Fantasy Football: 4 Things We Learned From Week 2
We Were (Probably) Wrong About Kelvin Benjamin
Prior to the beginning of the season, many of us here at numberFire were aghast at Kelvin Benjamin’s WR16 average draft position. How could folks be drafting Benjamin -- an inefficient, drop-plagued receiver who was coming off of an ACL tear on a team that drafted a similarly big-bodied receiver the previous season -- so early? With the Panthers sporting the second-lowest pass-to-run ratio in the league in 2015, I recently posited that Benjamin could lose significant targets in 2016.
I think we were wrong. And I think Benjamin has decided to give us all the middle finger while laughing his way home from Bank of America stadium.
Through his first two games, Benjamin has accumulated 21 targets, blowing the theory that Devin Funchess might end up being the apple of Cam Newton's eye in 2016 out of the water. Adding to that, Benjamin's also upped his game from his inefficient rookie season.
At numberFire, we analyze on field performance using our signature in-house metric, Net Expected Points (NEP). NEP uses down-and-distance data and historical performance in similar scenarios to determine a player's performance above-or-under expectation. NEP provides additional context that traditional box-score statistics can't. Check out our glossary if you want to learn more about NEP.
So far this season, Benjamin's compiled a crazy impressive 1.14 Reception NEP per target. For reference, the average wide receiver in 2015 delivered a 0.67 Reception NEP per target, the exact same Reception NEP per target Benjamin posted in his 2014 rookie season.
While two games isn't a sample size worth extrapolating too much from, we can probably say that we were wrong about Benjamin headed into the season. He figures to continue getting the target load we saw him getting in 2014 --145 for the whole season-- and with said target load, his preseason ADP actually made plenty of sense, even if he remained a wideout with only average efficiency metrics.
