Fantasy Football 2008: Tomlinson and Owens, Early Round Busts?

It happens every year to fantasy football experts, beginners, and everyone in between. You show up for your yearly draft, with lists full of "sleepers" and "secret weapons" who will help you build the best, most consistent, deepest fantasy roster the world has ever seen. And then the first round starts. And then you draft Shaun Alexander, or Larry Johnson, Marshall Faulk, Terrell Davis...the list goes back to the very first fantasy football season you played. Your season is already over, but you don't know it yet. It will take a few weeks for your top running back to go down to injury, get benched, or just plain suck. In about a decade's worth of fantasy football, I've drafted enough of these disasters to choke a camel. They aren't always running backs, and they aren't always in the first round, but it always hurts when the players who were supposed to be leading your team are the ones holding it back. Fortunately, these guys do get easier to spot as year after year rolls by and you vow to never draft a chump like that again. It takes a while, but eventually you can leave those injuries waiting to happen and old, unmotivated slackers to the other guys in your league, so that they too can enjoy a roster that looks more like a geriatric ward than an NFL team. If I disrespect your favorite NFL players in the coming pages, feel free to disagree, this is only a quick overview of some of the risks associated with top fantasy players that many of the experts are ignoring. I won't say "I told you so", but some of your opponents this year probably will.

Lets start off with the very first pick that will be made in most drafts this year, LaDainian Tomlinson. He is understandably being pushed as the best player in fantasy football because of his amazing consistency and his role on one of the best teams in the NFL. Since entering the league, he has been one of the top running backs year in and year out, missing only one game and piling up enough yardage and touchdowns to win games practically by himself. Oh, and he is only going to be 29 this season. With all of this going for him, it will seem crazy for most people to pass on him with the first overall pick in the draft, and nobody will question your choice if you choose to select him. However, making the "safe" pick doesn't always lead to championships, and there are a number of reasons why Tomlinson is not as safe as he seems that you may want to keep in mind.

First of all, let's have another look at that incredible streak of spectacular seasons that Tomlinson has going. He has rushed for well over 1,000 yards in each of his seven seasons. But history shows us that even the best backs in football rarely string together more than five or so great seasons. Priest Holmes had only three remarkable seasons. Shaun Alexander had five. Marshall Faulk, maybe the all-time best fantasy football running back, had seven astounding years before breaking down due to injuries. Emmitt Smith managed eleven seasons in a row with over 1,000 yards, but to be honest, only the first five of those seasons were truly dominant in a statistical sense. Barry Sanders is the only back who has been really great for more than seven straight years in the league, and he never scored as much as those other guys. So basically, if Tomlinson manages another season worthy of a top fantasy pick, he will be doing something that no running back has done in the modern era. This is certainly possible, because Tomlinson is one of the best players the league has ever seen, but to me this assumption represents more of an unneccessary risk than the "sure thing" that he is being represented as.

There are also some subtle clues that his skills and his team's confidence have begun to fade ever so slightly. Last year, he carried or caught the ball 375 times. That's still a lot for most players, but it represents a career low for him, as the Chargers kept him on the bench to rest him more than they had before. This is probably a great idea for the team and for his longevity, but it also means that his truly monster seasons are behind him. Last year was also the first year that he failed to make a play of over 50 yards, with his longest gain coming on a 49 yard run. Tomlinson also got off to a very slow start last year, something that many people will overlook when they see that his overall production ended up being very good. In the first 12 weeks of last year, Tomlinson had only two 100 yard rushing games. In weeks 13 through 16 he went on a tear that helped pad his overall numbers considerably after what had been a very ordinary season. To top this all off, Tomlinson struggled greatly during the playoffs, managing only 115 total yards and one touchdown through three games, before tearing his MCL. Speaking of that MCL, it is reportedly fine now but this is still the first year that Tomlinson will have to come back from any significant injury in the NFL. To me, this all shows that while Tomlinson had an incredibly high ceiling statistically at one point, it's safe to say that he will not approach those kinds of numbers again. In fact, Tomlinson has more downside and risk involved than any player I would want to draft with the top pick.

So where else should you look for your top player? I'm inclined to agree with the few people who have ranked Adrian Peterson at the top of their list. Injuries are a concern with him as well, but the fact that he already has the single game rushing record and that he is still improving gives him significantly more upside than Tomlinson. Steven Jackson is also a fine option. He battled through a horrible season for both himself and and Rams last year, but that team faced so many injuries last year that it feels fluky to me. I still think he is one of the best young players in the league, and he showed that he could carry the offensive load for the team and put up monster numbers in 2006. Every player runs the risk of being injured during the year, but Peterson and Jackson will certainly produce when healthy, and have their best days ahead of them, something that is unfortunately no longer true for Tomlinson.

Terrell Owens is another player who I consistently see ranked higher than I think his risk merits. The majority of lists I've seen have him ranked as the number two wide receiver, behind Randy Moss, who is generally accepted as the best fantasy receiver now. He is another tough player to criticize, because he is built like a tank, piles up yardage, and scores more touchdowns than any receiver has a right to. He has been remarkably durable, and seemingly came back stronger than ever after breaking his leg a few years ago. But this is just another case of a good player being ranked just a little too high based on past performance. There is little doubt that Owens has been a top five receiver for the past ten years, but to say that he is still the second best just suggests that you aren't looking at enough receivers in the league. For starters, Owens finished with good stats last year, but he faded in a big way toward the end of the year. In fact, he hasn't played a good game since last November. In three games in December and the playoff game against the Giants in January, Owens never had more than 49 yards.

