The Pros And Cons Of Week 15 (#FantasyFootball)

…don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it… Geez, I tell you what Amari Cooper is worth that first round pick now, isn’t he!

Fine readers of the Going For 2 fanbase my name is @TheBLeagueSays and I am 100% down with the sickness! I am absolutely looking forward to addressing Week 15 with you. Once again please remember that the articles I bring to you will be based on the Pros and Cons of players or scenarios the Fantasy Football Community has split ideas on heading into future fixtures for your matchups.

So before we get started – Thank you, and enjoy!

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Dammit man! I told you not to say it!

Look. I won’t lie, I hate the term ‘take’, I generally don’t have a definitive stance on many things and I’ve learned that in the Fantasy Football world very quickly that being flexible on players or scenarios is a must. And I’ve always said that this column per week is a piece structured to hear out those views. Now at the start of the season the players I looked into made sense for the players selected. For example, there were players who changed scenery like Jimmy Graham and Sammy Watkins who are always somewhat controversial figures with Fantasy Football. There were players who we knew a little about but needed more exposure to, like Trey Burton and Kenyan Drake. And there were players who saw upgrades and downgrades in player and coaching personnel like Russell Wilson and Eli Manning.

And for this article, there were players at times I seemed to stay away from. 

Amari Cooper was definitely one of them that I steered away from. There was way too much going on in Oakland to make heads or tails out of anything. Michael Crabtree. Gone. Khalil Mack. Gone. Team morale. Gone. Derek Carr? No idea what he could produce. John Gruden? No idea what he was going to produce either. ‘New’ players like Jordy Nelson, Martavis Bryant, and Doug Martin? No idea how they were all going to be used. I liked that Cooper was shaping up to be the alpha Wide Receiver, but the recruitment of other veterans bothered me. I liked that John Gruden had always supported a Top 15 Wide Receiver. But that was 10 years ago and his comments in the preseason about running the ball aggressively was a warning sign of what was to come. Everything was too muddied, which you think would be great for a Pros and Cons article but to be honest the thought alone seemed awful. All of this was too much to specifically decipher and I took a hard pass. Hindsight is a beautiful thing and an article for Cooper could have shaped up as such;

For example a ‘Pro’:

In games where Amari Cooper had double-digit Targets, he had over 100 yards each time. That was good for two Top 20 performances as a Receiver (WR19 and WR 7 in Half Point Per Reception or HPPR going forward). So you would think if they fed him the ball more he may have been able to produce right?

And a ‘Con’:

In the 4 other games where Cooper had less than 5 Targets, he had less than 20 yards each time. Frustrating. 

Considering the few good performances he had during this six-week span, Cooper was the only WR54 for Fantasy Football. What was his ADP again? I’ll get to that later… But, why was it so hard for the coaching staff, play-callers or even Derek Carr to see that when you aim for Amari Cooper frequently, he tends to produce and good things can happen?

Well…

Enter Dallas, who put out a 2019 First Round Draft pick out for Amari Cooper who clearly saw his qualities and took the burden of Cooper’s erratic performances off of the Raiders Franchise. The trade was brutally criticised shortly after due to the eventual trades of Golden Tate to Philadelphia (for a 2019 Third Round pick) and Demaryius Thomas (for a 2019 Fourth Round pick) to Houston for much cheaper ‘draft capital’ picks than what Dallas gave to Oakland, who looked to have robbed the Cowboys on a player who was starting to flounder rapidly. Ironically, what has been overlooked was Dallas with their whole ‘we don’t need a single-lead receiver’ preseason ethos, had backflipped on their stance and shelled out for Cooper. However, it is the Cowboys and doing something bold isn’t an uncommon theme.

But, did you know…

• That Amari Cooper’s Average Draft Position since he became a Pro, has been in Round 4 as a Rookie (2015, finished 67th Overall in Half Point Per Reception (HPPR)), Round 2 (2016, finished 53rd Overall in HPPR), Round 2 (2017, finished 109th Overall in HPPR), Round 3 (2018, currently 59th Overall in HPPR).
• That prior to being traded to Dallas, through Weeks 1-6 that Amari Cooper was 137th Overall in HPPR scoring. As I mentioned above, he is currently 59th Overall.
• That since entering the NFL, Amari Cooper has never had more than seven touchdowns in a season? In 2017 he posted up seven scores which does equal this year’s tally of seven also. Funnily enough, six of his scores this year have not been in Oakland but with Dallas in fewer games. He has three games remaining to beat his previous best tally. Dallas in their remaining games travel to Indianapolis and New York (Giants) and are home to Tampa in Week 16. Now Tampa and New York have been generous to Opposing Wide Receivers most of the year, but the Colts have given up the least amount of points to Opposing Wide Receivers (12.98 Points Per Game) over the past month. So keep that in mind!

