Lost at Sea: The Teams with Fantasy Football Holes Over Time

In theory, every team should be more or less equally able to find success at each position. They all have access to mostly the same information and the same scouting, so there’s no real reason to think any one team should be better than the others at finding success at a given position.

That’s in theory. In practice, for whatever reason, some teams have places where they just strike out. Think Bears quarterbacks (never a 4,000-yard passer) or Colts corners. Maybe it’s a blind spot, maybe it’s bad luck, maybe it’s a mystical curse from the 1400s, but some teams have just been lost at sea at specific positions for a while now. It’s not necessarily predictive, but it is worth considering whether it’s a case of a team not trying to address a problem, a team unable to address a problem, or a team that has tried to address a problem but just been terrible at it.

To do this, I’ve taken the last 10 years of fantasy results. This exercise is as simple as tracking each team’s best PPR result at each position. (Have two good players at a position? Doesn’t matter. This is just about success, not uber-success.)A first-place finish for the team’s best player at a position is one point, a 30^th-place is 30 points. One bad year with a few good years? You’ll score middle of the pack. Elite of years, you’ll have a tiny number. But if you struggle over a generation, your score will be very high, and we’ll have some information.

I did this over the last five and 10 years to see what trends developed. Let’s take a look.

Lost at Sea: Teams Without Answers at Fantasy Positions

Quarterback

The Bills are a good example of how figuring one thing out can fix a lot. Before Josh Allen, the Bills had never had a quarterback score even 275 PPR points in a season (Allen has now done it six times). Before Tyrod Taylor, no one had ever reached 260. The Bills had a problem. They solved it. Others haven’t.

New York Jets

Best finish in the last 10 years: QB11, 2015 (Ryan Fitzpatrick)
Best finish in the last 5 years: QB15, 2024 (Aaron Rodgers)

You can’t say the Jets haven’t tried. Fitzpatrick, Josh McCown, Sam Darnold, Zach Wilson and Rodgers have all started double-digit games in a season for the team in the last decade. They’ve spent the third and second overall pick in drafts and traded massive resources for quarterbacks. Despite that, their best quarterbacks in the last decade have been a 33-year-old they got for a late-round conditional pick (Fitzpatrick), a 41-year-old whose tenure can only be seen as a massive disappointment (Rodgers) and a 38-year-old journeyman who was no guarantee to start over Christian Hackenberg and Bryce Petty.

That does not necessarily mean the Justin Fields tenure will be a failure for the Jets. See what happened to the Bills. But the Jets have struck out at every turn so far.

Cleveland Browns

Best finish in the last 10 years: QB16, 2018 (Baker Mayfield)
Best finish in the last 5 years: QB17, 2020 (Baker Mayfield)

What, you were expecting someone else? The Browns’ jersey of failure is the stuff of legends. Deshaun Watson’s best season only ranks 11^th in the team’s last 10 years. The best non-Mayfield season from a Browns QB in the last decade belongs to DeShone Kizer, or all people. Derek Anderson is the only Browns QB since 1980 to top 250 points in a season, at a whopping 252.5 in 2007. And we don’t even know who they’ll be starting in 2025.

San Francisco 49ers

Best finish in the last 5/10 years: QB6, 2023 (Brock Purdy)

All right, this one might be a surprise. The 49ers have had a good offense overall for some years in the last decade, but it’s largely not been because of big fantasy success from the quarterbacks. Purdy’s 2023 was plenty good, but it’s the only time since Colin Kaepernick’s 2013 that the team has had a QB1 (top-12) finisher. It’s not that the 49ers have been able to generate successful quarterbacks out of anything, a la running backs, but rather it’s that they have been able to succeed generally despite whoever is under center.

Running Back

Unlike some teams, where a dominant back can pop up and then go away and they find themselves adrift again, the Saints just chug along. Sean Payton or no Sean Payton. Drew Brees or no Drew Brees. The Saints, be it Alvin Kamara or Mark Ingram or Deuce McAllister or Darren Sproles or whoever, just produce successful running backs.

Houston Texans

Best finish in the last 10 years: RB16, 2017 (Lamar Miller)
Best finish in the last 5 years: RB17, 2024 (Joe Mixon)

Joe Mixon might have made it into the RB1 ranks in 2024 if not for missing three games to injury, but as it is, he’s the only Texans back since Arian Foster to reach 200 PPR points in a season. Despite spending big on Lamar Miller, trading DeAndre Hopkins for David Johnson, stumbling into Dameon Pierce, the Texans have floundered out of the backfield.

