currently sitting at wide receiver 38 and Rashad Bateman is not too far behind at wide receiver 44 and in this contest James Williams was wide receiver 31 this was before the six game suspension that we know that he has so starting with Tony Tony is a player where we've essentially seen nothing in the NFL but he was a first round pick he does have a good athletic profile for his size and you go down and you look at his injury history and it's just kind of weird it's a dude who's just consistent hamstring strains now people question if he was actually hurt with the Giants or just didn't want to play but then he goes to Kansas City and gets hurt again ankle injuries just injuries kind of all around keeping him off the field there's no stats no metrics to go on he really hasn't done anything outside of a game or two but player profiler being the useful tool that it is still has information to give you if you look at his player bio just a little written about kind of the history of this guy it usually starts somewhere up here and then you can read more and read about Tony I didn't even know this until I looked at his profile this was a dual sport athlete in high school who when recruited to college was recruited as a quarterback and told that regardless of if he is the starter or not he will find the field and that was true he didn't start a quarterback but they played him at receiver and he was good in his senior year or his last season at least and then he comes to the Giants and it's it's similar at least when he is on the field it's like hey we're gonna get you the ball in situations you can succeed for that one game that he was good goes to Kansas City has a few plays so when you look at Tony it's a player that we would expect to have flashes of big play Upside I don't think it's realistic to expect him to be a Target hog or a high volume player you're not going to really want to hang your hat on a guy we've seen nothing for but there is still that hope and chance that even if Kansas City adds more receivers they find ways to Pepper him in as someone who's always been an explosive athlete and at least found his way to the NFL at his cost I don't know how comfortable I am making that type of investment for a player in the top 40 receivers and this is superflex in a non-superflex league he's well inside the top 100 around 80 or so it's a hard bet to make with the exception of stacking so for Tony I would say that if you have Patrick Mahomes on your team already that is when you go and you do a Tony stack and you don't reach for it you take it if he's there at ADP or post ADP you don't take him around ahead of ADP just because you have other Kansas City players if you're gonna take Patrick Mahomes 10 or 11 of the time which is healthy exposure probably half of those teams you want Tony which would be five or six percent because even if Tony does well let's say best case scenario for Tony he scores 170 fantasy points this year which would be absolutely absurd for a guy who's never done anything to do and let's say he's an eighth round pick which he was for the big board which was super Flex even if he does that you don't necessarily need him on your team to have won he's not necessarily the guy that wins you a million dollars and there's plenty of ways to do it without him in the eighth round so he really only helps you when you can stack it with the quarterback when you have the quarterback receiver stack his Spike weeks become even more valuable but if you don't have the quarterback his Spike weeks are the same as anyone else's Spike weeks and it's a very slim chance that Tony is a guy that has a high Advance rate and is a League winner when he's so Fringe I don't think a lot of people would argue that the one Rashod Bateman people are going to argue is Bateman who I would make the same argument for I would say that you really only want to take Bateman in teams where you've drafted Lamar Jackson to take Bateman anywhere except for stacked with Jackson doesn't really make sense you don't necessarily need him the chances he's a League winner are very slim at this point and people are gonna fight back most people at this point are looking at his Prospect profile so let's look at his Prospect profile he's six foot 190 good enough athleticism is not great but for receiver it's not as as meaningful he was a first round pick which is really good 83rd percentile College Dominator 98th percentile College Target share 93rd percentile breakout age with a 77th percentile College yards per reception is really good that's everything you do want to see when you're looking at those stats especially the young breakout age he goes to Minnesota he had the good sophomore year the high Target shares I would have to check if it's a big school or not but everyone really likes what he did in college he does have efficiency in size it's definitely a profile to like but at what point do we discount the profile I mean this is now a player who's been in the NFL for two years two partial seasons and in the flashes of him playing I didn't see enough to forgive so much missed time and you also look at how he missed that time he had a Liz Frank injury week 8 of 2022. that's a really hard injury for players to come back from and still be explosive and really good it's harder for running backs but it's hard for any position now Debo Samuel did it but his wasn't really a Liz Frank injury was more of a broken foot that's a kind of a brutal injury on top of a series of soft tissue injuries and then you look at what he did his rookie year and it's nice but it's not jaw-dropping 15 Target share is not great even on a Ravens offense that doesn't throw a lot not running a ton of routes not participating in routes not really good air yards poor average depth of Target and Lamar is willing to throw the ball deep he did it for Marquis Brown not a lot of deep targets only seven deep targets granted 67 targets that's okay the receiving yards is okay yards after the catch is poor nothing in the efficiency metrics it's not as impressive as you would like it to be now it was enough to invest in him last year at his cost with the profile but we've now seen a second year with 2022 where you look at the game log and I mean he's not getting high snap shares he's not running a ton of routes or at least his route rate isn't above 75 percent he arguably wasn't even outstanding Devin Duvernay now Devin Duvernay did fall off as the season went on and chances are had he stayed healthy