The 13 Most Undervalued Players in Fantasy Football
Carson Palmer, QB, Arizona Cardinals
Carson Palmer wasn't great last year. According to our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, his Passing NEP per drop back rate of 0.11 was below the 0.12 league average, and he tallied the 18th-best points per game rate in fantasy football.
The thing about Palmer and the Cardinals, though, is that they're pretty good at scoring points. And touchdowns are the backbone of fantasy football, after all. Over the last two seasons -- two years that happen to coincide with David Johnson's breakout -- the Cardinals have ranked second and sixth in points per game while throwing the ball 1,208 times, the eighth-most in football.
Palmer, like Dalton, was a monster in 2015 thanks to a career high 6.5% touchdown rate. And, like Dalton, that rate dipped below his career average last year, falling to 4.4%.
But Palmer's down year wasn't due to strange math or injuries to key receivers. He just couldn't get it done with his deep ball.
That's the thing about Bruce Arians' vertically-driven offense -- anytime a team is throwing the ball deep often (Palmer was third in 15-plus yard attempts in 2015 and fourth in 2016), they're opening themselves up to variance. Because, naturally, the deeper the ball, the less likely it is to be caught.
In 2015, Palmer finished with a hefty 2,897 air yards (on completions), the most in football. He ended the year with 13 touchdowns that travelled 15 or more yards through the air, which was slightly more -- about a touchdown and a half more -- than what would be expected of that type of air yards profile. That's according to the last six years worth of data among quarterbacks with 200 or more attempts.
Palmer's 2,586 air yards total last season was still fourth-highest in the league, but he threw just 6 15-plus air yard touchdowns, 7 fewer than the previous season. Given his air yards number, he should have thrown 3.80 more than he actually did. That difference was the 11th-largest in the wrong direction of any quarterback in the 212-passer data set. (For the record, Dalton's 2016 was second.) A lot of that probably has to do with variability of a vertical passing attack, but as long as we assume he can still get the ball downfield, then we should expect that number to rise.
And considering he's in an offense that should score points -- or, at least, one that has scored points over the last two years -- progression in the deep ball touchdown statistic means Palmer's late 13th-round average draft position is mighty enticing. Especially if he can regain his 2015 form, when he finished as a high-end QB1 in fantasy.
