Splitsville: Strong to the finish

We’re entering the homestretch in fantasy football now and setting our rosters with the playoffs in mind. Many of us are trading depth that the passing bye weeks have mostly made obsolete and, of course, our desired targets are the players who’ve had the greatest impact thus far in 2014.

Unfortunately, the season that’s before us is unlikely to bear much resemblance to the one in the rear-view mirror. Old stars will fade. New ones will be born.

To help quantify this, I looked at the players who had the most impact the first 10 weeks of 2013, according to Pro-Football-Reference’s default fantasy football scoring, to see how they fared the rest of the season. And I also charted the top 20 fantasy scoring non-QBs the final seven weeks of 2013 to see if they were top-scoring non-QBs in weeks 1-through-10, too. (I wanted to eliminate the QBs completely because I don’t really care much at all about them but I get that’s a minority opinion.)

I debated whether to lop off the non-week for us, Week 17. But I left it in because it counts all the same for the players and we do include it in the season scoring totals.

First, let’s see how the top 40 last year, including QBs, fared in Weeks 11-17. Where I say N/A, that means they didn’t chart those final six weeks.

So 18 of the 40 did not repeat and most didn’t even come close due to either injury or just ineffectiveness. That means roughly half of our top scorers are not obvious. But I think we all understand that QB scoring is largely random and dependent on game flow and matchups. Of the non-QBs, just six of the 17 players more or less continued their solid play to close the season.

As a sidebar, it’s plain to see that the running backs did relatively well and the receivers were far more volatile. Doesn’t this contradict the zeroRB strategy? I don’t think so. ZeroRB assumes wide receiver volatility and seeks to roster as many top ones as possible so that a couple pop every week. What this says to me is that counting on one elite WR (so far) to carry you through the postseason is very risky. Only one of eight on this list repeated, Demaryius Thomas. And also remember that in PPR, the big WR days tend to result in more points than the big RB days (Jamaal Charles last year notwithstanding.)

Let’s note the complete top 20 non-QBs the final six weeks of 2013:

So using this as a guide, we can assume that a majority of the most impactful non-QBs for the rest of the season are players we could not easily forecast.

Who will they be? Most of the players from last year were respected talents who, probably randomly, just didn’t pop until the home stretch. Some are disappointing again this year despite still being in the prime of their careers: Patterson, Bell, Jeffery, Decker, Mathews, Lacy, McCoy. Of course, Gordon could return to dominance by merely returning to action. All of these players are much cheaper to acquire for a stretch run than the actual week 1-through-10 stars. And are their chances to impact your championship quest that much worse? Patterson is free. He’s tough to bet on, I know, but this week against the Bears? Why not throw him out there if you’re a Dez Bryant owner?

The other possible risers who were highly regarded talents but who have been disappointments to date beyond the obvious (Megatron and Gordon) include Green, Michael Floyd and Bishop Sankey. I see DeAndre Hopkins as a player who can soar up this list going forward. Another cheap wildcard is C.J. Anderson and, yes, even Montee Ball, who I dislike as a player, but can benefit from the great Denver Broncos environment going forward if he’s available on your waiver wire.