Mecole Hardman is now a New York Jet, with the full expectation that Aaron Rodgers will be joining him shortly. Following the news of his signing, almost every reaction I read was negative. It would surprise the fantasy football community to learn that Mecole jumps off the page in terms of his team’s expected points added (EPA) when he’s on the field.
EPA is measured for every play and assigned to both the offense and defense. It ultimately measures the change in how likely an offense is to score due to the most recent play. EPA doesn’t assume each play is equally important for an offense’s likelihood to score, and so is adjusted for factors like the down and yards to go, among others.
For players that logged at least 200 snaps in 2022, Mecole led the league in on-field EPA. Now a lot of this is due to Patrick Mahomes. As you can see in the graph below, the Chiefs dominated the league in EPA per pass play. Essentially any team or player EPA graph is a Patrick Mahomes graph.
Even taking that into account, Mecole’s on-field EPA exceeded the Chiefs’ EPA by a substantial margin. As mentioned, EPA adjusts for a number of game-situation factors. To make sure we’re comparing apples-to-apples, we’ll need to adjust for these factors to compare Mecole’s EPA vs that of the Chiefs as a whole. Take a look at the tables below.
As an example, given that Mecole played more of his snaps on third down than the Chiefs as a whole, and those snaps had a higher EPA, we have to adjust his EPA down in order to compare the two. Even with conservative adjustments, Mecole’s on-field EPA mark in 2022 still looks great.
Yet, even after adjusting for the factors above, it’s still difficult to split the EPA value of Mecole versus the rest of his teammates when he’s on the field. Sports Info Solutions’ (SIS) Total Points metric attempts to do just this. It takes the EPA framework and provides a player value by taking essentially everything that SIS measures into account. On a per snap basis, Mecole finished as WR23 in SIS’ Total Points metric in 2022.
Now for fantasy managers, I’m not arguing you should take Mecole Hardman early in your drafts or prioritize trading for him in dynasty. Against a neutral-defense, I would project Mecole to average about 9 fantasy points per game, which doesn’t really move the needle. But perhaps he’s a better real-life NFL player than a fantasy asset. Especially on a one-year, $6.5M deal, I like the value for the Jets.
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