Scary ADPs: Deebo Samuel, AJ Brown, Dalvin Cook
by Alan Seslowsky

The collective knowledge of a group of people as expressed through their aggregated actions or opinions is commonly known as “The Wisdom of Crowds” theory. Average draft position (ADP) is more or less an expression of the collective drafting market. At times the wisdom of the crowd is missing a key piece of information, and you can leverage it to your advantage. The same is true with fantasy football drafting. Below are a few players that RosterWatch believes are getting drafted too high because of the collective thinking of the crowd. In other words, their ADP is too rich and/or comes with some sort of significant and recognizable risk.

Deebo Samuel (ADP 59, WR25 )

RosterWatch co-founder, Byron Lambert, once said that “fantasy football is already a game of many variables; we do not need to go out of our way to add more unknowns to the equation.” Deebo Samuel suffered a serious foot injury in mid-June. The timetable for return was set at 10-12 weeks. At RosterWatch we tend to lean towards the back end of timetables that are provided by the team. If we project 12 weeks that puts Deebo back around the middle of September. More recent reports have toe-tapped around an October 12th return. He will likely need a couple of weeks to regain game speed and now you are looking at around Week 5 before you can reasonably use him in fantasy. That ADP is way too scary, and RosterWatch Nation should be looking elsewhere at the time Deebo is getting drafted, even though he was a staple of our WR depth as a community last year. 

 

AJ Brown (ADP 36,  WR16)

A similar situation to Samuel, minus the injury: As much as we love AJ Brown the offseason draft price on him is not in line with a reasonable projection of his production. We acknowledge that AJ Brown had a monster finish to the 2019 season. He was hyper-efficient and passed the eye test at the NFL level as expected. That said, he finished the season with 55 receptions. When you look at AJ Brown’s fantasy points per game rank, he finished as the WR32. RosterWatch had AJ Brown as our WR1 last season for dynasty, and we still believe he is a future star, but the Titans are a running team. There are going to be games where the Titans pass 20 times or less. You can’t hang your hat on that in the 3rd round of your drafts.  

 

Dalvin Cook  (ADP 6, RB5)

For those who are just getting up to speed on the offseason, there is credible talk that Dalvin Cook may stage a holdout. He is underpaid for his production and he understands that it is an uphill battle to secure a long term lucrative deal after his rookie contract expires. Add to that, his injury history, and you have an irrational and unnecessary risk at that juncture of the draft. We know that 2020 is going to have headaches for fantasy football that we have not experienced in the past. It is not optimal to start your draft with additional uncertainty. There are many other rock-solid options in the middle of the first round. Second-year running back, Alexander Matison, is not only one of the most valuable handcuffs in fantasy but could be given some additional touches to spell Dalvin Cook throughout the season. RosterWatch prefers Derrick Henry, Kenyan Drake, and Joe Mixon over Dalvin in the first round until we know for sure he’ll be in camp and no longer a holdout risk.