Seattle Seahawks

Best finish in the last 10 years: RB12, 2019 (Chris Carson)
Best finish in the last 5 years: RB18, 2022 (Kenneth Walker III)

Carson, Walker and Zach Charbonnet have all been good enough backs for the Seahawks over the years. But injuries have kept the first two in check (and even forced Carson into retirement), and since the Marshawn Lynch days, the team hasn’t had any kind of big success there. This is a team that has pretty much always been fine, rarely been more than that.

Baltimore Ravens

Best finish in the last 5/10 years: RB4, 2024 (Derrick Henry)

Derrick Henry pretty comfortably put the kibosh on this trend in Baltimore, but before him, the team had only had one top-20 back (Mark Ingram, RB11 in 2019) in the last decade. A team that produced backfield monsters (Jamal Lewis, Ray Rice) early in the 2000s found itself adrift for the better part of a decade. Henry’s a free agent after 2025, so let’s see what happens then.

Wide Receiver

One player can really swing these results to the good. Take the Falcons, who had a top-seven finisher every year between 2014 and 2020, primarily because of Julio Jones (it was Calvin Ridley in 2020, but the point holds) and then didn’t have a top-30 receiver the next three years until Drake London in 2024. Or Mike Evans in Tampa, who has been WR17 or better for the last nine years and 10 of the last 11. One player can make a team look good, but it takes a group failure to hit the bottom of the list.

Baltimore Ravens

Best finish in the last 5/10 years: WR22, 2021 (Marquise Brown)

The Ravens are a fascinating team, with a historic quarterback, regularly strong tight ends, and then basically nothing from the other primary skill positions, and the sixth-best record in the NFL in the last decade despite that. Joe Flacco, Lamar Jackson and some good defenses have done a lot. It’s not for lack of trying — the Ravens have spent first-round picks on Brown, Zay Flowers and Rashod Bateman in recent years and spent big on Steve Smith Sr. and Mike Wallace. But it hasn’t turned into much.

New England Patriots

Best finish in the last 10 years: WR7, 2019 (Julian Edelman)
Best finish in the last 5 years: WR29, 2021 and 2022 (Jakobi Meyers)

It’s really the last five years that illustrate the Patriots’ failures at receiver. Other than Meyers’ consecutive WR29 finishes, the Patriots’ best receiver have finished WR65, WR64 and WR47 in the last few years. That’s why they are linked to every high-end receiver in this year’s draft and why they tried to spend big money on Chris Godwin. The Patriots have to get out of the wilderness somehow.

Tight End

As I mentioned in the WR section, one player can really skew this. Travis Kelce is the best example. The Chiefs’ score over the last decade is 24, meaning their best tight end (which has been Kelce every year) has averaged better than a third-place finish among tight ends. That’s six firsts, a second, a third, a fifth and an eighth. It’s hard to do much better than that.

New York Jets

Best finish in the last 5/10 years: TE15, 2022 (Tyler Conklin)

Unlike some situations where a team has tried but failed to fix things at a position, the Jets haven’t really cared to do much of anything to fix its tight end situation. The team’s biggest expenditures at the tight end position have been marginal money for second-tier TE Tyler Conklin and a fourth-round pick on Chris Herndon. Their best tight end in 2016 scored 21.0 PPR points, their best in 2015 scored 12.7. I’m not saying the Jets have to figure things out at tight end, but … I mean, it can’t hurt.

Carolina Panthers

Best finish in the last 10 years: TE3, 2017 (Greg Olsen)
Best finish in the last 5 years: TE36, 2024 (Ja’Tavion Sanders)

The last five years are really the story here, because the Panthers had Greg Olsen before that. But since his departure, not only have they not had a startable tight end in one-TE leagues, they’ve barely had one in three-TE leagues … which don’t really exist. Sanders is the only guy to even top 61 PPR points, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone holding up his “342 yard, 1 TD” rookie season as some paragon of productivity.

Indianapolis Colts

Best finish in the last 10 years: TE4, 2018 (Eric Ebron)
Best finish in the last 5 years: TE26, 2020 and 2021 (Trey Burton and Mo Alie-Cox)

Like the Panthers, this is more about the Colts’ last five years than their last 10. They spent a few years as a team that could generate productive tight ends out of just about anything, from Jack Doyle to Coby Fleener to Dwayne Allen to that one Eric Ebron year. But after Ebron left, that ability seemed to go with him. Waiver columns have been full of Colts names like Trey Burton, Mo Alie-Cox, Jelani Woods and Kylen Granson in the last five years, and … it has not been worth it one single time.