Cooper’s arrival has been a breath of fresh air for Dak Prescott too. Their signal caller was averaging 202 Yards Per Game (YPG) prior to Amari Cooper wearing the ‘Star’, which is now up around the 285 YPG region, and the last time they suited up the pair had combined for a 13-10-217-3 evening. To correlate that, over the first half of the year Dak Prescott was the QB23 overall in Fantasy Football but from Weeks 9 to 14? Prescott has been the QB5 overall. Cooper’s arrival has boosted that QB23 to metric to the QB14 overall for the year with 3 games left to play. Amari Cooper is also the difference between a 3232-yard season for Dak Prescott and a potential 4560-yard season. And had Cooper been a Dallas Cowboy at the start of the year and followed his averages right now (over the course of a full season): 141 Targets, 106 Receptions, 75% Catch Rate, 1712 Yards, 16.15 YPR, 16 TDS.

Ok, not bad, right? I know, I know, rejuvenating numbers like that is a dangerous game to play but it is still interesting to see.

Well, that’s great @TheBLeagueSays, but surely he’s not worth that first round pick again? Let alone the top Wide Receiver in his draft?

Glad you mentioned his 2015 Draft!

But @TheBLeagueSays, I didn’t mention his 2015 Draft Class…

Right, so let’s step back a bit and see who was Drafted in 2015 with Amari Cooper. In the First Round, Cooper went Fourth overall to Oakland as we know. Here is the rest of the First Round Wide Receivers:

• Kevin White to Chicago (7th)
• DeVante Parker to Miami (14th)
• Nelson Agholor to Philadelphia (20th)
• Breshad Perriman to Baltimore (26th)
• Phillip Dorsett to Indianapolis (30th)

Now this murderers row of Wide Receivers has combined for 209 games with an average of 42 career games each. Cooper has knocked over 58. Only Parker and Agholar have had over 50 starts in this group also. I know that comparing Amari Cooper to this group of players is one thing, and Tyler Lockett may have been a better comparison but to be fair, Lockett has only really started coming into his role over the past year or so, so let’s give him a pass because his future is pointing up with the way Doug Baldwin has been traveling this year. But it’s Saturday and I’m feeling frisky. How about this, how about a good old fashioned player comparison

Player A: 58 Games, 265 Receptions, 3825 Yards, 14.43 YPR, 25 TDS, current WR17 with 164 points in HPPR.

Player B: 52 Games, 288 Receptions, 3387 Yards, 11.76 YPR, 21 TDS, current WR13 with 178.8 points in HPPR.

Now I can see that ‘Player B’ is a few games short of ‘Player A’. So how about I extrapolate that to the same amount of games to ‘Player A’s’ (58 games) to even it out?

Player B over 58 games: 321 Receptions, 3777 Yards, 11.76 YPR, 23 TDS.

Pretty similar to near same player right? A slightly more Receptions, but slightly fewer Yards and TDS. But on the spectrum, it’s close to being the same or similar player statistically right?

So we know who ‘Player A’ is? We know it’s an Amari Cooper article and it would make sense to have him as that guy right? Geez, I’ve already mentioned above the number of games he had played so if you are good at connect-the-dots you get a star. But who is ‘Player B’?

Before I give that away (I know, the suspense, right?) I also want to tell you this:

In 2015, ‘Player B’ was drafted much, much later than ‘Player A’, there was a five Round difference. This year ‘Player B’ has 26 more Receptions than Amari Cooper and seven (!) fewer Yards than Amari Cooper. They’ve both played 12 games and he has one less Touchdown than Amari Cooper has had. There were also four games where in Oakland, Amari Cooper had two or fewer Receptions.

So is it right to say Amari Cooper has had a worse year (it may or may not be fair to say depending on who you are standing up for) statistically or that ‘Player B’ has underwhelmed this year? (I’d say so).

