Scouting Notebook: Forecasting limitations

When you have the hottest quarterback ever (Ben Roethlisberger) facing the all-time worst pass defense (NY Jets) and the result is nothing close to a fantasy football points explosion, you have to stand back and assess our forecasting limitations.

Players are volatile. Even the quarterback, who is able to express his skills more completely than other players, can be overwhelmed by his environment. Roethlisberger had no time to throw and was hit on most plays, sometimes even after the whistle. All the momentum that had been in his favor the prior two weeks went against him. And this was at the hands of the team setting new records for inept play versus opposing quarterbacks, having yielded 24 touchdown passes with only one pick.

There’s nothing bankable about Roethlisberger or any player. What was and remains bettable about him, though, is that he’s a great player. But understand this has little currency if his teammates let him down. Look what happened to Tom Brady earlier this year. And there’s also a range of probabilities in his performance, too. We can only expect a player’s average day but we may get him at his best or at his worst, i.e., the 90th percentile day or the 10th percentile one.

So, know what you can know and what you can’t. Roethlisberger is a great player with good receivers on a team with a bad defense. Those are three big plusses. The minuses are that the team is not really committed to having a wide-open passing offense and that the offensive line can be overpowered. This all adds up to Roethlisberger being a top 12 QB every week, one clearly worth betting on. But he’s going to be volatile and dependent on game flow, like 90 percent of players.

On a similar note, I really try hard to not be reactionary with slumping players who have demonstrated elite talent and who should be in the prime of their career. But there’s no reason to start Michael Floyd right now. What’s frustrating to me, as someone who was so wrong about Floyd, is that I’d love to take some lesson out of this. Make it a teachable moment. But I can’t find one. This isn’t Corderrelle Patterson, who was mostly projection and playing in a new offense with a new quarterback. That’s lesson learned. Floyd seemed to have arrived last year in this offense with this quarterback (who is now out for the season).

The Dallas Cowboys can’t generate enough volume to feed a high-flying running back, stud wide receiver and two more players. So Terrance Wiliams or Jason Witten alternate as the third option. While I’d still bet on Williams as a No. 3 receiver in standard scoring, the floor is too low in PPR, with 27 catches through 10 games.

The 49ers and Jim Harbaugh don’t want to deploy Colin Kaepernick as a runner and he’s clearly not a volume passer. Kaepernick has 200 less rushing yards than Russell Wilson and zero rushing TDs to four for Wilson. There’s no reason why Kaepernick can’t run at least as well as Wilson and be an even bigger threat on the goal-line due to his superior size.

On the positive side, Wilson’s running is bettable though it makes him highly volatile, too. He really needs explosive days with 70-plus yards. He is averaging almost 60 but there are already three 100-plus yard days mixed in there.

I’d try hard to trade Michael Crabtree for anything this week off his dramatic catch. And Vernon Davis is pretty worthless, too. While Crabtree is overrated, Davis is still the best athlete in football at the position and right there with Tony Gonzalez as the best tight end athlete ever. The 49ers seem allergic to getting him the football though.

Believe it or not, Travis Kelce received two-thirds of the Chiefs snaps. But Andy Reid just hates touchdowns so much that he refuses to feature Kelce when he’s on the field. Plus Alex Smith will never risk any throw downfield when the guy is not wide open. Kelce down the seam one-on-one is wide open, I don’t care how close the defender is. You have to let Kelce go up and catch it.

But none of these things are going to happen: Reid featuring Kelce as a wide receiver given he’s by far the best receiving option on the team and Smith actually developing the gonads to deliver him the football downfield. So this isn’t ending for Kelce this year and not likely in 2015, either. But if you drafted Kelce because you thought he was a great player, you clearly were correct.

Yes, get C.J. Anderson with Ronnie Hillman’s health a question. Forget Montee Ball though. Ball said last week that Hillman should be the starter. Why believe in a player who doesn’t believe in himself?

Hat tip here to colleague Nando DiFino (@nandodifino) for noting today with me on SiriusXM Fantasy radio that the play is to offer the owner of a Week 11 bye week RB 80 cents on the dollar. Of course this only works if the RB owner absolutely must win this week. I’d target Justin Forsett and Denard Robinson in that order. Forget about this strategy with DeMarco Murray. If you try it with Chris Ivory, just offer a warm body as Ivory’s place in the Michael Vick-led Jets offense seems uncertain.

Andre Holmes shows you what happens when you’re a young receiver and you make a name for yourself. You get the best cover corner and you don’t have enough juice for your team to look for you anyway. The quarterback just ignores you and distributes your targets elsewhere, like 12 (for eight catches and 20 yards) to James Jones.

The Giants just don’t know how to deploy Reuben Randle in their new offense and maybe a lot of this is on Randle. But he’s a long receiver who needs to use his size on the boundaries, not catching a bunch of screens and 1 routes. Randle’s average depth of target is 7.14 yards, which is 74th among receivers. Randle is 6-foot-4 and similarly tall receivers are near the top of this depth of target ranking: Malcom Floyd, Michael Floyd, Kelvin Benjamin, Calvin Johnson, Mike Evans….

What do we do with A.J. Green? Andy Dalton is not a good quarterback, but we knew this. A healthy Green doesn’t need a top QB to be productive in our game. Green, most importantly, played every snap in Week 10 before the game was classified as garbage time and many starters were removed. This is the cheapest you’ll ever be able to get Green and he has a very good chance to be a valuable asset going forward even at less than 100 percent due to his injured toe.