NFC WEST Fantasy Football Review

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    NFC West

    What went right?

    The NFC West was set up to be one of the best divisions in football, but it didn’t exactly pan out that way.  The Seattle Seahawks were a rollercoaster of a team that peaked early offensively and then never really found its footing again.  Geno Smith showed he wasn’t a one-year wonder and finished in the top-10 with over 280 yards in four of the first first five games.  As great as Smith was throwing the ball, he didn’t have multiple passing TDs until Week 7 and until then had a 6:6 TD/INT ratio.  This is all window dressing as the most important story coming out of SEA is the emergence of Jaxon Smith-Njibga (WR10) as one of the premier WRs in fantasy football.  From Week 8 to Week 16, the lowest yards he had was 69 as he made the leap and starting dominating the target share (24%) for SEA .  JSN led the team with 137 targets as SEA became the fifth-most pass-heavy team with 63.1/38.9 pass/run % splits.  He had half the receiving TDs of the WR core and was the only real standout fantasy player on an otherwise middling offense that didn’t have any other fantasy standouts.  JSN started slow and finished slow, but in between he was an absolute monster and will be one of the early WRs taken off the board after the established superstars.  The real question is what is going to happen with DK Metcalf as he finished as the WR30 and didn’t have more than 70 yards in any game after the bye in Week 10.  With Tyler Lockett finally taking a backseat, there should be more than enough room for two elite WRs, especially if they are going to keep passing at a top-five level.

     

    What went wrong?

    You can call it the Madden curse, the curse of being number one or the Super Bowl loser curse, but any way you slice it, the San Francisco 49ers had a disaster of a season that somehow kept getting worse.  It started with Christian McCaffrey and regardless of whether he was misdiagnosed in the summer, the team hid the serious nature of the injury or they just hoped it would heal up by the start of the season, he was the first domino and his absence caused the Niners to play left-handed and kept them from ever finding the right groove.  Jordan Mason was the next man up and he was great filling in for the short term (3 top-10 finishes in first 4 games), but he wasn’t the same dual threat as CMC. As a result, the Niners went from targeting their RBs 24% of the time which was a top-five rate to 18% which kept them out of the top-10.  The patchwork RBs seemed to hold the fort for part of the season, but they just kept getting hurt and as a result the Niners went from RBs scoring 28.2 points per-game last season with peak CMC to 19 with Mason, Issac Guerrendo, Patrick Taylor and a limited CMC. While the RBs were a clear downgrade, it was the passing attack that couldn’t pick up the slack as Brandon Aiyuk never got going after holding out and then tearing his ACL and Deebo Samuel looking lost for most of the season.  Aiyuk played six games, but only had one game over 50 yards and while Deebo was healthy, he had seven games with less than 25  receiving yards and it’s not like he was running the ball well either, only racking up 25+ rushing yards in one game.  Deebo and Aiyuk went from accruing 41% of the WR targets a year ago, to a measly 25% as Jauan Jennings made the leap and eventually Ricky Pearsall showcased what he can do.  Talent is not the problem for the Niners, it’s staying healthy and figuring out the hierarchy as the only blessing was George Kittle reassuming his TE reign and finishing the TE1.  Brock Purdy has enough of a track record to be established as he remains one of the sneakiest, yet unsexiest fantasy options with another top-15 finish and over 300 yards passing in three of the last four games of the season.  Purdy started strong and finished strong and had a four-game stretch in the middle where his worst finish was QB6, but the season was still a mess and it’s easy to play the health card and call this entire campaign a mulligan.  With a last-place schedule and all the motivation in the world, it’s going to be impossible not to back this team next season.  They are deep, explosive, well coached and the rest of the NFC is going to be put  on notice.

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