Who is ‘Player B’?

‘Player B’ is Stefon Diggs, who was taken in Round 5 by Minnesota in 2015 and carried a late Second to an early Third Round ADP this year for Fantasy Football. Diggs in this offseason had agreed to a 5-year, $72 million deal with $40 million in guarantees, gifting him $81 million in total with the Vikings.

A same-to-similar player.

Is Amari Cooper worth that, less or more in the upcoming offseason? The way he is going…

Ok, ok @TheBLeagueSays, we get it you love Amari Cooper. Get on with…

THE PROS

Josh Allen…

I tell you what he would make an incredible Running Back or a Tight End…

cough

Bad jokes and a bad cultural reference aside, this Rookie over the past month has looked ok. And I mean no disrespect when I say ok. Statistically, he is getting the combined yards it’s just when you watch Buffalo play, even though it’s somewhat effective it just still looks, well, messy. However…

Since Week 11, Josh Allen ($5800 on Draft Kings) is the QB8 with a 24.4 PPG average, boosted by his ability to scramble on the run. Allen has totals of 99, 135 and 101 Rushing (with 2 scores to boot) with an average of 199 yards Passing and Touchdown or so a game.

Now Buffalo has started to trim the proverbial fat by cutting Kelvin Benjamin and Andre Holmes and have started to hone in on Zay Jones (second-year receiver) and Robert Foster (rookie) who have both had a Top 15 finish as Wide Receivers over the past couple of weeks each. The Bills have been known for letting some good Receivers go in the past (Robert Woods, Sammy Watkins, Marquise Goodwin to name a few), let’s see if they can build upon this chemistry late in the season and see where it goes.

Derrick Henry…

Talk about one of your all-time greatest backfires!

I don’t know of anybody that played Derrick Henry last week (except maybe a few guys on the Jaguars roster who may have had him in their lineups). On ESPN, Henry only had a 15% of anyone who had rostered him give him a start. So if you were one of them, congratulations! If you weren’t one of them, chin up and hopefully, you kicked on anyway!

The Titans head to the big apple to face a resurgent Giants outfit, who haven’t been that impressive against the run game since Damon Harrison was moved to Detroit. Now, the Giants have faced studs like Jordan Howard (70 yards), Matt Breida (101 yards rushing, 31 receiving) and Peyton Barber (106 yards)… Wait, they aren’t that great? They’re kind of average? Breida has sparked a bit, but still…

You’re telling me there’s a chance?

Derrick Henry ($5000 on Draft Kings), whose total snap share is starting to overtake Dion Lewis‘, gets to face a team who is the 9th worst for Fantasy Points conceded to the Running Back with an average of 21.18 PPG. Now, I don’t think he will have the massive game again like last week. However, is poaching a goalline run or two in his future? I think it can be, and if the Titans can get up early I can imagine Henry will be used to control and slow down the tempo of the game.

DaeSean Hamilton…

Yes. Congratulations if you were the person who saw the Emmanuel Sanders injury news and grabbed this DaeSean Hamilton ($4600 on Draft Kings) as soon as possible. He was the right play.

We have seen his snap share come up over the past few weeks even when Sanders was on the field. Now, Tim Patrick had himself a nice afternoon and that came in handy as Courtland Sutton had a rough weekend. But as I have mentioned a few weeks ago you want to grab your share of Denver Receivers as their run into the end of the season (with Playoff hopes in sight also) is tasty with games away to Cleveland this week in a potential shoot-out and Oakland in Fantasy Football Championship Week 16 at home. D.J. Moore had 67 yards and also Tyler Boyd had 85 yards and a score recently against the Browns, I would not be shocked to see Hamilton poach a consecutive score while the yards start to creep up.

Oh, really! A few flash-in-the-pan options there @TheBLeagueSays, how desperate of you! Get on with…

THE CONS

Lits-burgh? More like Pittsburgh, right?

Jaylen Samuels came through for us though didn’t he, that’s a start isn’t it? Look I’m not here to bad mouth the Steelers players – they’re studs and I hope they bounce back because when they are firing on all cylinders they are a joy to watch. But they’ve had a tough week, haven’t they… You know, not beating quite possibly the worst team in American sports right now in a game that would have seen them attain a one-win buffer over the Ravens. But they just couldn’t help themselves and literally put up one of the worst team performances I’ve seen in some time.

