Week 7 of the NFL season is over and with that, we are just about halfway through the fantasy season. Hopefully all of you readers out there are doing well in your leagues and coasting into the playoffs.
That’s our goal here at FantasyPros: to help our readers succeed in their fantasy leagues and to help them learn more about football. For fantasy football analysts, the only feeling better than being right about a take or an opinion is if being right actually helps another person. It’s a deeply rewarding feeling and the best part about the job.
Now, when it comes to writing about rookies things can be a little different. Rookies usually stand apart from other NFL players. They can take time to adjust to the speed of the NFL or to earn playing time in their coach’s eyes. Rookies are usually graded on a different curve than other players because historically they don’t produce at the same rate as established veterans.
This year has been special in that regard. Several rookies are not just excelling compared to their fellow freshman, but also at the NFL level. While takes about rookies usually take time to come to fruition, this year we have seen a number of rookies dominate at the NFL level and for your fantasy teams. Today we’ll be going over the rookie leaders in fantasy points at each position so far this season.
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Deshaun Watson
Is anybody surprised at this point that Deshaun Watson is the leading rookie quarterback in fantasy points? His 141 fantasy points lead all rookies and rank fifth among all quarterbacks in the league. Of the four quarterbacks with more fantasy points, three have played one more game than Watson – and that’s counting his first game, where he was put in halfway through.
Things didn’t look so great for Watson at the start of the season. After understandably only scoring 6.68 points against Jacksonville in one half of football, Watson’s Week 2 performance against the Bengals would have been terrible if he hadn’t saved the day with a long rushing touchdown.
It was that rushing production that analysts believed would help buoy his floor for fantasy purposes, but over the next four weeks, Watson threw for no fewer than two touchdowns in each game. In fact, per Rich Hribar Watson is the first rookie quarterback ever to throw three or more touchdown passes in three consecutive games in NFL history.
So while he’s breaking NFL records, he’s breaking your opponents in fantasy leagues. He has scored no fewer than 17 fantasy points in any of his starts this year. If you’ve been starting him odds are you’re doing pretty well in your leagues.
This week he draws his toughest defensive match since Week 2: the Seahawks. We’ll have to wait and see if he can continue his historic and ridiculous pace, but the fact remains that Watson is one of the most exciting young players in football today.
Kareem Hunt
Speaking of historic rookies, Kareem Hunt‘s first ever game in the NFL broke the all-time record for yards from scrimmage in a debut game. His very first game of football yielded over 40 fantasy points.
He didn’t just fall off after that game, either. While he is no longer producing over 200 yards from scrimmage every game (and who could?), Hunt has still finished each game this season with over 100 yards from scrimmage. His consistently high floor has resulted in over 13 fantasy points in every game this season.
To make Hunt’s consistent production seem even more ridiculous is that he’s been doing it without two of his starting offensive linemen for the past few weeks. Mitch Morse and Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, the Chiefs’ starting center and right guard are both expected to return in the next few weeks. When they do, we could see the Kareem Hunt of Weeks 1 through 3 back in action.
The big thing that has limited Hunt’s production the past few weeks has been the lack of touchdowns. After scoring six touchdowns in the first three weeks of the season, Hunt hasn’t found his way to the end zone since.
With a running back of Hunt’s skill level (and he really is that good; check out his peripheral metrics, like Breakaway Runs, Evaded Tackles and Juke Rate) we can reasonably expect those touchdowns to come, but Hunt’s 13-point fantasy floor has certainly been comforting for his owners in fantasy. Those touchdowns might not come this week against the tough Denver Broncos run defense, but they will come eventually.
Hunt leads the league in rushing yards with 717, and his 285 receiving yards currently rank fifth at the running back position. Think about that. He’s already broken 1,000 yards from scrimmage and we are only seven weeks into the season. You really couldn’t ask for more from a guy you likely drafted outside of the first few rounds of your fantasy drafts.
Evan Engram
Evan Engram has been a beast, and not just for a rookie. He is currently the TE5 in 0.5 PPR leagues and has the fourth most receiving yards at the position. So I’ll reiterate: he hasn’t just been good for a rookie.
Engram has quickly developed into an every-week starter at the tight end position in fantasy and was doing so even before the apocalypse descended on the New York Giants’ receiving corps. He was already running a ton of routes for a tight end at that point (he ran a route on 84.6 percent of his snaps per PlayerProfiler.com) and was commanding a significant target share in the offense.
To illustrate that point, he’s finished with no fewer than four targets in any game this season and has had four or more receptions in all but one game. These are elite numbers for a tight end, and Engram has been producing with the best of them.
The only tight ends with more touchdowns than Engram through the first seven weeks of the season are Zach Ertz, Rob Gronkowski, Cameron Brate and, somehow, Marcedes Lewis.
Don’t expect Engram to slow down either. After his bye, he has a series of soft matchups for tight ends, and with Odell Beckham Jr. and Brandon Marshall out of the picture Engram should continue to garner an even larger share of the team’s passing volume.
Engram is a lock for a TE1 finish if he stays healthy for the remainder of the season, so keep firing him up if you were lucky enough to grab him off of your waivers this year.
Cooper Kupp
It’s been an odd year for rookie wide receivers. The first three wide receivers selected in the 2017 NFL draft have all been injured to start the year, paving the way for later-round talent to make a splash.
In that fantasy ecosystem, it has been Cooper Kupp who has stepped up to lead all rookie receivers in fantasy points through the first seven weeks. He is currently the overall WR31 in 0.5 PPR leagues.
Kupp stepped up for the Los Angeles Rams and immediately made an impact, scoring a touchdown in his very first NFL start. He hasn’t let off the gas either and has accrued at least one red zone target in six of his seven starts this year. His 13 total red zone targets are second in the NFL.
He has rather unexpectedly dominated the veteran receivers on his team. Coming into the season it was assumed that former Bills receivers Sammy Watkins and Robert Woods would lead the team in targets and production, but Kupp has soundly out-produced Watkins so far and is keeping up with Woods (Woods has more targets and receiving yards, but two fewer touchdowns than Kupp).
Kupp has been the least productive of the rookies highlighted today, but he’s been a helpful player in deeper leagues. He seems established as Jared Goff‘s favorite target near the end zone in an explosive Rams offense, so he’ll keep producing for fantasy purposes this year.
It will be exciting to see if any of the three first-round receivers give Kupp a run for his money as the top rookie receiver in this year’s draft class. Kupp has a solid lead seven weeks in, but there were reasons Corey Davis, Mike Williams and John Ross were each selected within the first ten picks if the draft. For now, Kupp remains a WR3 for fantasy and a name to watch for the future as he continues to develop chemistry with Jared Goff.
Conclusion
Halfway through the season, it’s good to look back and take things into perspective. Frankly speaking, the rookies this year have been phenomenal for real football and for fantasy. We are truly lucky to have so many exciting figures to follow.
That’s it for this week’s Rookie Report. I hope you enjoyed the recap and I wish you luck in your matchups this weekend.
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Aidan Mcgrath is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Aidan, check out his archive and follow him @ffaidanmcgrath
