Biggest fantasy football busts of the 2015 NFL season
The 2015 NFL season is heading into the home stretch with plenty of teams battling for playoff spots in December.
If you’re a fantasy football owner who’s not making the playoffs, however, your season most likely ends this week or next week.
If you’re not one of the lucky ones who will be checking their phones for fantasy scores in Weeks 15 and 16, it’s probably because you have one of this year’s 10 biggest fantasy football busts on your roster.
Jamaal Charles and Le’Veon Bell aren’t considered busts because they were productive before suffering their season-ending injuries.
Unless othewise noted, players’ point totals are based on Yahoo! public leagues and Fantasy Pros was used for average draft position (ADP).
10. Ameer Abdullah
Why pick on a rookie whose ADP was 59 in standard leagues and 48 in points per reception (PPR) leagues?
Because Ameer Abdullah was no longer about upside after running 24 yards for a touchdown less than five minutes into his career. The Lions running back rushed for 50 yards that day in San Diego and caught four passes for 44 yards to score 15.4 points.
Abdullah has scored only one touchdown since then, a receiving TD in Week 3, and he hasn’t run for 50 yards in a game since the opener.
In seven games, Abdullah has scored less than five fantasy points and in four of them he’s scored less than three. It turns out he was just a Week 1 tease.
9. Carlos Hyde
Hyde had the 49ers backfield all to himself with Frank Gore gone to Indianapolis, and his ADP of 37 looked like a steal when he ran for 168 yards and two touchdowns in San Francisco’s season-opening 20-3 win over the Vikings.
Considering the Vikings are now leading the NFC North and the 49ers are last in the NFC West, the best explanation for that game is that it took place in some bizarro universe. It was a late-night game on a Monday. Did anyone really see it happen?
Hyde has scored double-digit fantasy points just one more time and he scored just one more touchdown before going down with a foot injury in Week 7. He hasn’t played since.
Jordan Matthews fantasy owners weren’t panicking quite as much as Eagles fans after the team’s 0-2 start.
Matthews caught 10 passes in Week 1 and six passes, including a touchdown, in Week 2. Then came five straight weeks of five fantasy points or less. The high point of the Eagles season, and for Matthews, came when Matthews caught the game-winning touchdown pass in overtime at Dallas in Week 9.
Since then, Matthews’ fantasy fortunes have paralleled that of the Eagles. During the Eagles’ three-game losing streak he’s scored 2.1 points, 1.3 points and 12 points fueled by a garbage-time touchdown in the Eagles’ 45-14 Thanksgiving Day loss at Detroit.
Matthews’ ADP was 14th among wide receivers, but he’s 35th among receivers on the scoring list. He still doesn’t have as many points as Steve Smith Sr. or Keenan Allen, players whose seasons have been cut short by injuries. Also ahead of him is Martavis Bryant, who sat out until Week 6. Matthews has caught 58 passes. No other Eagles receiver has more than 20 receptions, but with Jeremy Maclin out of the picture Matthews was supposed to be a lot more productive from a fantasy standpoint.
7. Jeremy Hill
Jeremy Hill ran for 100 or more yards in five of the final nine games of his rookie season, and he was a first-rounder in many fantasy drafts this year with an ADP of nine. The closest Hill has come to the century mark this season is his 86 yards in Sunday’s 31-7 win over the Rams. The 6-1, 233-pounder is third among running backs with seven touchdowns, but they’ve been packed into three games. He’s gone without a touchdown in eight games and has scored less than three fantasy points in four games.
Giovani Bernard, meanwhile, has run for 581 yards this season after running for 695 in his rookie season and 680 last season. He also brings a pass-catching dimension that Hill doesn’t have. Bernard has caught 135 passes in his career while Hill has caught 36. Hill will have to share touches with Bernard for the time being.
"Hue Jackson did call Jeremy Hill into his office Sat...As dynamic as that offense has been this year, he hasn’t gotten going." @MikeSilver
— NFL Media (@NFLMedia) November 29, 2015
6. Jimmy Graham
Jimmy Graham’s fantasy value took a hit when he was traded from the Saints offense to the Seahawks’ smashmouth offense. He still was the consensus No. 2 tight end off the board, which meant he was expected to be the best fantasy tight end not named Rob Gronkowski.
