Entering last season, nobody was digging the fantasy football vibes of Andy Dalton.
Not only was Dalton largely a streaming candidate in Week 1, but he didn't even have an average draft position (ADP) for 2015 on Fantasy Football Calculator. When future fantasy pariahs such as Teddy Bridgewater and Colin Kaepernick get an ADP, and you're stuck on the margins, you know the peeps be hating.
Dalton promptly went out, gashed defenses left and right, and had the fifth-most fantasy points among all quarterbacks before sustaining an injury in Week 14. If he hadn't gotten hurt, he may have logged the second top-five fantasy finish of his career, following up his breakout 2013 campaign.
There wasn't a single soul who saw this display of deliciousness coming.
Except for the fine folks in Vegas, of course.
In August of last year, Bovada had Dalton's Cincinnati Bengals pegged at 8.5 wins for the 2015 season. As we saw last week, there is a strong bond between preseason Vegas win totals and fantasy scoring, and that's before you factor in all of the fluctuations that occur due to in-season injuries. Vegas was optimistic about what the Bengals would be able to do as a team, yet Dalton continued to fly under the radar for fantasy.
If we had paid attention to Vegas last year, it's possible we could have seen Dalton's stellar output coming, allowing us to reap the benefits of his exploits without paying a high cost.
This begs the obvious question: which guys are flying too far under the radar for 2016?
Because of the aforementioned look at Vegas win totals, we can apply this year's preseason projections to quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers to see where the inefficiencies lie early in the drafting season. We'll be basing the win projections off of Bovada's 2016 win totals, and all ADP references will come from Fantasy Football Calculator for 12-team PPR drafts that took place between June 17th and June 27th of 2016.
Throughout this, we'll also be using numberFire's Net Expected Points (NEP) to develop further context. NEP is the metric we use to track the efficiency of teams and players with the team metrics being weighted based on strength of opponent.
In case you're new to the site, here's how NEP works. Prior to each play, a team has an expected number of points that it will score on its current drive. A positive play -- such as a five-yard completion on 3rd and 4 -- will increase that, giving the team positive NEP. A negative play -- such as a five-yard completion on 3rd and 6 -- will decrease that as they will likely be forced to punt. NEP tracks the ebbs and flows in expected points over the course of a season to tell us which players and teams operated most efficiently.
Without further ado, let's dive on in. Here are six players who are currently undervalued in fantasy football based on Vegas preseason win totals.