Fantasy Football: 10 Players Who Won't Live Up to the Hype
Amari Cooper, WR, Oakland Raiders
Amari Cooper was a 1,000-plus-yard receiver as a rookie. He scored six touchdowns. He saw 130 targets. These are promising signs.
Not so promising, though, are his advanced analytics. Cooper's Oakland Raiders ranked 16th in the NFL in Adjusted Passing NEP per play in 2015, and Cooper himself graded out average across the board. His Reception NEP per target of 0.69 was just a smidgen above the NFL average for receivers of 0.67. His Reception NEP per catch of 1.24 ranked 21st among 54 receivers with at least 75 targets, and his 86.11% Success Rate ranked 29th.
His raw stats were somewhat empty. And while it doesn't matter if the Raiders are winning or losing games for fantasy football purposes, Cooper finished outside the top 40 receivers in PPR scoring seven times last year (excluding Week 17). He had as many red zone targets (7) as Marques Colston, Vernon Davis, Bilal Powell, Jeremy Langford, Denard Robinson, De'Anthony Thomas, Cecil Shorts -- you get the picture.
Cooper's got amazing talent, but drafting him over Alshon Jeffery, Sammy Watkins, and Demaryius Thomas, to name a few, is pretty big praise. And the underlying numbers from 2015 suggest he is being overvalued.
