This article is part of our On Target series.
It's championship week (for all leagues with a soul), and I hope that this column has helped loyal RotoWire readers. We've looked at targets and efficiency metrics every week to help discover useful players. In particular, Stedman Bailey and Charles Johnson were discussed in depth here before their respective breakouts. Kelvin Benjamin and the other rookies were given their due in this space before they became widely regarded as top-20 WR commodities. There were also some pretty bad misses in here as well. I made feelings widely known about Emmanuel Sanders' lack of ability to score touchdowns after he had none in his first four games as a Denver Bronco.
That said, I want to look at three players who are likely on a bunch of championship teams and return to the market share concept that we started with the first week of this column. I was a firm Zero-RB drafter in 2014 and after looking at all of the injuries and attrition at the position, I think that it is the proper way to approach fantasy football world in the backfield-by-committee era. Elite wide receiver production is not easy to come back, especially in terms of consistency. That's why consistent wide receivers with high ceilings are the most valuable commodities in fantasy football at the moment, in my opinion. The three championship players I want to focus on are Jordy Nelson, Demaryius Thomas and Antonio Brown.
Jordy Nelson has long been an undervalued commodity in fantasy circles. To be honest, I think part of that stems from the fact that he doesn't look the part. He's white and therefore is not discussed as an elite athlete, yet his combine scores would make 80 percent of wide receivers in the NFL blush. Nelson plays 97 percent of Green Bay's wide receiver snaps, has a 28.5 percent market share of targets for Green Bay and 27.2 percent of his team's red-zone targets. All of those are elite numbers, but the most important factor is Nelson's quarterback. I talked last week about the value that Emmanuel Sanders received due to his quarterback play, and the same thing is true for Nelson. Occasionally, the quality of his quarterback means that the Packers put the game out of reach and hurts Nelson's number, but if the game is close, he is a mortal lock to be involved. Nelson is probably about to reach his decline at age 30 next season, but he should still be a first-round pick in fantasy drafts in 2015. Chances are, though, he won't be drafted there. As long as there is profit potential in Nelson's ADP, we should keep taking advantage.
Demaryius Thomas plays with the second-best quarterback behind Rodgers and has been even more consistent than Nelson. He seems a similar percentage of his teams targets to Nelson at 28.7 percent, but where he truly becomes elite is the percentage of targets he sees in the red zone. When Peyton Manning drops back to throw inside the opponent's 20-yard line, Demaryius has seen a target 34.9 percent of the time. That is truly an elite number and one that makes sense. Emmanuel Sanders is a talented player, far more than I gave him credit for, but he still isn't a good red-zone weapon. Wes Welker is a shadow his former self, and Julius Thomas has been relatively uninvolved in the Denver offense, even before he suffered an injury that has left him inactive and catchless for a month. Demaryius was my No. 1 overall play in redraft for 2014, and there is a good chance he finds himself in that spot in 2015 if Peyton Manning returns for one more season. There will be those who clamor for DeMarco Murray, Jamaal Charles or Matt Forte at No. 1, but the week-to-week consistency of an elite WR with an elite QB simply cannot be replaced whereas running backs can be found on the wavier wire every week. Just look at DT's own backfield with C.J. Anderson, who is an RB1 despite being a fourth-stringer at the beginning of the season.
Antonio Brown is probably the largest argument for Zero-RB. He's discounted every year in drafts because there is an air of regression in everything he does. His combine metrics are mediocre at best for a small receiver and the target volume seems unsustainable, but here he is every year. He's played 100 percent of the available WR snaps for the Steelers and sees 29.1 percent of his teams targets and 33.8 percent of their red-zone targets (though he is not efficient there with only a 63 percent catch rate in the red zone) but is eighth in the league in fantasy points per target with 2.17. I don't own Antonio Brown in any leagues because I far preferred Alshon Jeffery (which ended up being incorrect), but if he is available in the second round in 2015, I will certainly own many shares. Part of the success of Zero-RB drafting and stocking up on wide receivers is that the fantasy football market doesn't account for receiver production the right way. The consistent wide receiver performers are almost purely found in the first few rounds, whereas fill-in RB production can be found up and down the draft board because good fantasy running backs have built in volume in their projections that simply good (and not great) wide receivers do not have.
