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Dad Bod Fantasy Squad

Apr 26 • 20 tweets • 7 min read

The Case Against Chase - A THREAD: First of all, I want to say that I don’t dislike Ja’Marr Chase the player. Actually, I love Ja’Marr Chase the player. I think he is a dog, and a future star of the league.

But I don’t love him for the 2022 fantasy season at his current ADP of WR3 and the 9th overall player off the board in PPR according to ECR. Some experts even have him ranked as their number one receiver for 2022.

Ja’Marr had a historic rookie season with 81 catches for 1,455 yards and 13 TDs. He was a big play superstar, averaging 18 yards per reception. Those big plays included six receptions of more than 40 yards that went for TDs.

In fact, those six big play TDs accounted for more than a quarter (26%) of Ja’Marr’s fantasy production for the year in ppr scoring. This stat triggered me to question two things. One, is that type of big play production repeatable?

And two, what would Ja’Marr’s season look like if those big play TDs had not come along quite so often?

To answer these questions, I looked at three-year data for some of the best-known big play receivers in the game today, the likes of Tyreek Hill, A.J. Brown, Mike Williams, Tyler Lockett, D.K. Metcalf, Deebo Samuel, Stefon Diggs, Mike Evans and Justin Jefferson (2 years of data).

This gives us a group of 10 elite big play receivers, and their big play statistics are pretty much as expected, other than Ja’Marr Chase’s. Some interesting takeaways from this data are shown in the table below.

As you can see, Ja’Marr did some pretty amazing things when it comes to big play TDs. He was able to secure six TDs of 40+ yards in just 17 games, while DK Metcalf has secured the same number in 49 games and Stefon Diggs has secured five in 48 games with Josh Allen’s cannon.

Over the past three years Tyreek Hill, the best in the deep ball business, has caught a 40+ yard TD on one in every 23 catches, Mike Williams on one in every 24 and Tyler Lockett on one in every 36. Ja’Marr did it on one in every 13.

And it takes Mike Evans an average of 83 targets to catch a 40 yard TD, while it only took Ja’Marr 20 targets. All this to say, he very likely can’t keep up this level of productivity.

Let’s do a hypothetical and say he only caught three 40+ yard TDs last year rather than the six that he did. That would have still made him one of the absolute best deep threats in the league, a pace bested by only Tyreek Hill.

But instead of finishing as WR5 in PPR he would have finished as WR12. Just three completions that are exceptionally hard to repeat take him from being a bonified fantasy star, to a borderline WR1.

There’s also a slight issue of consistency with Ja’Marr. He had 2 monster games, and scored 47% of his total fantasy points for the season in just 4 games. Huge games are fantasy week winners, but the lack of consistency throughout the season can lead to a lot of losses as well.

If you’ve ever owner Tyler Lockett you know what I’m talking about. In the other 13 games Ja’Marr averaged 12.44 fantasy ppg in PPR. That’s WR26 pace in 2021. The highs were phenomenal, but you were likely disappointed a lot of weeks owning Ja’Marr in 2021.

Couple this absurd deep ball efficiency and general inconsistency with the fact that his teammate, Tee Higgins, had a 17-game pace of 90 catches for 1325 yards and 7 TDs and it starts to get hard to see a path for Ja’Marr to be a top three wide receiver.

In order to return value where he is being drafted I think he is going to have to catch close to 100 balls, which would be a nearly 25% jump over last year.

I still have him as my WR7 as I think there is some room for more receptions and more development as a NFL WR, but I probably won’t own any Ja’Marr Chase this year as I’m not willing to take him until the middle part of the second round.