Weekly Upside > Season-Long Totals In Fantasy Football
Who plays in leagues where the title automatically goes to the team with the total points scored? Me neither. Now, who plays in leagues where weekly wins and losses get you a shot at the big prize? Yep, me too. So why do we care so much about which players are going to score the most total points and why aren’t we focusing more on who can give us the most weekly wins? If you take a step back and start approaching your league with this different mindset, you might be surprised.
More: How To Build Fantasy Football Projections In 2023
The Data
First things first. We need to understand the data on the players who give us the most top weekly performances and how many of those performances they give us. This is where the surprises start.
Lets play some guessing games – how many top 12 weeks do you think you get from the very best players in fantasy football?
You’re probably too high.
The two best returns at Wide Receiver in 2022 were Justin Jefferson and Stefon Diggs. They produced top 12 wide receiver performances just 9 times. That’s pretty close to half. That means that half the time, the best wide receiver you can have in fantasy football does not give you a top 12 performance. Surprised yet?
In fact, only 13 wide receivers produced a top 12 performance more than 4 times. Just read that again – only 13 wide receivers finished top 12 more than 4 times for the entire season.
Here’s the list of those players and their number of top 12 finishes:
- Justin Jefferson – 9
- Stefon Diggs – 9
- Davante Adams – 8
- Tyreek Hill – 7
- CeeDee Lamb – 7
- A.J. Brown – 6
- Jaylen Waddle – 6
- Amari Cooper – 6
- Cooper Kupp – 6
- Amon-Ra St. Brown – 5
- Ja’marr Chase – 5
- Garrett Wilson – 5
- D.J. Moore – 5
Related: Garrett Wilson 2023 Outlook
Ok, there’s one thing being able to predict who is going to hit the top 12 every week but surely the best wide receivers are at least hitting top 24 on a regular basis, right? Right?!
Well, of that above list only 5 of them had 10 or more top 24 finishes. Put that a different way, of the 13 receivers who posted more than 4 top 12 finishes, only 5 of them had a better than 50-percent hit rate of even hitting a top 24 finish. Here’s the list of those players and their number of top 24 finishes:
- Tyreek Hill – 13
- A.J. Brown – 12
- Justin Jefferson – 12
- CeeDee Lamb – 11
- Stefon Diggs -11
Interestingly, there were two other wide receivers who hit 10 top 24 weeks but didn’t get to the 5 top 12 weeks in the first list – DeVonta Smith and Tyler Lockett. So, nice solid WR2’s that aren’t necessarily going to win you many weeks.
What about Running Backs and Tight Ends?
Ready to guess again? How many Running Backs do you think produced top 12 finishes more than 4 times in 2022?
13. There’s that number again, only 13 running backs produced more than 4 top 12 finishes all season in 2022. Running Back looks a bit better at the very top end compared to wide receiver at least, but even the very best players maxed out at 12 top 12 finishes. Here’s the list of those players and their number of top 12 finishes:
- Christian McCaffrey – 12
- Austin Ekeler – 11
- Josh Jacobs – 9
- Derrick Henry – 9
- Nick Chubb – 8
- Saquon Barkley – 7
- Rhamondre Stevenson – 7
- Aaron Jones – 6
- Tony Pollard – 6
- Joe Mixon – 6
- Jamaal Williams – 6
- James Conner – 5
- Ezekiel Elliott – 5
More: Managing Rookie WR Expectations
The Running Backs also look a lot better when you expand out to top 24 finishes. 9 of these 13 players had 10 or more top 24 finishes, and Christian McCaffrey managed it in every single game. Here’s the list of those players and their number of top 24 finishes:
- Christian McCaffrey – 18
- Austin Ekeler – 16
- Nick Chubb – 13
- Saquon Barkley – 13
- Derrick Henry – 12
- Josh Jacobs – 12
- Rhamondre Stevenson – 12
- Joe Mixon – 10
- Tony Pollard – 10
Tight Ends are a bit more spread as you might imagine, but it’s questionable whether or not a top 12 finish is actually a great performance at this position.
The top is heavy with only 4 players hitting the mark in 9 or more games, but 20 tight ends getting there in more than 4 games. Here’s the list of those players and their number of top 12 finishes:
- Travis Kelce – 14
- T.J. Hockenson – 10
- Mark Andrews – 9
- Pat Freiermuth – 9
- George Kittle – 8
- Evan Engram – 8
- Dallas Goedert – 8
- Tyler Higbee – 7
- David Njoku – 7
- Dalton Schultz – 7
- Gerald Everett – 7
- Zach Ertz – 7
- Dawson Knox – 5
- Juwan Johnson – 5
- Tyler Conklin – 5
- Taysom Hill – 5
- Hayden Hurst – 5
- Hunter Henry – 5
- Greg Dulcich – 5
- Darren Waller – 5
What about Quarterback?
