Despite it being the start of July, I’m fairly certain that I’ve found the player who’ll be on the majority of my rosters, the player who I’m attaching my name to in 2017. He was taken inside the top 32 wide receivers at this time last year, but failed to live up to expectations, leading him to fall outside of the top 45 wide receivers this year. That’s not going to last for very long.

Underrated 2015 Campaign

Most expected John Brown to take the third-year leap in 2016, but what they missed was that Brown already took the leap in his sophomore season, finishing as the No. 21 receiver. With both Larry Fitzgerald and Michael Floyd on the roster, it was hard to expect more than that type of finish in 2016. Going back to 2015 (the last time Brown was healthy), Brown was one of just three receivers who finished inside the top-24 while seeing fewer than 105 targets. The other two were Doug Baldwin and Sammy Watkins; both of whom are being drafted as top-18 receivers in 2017.

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Injuries Affecting Play Time

Instead of the “leap” that most expected in 2016, Brown wound up missing a lot of time due to his sickle cell trait, as well as a cyst on his spine. Most don’t know about the cyst, but Brown had it drained this offseason. Brown himself said that once the cyst was drained, he was feeling normal within 24 hours.  Offseason reports from head coach Bruce Arians are glowing, saying “Smoke (nickname) looks like John Brown… A couple of those routes he ran, he did not run one route like that last year.” The Cardinals team doctors also feel as if these problems are behind Brown. This is important, because Arians doesn’t put players on the field who can’t practice.

Some will look at the final year-end numbers and say, “Brown only missed one game in 2016,” but that doesn’t tell the full story. Brown went from playing as high as 93 percent of the snaps early in the year, but falling to just 43.6 percent of the snaps (175 of 401) over the final six weeks. In the end, he played 39.7 snaps per game, which ranked 85th among wide receivers. And keep in mind that he did so while playing through these injuries.

Targets on The Rise

Going back through Brown’s game logs, you can find a trend on how he did when he saw a respectable number of targets. Below is a chart on when he’s seen more than five targets, as well as when he’s seen five or less. Keep in mind that this is over the span of his entire career.

If you were to take that per-game average in games with more than five targets, it would have ranked as the No. 14 wide receiver in 2016, right in between Dez Bryant and Michael Crabtree. It’s not like we’re asking for many targets here, as six per game would amount to 96 over an entire season. There were 46 receivers who hit that number in 2016.

Even looking at his splits in 2016 when he was playing at less than 100 percent, Brown was a productive receiver when called upon. There were four games in which he saw more than four targets, and in those games he finished with lines of 6/70/0, 10/144/0, 5/54/0, and 5/81/1. That’s an average of 6.5 receptions for 87.3 yards and 0.25 touchdowns.

Taking a look at the lack of starting talent around him, it’s easy to understand why you should be excited for his prospects in 2017. Michael Floyd is now in Minnesota, and regardless of how you feel about his talent, he averaged 6.2 targets per game over the last four years. On top of that, Larry Fitzgerald will be 34 years old when the season starts. Going over the last 10 seasons, there have been just two wide receivers (of the 16 eligible) who totaled more than 127 targets in their age-34 season. Larry Fitzgerald has seen 295 targets over the last two seasons, which ranks 10th in the NFL. If that number were to fall at all, Brown would be the main beneficiary.

2017 Outlook

When looking at the Cardinals roster, it’s littered with role players like J.J. Nelson and Jaron Brown. The Cardinals also went out and drafted wide receiver Chad Williams, who comes from a small school and is extremely unpolished. It’s been rumored that he’ll eventually be Fitzgerald’s replacement, which has no effect on Brown.

Most want to assume that David Johnson will automatically resume the role he had last season, when he saw 120 targets, while no other running back saw more than 94 of them. I’m of the belief that those targets were more out of necessity with Brown hurt, Floyd off to New England, and even backup receiver Jaron Brown hurt. It might not even be necessary to take targets away from Johnson in order to feed Brown, but I’d be willing to bet that Johnson falls short of his 2016 target total.

Over the last three years, the Cardinals have targeted the wide receiver position an average of 385 times per year, including 407 times in 2016, which was tied with for most in the NFL. When looking at projections, if a quarterback and head coach remain intact, most teams tend to pass more often as they get more comfortable together. Speaking of comfortable, Brown is living with Carson Palmer this offseason, as they did when he had his breakout campaign in 2015.

If you were to modestly project Brown for 115 targets (not hard to do even keeping Fitzgerald around 135), the possibilities of him finishing top-36 at wide receiver is nearly a lock, as there have been 78 wide receivers to see that number of targets over the last three years. Of those 78 receivers, just six of them finished outside the top-36. Four of those receivers were age-32 or older. Brown is 27 years old, in the prime of his career, about to be a free agent, and severely under-priced in fantasy leagues as of this moment. In case I didn’t make myself clear, Brown is well worth drafting as a top 36 wide receiver.

If you’ve missed any of the other Player Profiles that have gone up, you can see the full list right here.

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