Fantasy Football: 7 Veterans Who Were Negatively Impacted By the Draft
Martavis Bryant, WR, Oakland Raiders
Pre-Draft ADP: 126
Is it cheating to include Martavis Bryant on a list that is about value falling from incoming draft picks? Probably. Bryant was traded from the Pittsburgh Steelers to the Oakland Raiders for a third-round pick, though, and since that trade came during the draft, he makes the cut here anyway.
Bryant already didn't have a clear path to big volume in Pittsburgh, playing next to Antonio Brown, Le'Veon Bell and JuJu Smith-Schuster, but he did benefit from receiving targets from the efficient Ben Roethlisberger.
Now he moves to a Raiders' receiving corps that appears to already have two top guys -- Amari Cooper and Jordy Nelson -- and Bryant will be receiving his targets from Derek Carr instead of Ben.
This is a comparison that isn't one-for-one, thanks to drastically different supporting casts, but here are the fantasy points per target averaged by wideouts on both the Steelers and Raiders since Carr's 2014 rookie campaign.
Season | Steelers WRs | Raiders WRs |
---|---|---|
2017 | 1.87 | 1.71 |
2016 | 1.89 | 1.66 |
2015 | 1.90 | 1.66 |
2014 | 1.94 | 1.39 |
Does Ben benefit from throwing to Antonio Brown? Obviously. But the combination of Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree has been a solid one, and it's pretty telling that the highest efficiency Carr has generated for his wideouts doesn't even come close to the lowest Ben has notched in this stretch.
Our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, which you can read more about in our glossary, doesn't have this as a close comparison, either, looking their marks in Passing NEP per drop back.
Year | Roethlisberger | Carr |
---|---|---|
2017 | 0.23 | 0.08 |
2016 | 0.23 | 0.20 |
2015 | 0.25 | 0.06 |
2014 | 0.25 | -0.07 |
Still without a clear path to increased volume, the decrease in efficiency we're likely to see from Bryant drops his 2018 floor for fantasy production in a huge way.