There are many fantasy enthusiasts out there who are willing to draft Will Fuller as a top-30 wide receiver this year based on his 2017 performance, even though it was an abbreviated 10-game season. He scored seven touchdowns on 50 targets in those 10 games, which translates to one every 7.1 targets. Is that anywhere close to repeatable, or are fantasy owners being duped?

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SUDDENLY CROWDED RECEIVER CORPS

Not only is Deandre Hopkins on the other side of the formation, but the Texans also drafted Texas Tech wide receiver Keke Coutee in the fourth-round of the NFL Draft, and he’s reportedly turned heads in Texans camp the entire offseason. He was forced to miss a lot of training camp, however, which opened the door for Bruce Ellington, who played a decent role in the offense for the Texans last year, hauling in 27 receptions for 323 yards and two touchdowns in just nine games from Week 3 through Week 12. Ellington has also looked really good throughout the preseason, hauling in seven passes for 72 yards and a touchdown from Deshaun Watson. Whatever the case, the Texans wide receiver room is suddenly filled with talent.

TARGET SHARE

Knowing what you do about the Texans wide receiver corps, we need to go through and figure out how the targets will be divvied up. Now that we have a good sample size on how Bill O’Brien runs his offense, this should have been a relatively easy exercise, but it’s really not. Why? Of the four years O’Brien has run the team, two of them threw the ball 525 times or less, while the other two threw the ball 583 times or more. This rarely happens to teams without a coaching change, but trying to make sense of it, let’s look at the defense.

This helps us in no way, as the two have seemingly had no correlation to one another. The defense was the worst in the league last year, but the offense ranked 23rd in pass attempts? You can say that the efficiency of their pass attempts was the reason, but it’s hard to say it should make that much of a difference. The only year the two matched where they probably should have was 2014, and that was the year O’Brien didn’t have an offensive coordinator.

If there’s one thing that’s been relatively consistent in the offense, it’s the percentage of targets that wide receivers account for, which has been in between 62.7 and 66.3 percent in three of the four years. With the defense improving (mainly getting J.J. Watt back), combined with the fact that O’Brien’s offense has never finished higher than the 10th-most pass attempts, it’s hard to see them finishing inside the top-10 in attempts. If we go the optimistic route, we can put them down for around 560 pass attempts, which would have ranked 15th in 2017. Putting down the wide receivers for their usual target share, we’re looking at 350-370 targets between them.

Over the last three years, Hopkins has averaged 172.3 targets per season, which takes a massive chunk out of the potential for any of the other wide receivers, not just Fuller. You’re going to see guys like Braxton Miller, Coutee, Chris Thompson, and others account for at least 40-50 targets, as they’ll get on the field in garbage time situations, 4WR sets, etc. Suddenly, we’re looking at 140-160 targets split between Fuller and Ellington (could be Coutee if he wins the job).

INCONSISTENT PRODUCTION

Most might just assume that Fuller would see plenty of those targets, but things would have to change in a big way if that’s going to happen. Did you know that Fuller saw more than six targets in just 2-of-10 games last year? What if I told you that Ellington did that in 5-of-11 games? Some will wonder just how many more snaps Ellington played, and the answer would be 67 of them, which isn’t much. I don’t care how you feel about Fuller’s talent – when you’re not seeing consistent targets, you’re not going to live up to expectations. Here’s a list of some of the players who had more seven-plus target games than Fuller in 2017 (on top of Ellington): Donte Moncrief, Corey Coleman, Albert Wilson, Tyler Lockett, Allen Hurns… The list goes on, but you get my point.

EFFICIENCY OVERLOAD

But Mike, Fuller produces on fewer targets! I’m not going to say that he won’t be an efficient wide receiver working opposite Hopkins, but I will tell you that his touchdowns won’t save him in 2018 like they did last year. His touchdown every 7.1 targets was the second-lowest number in the last five years among wide receivers. How does this happen? Well, it happens with a lot of second-tier wide receivers every now and then. Over the last five years, here’s the players who’ve scored a touchdown every 8.5 targets or less and then what they did the following season.

As you can see, the target to touchdown rate is likely to at least double for Fuller in 2018, as it has for almost every single one of these wide receivers. On top of that, Deshaun Watson‘s touchdown rate was uber-inflated in 2017, as it was the second-highest touchdown percentage since the merger. If you were to move Fuller’s touchdown rate to 20.0 last year, which is slightly above the league average (22.8 targets per touchdown is the wide receiver league average), he would have scored 2.5 touchdowns. All of a sudden 423 yards and 2.5 touchdowns over 10 games doesn’t look so good. Fuller’s 8.5 standard points per game in 2017 ranked 22nd, but if you were to lower the touchdown total like we did, he’s suddenly way down as the 53rd wide receiver in points per game. Can we blame him? Not really, because the targets were not there on a consistent basis. He made most of what he had, though you shouldn’t expect that to happen again (as referenced with the players above).

2018 OUTLOOK

I’m not going to sit here and say that Fuller is going to be a complete bust – he likely isn’t. What I’m saying is that while Deandre Hopkins is healthy, he’s going to have a difficult time living up to the WR3 expectations that his current ADP (WR29) gives him. There were reports that Fuller added 15 pounds this offseason, which is quite odd because he’s never going to be the possession receiver on that team. Both Hopkins and Ellington are going to be higher in the ranks than him when it comes to underneath targets. Reports also say that he hasn’t lost any speed, but I find that difficult to believe, because, well… physics. Maybe Fuller wants to see more targets than be viewed as a deep-threat, but he’s on the wrong team if he wants that to happen. It’d be surprising if he sees more than 80-90 targets this year, and if that’s the case, he’s not likely to finish as a top-30 wide receiver. Why do I say that? Well, of the 150 wide receivers who have finished top-30 over the last five years, just six of them saw less than 90 targets. Again, he’s being drafted at his ceiling. He’s fine as a bench receiver, but that’s it. My 2018 projection: 80 targets, 44 receptions, 669 yards, 5 touchdowns

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