Fantasy Football's Most Underrated Players at Each Position

Quarterback: Tyrod Taylor

Maybe it was an anomaly. Maybe Tyrod Taylor isn't as good as he was last year.

But maybe he is. And maybe he's a screaming bargain in the 12th round of fantasy football drafts.

Taylor finished as the 16th-best fantasy quarterback last year, but he ended the year with the 7th-highest points per game mark among relevant passers thanks to missing a pair of games. Very simply, if he continues his pace from last year and stays healthy, then he's a top-10 quarterback. No questions asked.

What we have to wonder, of course, is whether or not he can sustain the pace he played at.

The scariest part about Taylor is what we'd consider a reliance on the big play.

In 2015, he ended with 30 plays of 25 or more yards, which was 15th-highest in the league. Meanwhile, Taylor ended the year with the 23rd-highest drop back total -- Philip Rivers had nearly 300 more drop backs than Taylor and finished with the same number of 25-plus yard plays.

This all shows up within our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, too. Despite a top-10 efficiency rate last year, Taylor's Success Rate -- which measures the percentage of positive plays made by a player -- was 45.69%, good for 22nd in the league. In other words, he wasn't exactly consistent from drop back to drop back, which means if you were to remove the big play -- if he were to regress even a bit -- we could see trouble.

But it's not all that bad, because last year, only Ben Roethlisberger saw a higher percentage of his yards come strictly from the air -- that is, with yards after catch removed -- meaning Taylor could have some growth coming from his receivers in the yards after catch department.

And there's also the rushing upside. Taylor ended up scoring 4 times on 104 carries in 2015, and just another pair of scores would've catapulted his fantasy points per game average to top-5 status, right in line with Drew Brees.

The fact is, quarterbacks drafted outside of the single-digit rounds need to be valued almost entirely by their upside. In a worst-case scenario -- in most leagues -- you can find replacements at the position on the waiver wire.

Taylor has very real and easy-to-see top-five upside, but the consensus is afraid. Don't be.