Identifying Fantasy Football Sleepers
Much of the fantasy football discourse is centered around the top of the fantasy draft. Intuitively, that makes sense. These are the stars of the NFL and carry early average draft positions (ADP) as they typically sport elite production and high expectations entering the year. Creating the right foundation of players in the early rounds is often pivotal to the success of your fantasy campaign in each season. You don’t want to mess up these early rounds.
Given the current landscape of the NFL and that it’s an all-encompassing media juggernaut with 24/7, 365-day coverage the idea of “sleepers” is essentially outdated. No stone is left unturned when it comes to prospect evaluation and offseason depth chart prognosticating. Extensive team-by-team and player-by-player projections thoroughly cover expectations for the upcoming season.
However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an edge to be found when trying to identify potential sleepers or breakout players in the middle or late rounds. We are blessed to be in the information age with respect to data collection and advanced statistics. We are also cognizant of which statistics are predictive and sticky, carrying over year-to-year. That allows us to find some diamonds in the late round mines.
Sleepers at the quarterback position are centered around their rushing skillset. The end of season fantasy leaderboard is littered with dual threats as scoring formats are simply antiquated at this time. In most leagues, one rushing yard (0.1 fantasy points) outscores one passing yard (0.04 fantasy points). Rushing touchdowns (6.0) outscore passing touchdowns (4.0). Last year Anthony Richardson led all quarterbacks in fantasy points per dropback (0.73) with Josh Allen (0.63) and Lamar Jackson (0.62) backing him up. Identifying quarterbacks with rushing upside remains a cheat code in today’s fantasy landscape.
At the running back position, we are actively hunting for touches. Volume trumps efficiency. There are two things that we should be actively seeking at this position, Snaps and Weighted Opportunity (WO). Snaps are the number of plays that a running back is on the field. Perhaps overly simplistic, you need to be on the field to accrue fantasy points. Weighted Opportunity categorizes a player’s touches into whether it’s a carry or target, inside or outside the red zone, and applies a multiplying factor to determine the end value. Essentially, this is saying not every touch is created equal. WO discerns the value of these touches while also highly correlating to fantasy production.
The key to finding running backs that are in line for snaps and weighted opportunities – that aren’t early fantasy football selections – is identifying situations where a surprise player could emerge. We’re looking to identify offenses where we could see a changing of the guard, potentially leaving vacated touches. That can unfold in many different ways. It could be a team with a new offensive coordinator that was brought in this offseason implementing a new scheme. It could be an ambiguous backfield where a free agent and an incumbent are potentially fighting for the RB1 role. It could be an offense where a team drafted a rookie with high capital. We could be looking at a scenario with a player returning from injury. These are the situations we are looking to monitor and potentially make our dart throws at running back.
Similar to vacated touches at running back, we can hunt for vacated targets at the wide receiver and tight end positions. If we have an offense that typically throws for 550-600 attempts on an annual basis and have zero changes at either quarterback or playcaller (HC/OC), we can project the offense to stay within historical bounds of previous production. If we add in the context of a player leaving the offense (expiring contract, trade, retirement, etc.) we know those targets are going to have to be redistributed elsewhere on that team. Targets are one of the more sticky statistics year over year. If we are left with 200 vacated targets in this example, we could find a hidden breakout star in this offense waiting to emerge and beat their ADP. We can also invest in the tertiary pass catchers in elite, pass-heavy offenses. The third string wideout on paper may not be heavily involved in Week 1, but he could be an injury, trade, or suspension away from being elevated into a starting role.
Opportunity remains the name of the game but there are other positive indicators we can hunt for at the wide receiver position. We used to wait for the “Year 3” breakout for many wideouts, but today’s collegiate game has often ramped up the learning curve to where we’re seeing these breakouts occur in Year 2. Slow starters from Year 1 due to playing time, depth chart battles, or injury will often have suppressed redraft ADP. That makes them perfect sleeper candidates. Tight ends have a steeper learning curve so we shouldn’t put them in this category. Consider them more offense-specific. As far as advanced statistics, we can look at yards per route run and first down rate as reasons to be bullish on a player’s future outcome. This can apply to both wide receivers and tight ends. These efficiency categories are a step below volume, but if we can identify a highly efficient pass catcher in line for a surplus of targets, we could be off to the races.
One final note when hunting for sleepers – wait until the very tail end of your draft to pick up your defense or kickers. If you’re in a 16-round draft, ideally it makes the most sense to wait until Rounds 15 and 16 to address these positions. There are two primary reasons for this.
First, we don’t want to burn mid-to-late draft picks. This is historically the sweet spot for hunting for sleepers. Raheem Mostert (Round 12 ADP, RB5 fantasy finish), Nico Collins (Round 13 ADP, WR12 fantasy finish), and Sam LaPorta (Round 14 ADP, TE1 fantasy finish) are cherry-picked examples illustrating the opportunity cost that found success in 2023. All three were league winners drafted in the double-digit rounds. Drafting LaPorta in Round 14 was far more valuable than selecting any of the top DST units. This wasn’t just an outlier season either, it occurs on an annual basis.
Second, we don’t want to chase the previous year production at DST/K. DST specifically has immense fluctuations year-to-year. It must account for 11+ different players (keeping in mind injuries, rotations, formation changes) and any possible schematic or playcalling deviations. Every year I go through an exercise pulling the top-six DST units by ADP to find how many of those units return top-six fantasy production. Over the last five years they have a collective hit rate of just 36.7%, frequently failing to live up to expectation and often burning those that spent early capital to acquire them. Scoring at the Kicker position is incredibly linear. The difference in scoring between last year’s K2 and K12 was less than 1.0 points per game (0.82). We’re talking fractional points on a per-game basis and the opportunity cost of picking K5 versus K10 is next to nothing. Wait at these two positions and spend your mid-to-late round draft selections hunting for those important, season-altering sleepers.
Good luck this year!
