Competitive Receiving Corps to Fade in 2022 Fantasy Drafts

June 3, 2022

Antonio Losada looks at wide receiver groups expected to share the targets among their players, making the WR/TE involved bad assets to draft for the upcoming 2022 season.

We're talking about fantasy football here, and in fantasy, football volume is the key to rostering and fielding a winning team. While everything boils down to that concept, seeking volume calls for looking deeper than just the name and reputation of players. Put a wide receiver or tight end in a stacked offense (one featuring multiple top-tier pass-catchers and one or two great rushers) and his volume – and thus his fantasy outcome – will drop without question. The opportunities will go down and with them the chances of scoring fantasy points.

With that in mind, it makes sense to pursue WRs/TEs with clear and very well-defined no. 1 roles without other players threatening their targets. Even if the players in those offenses are not top-tier options, they will get all of the opportunities they can handle, which will ultimately benefit them. Those players might not be that good, but they will compensate for it just on pure volume. The exact opposite is also true: great pass-catchers can rack up points even on low volume, separating themselves from the pack.

Today, I will explore some offenses that enter the 2022 season with a lot of players to throw passes to, making them dubious draft picks for the upcoming year. Let's get to it!

2022 Must-Avoid Crowded Depth Charts

Cincinnati Bengals

Let me clarify something before we get started. By "avoiding" in this column I mean not worth chasing heavily/early on fantasy drafts. Cincinnati poses a great example for this so it's worth starting by discussing the Bengals situation. First of all, Cincy is one of seven teams (via PFF) projected to have three players getting at least a 17% of the team total targets (Ja'Marr Chase, Tee Higgins, and Tyler Boyd all project to at least 102+ each). That isn't bad all by itself. Only 49 players are projected to get 100+ targets in the NFL next season, and three of those play for Cincy, which is fantastic!

The problem, as always in fantasy, is related to volume and the share of opportunity. If any of Chase/Boyd/Higgins goes down or was playing on any other team they'd probably all multiply their targets – and fantasy-point outcomes, subsequently – by 1.5x at least. Playing together, that's not going to happen. Of course, Chase is coming off a ridiculous rookie season, and although he will most probably regress a bit, he should still put up numbers. Boyd has steadily decreased his production on a per-game basis for three years in a row but is still an 11.5 FPPG player in PPR leagues. Higgins is coming off a career year with an average of 15.7 FPPG in 14 games played last season.

You can expect all of these three to score around 12+ FPPG weekly next season, but it might be too risky to draft just one of them and expect steady performance given the sky-high target shares. It could be Chase one week, Boyd the next one, Higgins on the third, etc... Would you draft the full package, then? Not at all, I'd say. The ADP is ridiculously high on average and the production of the trio isn't expected to be so separated from other, cheaper units.

Kansas City Chiefs

Now that I have explained the reasoning about avoiding drafting individual members of crowded pass-catching units – cue the Bengals – and also the uselessness of getting the full trio/quartet of players in such teams – mostly because of their usual combined-average ADPs – it's time to move on to another tasty team in Kansas City. Not only does this unit of receivers boast a ton of options (including a tight end, Nuff said) but it also comes with the unstoppable and inevitable Pat Mahomes Boost.

The Chiefs lost Tyreek Hill but that isn't preventing fantasy GMs from keeping their stock rather high when it comes to Chiefs wideouts and Travis Kelce. Tyreek scored 334, 329, and 296 PPR points in his last three seasons in KC. Next year, PPF projects Marquez Valdes-Scantling and JuJu Smith-Schuster to put up a combined 378 PPR points, only slightly edging Hill's career-high mark from three years ago. Add the fact that Travis Kelce has the highest projection (292 FP) along with a monster 23.5% target share, and I don't love this for a start.

Not convinced to pass on this offense yet? Well, what about the still unmentioned Mecole Hardman and rookie Skyy Moore? Playing under Mahomes, you know one or most probably the two are going to have some monster games throughout the season. That's the Mahomes Boost I mentioned above. Of course, those explosions will come at the expense of the top-3 targets (Kelce/JuJu/MVS) having putrid weeks when those happen. Similar to what happens in Cincy, none of those (perhaps barring Kelce) is worth his current ADP, and the overall/combined/average ADP of the unit is super expensive, all things considered.

Detroit Lions

This is quite surprising, I have to acknowledge. Detroit projects to some ridiculous numbers on PFF's latest run of calculations. The Lions have five (!!!) players projected to a target share of 13% or higher. It's the lone team with such an amount of players reaching that mark, and all five project to at least 72 targets through the year. There are only two other franchises with four players (the Cards and the Rams).

Remember that Detroit has Jared Goff as their QB1, just in case. As if the receiving corps weren't packed enough (WRs Amon-Ra St. Brown, D.J. Chark, Jameson Williams, and TE T.J. Hockenson), PFF is also projecting D'Andre Swift to 72 targets next season. This looks too big of a risk/mess/however-you-want-to-call-it for my fantasy blood, folks.

ASB is the only player projecting to more than 176 PPR points in this offense counting only pure receiving statistics, with D'Andre Swift having the highest total projection (256 PPR points) though his figure (obviously) is boosted by more than 145 rushing PPR points. The overall combined ADP isn't quite expensive compared to the likes of Cincinnati and Kansas City (just imagine...) but neither is the expected outcome. The headaches trying to predict who will hit and who will not each week, though, will be similar to those other star-loaded franchises and definitely not worth chasing in the fantasy realm.

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