Fantasy Football Busts: I Know What You Did Last Summer

Everyone is a fantasy football expert. Your buddies, your co-workers, your neighbors, your siblings, your parents, your teachers, probably even your grandparents. Just ask them.

With so many casual fans turning into fantasy gurus, predicting sleepers before the season is almost an impossible task. Most NFL fans can name at least the backup running back if not the third-string running back on all 32 teams. If you don’t want to get laughed out of your fantasy draft, this otherwise useless knowledge is essential.

The problem is that nobody is always right. All of those so-called fantasy experts you know usually get their information from the usual sources. These self-made experts just regurgitate information they’ve read or heard. It’s not a perfect science, but it’s definitely made fantasy football more competitive.

Therefore, it’s exponentially more difficult to dominate fantasy leagues these days as long as your fellow owners have any interest in football. In order to distinguish yourself from being an auto-drafted team from Gridiron Experts or ESPN.com or the plethora of preseason prediction magazines, you have to evaluate these rankings and make your own decisions. However, sometimes players are glorified by such a large number of different publications that it’s impossible not to believe the hype.

For example, most publications I read had Detroit quarterback Matthew Stafford as a breakout player for 2011. I hope you bought into the hype because he’s lived up to and exceeded many expectations. On the other hand, I saw Arizona’s newly acquired Kevin Kolb mentioned in much the same way. Umm, how is that working out for Kolb owners? Not so well; trust me, I know firsthand.

With summer officially over, the preseason hype for a number of players is dying like the leaves on the trees. So let’s look at eight Fantasy Football Busts who were overhyped and caused thousands of owners to waste high draft picks on them during the summer.

1. Kevin Kolb, QB, Ari – All you need to know is that he’s been outscored by Chad Henne, Tarvaris Jackson, Matt Cassel, and Donovan McNabb. However, I believed the hype, I’m not going to lie. I thought Kolb would be a perfect fit with the group of receivers in Arizona, especially with Larry Fitzgerald as a safety blanket that he could just throw it up to if he was in trouble. Kolb looked good in the first two games, throwing for 4 touchdowns and 560 yards. In the last three games he’s thrown 5 interceptions compared to only 1 touchdown – and two of those games were against less-than-stellar opponents, the Seahawks and the Vikings. After the bye this week, Kolb is facing a rough stretch with four out of five games against Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Things aren’t going to get better any time soon.
2. Chad Ochocinco, WR, NE – What’s there left to say? Chad isn’t producing and the team, his coach, and his quarterback don’t seem to have faith in him. If he doesn’t produce soon, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ochocinco looking for a job. Maybe he can go back to riding bulls and playing soccer instead of disappearing on Sundays; he was a lot more exciting then. I thought he could be a great value as a low-end second wide receiver, but in reality he shouldn’t even be owned.
3. Peyton Hillis, RB, Cle – It’s real, don’t doubt it. You can’t deny it. I almost hate to say it in fear that it will somehow creep into my performance writing each week… the Madden Curse. It’s probably his unsettled contract situation affecting him the most. This is a preseason top ten running back that has done nothing in four out of five games outside of a decent game against the lowly Colts.
4. Shonn Greene, RB, NYJ – At the end of every year and in the playoffs, Greene seems to be at his best, specifically a 76-yard and 1-score day in a win over the Patriots in New England last year. I bought into Green being a top 15 running back by at least 90%: the Jets’ offense is predicated on running the football and stopping the run on defense. The problem is that the Jets haven’t been good at either of these this year, and Greene has suffered the most. What’s encouraging is that he’s still getting the majority of the carries in New York and has a chance to turn things around.
5. Mike Williams, WR, TB – Coming off an incredible rookie year in which he caught 11 touchdowns to go along with 964 yards, Williams looked poised to jump into the conversation as an elite wide receiver. The team, the quarterback, the receiver are all young and looking to take the next step; however, after catching a touchdown Week 1 against Detroit, Williams hasn’t found the end zone and has under 200 yards combined in his last five games. Tampa Bay was all hype coming into this season after a decent year in 2010, and unfortunately are having to deal with the aftereffects of underachieving.
6. Julio Jones, WR, Atl – I’m an Arkansas Razorback football fan, lover of all things SEC, so I know how explosive Jones was in college. However, I always thought he was overrated: his production never matched the respect he was given. Jones played on a team that had Mark Ingram and Trent Richardson in the backfield, and still struggled to produce on a weekly basis besides catching a long pass off of play-action. Naturally he seemed like a perfect fit for Atlanta, but things haven’t worked out so far; he’s yet to score his first career touchdown. Playing opposite of Roddy White, I heard some ridiculous predictions for Jones’s rookie season, but I don’t think those will be coming true. He seemed poised to explode after an average start with back-to-back 100-yard receiving games, but then he injured his hamstring. Once he returns, I see his value decreasing because the Falcons are finally realizing that they can’t win as a pass-first team.
7. Sam Bradford, QB, STL – Who has been worse than Kolb? Yeah, you guessed it: Bradford. In three out of five games he’s failed to reach 200 yards passing, despite the Rams throwing the ball more on average than any other team in the league. He’s also only thrown for three touchdowns and hasn’t had a multi-touchdown game yet. Now he’s injured. The 2011 season is turning into a bust in every way for Bradford and the Rams.
8. Knowshon Moreno, RB, Den – John Fox. Run-first offense. Increased workload. Forget all that. We call this the Willis McGahee Effect. McGahee has made a living being underrated and out producing the backs ahead of him. Because of injuries and the McGahee Effect, Moreno has been one of the biggest busts in fantasy football. I’m beginning to question whether he will ever be healthy enough to live up to his draft status.