Bateman would have started to do so but we saw very little Lamar did start to get hurt but a lot of people are hanging their hat on this one seven Target four receptions a hundred receiving yards game where he found the end zone and it's nice he's certainly a nice player but it's two years of very little you're coming off a brutal foot injury in what's inherently a low passing volume offense I understand the hype you can certainly still draft him he's a little pricey though for what you're gonna get out of him as wide receiver 44. he fell he opened up in Big Board as a higher receiver so if he does keep falling he does get more valuable but again for this type of Fringe profile I'm gonna stick with stacking him with Jackson and that's really the only time where you're gonna get the most out of him the chances that as a standalone player he provides so much value that you absolutely had to draft him is very slim even when players hit in this range so I would much rather the stack I would rather take guys who are less injured with equally as high upside a guy like Datsun right even though arguably he's gonna have a worse quarterback so not huge John Bateman not huge on Tony but it's their appropriate players to stack with because of the idea of their explosive upside so now that leaves us Jameson Williams with Jameson Williams who again we've seen nothing it's a player who came in off of an ACL and then when he was finally on the field it just didn't get the ball he didn't even get targeted you look at his game log I mean minimal he's one catch in the NFL now it was a beautiful catch we'll all watch that highlight for years to come and wonder what could have been but one catch I'll give him a pass that coming off an ACL is hard for receivers and he wasn't even a year off I mean they just said hey you can run get on the field so you can give him a pass you look at the prospect profile very fast 61180 with the 99th percentile 40 yard dash is very good the 19.9 college yards per reception with the speed is very good the breakout age is good enough at 20.4 you would like it to be higher but it's good enough and he was an early first round pick the lions are obviously invested in player I can understand liking him you look at his college stats he certainly put up in his Junior season at Alabama that's really good to see with the 20 Target share and special teams work it's a profile to really like but to see so little in six games even off the injury is a red flag for sure and to have so much commitment to taking his wide receiver 31 was obviously a bad idea he will fall now though now that he has a six game suspension people will will drop him so the question is how far do we want to take him where Tony is if he falls to wide receiver 40 I probably still don't do we want to take him where Bateman is at wide receiver 44. it's still questionable because I would say Bateman at least has some work in the NFL you could invest in rookie receivers like Addison or flowers you have a guy like Elijah Moore who might reclaim his career it's going to be a question of how far does he fall would I take a shot on him before Juju who's a very boring player probably right but I'm not gonna go crazy on him again I would prefer to stack him with Jared Goff it's gonna be a matter of where this is is price fall but chances are it's not going to fall far enough you're now not going to get him for six games so he's now not going to be a player that helps you advance he's going to have to be a player to help you win in those you know Lottery one-off weeks during the playoffs but that's a lot of risk for a sophomore player who is essentially in a de facto rookie season with a fringier profile that because it has the ACL and one catch in six games and a lot of people like to say oh you know he's the next Tyree kill that's a really really bold assumption to make Tyree kill is one of a kind at best you would want to hope that he could be Marquis brown or Henry rugs I think people forget Henry Rogues was quietly a very good player who did well down the field but was also versatile in in short yardage area when needed Marquis Brown's the same way but these guys were not Tyree kill but they were very good and they were both first round picks similar to Jamison Williams there's a lot of similarities here he might be a little faster than those guys but rugs was certainly fast you look at Marquise Brown's fantasy points he was hurt last year 180 total on Underdog two years ago 122 last year in limited games so assuming Jameis Williams is Peak Marquis Brown and he gets you 180 fantasy points that's fine as wide receiver 31 but the bet you're taking there is such a fringe bet if this was poker you're going all in before the Flop with a 2-6 unsuited technically you could flop a full house and get a 662 but you're really gonna go all in it's not a good bet he's gonna have to fall drastically to Warrant being drafted now and we're gonna have to see what happens with the Free Fall Life's greatest questions that keep you up at night actually aren't all that interesting it turns out the answer more often than not is just fade this extreme level of uncertainty despite the promise of flashy upside with the exception of a guy like Calvin Ridley who we actually know for certain is really good and is probably underpriced for his ceiling and there's no question of situation he's Tethered to a fantastic quarterback and a team that has a lot of consistency Recap right now where Tony a lot can change Bateman we don't know who his quarterback is we don't know how healthy his foot is and Jameson Williams has Jared goth and the lions and even though the Lions have a lot of hype it's the Lions let's be honest that'll do it if Outro anyone wants to hear more we are live Wednesdays at 8 on Discord normally I have Aaron the salary Captain Stewart with me but today he was unavailable he is going to the NFL draft with the underworld to represent fantasy football's best live right in The Fray so you just get me tonight and you get to ponder some of the existential dread that comes with fantasy football and that'll do it thank you guys hey you like that video be sure to subscribe and activate those alerts so you get notified as soon as new videos Drop and be sure to check out player profiler.com we have all the tools for you to dominate every type of fantasy league we have a draft kit Dynasty Deluxe data analysis DFS Dominator and don't forget the player rankings to rule them all thank you [Music]