This is interesting. Firstly, it’s a bit more predictable. 7 Quarterbacks with 9 or more top 12 weeks, 17 Quarterbacks with more than 4.
BUT the top players are still not guaranteed week-in, week-out locks. Jalen Hurts for example, was third on this list and only produced 12 top 12 weeks. That’s a third of the time that your star quarterback doesn’t finish as a top 12 player at his position. Here’s the list of those players and their number of top 12 finishes:
- Josh Allen – 15
- Patrick Mahomes – 14
- Jalen Hurts – 12
- Joe Burrow – 11
- Geno Smith – 10
- Trevor Lawrence – 10
- Kirk Cousins – 9
- Justin Herbert – 9
- Justin Fields – 9
- Derek Carr – 8
- Kyler Murray – 7
- Jared Goff – 6
- Tua Tagovailoa – 6
- Lamar Jackson – 6
- Dak Prescott – 6
- Tom Brady – 5
- Daniel Jones – 5
What do we do with all this?
“Interesting stats Matt, now what?”
I’m glad you asked.
For starters, when one of your top players doesn’t blow up in a key matchup, you can remind yourself that it’s not just this once and that even the very best players have plenty of weeks that don’t give you what you want.
Ok, we feel better but that doesn’t actually help us, let’s keep going.
There are actually some fairly common traits that follow these various players around. When you start carving up these weekly finishes in to tiers at each position, you can see the volume that they tend to (mostly) share.
SIDE STEP: There are always going to be players that score an inordinate amount of touchdowns and find themselves in these lists. Touchdowns are incredibly volatile and unpredictable. Players who do this will absolutely win you weeks but if they don’t score a touchdown they will give you nothing. If you can find the players with the volume, this is much more reliable and you should hope for those players to get their ‘fair share’ of touchdowns. Of course there will be players who don’t get their fair share no matter how much volume they get (see Diontae Johnson from 2022) and these are usually on bad / low scoring offenses. When you get to the end of this exercise, if you see players on bad offenses, it might still pay to drop them down your expectations somewhat…if you think you can predict the low scoring offenses that is!
Aaaaand we’re back. Ready for some threshold guidance?
Wide Receivers
- 150+ targets = Elite Wide Receiver, expect 7+ top 12 finishes
- 130+ targets = 2nd Tier WR1, expect 4+ top 12 finishes
- 110+ targets = Consistent WR2, expect 6+ top 24 finishes
Running Backs
- 300+ carries, OR 200+ carries and 100+ targets, OR 250+ carries and 60+ targets = Elite Running Back, expect 7+ top 12 finishes
- 200+ carries and 60+ targets = 2nd Tier RB1, expect 5+ top 12 finishes
- 200+ carries OR 50+ targets = Consistent RB2, expect 7+ top 24 finishes
Tight End
- 100+ targets = Top Tight End, expect 9+ top 12 finishes
- 80+ targets = 2nd Tier TE1, expect 5+ top 12 finishes
Quarterback
- 100+ Rush Attempts, OR 500+ Pass Attempts and 50 Rush Attempts = Top Quarterback, expect 10+ top 12 finishes
- 500+ Pass Attempts = 2nd Tier QB1, expect 5+ top 12 finishes
Wrapping it up
There are a couple of things I want you to take away from this article
- Weekly performances are what wins you a fantasy football league so look at the likely volume (not touchdowns) a player is going to get when you’re trying to predict who those weekly winners could be
- If, for example, 110 targets only gets you to a consistent WR2 that isn’t even guaranteed to get many WR1 performances, then think very carefully about whether a player really has the opportunity to get higher volume before you draft them. Otherwise, why are you drafting them?
Shameless plug time
When I’m working through my list of players who I think can hit the thresholds, I find projections to be the best way to go. And in the new update of the Yards Per Projections Template, we’ve added some Volume Tier numbers, along with a Range of Outcomes. These work off the above thresholds, so once you’ve finished projecting the document will tell you what category each and every player falls in to, along with some theoretical upside and downside positions. Remember, it’s still up to you to make that call on whether you think a player can do that but this is to help guide you along the way.
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