Fantasy Football: 3 Players You Can Drop After Week 14
Amari Cooper, WR, Oakland Raiders
Yahoo Ownership: 95%
No player has experienced a more precipitous fall from pre-fantasy football draft grace than Amari Cooper has. Only 23 years-old and entering his third season after two straight 1,000-yard campaigns to start his career, Cooper's ceiling was assumed to be sky high for 2017.
We got to see that ceiling back in Week 7 when Copper absolutely torched the Kansas City Chiefs' secondary for 11 catches, 210 yards, and 2 touchdowns. But that one game against the Chiefs accounts for 42% of his entire receiving yardage output on the season, showcasing how devastatingly low his floor has been.
Furthermore, it's impossible to blame all of Cooper's ineffectiveness on the Oakland Raiders' offense as a whole. At numberFire, we go beyond analyzing traditional box score stats to quantify a player's on-field effectiveness through our signature player performance metric, Net Expected Points (NEP). NEP measures a player's contribution to their team in terms of their output over expectation, based on down-and-distance data. To learn more about NEP, check out our glossary.
| Targets | Receptions | Catch Rate | Reception NEP | Reception NEP per Target | Reception Success Rate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jared Cook | 76 | 48 | 63.2% | 51.82 | 0.68 | 89.6% |
| Michael Crabtree | 78 | 48 | 61.5% | 55.54 | 0.71 | 85.4% |
| Amari Cooper | 86 | 42 | 48.8% | 41.81 | 0.49 | 76.2% |
As you can see, teammates Michael Crabtree and Jared Cook have each proven more productive in terms of efficiency, as measured by Reception NEP per target, and consistency, as measured by Reception Success Rate, which is the percentage of catches that contribute positive NEP.
To be sure, the dual concussion and ankle injuries he suffered in Week 13 and the re-tweaking of his ankle injury he suffered in Week 14 didn't help his cause. But those injuries only add ammunition to the argument that Cooper should be dropped, as he was already completely untrustable before those injuries.
Drop Cooper for a higher-floor, higher-ceiling option like Dede Westbrook, and don't look back.
