NFL
Don't Take Allen Robinson in the First Round of Fantasy Football Drafts
While Robinson's 2015 season was impressive, a closer look at the numbers should temper your expectations for 2016.

Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Allen Robinson burst onto the fantasy football scene in 2015, recording 80 receptions for 1,400 yards and a league-leading 14 touchdowns.

He finished with the fourth-highest fantasy point total among wide receivers, providing a great return on investment for fantasy owners.

That performance has people incredibly high on Robinson for 2016, and per MyFantasyLeague.com, he has the sixth-highest average draft position (ADP) among all players, going on average at pick 8.71, and as the fifth wide receiver off the board.

To justify that kind of price tag, you're counting on Robinson repeating his 2015 performance.

The issue there is that Robinson produced at a completely unsustainable clip last season.

Quarterback Blake Bortles is due for big-time touchdown regression, meaning there will be less to go around for the receivers, Robinson caught touchdowns at a staggering rate that he's incredibly unlikely to repeat, and the Jaguars' passing offense in general is a long shot to repeat their 2015 production.

I'm not here to tell you that Robinson isn't a great player, because he is, but to take Robinson in the first round, you're blindly ignoring how heavily the odds are against him having the kind of success needed to live up to that draft spot.

The NFL's Most Prolific Touchdown Scorer?

Let's ignore, for the moment, the idea that the Jaguars aren't one of the league's top passing offenses and that their finishing third in the league in passing touchdowns is a total anomaly and incredibly unlikely to be repeated.

We'll pretend, for now, that the Jaguars belong in the same conversation as offenses like the New England Patriots, which threw for only one more touchdown than the Jaguars, and the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers, both of whom had the same number of passing touchdowns as Jacksonville in 2015.

Allen Robinson's touchdown production last season was downright absurd. He scored a league-high 14 touchdowns, which in and of itself isn't unbelievable, but the rate at which he scored them was.

Robinson accounted for 35% of the touchdowns in the Jacksonville offense, and he scored 12 touchdowns on 22 red zone targets, good for a 54.44% red zone touchdown rate.

Let's put both of those numbers into some context.

Year Player Touchdowns % of Team Total
2007 Randy Moss 23 34.3
2011 Rob Gronkowski 17 31.6
2003 Randy Moss 17 36.2
2014 Dez Bryant 16 30.2
2007 Braylon Edwards 16 38.1
2013 Jimmy Graham 16 32.7
2011 Calvin Johnson 16 32.0
2004 Muhsin Muhammad 16 41.0
2001 Terrell Owens 16 33.3
2014 Allen Robinson 14 35.0


These are the players with the most touchdowns in a season since 2000 and Robinson (whose 14 tied for 15th-most). This is not only a group of the most prolific touchdown scorers of the past 15 years (and

It shouldn't really come as much of a surprise, but in general, the more efficient an offense, the more plays they run in the red zone. The Jaguars ranked 26th in NEP per play but ran 155 red zone plays, the 7th-most in the league.

Even if they remain among the league's most pass-heavy teams when they're deep in opposing territory in 2016, it will likely take a huge increase in offensive efficiency if they want to run as many red zone plays as they did in 2015.

With Robinson's share of the team touchdowns and red zone efficiency above sustainable levels, a dip in Bortles' touchdown numbers and being on the field for fewer red zone plays can only spell trouble for his fantasy production.

What This Means for Fantasy Football

Like I said at the top, Robinson is being drafted as a first-round fantasy pick -- as the fifth receiver off the board.

The fifth-highest fantasy score among wide receivers in recent seasons tends to hover around 210 points, and Robinson's 224 fantasy points ranked fourth last season.

It is always going to take some good fortune to have a huge fantasy season like that, and only seven receivers have posted 200-plus fantasy points more than once in the last five years. There are no truly "safe" bets for top-five fantasy scoring, but we can certainly look at the numbers and flesh out varying degrees of safety.

Robinson may excite you. Maybe he was a sleeper who carried you to a championship last year, or maybe you missed Robinson in the draft and it haunted you for the whole season, but there is no avoiding the fact that his 2015 production was hugely improbable.

Unless you're banking on his being one of the most dominant receivers the league has ever seen (or on Blake Bortles being really, really good), there's no way he should be in play with your first-round pick this year.

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