It’s rare that I’ll overpay for a player in dynasty, but when I do, it’s for players like Amari Cooper. There are some who aren’t quite on the bandwagon just yet, which reminds me of a situation back in 2011 where I was watching Antonio Brown and Mike Wallace operate on Monday night football and I made a statement soon thereafter, and it was one that wasn’t popular at the time. I said that Brown was a far better receiver than Wallace, though nobody wanted to acknowledge that.

You could’ve gotten Brown for pennies on the dollar at that point, despite reading into what the Steelers were doing. They gave Brown a five-year, $42.5 million contract extension after that season, which had a lot of people up in arms, saying they should’ve given Wallace that deal. While the situation is different with Cooper and Michael Crabtree, the point is that you can get an elite level wide receiver for cheaper than he’ll cost in a year or two, simply because there is another veteran on the roster.

Rookie Year Injuries

Cooper is a route-running technician and one that can get open against any cornerback in the NFL. He’s proved that over his first two seasons, though there has been some inconsistency in his fantasy output. Looking closer at the subject, it’s easy to see the problem.

It started in his rookie season, where he totaled 50 catches for 732 yards and four touchdowns in the first nine games of his career. He was on pace for 89 catches, 1,301 yards, and six touchdowns. That yardage would’ve been fourth all-time on the rookie list, right behind Randy Moss. Think about that for a second. Randy. Moss. It was a quad injury that limited Cooper at first, but what ultimately hindered him was a foot injury that almost had the Raiders shut him down for the season. Instead, Cooper gutted through what sounds like plantar fasciitis and his performance suffered where he failed to top 20 yards in four of the final seven games.

Fast forward to 2016, where Cooper finished as the No. 12 wide receiver in fantasy despite scoring just five touchdowns on the season. In fact, there were no other wide receivers in the top 15 with less than six touchdowns. Cooper finished the season with 14 fewer targets than Crabtree, but that’s not the area we’re concerned about so much.

Red Zone Usage

If you haven’t heard by now, Cooper wasn’t heavily involved in the red zone last season, scoring just nine fantasy points inside the opponents 20-yard-line, and four of those points were on two-point conversions. Cooper’s nine redzone fantasy points made up just 6.04 percent of his fantasy points. Meanwhile, Crabtree scored 37.1 percent of his points in the red zone. Stop me if you’ve heard this phrase before: Touchdowns are the most volatile thing in football. Crabtree’s 55.7 red zone fantasy points ranked the third-highest in all of football, behind only Jordy Nelson and Davante Adams.

So why did this happen? Part of the reason is because of the play-calling, as Cooper saw just 15 targets in the red zone, compared to 23 for Crabtree, 21 for Seth Roberts, and even eight for Andre Holmes. In his rookie season, Cooper saw just eight red zone targets, in which he turned into 17.4 fantasy points. In that same year, Crabtree scored just 13.8 red zone points on 13 targets. As you can see, the tables can turn really quickly when we’re talking about targets in the red zone.

What about non-red zone targets? The average target outside the red zone yields 0.94 fantasy points in standard leagues and Cooper was one of the top performers in this category, totaling 1.21 points per target. There were just nine wide receivers who scored more fantasy points than expected outside the redzone than Cooper did, including Julio Jones, Brandin Cooks, Antonio Brown, T.Y. Hilton, and DeSean Jackson. On the flip side, Crabtree scored 20.2 points fewer than expected outside of the redzone, which ranked as the ninth-worst in all of football with names like Jeremy Kerley, Tavon Austin, Brandon Marshall, and Dorial Green-Beckham.

Oddly enough, Cooper averaged just half of his total inside the red zone (0.60) when the expected output is 1.84 points per target inside the 20-yard-line. If he would have just been average inside the red zone, he would’ve finished as the No. 9 receiver in fantasy despite seeing just 15 red zone targets.

2017 Outlook

Looking forward, Cooper is entering his third-year in the league and is just 22-years-old until the middle of June, while Crabtree will be 30-years-old when the season starts. Try to remember that Crabtree hasn’t exactly been efficient with his targets over the last two years, totaling fewer than 2,000 yards despite seeing 291 targets. Sure, his red zone numbers were off the charts last year, leading to a solid finish, but if he’d just been average (1.84 points per target) in the red zone, he would have finished as the No. 18 receiver, instead of the No. 11 receiver that he did.

There are just three wide receivers that I’d select over Cooper in dynasty formats and their names are Odell Beckham Jr., Julio Jones, and Antonio Brown. And to be honest, I almost took him over Jones in our FantasyPros Invitational League a few weeks back. Something tells me that I’m going to regret missing out on a player who should dominate this league for the next 8-10 years. Though I’m very happy with Jones, it just goes to show the type of company that I put him in. In redraft, he’s a rock solid second-round pick with upside for more if he can just get some more attention in the red zone.

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Mike Tagliere is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Mike, check out his archive and follow him @MikeTagliereNFL.