Percy Harvin plays wide receiver. But really, that’s just a name. Although he’s fully capable of doing awesome stuff while split out wide, there’s often very little that’s wide about his alignment. He’s pretty damn good at being a slot receiver, where his speed in open space is utilized on crossing routes.
But over the past two seasons — and also his final two seasons in Minnesota — he was aligned in a position where both the words “wide” and “receiver” don’t apply.
Does not compute.
Mike Wallace sure seems to like this Ryan Tannehill kid. The two teammates are playing catch (or rather, you run really far and I’ll throw it really far) two or three times together after practice every day.
Wallace has been so impressed that he raised the bar to Ben Roethlisberger-ian levels earlier this week:
“Both have strong arms. Ryan has a cannon, can really fling it. Ryan may be able to throw the ball a little farther than Ben. Obviously, Ben is more experienced in game time experience. The way it’s going, it won’t take long for Ryan to be one of the great quarterbacks. I feel like we can make a lot of big plays.”
Mighty high praise for a quarterback whose wife is already worth $1 million, earned through a talent for being easy to look at, and easy to click on. The Miami life is a rough life.
Tannehill is one hell of a drug this offseason, and it’s easy to get pretty high on his growing fantasy aroma. So, here’s the question that lies before us: will Tannehill in 2013 = Andrew Luck in 2012?
May is usually filled with failed attempts to make predictions about depth charts, and justifying why you should care about Chad Henne. But nearly every year there’s at least one significant injury during OTAs. Something pops, or tears, or breaks, or just bends in a direction that goes against its intended design.
That happened to Melvin Ingram Tuesday (the tearing part), as the Chargers second-year pass rusher tore his ACL, which almost certainly ends his 2013 season. We don’t cheer the fall of a man around these parts, but we wouldn’t be degenerate gamblers and fantasy folk if we didn’t explore to see how Ingram’s injury will benefit opposing quarterbacks, and particularly one within the Chargers’ division.
Antonio Gates will again be a difficult guy to project next year. Is he old? By football standards, maybe. He’ll turn 33 next month. But Jason Witten isn’t too far behind, as he just celebrated his 31st birthday, and the everlasting Tony Gonzalez is 37. Both of those guys were pretty good last year, combining for 1,969 receiving yards.
Merely saying Gates is old becomes an exercise of reaching for the lowest possible branch on the fantasy football tree o’ scare tactics. The reasons for his plummeting stock over the past few years go beyond that.
Wide eyes could be quite common for Mike Goodson next year.
We already know there are so many horribly depressing reasons for an oncoming fantasy chemical spill in New York, and its point of origination will be the Jets’ locker room.
We know this because the guy they choose as a starting quarterback will be inadequate, because that’s an appropriate adjective to describe every available option. We know this because Santonio Holmes spreads a strong odor of disappointment. And we know this because Rex Ryan.
But if there’s even a sliver of sunshine amidst the acid rain for some sort of value in even a flex role, it lies in a running game that’s been revamped this offseason with the additions of Mike Goodson and Chris Ivory. The problem, though, is that unless a team employs a guy named Adrian Peterson, the passing game has to be remotely competent to achieve that value.
And for the Jets, that could continue to be a serious and crippling problem. Sigh.
Let’s begin this with good news, because there’s so little of it surrounding Rex Ryan in his steaming toxic hell hole. The good news has two names: Mike Goodson and Chris ivory.
There are reasons to believe the Jets will have something which has eluded them entirely in recent years, and that’s a run game which deserves your respect. The combined speed of those two and their slashing ability could lead to frequent chunk yardage as they gain the edge consistently. This past season Goodson averaged 6.3 yards per carry, while Ivory moved along at a pace of 5.4 during his limited time in New Orleans. That sparse usage is some added little bit of gravy, as even though both backs have played a combined seven seasons, they’ve combined for just 416 carries.
But this isn’t a post about good news.
Here’s the problem with making fantasy football predictions in late April and early May: it’s damn impossible.
Sure, prognosticating is always difficult, and it can make many an intelligent man look rather clown-ish. That’s the game, bruh.
But trying to make educated predictions on the outcome of future events many months in advance can be an especially facepalm-y task, because following the draft and free agency, doing that also involves guessing how the jostling of depth charts will end.
All this is my way of admitting that here in May, I may be ahead of the game with my first misstep. Transparency!
