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Fantasy Football Player Profile: Martavis Bryant

Fantasy Football Player Profile: Martavis Bryant

There are always a few players that’ll peak my interest when positive news surfaces, but probably none more than Steelers wide receiver Martavis Bryant. As you may remember, Bryant was suspended the entire 2016 season after a failed drug test, his second failed test in two years. Since his reinstatement, we’ve heard nothing but glowing reports about the shape he’s in, and for good reason.

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Learning From Mistakes

Upon being suspended for the year, Bryant’s agents recommended that he move out of Los Angeles (where he lived at the time) to re-focus his life and get away from his circles. He said that he hadn’t realized how many people were around him all the time, something that changed when he moved to Henderson, Nevada. This is important because of what he did when he got there.

He worked out. Something he said that he’d do maybe once per month in the offseason. In fact, after his rookie season he said that he worked out for the first week and then not again until he was required to with the team. When you look at the work some athletes have to put in to stay atop their game, it’s quite remarkable what Bryant accomplished while taking everything for granted. Let’s take a look at what was actually accomplished.

Boom or Bust?

Bryant played in 21 regular season games in 2014 and 2015, totaling 76 receptions for 1,314 yards and 14 touchdowns. Some have labeled him as a boom or bust player who only produces if he snags a long ball. While he did that extremely often, he didn’t necessarily ‘need’ it to produce. Of the 21 games he played, he produced 12.0 or more PPR points in 13 of them, or 62 percent of games. In 2016, the average top-36 wide receiver performance required 11.8 PPR points. By comparison, there were just 14 wide receivers who produced top-36 numbers more than 62 percent of the time in 2016.

Knowing what you do about his workout habits, would it make sense that he wore down at the end of the season? How about this – of his eight games that he didn’t produce top-36 numbers, six of them came Week 13 and beyond, including five of them in Weeks 15, 16, and 17. While working out in Nevada, Bryant said that he feels like a different person and that he added 10 pounds while there. His endurance should be better than year’s past.

With and Without Him

His presence and effect while on the field shouldn’t have ever been in question, but if you thought the Steelers and Ben Roethlisberger were fine without him, here’s Roethlisberger’s splits from 2014-2016 in games with and without Bryant.

G Comp Att Yds/gm YPA TD FPts
With Bryant 19 27.2 40.5 336.6 8.4 2.11 25.5
Without Bryant 23 23.4 35.5 275.7 8.0 1.78 21.5

 

The Steelers were not as potent of an offense without him, but his replacements still posted solid numbers, making Bryant’s production in 2014-2015 easily repeatable and less likely a fluke. There was a rotation of receivers who they tried to replace him with in 2016, whether it be to lack of performance or injury. Here are the stats that the combination of Sammie Coates, Darrius Heyward-Bey, Cobi Hamilton, and Markus Wheaton posted in 2016: 105 targets, 48 receptions, 834 yards, and seven touchdowns. Those numbers would’ve amounted to the No. 30 wide receiver in fantasy football last year.

To give you an idea as to how achievable that is for Bryant, he averaged 8.4 targets per game in the 11 games he played in 2015, which would amount to 134 over a full season. You don’t need to count on that many targets in order to justify Bryant’s ADP, which currently sits at WR26, but it’s good to know it’s possible. Some will try and tell you that you’d have to take away targets from Antonio Brown in order to make that happen, which is the opposite of the truth. In fact, Brown had his two best fantasy seasons when Bryant was on the field.

2017 Outlook

There have been changes to the team since Bryant was suspended, including the addition of rookie JuJu Smith-Schuster, third-year slot receiver Eli Rogers, and the departure of veteran tight end Heath Miller. Smith-Schuster is reportedly trying to earn snaps, while his main competition is Rogers. Those two will likely cancel each other out in one way or another. Miller was replaced by Ladarius Green, who has since been released, forcing them to move forward with Jesse James, who was the definition of an average tight end in 2016. Roethlisberger targeted the wide receiver position 406 times in 2015, then just 338 times in 2016. When trying to project the targets among the wide receivers, it’s relatively simple to find 110-plus targets for Bryant. When taking that total over his points-per-target average of 1.60 in standard leagues, and we’re looking at the No. 7 wide receiver in 2016.

Am I saying he’s most definitely going to finish as a top-10 wide receiver? No, but I will say that it’s most definitely in the realm of possibilities, and that’s not something you can say about a lot of wide receivers drafted outside of the top-25, which he is. It’s also not often that a player of his skill-set doesn’t see the top cornerback on the other team, but when Antonio Brown is on the other side of the field, he’s not going to see top cornerbacks very often. I understand the risk, I really do, but considering the reward, a potential top 10 wide receiver, it’s well worth it. If Bryant slips into the fifth/sixth round, he’ll be on almost all of my fantasy teams.

If you’ve missed any of my other player profiles, you can find all of them on the landing page 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.

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