Sneaky Late-Round Fantasy Football Values and Sleepers

One of the biggest keys to winning your fantasy football league is hitting on big contributors or league-winning players in the double-digit rounds of your league's draft. The amount of value you will add to your roster even rostering just one key fantasy contributor from the 10th round or later is transformative and boosts your team's strength immeasurably.

Just last season, we had players like Tank Dell, Kyren Williams, Raheem Mostert, and Sam LaPorta seemingly come out of nowhere. These players went on to massively boost the fantasy squads of the teams who drafted them. There are numerous paths towards selecting these players too, via drafting a running back in a timeshare only to see his role grow over the season, to a wide receiver in an ambiguous receiver room, or even to rookies or mispriced players on the draft board. These are the profiles from which the massive hits in the later rounds generally come.

There's no shortage of players in the later rounds this season that could sneakily impact their respective NFL teams and, in turn, your fantasy football roster as well. We will look at the three players below who could be the next big hits from the later rounds in 2024.

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Dontayvion Wicks, WR, Green Bay Packers

Lost in the Jayden Reed, Christian Watson, and Romeo Doubs wide receiver talk last season was the emergence of Wicks, who impressed in early spot duty for the Packers before becoming a regular contributor from midseason through the playoffs. If you just look at his 2023 stat line of 39 receptions, 581 receiving yards and four touchdowns, it doesn't strike immediate optimism. However, Wicks' peripheral stats of 2.04 yards per route run, as well as one earned target for every five routes run (20% TPRR) despite his limited number of routes shows that he's a solid contributor who just needs to be on the field more.

Jordan Love: I think Dontayvion Wicks will have a monster year. https://t.co/NANFWejn4p

— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) July 17, 2024

I mean, when your quarterback is pumping out these training camp one-liners, it only adds fuel to the drumbeat. Wicks is a player we need to be much more in on at cost. If the receiving pecking order in Green Bay were more settled, Wicks would likely be going much higher or go undrafted altogether. Due to the reality that there are a lot of mouths to feed in this offense, Wicks' ADP is being suppressed. He has an ample path to being a league-winner and at worst, a consistent contributor to an offensive that is close to breaking through into elite status for 2024.

According to FantasyPros, Wicks is the WR66 off the board with a current ADP of 163. Smash!

Ray Davis, RB, Buffalo Bills

When Joe Brady was pushed up to become the Bills' new offensive coordinator following Ken Dorsey's firing in the middle of last season, the Bills simplified their approach and leaned much more on Josh Allen and James Cook in the backfield. While Cook did earn quite a bit more rushing volume, the team was clearly looking for more contributors as they cycled through retreads like Latavius Murray, Ty Johnson, and even Leonard Fournette in an attempt to give Cook a backfield mate. None worked out, so the Bills drafted Ray Davis from Kentucky in the fourth round of the 2024 NFL Draft.

#Bills OC Joe Brady on whether he needs to dial back James Cook’s workload:

“A lot of that is just kind of seeing how his body holds up throughout the season… He’s physically in better shape than he was [last year].”

Brady on rookie Ray Davis:

“He brings a little different… pic.twitter.com/VW2ZkvYi5m

— The Coachspeak Index (@CoachspeakIndex) May 28, 2024

Asserting himself at all three stops in his college career with stints at Temple, Vanderbilt, and Kentucky, Davis has 38 pounds of weight on the incumbent Cook and can provide more of the power element to the run game for the Bills. Davis can also contribute to the passing game and also be an early-down contributor for the Bills. Davis appears as close to locked in as the team's RB2 as can be at this point. As a contingency bet, Davis has low-end RB1 potential should Cook miss any time in 2024, which provides multiple outs to Davis being a smash in the late rounds of fantasy drafts this season.

My hot take: what if Cook/Davis is just this season's arbitrage version of Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery from 2023?

Audric Estime, RB, Denver Broncos

The former Notre Dame running back potentially has some real opportunity brewing for him in Denver this season. With Javonte Williams and Samaje Perine facing rumors of one of them being cut per Denver beat reports, the backfield does not appear to be settled at all. When that's the case, pushing your chips in on the cheapest option may be the best course of action for fantasy drafts in 2024.

Estime has a legitimate case for early down work and with his 220-pound frame, stands to hold up better to punishment than backfield mate Jaleel McLaughlin, who doesn't even crack 190 pounds. The per-touch profile for McLaughlin from 2023 was solid and as a receiving back, McLaughlin has some late-round value as well, but it's fair to question just how much of a workload he can shoulder. The Broncos' offense is catered to all kinds of valuable high-value touches for running backs via green-zone touches and receptions just like the Saints' offenses of old that were also led by head coach Sean Payton.

we hold coaches/GM to a much higher standard than we should in terms of doing the correct thing/enacting the correct process

the whole thing just looks like the 2012 Saints:

Ingram = Estime
Sproles = McLaughlin
Pierre Thomas = Javonte

— Kevin Tompkins (@ktompkinsii) July 20, 2024

For now, you can get Estime with one of your last remaining picks in drafts and get a running back that has multiple paths to being a worthwhile contributor for fantasy football lineups this season. Drafting running backs in ambiguous backfields (where we don't know who the starter is or how the backfield share will work out) tends to work itself out more often than not due to the fact that the uncertainty is already baked into a player's price, but many fantasy drafters are double counting anyway. For Estime, a last-round pick is a potential massive hit in terms of return on investment. Now if the Broncos' offense steps up this season? That would be the cherry on top.

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