Fantasy Football: 5 Players You Can Drop After Week 3
John Ross, WR, Cincinnati Bengals
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Yahoo! Ownership: 10%
2018 was supposed to be the year that Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver John Ross broke out. A highly-touted speedy deep threat out of the University of Washington, Ross was the ninth overall pick in the 2017 draft and was expected to fill a DeSean Jackson-esque field stretching role for the Bengals nearly immediately. Instead, it’s taken more than a year for Ross to even get on the field for a significant portion of time.
In the six NFL games Ross has played, he has averaged 1.5 targets. He has a pitiful 5.4 yards per reception (95th among wide receivers) and has caught just 5-of-9 career targets. You may be saying, Joe, all of this is a relatively small sample size, which makes it hard to judge just based on these numbers alone – and you’d be right. However, it’s precisely that small sample size that’s the most worrisome element.
Ross has played just 57 percent of his offensive snaps in 2018, and the percent weekly has been going downward as he’s proven less and less reliable. Per PlayerProfiler.com, Ross’s Hog Rate (the percent of snaps he sees a target on) is just 11.1 percent, which ranks a lackluster 63rd among wideouts.
Ross could still blossom into a big-time receiving threat, but he’s getting lightly-used now and his usage is short-area to boot. Look elsewhere for upside.