To see the significance of that statistic, we only have to look back at a couple of other players who recently experienced similar occurrences. Marvin Harrison and Isaac Bruce were two of the best receivers in the league toward the end of the 1990s and the better part of this decade. In 2006, Harrison was among the league leaders in receiving and helped the Colts win the Super Bowl. However, if you look back at the playoff stats, you'll see that Harrison was strangely quiet during those games. In his best game of those playoffs, he only had 59 yards, and he never scored. Definitely a drop off for someone who averaged almost 100 yards a game and scored touchdowns in bunches all year. In 2007, he only managed to play a few games before getting hurt, and then failed to come back and make any significant contribution for the rest of the year. Harrison was 35 years old when the 2007 season started, and Owens will be 35 before the 2008 season is over, so their cases are remarkably similar. Isaac Bruce followed the same pattern a couple years before that in 2004. He was a couple years younger then than Owens is now and he ranked among the top five receivers in yardage at the end of that year. But he also slowed down as the season went on. Like Terrell Owens in 2007, Bruce never had another game where he had 100 yards after November of 2004, including one playoff game. In fact, Bruce got hurt the next year and didn't end up with another 100 yard game until well into 2006, nearly two years later!

Owens may or may not be able to go against these trends and continue with another dominant season. He has the talent to be an exception, but Harrison and Bruce have always been very talented as well. Whether or not history repeats itself, I still feel that the risk in drafting Owens is too high to warrant a place in the top five receivers this year. Reggie Wayne, Braylon Edwards, Andre Johnson, and Larry Fitzgerald have each had at least one season that is comparable to what Owens has done in his best years. Injury is always a risk, but with each of them well under 30, it is reasonable to expect that they will stay healthy this year. I'm especially excited by Andre Johnson's potential this year on the improving Texans offense. There is even a case to be made for putting more receivers ahead of Owens, such as Chad Johnson, Marques Colston and a couple others, but the nice thing is that there is really no need to do that. If you pass on Owens and grab one of the younger guys, someone else will still take him in the top five because of his past success and the perceived safety of the pick.

To wrap this up, I'm going to talk about a couple quarterbacks, Matt Hasselbeck and Derek Anderson. These are two players who might not be very high picks, but who I still think are being overrated this year for different reasons. Hasselbeck is one of my favorite quarterbacks in the past few years. I had him on my team last year and he turned out to be a great steal as one of the last starting quarterbacks drafted in my league. He plays smart and really got a lot better last year when he had to carry the offense along by himself. This year, he is being ranked as a mid-range starting quarterback, usually right around guys like Ben Roethlisberger and a little higher than Eli Manning, Marc Bulger, and Donovan McNabb. At first, it seems to make sense, since he has been very consistent and productive for years, and he is coming off his best year ever. But consider that he threw the ball 352 times last year, which was the fourth highest number in the league and more than he had ever thrown it in a single season before. As the Seattle running game stalled, he was called on to throw the ball more often and played excellent football all year long, but this year, Seattle has loaded up with some new running backs who should keep the ground game going.. Add the new and improved running game to the fact that Deion Branch, one of the team's best receivers, will probably miss a good part of the year trying to rehab his knee, and you have a return to more modest statistics for Hasselbeck. He can still be your starter, but I don't think there is any reason to go out of your way to get him, considering that there should be at least another half dozen quarterbacks in that same tier of possible starters.

Derek Anderson has also been ranked right around Hasselbeck, usually around picks five to seven. He had a lot of touchdowns and yardage last year, but I don't think he has been a starter nearly long enough for me to put faith in him to do it again. He got off to a great start at the beginning of last season, but as the games wore on, it seems that a lot of opposing defenses were able to figure him out a bit. In the last five weeks of the year, he threw more interceptions than touchdowns, and he had a passer rating better than 80 only once. To compare, Ben Roethlisberger had a passer rating under 80 only three times in the entire regular season, and threw seven touchdowns and no interceptions in his last three games. Sure, Cleveland has a lot of weapons in the passing game and a very good offensive line, but with Brady Quinn sitting on the bench, Anderson will be feeling a lot of pressure if opposing coaches continue to limit him. Derek Anderson is an alright option as a starting quarterback, but like Hasselbeck, I think he will be drafted too early, just behind top guys like Tony Romo, Drew Brees, and Carson Palmer. I think Roethlisberger is a bit safer than either Hasselbeck or Anderson, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Bulger, McNabb, or Matt Schaub come back and end up with better stats than them. Even David Garrard, Eli Manning, or Jay Cutler could continue to develop and give them a run for their money, so do yourself a favor and resist the urge to reach for these two. Draft someone better in the earlier rounds, or wait and try to find a bargain later, but either way you can do better than the potentially average Hasselbeck and the possible backup, Anderson.

That's all for now on risky draft picks. Hopefully you can keep this article in the back of your head and save yourself some trouble later on by keeping your roster free of disappointments this year. I may write a bit more on this topic before the drafts get started, but for now watch for an article coming up on draft day gems and underrated players.