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Fantasy Football: 4 Players You Can Drop After Week 7

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Martavis Bryant, WR, Pittsburgh Steelers

Yahoo Ownership: 87%

Sometimes, upside is the forbidding mistress of fantasy football. Every year there is (at least) a player or two with tantalizing upside whose skills never translate to the gridiron, but they went highly drafted because their physical measurables are mouth-watering. But Martavis Bryant is one of those physical freak players who'd actually translated his high upside into production on the field.

But 2017 is not Bryant's year.

By the time Week 7 rolled around, starting Bryant on your fantasy squad wasn't an option, unless you had an incredible dearth of choices. From Week 1 through Week 6, he had only one game that he exceeded 50 yards receiving and only one touchdown to his name. Per our Net Expected Points (NEP) metric, which measures the degree to which a player performed above-or-under expectation, Bryant's 0.49 Reception NEP per target ranked 42nd out of the 48 receivers with more than 30 targets through six weeks.

While he may not have been getting the opportunities owners were hoping for, he was getting enough looks through the first five weeks of the season that it seemed like he was a big play away from busting loose.

Those chances now appear to be evaporating. In the last two games, Bryant's received a total of five targets, putting up an abysmal one-catch, three-yard effort in Week 7. Moreover, his relationship with the Pittsburgh Steelers' organization has turned volcanic.

With rookie receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster out-snapping Bryant in four of the last five games, Bryant's target share dwindling toward non-existence, and a soured-at-best relationship between him and the team, Bryant can be dropped for another high-upside player like Josh Doctson.