On Target: Football’s Most Important Players

By Davis Mattek:

The trade deadline has come to pass in most leagues. The players sitting on your roster are likely the players getting you to the championship … or not. For the rest of the season, start/sits and waiver-wire pickups are the most important choices you can make for your roster. Let’s look at a little data to help make those choices for the playoff run a little easier.

About 6 weeks ago, I looked at red-zone efficiency. Valuable fantasy football lessons can be gained from a micro perspective (should I start player X or player Y, should I trade for player Z) by looking at how often targets turn into touchdowns for a player, and there are macro lessons to be learned as well. Antonio Brown is an amazing, incredible player for the Steelers and for your fantasy football team, but god bless his heart, he just can’t be efficient in the red zone.

Without further ado, here is the 2014 (so far) red-zone efficiency table. (Click columns to sort.)

Rob Gronkowski tops this list, and it is literally the least surprising thing that has ever happened. For his career, Gronk scores .85 touchdowns per game. Randy Moss stands at .71 touchdowns per game in his retirement and consummate All-Pro Calvin Johnson is a .64 touchdowns per game. As long as Gronkowski is healthy, he is the most important player in football, real or fantasy. He opens the entire rest of the offense for Brady by forcing safeties and linebackers to not pay attention to the likes of Danny Amendola and Julian Edelman, and he’s such a fearsome run blocker that Jonas Gray was set free for 199 yards and four touchdowns. In redraft leagues next season, I think there is real merit to the idea that Gronk will go first overall and may find myself in that camp when it comes to draft time.

Some other interesting names toward the top of the list are the ageless Antonio Gates, the ever-efficient Travis Kelce, a rebounding Brandon Marshall and the impressive rookie trio of Mike Evans, Jordan Matthews and Sammy Watkins. Those three are going to forever change the way we draft rookie wide receivers in fantasy. Whereas Kelvin Benjamin‘s success (sitting at WR8 as of this writing) has mostly been predicated on volume and garbage-time production, the triumvirate of Evans, Matthews and Watkins have succeed on less volume and much better efficiency. Evans and Watkins have wildly subpar quarterback play but have overcome it through a combination of overwhelming athleticism (for Evans) and superior technician ability (Watkins).

The main player I want to talk about it Jordan Matthews, as his fantasy stardom is far fresher than the other rookies. The last two weeks, he’s scored three touchdowns and gained more than 100 yards in both games. I think a lot of the popular sentiment is that his supposed rapport with Mark Sanchez has created the opportunity for more fantasy points than Matthews was receiving with Nick Foles at the helm. I tend to disagree with that line of thinking. Matthews is doing well for fantasy because he’s an incredible football player and is adjusting to the NFL game after spending four years playing for lowly Vanderbilt and never having a shred on continuity on offense. With last week’s performance, Matthews vaulted himself into WR2 range and should be started/treated as such on your fantasy teams for the rest of season. I sense there might be a little trepidation in starting him week to week in the fantasy playoffs, but this slight increase in volume in combination with his efficiency per target, I see little reason to leave him on your bench.