Now the Steelers have a tough road in front of them with an embarrassed New England Patriots outfit visiting this week. And a matchup against the New Orleans Saints the following week who are also hoping to close in on being the Top team coming out of the NFC. With four teams in the AFC on a 7-6 record (Titans, Colts, Dolphins, Ravens) heading into the final three weeks, and with Baltimore who have a softer schedule, is there a possibility that the Steelers potentially lose out (Week 17 they face the Bengals in a typical AFC North grudge match) and miss a playoff spot this year? That sounds crazy, but isn’t it something we should be asking right now?

New England? More like Old England, right?

I mean that last play for the Dolphins to win was comical. And it’s typical of Miami to put up an effort like that against the Patriots and are likely to go 8-8 and hand Adam Gase and Ryan Tannehill a new contract. Which is probably what Bill Belichick planned all along? Checkers and chess, I guess…

But in all seriousness, the New England Patriots were a team I focused on at the start of the season when everyone had panicked and jumped off them all together. Funnily enough, I also said that they would likely go 12-4, 13-3 despite the slow start and here we are, three weeks to go and staring at a maximum 12-4 record. But it’s the 2-2 record in the past month that has caught my eye. The Titans absolutely destroyed them and it was at times beautiful to watch if you’re a Tennessee fan or a Patriots hater (I get it, I won’t judge you), and last week they lost focus and concentration and blew it against Miami.

When do the Patriots ever get blown away or lose concentration at this time of the season?

Now I understand the importance of keeping up with Houston in the win/loss column and this weeks away game to the Steelers could be quite telling. But they also have back-to-back home games against Buffalo and the New York Jets and I can’t help but think that a win this week will see the Patriots reset and recharge for a run in the post-season. But until then, this week remains a must win to keep that home-field advantage in the Playoffs alive.

Is it over yet? If it isn’t, don’t look now…

In a world where Cody Kessler, Josh Jackson, Nick Mullens, Jeff Driskel, and Nick Foles all have the fate of your teams in the Fantasy Playoffs in the palm of their hands, I wish you good luck. If you have anyone starting over the next two weeks and have gotten this far while this madness has been going on then you are far better than me at this, and you’ll never hear from me again!

Jokes, I’ll be back next week!

PROJECTIONS

All projections are for the respective Players ceiling

Josh Allen: Attempts; 32 / Completion %; 58.1 / Completions; 18.59 / Yards Per Reception; 11.44 / Yards; 212.66 / TDS; 1.5 / Rushing Yards; 44.54 / TDS; 1

Derrick Henry: Carries: 16 / Yards Per Carry: 4.43 / Yards: 70.88 / TDS: 2 / Targets: 3 / Receptions: 1 / Yards: 8.22 / TDS: 0

DaeSean Hamilton: Targets: 6 / Catch Rate: 66% / Receptions: 4 / Yards Per Reception: 10.3 / Yards: 41.2 / TDS: 1

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SUMMARY

I’m not here to tell you that Amari Cooper is the answer that Dallas has been looking for. We can see that right now he probably is. But he has helped lift Dak Prescott’s play straight away. Ezekiel Elliott hasn’t taken a backward step, and both are thriving with plenty of volume each. Jason Garrett and Scott Linehan look revitalized, and both had come under enormous pressure to turn a boring team around, who now look electric at times. And Steven Jones looks like a genius for having the guts to throw out a First Round pick for a player that many had considered ‘broken’.

I’m just telling you that one move made an enormous impact on one team because of some fantastic performances… and to prepare yourself for another offseason of ‘where will we Draft Amari Cooper in 2019?’

I want to thank you for getting this far and taking in everything I have presented. Set your lineups accordingly and check out the DFS and Weekly Content all the hard-working staff is pumping out to get you best prepared. Also – download the Going For 2 app, then and rate, review and share with your loved ones. You all deserve it!

I also want to say a big, big thank you to my superhero wife for taking 9 months of pregnancy like a champion and delivering our second child into the family. Thank you K, I am again eternally grateful. Welcome to the family little Roman – I’m overjoyed for you to finally join us!

You can as always follow and find me at @TheBLeagueSays and offer any view or conversation about this. Let’s all get better together!

(stats gathered from fantasypros.com, fantasyfootballcalculator.com, nfl.com, espn.com, statroute.com)

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