4 Wide Receivers Who Could Lose Significant Targets in 2016

Larry Fitzgerald, Arizona Cardinals

Larry Fitzgerald has been one of the greatest receivers of his generation, and the fact that he's still going strong at age 33 is a testament to his wizardry.

But a significant reduction in targets is completely on the table for 2016.

Fitz currently occupies a spot on one of, if not the best three-headed receiver tandems in the NFL with Michael Floyd and John Brown. Heading into the 2015 season, he was being drafted in the late-seventh-to-early-eighth-round range in fantasy football drafts, having come off of three straight seasons of fewer than 1,000 yards.

Yes, drafters were being way to pessimistic about him. In 2014, Fitzgerald was actually performing at a 1,000-plus yard pace prior to Carson Palmer’s ACL tear.

Paying the faithful back in spades, Fitzgerald started off the season torching defenses, generating 926 receiving yards in his first 10 weeks of play. But after that point, Floyd really started to come on strong after having started off really slowly due to a gruesome hand injury suffered in training camp.

From Week 9 on, Floyd surpassed 100 receiving yards in five his remaining eight games. That production didn't immediately eat into Fitzgerald’s target share, but from Weeks 13 to 17, Fitz definitely became less of a factor. Looking at Rotoviz's game splits app tells the story of the last quarter of the 2015 season.

Prior to Week 13, Fitzgerald's extrapolated season-long target pace would have been 163 targets, but in the final five weeks of the season, it would have been 109 targets. That's a huge difference and should be worrisome to those thinking they're getting a steal at Fitzgerald's current late-fifth round ADP.

Floyd enters the 2016 season fully healthy with his hand intact, and Brown, a respectable receiver in his own right, will be entering his third year and has drawn lofty comparisons from some of the most respected voices in the fantasy football community.

And David Johnson, the young phenom running back with outrageous measurables and significant pass-catching acumen should garner up a healthy target share too now that he's the entrenched starter in the Arizona Cardinals' backfield.

With two young and efficient receivers on the outside and a very capable pass-catching running back siphoning targets away, Fitzgerald can still be a factor in the Cardinals' passing game in 2016 operating out of the slot. But don't be too surprised if the target share he garners in 2016 is closer to his final five-game pace from 2015 than his first 11 games.