Ten Players to Build Best Ball Championships Around (Part 2)

My Top Five Targets in the Top 100

In my last column, I kicked off best ball content on the site with five players I’m hyper-targeting outside the top 100 in ADP. I also discussed reasons why I’m taking a more consolidated approach to drafts this year with stronger stances on individual players, and the criteria I’m looking for in whom to plant my flag on.

Today I want to dive into the rest of my Ten Players to Build Best Ball Championships Around with five players in the top 100 I am prioritizing well above market rates.

Let’s get into it!

NOTE: Statistics are pulled from an amalgam of sites and may be slightly inconsistent with what you use. Route participation is sourced from PlayerProfiler, Yards and Targets per Route Run (YPRR/TPRR) are from PFF, RYOE and ROE% is from NFL NextGenStats, and all other NFL statistics are from 33rd Team’s “The Edge” unless otherwise noted. All college stats and charts are from Campus2Canton.

5. Kyle Pitts

In Part 1 of this series we briefly discussed the historical outlier that was the 2022 Atlanta Falcons. While everyone is aware of it, I’m not sure the extent of it has truly been reckoned with by the fantasy community.

In 2022, the Falcons passed 24.4 times per game for 172.2 yards per game. To put this into perspective, if you combined the Bears and Falcons pass attempt totals over 34 combined games; it would still be less pass attempts than the Buccaneers threw in their 18 games (including the playoffs). Since 2014, only the 2022 Bears averaged fewer pass attempts, and only 2 other teams averaged within 3 pass attempts per game of last year’s Falcons.

Atlanta could have passed 50 more times last year and still be in the bottom five for team pass volume over the past nine years. JJ Zachariason has studied team-level regression in various forms over the past decade and found that whenever a team has an outlier season in terms of their play-calling distribution, they tend to significantly regress toward the mean the following year.

This tends to be exacerbated when the offense also changes play-callers or key personnel; the latter of which is the case in Atlanta. As discussed last time, with Desmond Ridder at QB the Falcons threw the ball 28.8 times per game, which is certainly low, but more along the lines of “normal low” than “historically low.”

My expectation for the Falcons is for them to pass at a bottom-10 rate in the NFL, but cease to be a historical outlier. If that comes to pass, we can work with that! In 2022, the 25th percentile in pass attempts per game was 30.1. This would mark a 97-attempt increase over 2022 and should be a reasonable expectation moving forward.

This brings us to Kyle Pitts:

In 2022, he posted the following statistics that do not take into account team passing volume. The bracketed number is his rank in each among all tight ends with minimum 30 targets:

• Targets Per Route Run (TPRR): 26.5% (2nd)

• Target Share: 26.9% (2nd)

• Yards per Route Run (YPRR): 1.69 (6th)

• Air Yards Share: 34.5% (1st)

• Weighted Opportunity Rating (WOPR): 0.645 (2nd)

• PFF Receiving Grade: 76.6 (8th)

I posted this sentiment on twitter this week and I want to stress it again here:

We as a fantasy community have cultivated a wealth of data points to inform us better about the talent of players. And yet, when faced with a situation such as Kyle Pitts and the 2022 Falcons, we are most willing to throw the process aside. In reality, these are the times it is most necessary.

I cannot promise you Atlanta will pass at league-average efficiency or volume this year. But Kyle Pitts is effectively posting low-end WR1 peripherals, and being drafted behind 35 receivers.

Oh, and he plays Tight End.

To illustrate this point, Pitts’ teammate Drake London is a totally fine ‘bet on talent’ selection in the fourth round. However, the peripherals between the players were quite similar when they shared the field in 2022 and I project them similarly moving forward. Given the reduced price, and the scarcity of his position, Pitts stands out as an infinitely better value selection.

In my opinion, Pitts is the best pick at cost on the entire board in 2023 drafts and a bet worth staking a portion of your season on.

Target Exposure: 30%