5 Players Whose Fantasy Football Stock Has Risen Since Free Agency Started

Terrelle Pryor, WR, Washington Redskins

To be honest, the one thing that kept Terrelle Pryor afloat in fantasy football last year was volume. Only 11 wideouts saw more targets than he did, but among the top-30 target hogs in football at the position, Pryor was sixth-worst in PPR fantasy points scored per target. DeAndre Hopkins, Allen Robinson, Brandon Marshall, Jeremy Kerley, and Jordan Matthews were the five who were worse.

Naturally, most if not all of those receivers had quarterback issues this past year. As did Pryor.

Pryor finished as fantasy's 19th-best receiver in 2016 (again, this is PPR) with 213.44 points, scoring 1.52 fantasy points per target. (I don't love analyzing season-long data this way, but stay with me.) The absolute worst Washington Redskin wide receiver a season ago -- among the high-volume ones -- came in at 1.76 points per target. That was Pierre Garcon.

A big reason for Pryor's lack of effectiveness per target was because he scored just four touchdowns, but a little regression analysis through the use of our Net Expected Points metric (or NEP, which you can read more about in our glossary) shows that, per his expected point numbers, he should've scored more than seven.

So if we assume Pryor's rate of adding fantasy points in 2017 is relatively similar to that of Garcon's (again, he was the worst among relevant Washington wide receivers), then he'll need a little over 121 targets to score as many points as he did a year ago with the Browns.

Is that volume doable? I'd say so. With both DeSean Jackson and the aforementioned Garcon out of the picture, 35.25% of Washington's targets at wide receiver are gone.

Even with a healthy Josh Doctson, who missed most of his 2016 rookie season due to injury, a newly-signed Brian Quick, and Jordan Reed, an 18% to 20% market share for Terrelle Pryor in the Washington offense doesn't seem unreasonable. That's about what he'd need to hit 120 targets.

There's upside here, though, as well. Among the 93 wide receivers with 50 or more targets last year, Pryor was 20th in air yards per catch. His yards after the catch was pretty minimal, but part of that could've been because he was force fed, or that he didn't have a true, consistent complement across the field from him.

Air yards mean fantasy goodness -- it means, generally, that you're gaining bigger chunks of yards with each target. And that lines up really well with what Washington does, as Kirk Cousins topped the league in 2016 in air yards per attempt.

To wrap this up: Pryor may see fewer targets in Washington, but efficiency should make up for it. On top of that, he's got a good bit of upside considering he's only played wide receiver for one NFL season, and his air yards profile could end up seeing a nice boost with Cousins tossing him the rock.