15 Bold Fantasy Football Predictions for the 2018 Season
Julio Jones Will Score More Touchdowns Than Odell Beckham
Why This Is Bold: Both Julio Jones and Odell Beckham scored three touchdowns last year. The difference? Beckham played 12 fewer games.
Why This Will Happen: Yeah, I know -- this one's bold. Very bold. But let's look at how it could happen.
In OBJ's healthy history, he's been a massive touchdown producer -- in his three seasons with 12 or more games played, he's hit double-digit touchdowns.
He'll probably get close to that mark again this year, but it could be less of a lock. From 2014 through 2016 -- Beckham's healthy seasons -- the Giants scored 43 (2014), 41 (2015), and 32 (2016) offensive touchdowns. In two of those seasons (2015 and 2016), they combined for just 11 rushing scores. In other words, their touchdown scoring has skewed very much towards the passing game.
With the addition of Saquon Barkley and their clear urge to be more balanced, there's a chance that ratio begins shifting in the other direction, potentially lowering Beckham's touchdown total. That's emphasized even further by the fact that Beckham's more or less been the sole red zone threat for Eli Manning, but now the team has Evan Engram as well.
On the other side of things, Julio Jones should have scored far more touchdowns than he did last year.
Based on the number of receiving yards per touchdown we've seen over the last seven seasons -- so since 2011 -- at wide receiver, Jones' 1,444 yards should have yielded close to 9 touchdowns last year. Instead, he scored three, marking the second-largest difference between "actual" touchdowns and "should have" touchdowns that we've seen during this span. The largest? Calvin Johnson in 2012, where he scored 5 times on 1,964 yards receiving. For what it's worth, the following year, Megatron had 12 touchdowns in 14 games.
That's from a July piece yours truly wrote on undervalued players, noting that Jones won't be keeping up this low touchdown pace in 2018. And it's not like he wasn't fed in the red zone -- Jones saw the third-most red zone targets of his career last season, as well as the second-most targets from within the opponent's 10-yard line.
This certainly isn't a probable outcome, but touchdown variance is real, and there are scenarios that could unfold where Jones finds the end zone more than Beckham does this year.
