Buccaneer Battle: Chris Godwin vs Mike Evans

April 16, 2023

Who to draft? Rob takes a look at the ADPs for Buccaneers wide receivers, Chris Godwin and Mike Evans. Can they both be assets in your fantasy football league?

This is my third installment of ADP teammate battles and this edition features Mike Evans and Chris Godwin of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Previous editions include Mike Williams vs Keenan Allen here and Diontae Johnson vs George Pickens here. For the past three years, Godwin and Evans have been incredibly valuable fantasy football assets, but this year, as we all know, major changes are on the horizon in Tampa Bay.

Tom Brady officially retired which means Evans and Godwin will be catching passes from second-year and former second-round pick, Kyle Trask or veteran Baker Mayfield. Saying these two signal-callers are downgrades would not even come close to doing it justice. Fantasy managers should be expecting significant decreases in terms of the passing efficiency in Tampa Bay, but also the passing volume. Maybe especially the passing volume.

Both cannot be overstated and it makes ranking and valuing these two players especially difficult. We don’t know which quarterback will start the majority of the games. Realistically, there’s going to be a quarterback change at some point in the season. How well these two quarterbacks play is unknown and just how much the passing volume decreases is unknown, as well. It makes for a difficult situation to interpret, but we’re going to look at the numbers and decide which receiver fantasy managers should be targeting this season.

Evening the Playing Field

I went back and looked at the last three years for Godwin and Evans and eliminated any games in which one of them did not play at least 65% of the snaps. I wanted to specifically look at how they each performed when they were on the field together. This amounted to 12 games in 2022, 13 games in 2021, and 11 games in 2020. In the 2020 sample, Evans averaged 56.2 snaps per game and Godwin averaged 56.0. Evans averaged 62.3 snaps per game compared to Godwin’s 63.5 in the 2021 sample and in the 2022 sample, they averaged 63.8 (Evans) and 63.4 (Godwin) snaps per game. That’s just about as even as it gets, so what did that look like?

There are a couple of things to recognize and pay attention to when looking at the table above. First and foremost, Chris Godwin has averaged more targets and receptions per game in all three seasons. This is echoed by his having a significantly higher target share and target per route run rate. The reason for this is fairly straight-forward.

Godwin’s average depth of target has been around nine yards or less in each sample. Evans, on the other hand, has had an average depth of target of 12 or more in all three years. The way Tampa Bay has utilized these players and what routes they’re running makes it much easier for Godwin to earn targets because his routes are much closer to the quarterback.

In connection with this, Evans has averaged more yards per game in two out of three seasons and more air yards per game in all three samples. He’s also found the end zone significantly more because in the past three years, he’s earned a lot more end zone targets than his adversary.

Which role has been more lucrative for fantasy scoring? That would be Chris Godwin’s. He’s outscored Evans in each of the last two years following 2019 where they tied with the same PPG. Godwin’s expected full-PPR PPG average has also been higher than Evans’ in each of the past two seasons.

Over this 36-game sample, Godwin has nine WR1 finishes, nine WR2 finishes, and 18 WR3 or worse finishes. Evans had one fewer WR1 performance with eight, 10 WR2 weeks, and 18 weeks finishing as a WR3 or worse. Incredibly similar. The one difference is in their ceiling. Godwin has four contests with 25-29 points, one game with 30-34 points, and zero games over 35. Evans has one 25-29 point performance, two games between 30-34, and two games with 35 or more.

Knowing this, it makes sense that Godwin is the higher-priced player early on in the draft season. On Underdog, Godwin has an ADP of 55.9 vs Evan’s 64.4. There’s just a round separating these players, sometimes not even. Godwin is ranked as the WR30, while Evans is at WR34. This ADP is based on their best ball tournaments. Over at FantasyPros, Evans is their WR32 and Godwin is much higher, all the way up at WR18.

What is the Plan of Attack for 2023?

Fantasy managers need to be mindful of just how much this offense is going to change without Tom Brady behind center. Over the past three years, no team in football has passed the ball more. From 2020-2021, they were arguably the best passing attack in the NFL, evidenced by the stats below.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to see their pass attempts drop by 10 in 2023 and no, I’m not kidding. They were at 44 last year and 43 the year before. If they finish the 2023 season with around 32 pass attempts, that would put them slightly below the league average. With the quarterback change, this seems quite likely and that decrease in targets is going to have a big effect on both receivers, as is the efficiency of the quarterback play. Let’s check out how Tom Brady and Baker Mayfield stack up over the last three years in some non-counting stats.

The first thing that stands out is how big an advantage Brady has in completion percentage over Mayfield. This should be expected, but still, it’s going to be a huge change for both of these receivers. We’re going to be seeing the ball hit the ground a lot more than we’ve been used to in Tampa Bay. That’s a really big deal because not only is the volume going to decrease, but the number of completions will go down too.

Think about this… last year, Brady had 44 attempts per game and completed just under 67%. That’s about 30 completions per game. With Mayfield, if their per-game attempts drop to 33 with a 60% completion percentage, we have just 20 completions to go around. That’s huge.

It’s not only going to impact completions either but touchdowns as well. Last year, Brady averaged around 1.5 touchdowns per game despite a very statistical season in terms of touchdown percentage, finishing at just 3.4%. If the number of per-game pass attempts drops from 44 to 33 and the touchdown rate falls from 3.4% to 3.0%, our available passing touchdowns per game go from 1.5 to a smidge below 1.0. Ladies and gentlemen, be prepared.

Over the last three years, you can see that Mayfield and Brady have been fairly similar in regard to yards per attempt and intended air yards per attempt. The one area that may surprise people is Mayfield’s deep ball completion percentage. This is their completion percentage on passes with more than 20 air yards. Mayfield bested Brady in two out of the last three years and was almost 10 percentage points higher in 2022.

Whose Ship Do We Want to Ride in 2023?

The Chris Godwin and Mike Evans debate, unlike any other, comes down to your league’s scoring rules. In a standard-scoring league, I’d prefer to wait on Evans and get the cheaper player who has a history of scoring more touchdowns, and whose downfield skills might just get a slight boost with Mayfield. I know that sounds hard to believe, but Mayfield has had the higher deep ball completion percentage over the last three years.

In any PPR-scoring league, Godwin remains the likely bet to score more fantasy points and be the more productive player. However, that said, FantasyPros ranking of WR17 seems much too high for him right now. I’d prefer to target Godwin as a backend WR2. For Evans, that mid-WR3 range feels right, with limited risk for a player of his talent caliber and solid upside yet.

At cost, Evans might be the better target for fantasy managers right now. He’s the slightly cheaper option on Underdog and his skillset is better suited for best-ball leagues. In typical re-draft leagues and using FantasyPros rankings of WR17 for Godwin and WR32 for Evans, I’d much rather take Evans later.

Either way, fantasy managers need to understand there’s going to be a lot more boom and bust nature to these two receivers that we’re not accustomed to. I do think there’s an outside chance Mike Evans is this year’s Tyler Lockett.

Last year, with Geno Smith starting for the Seahawks, fantasy managers everywhere largely wrote Lockett off even though he’s been an incredibly efficient and productive receiver. His counterpart, DK Metcalf, didn’t see experience too much of a negative impact on his ADP, much like Godwin, but Lockett ended up being the much better value. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if that holds true for Godwin and Evans at the season’s end.

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