It hasn’t really worked out that way.
Graham caught two touchdown passes in the first three games, but none since then. He’s scored less than five fantasy points in six games and is just ninth among tight ends in fantasy points, behind players like Tyler Eifert, Gary Barnidge and Delanie Walker.
More names will pass Graham on that list because a knee injury ended his season on Sunday.
5. Randall Cobb
With Jordy Nelson out, Randall Cobb was going to have a monster fantasy season, right?
Well, not quite.
Cobb did have one monster game. He scored 28.3 fantasy points with three touchdown catches in a Week 3 win over Kansas City. The problem is he’s had just three touchdown catches outside of that game. In the next four games, Cobb failed to reach five fantasy points.
A consensus No. 20 pick in fantasy drafts, Cobb is 23rd on the wide receiver fantasy scoring list and hasn’t been the WR1 most fantasy owners thought they were getting.
Tavon Austin has more fantasy points than Demaryius Thomas this season.
Think about that for a second.
Sure, Austin can generate points running with the ball and catching it and he does have the occasional big game. Who would have thought, however, that fantasy owners would get more out of a receiver in the Rams’ anemic offense than Thomas, a consensus second-round pick?
Thomas has just two touchdown catches this season and is 22nd among receivers on the NFL.com scoring list. He had 168 receiving yards for 16.8 points in the Broncos’ 29-10 win over the Packers in Week 10, but he’s scored in double digits just once in four games since then. He bottomed out Sunday against the Patriots, catching just one of the 13 passes thrown his way and scoring 3.6 points.
Thomas caught one of his more important targets Sunday, a 36-yarder to spark the Broncos’ go-ahead touchdown drive with two and a half minutes left in regulation. But that’s real football. There’s no clutch points in fantasy.
3. Eddie Lacy
Eddie Lacy would have been No. 1 on this list three weeks ago, but he ran for 100 yards in Week 11 and 105 in Week 12.
Lacy isn’t excused from this list, however. He was the top overall pick in many leagues and has ruined a lot of fantasy seasons.
Demaryius Thomas has 11 targets and 0 catches tonight. Via @pfref, first time that's happened in an NFL game since 1995.
— Michael David Smith (@MichaelDavSmith) November 30, 2015
Between Week 2 and Week 6, Lacy failed to score double-digit fantasy points. Four times this season he’s scored less than four fantasy points.
If Lacy continues his resurgence he could be a star in the fantasy playoffs, but a lot of fantasy teams that rostered him won’t get that far.
Marshawn Lynch hasn’t been fully healthy all season, and now he’s out with an abdominal injury. But he’s played seven games this season and scored less than fellow fantasy bust Carlos Hyde, who’s also played in seven games.
Expectations were much higher for Lynch, whose ADP was five, so he’s more of a bust than Hyde.
Lynch was the third-highest scoring fantasy running back last season but is averaging less than 10 fantasy points a game this year, and only the most savvy of fantasy owners handcuffed him with Thomas Rawls. Robert Turbin, now a Cowboy, and Christine Michael, now on the Redskins practice squad, both were drafted before Rawls in most ESPN.com leagues.
Peyton Manning’s numbers were generally expected to dip in 2015. He started to show his age late last season and had only the fourth-highest ADP among quarterbacks this year.
Few expected Manning’s decline to be this steep, however.
The 39-year-old threw nine touchdowns and a league-high 17 interceptions in nine games before suffering a foot injury. Manning scored 21.24 points in Week 2 and 19.86 points in Week 3, but less than that in every game since then.
Manning crashed and burned when the Chiefs intercepted him four times in Week 10. He scored minus-2.6 points that day and is currently 30th among quarterbacks on the fantasy scoring list, right between Colin Kaepernick and Nick Foles.
Unlike those guys, however, Manning will at least be standing on the sidelines in January.
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