Sleepers, Busts and Bets: The 2022 Carolina Panthers

Tyler Loechner and Josh Larky continue with the 2022 Sleepers, Busts, and Bets series to preview all 32 NFL teams for the upcoming year. Next up: The Carolina Panthers.

Tyler and Josh will list their picks with confidence in “The Answers,” then expand upon their picks with more detailed reasoning in “The Explanation.”

The Answers

Favorite Sleeper

Larky: D’Onta Foreman
Loechner: Robbie Anderson

Biggest Bust

Larky: Robbie Anderson
Loechner: Nobody

Boldest Bet

Larky: Christian McCaffrey outscores all other RBs by more than 3 points per game
Loechner: Christian McCaffrey is the overall RB1

The Explanation

Sleepers

Larky: D’Onta Foreman

D’Onta Foreman was a highly regarded RB prospect, rushing for 2,028 yards as a junior at Texas. Weighing in at over 230 pounds, Foreman ran in the 4.4s at his Pro Day, demonstrating upper percentile size-adjusted speed. The Houston Texans took him Round 3 in the 2017 NFL Draft, and he was having a perfectly adequate rookie season backing up Lamar Miller until he ruptured his Achilles in Week 11.  

His recovery took many years, but in 2021 he once again flashed his college explosiveness, averaging over 80 rushing yards per game in his final six contests of 2021, while playing with the Titans. Christian McCaffrey has only played parts of 10 NFL games the past two seasons, and the Panthers tested Chuba Hubbard as their bell cow once McCaffrey went down, only to let multiple other RBs form committees with him down the stretch. Clearly, the Panthers weren’t impressed with Hubbard’s rookie season. Foreman makes for a solid end-of-bench stash through the first few weeks of the 2022 season, as we haven’t seen McCaffrey make it through a full season healthy in three years.

Loechner: Robbie Anderson

Robbie Anderson flopped in 2021, catching just 53 passes for 519 yards and 5 TDs. It was a huge downgrade from his 2020 debut with the Panthers, when he posted a strong 95-1096-3 line. 

Anderson was the subject of trade rumors prior to free agency, but he remains on the Panthers and is now being drafted as the WR79 in fantasy leagues. I’m not saying he should be drafted higher than that, but it’s an aggressively low ADP for a player who saw 110 targets last year. For a point of reference, most of the players he’s being drafted around saw between 40-60 targets last year. 

There are more paths for Anderson to exceed that lowly ADP than to be bested by it. A deep threat at heart, Anderson was poisoned by last year’s dreadful QB play. Cam Newton attempted 126 passes for the Panthers last year and threw only 7.1% of them more than 20 yards downfield — the fourth-lowest rate among QBs with at least 100 attempts last year. 

Sam Darnold was hardly better (9.6%), and to make it worse, he completed only 28.2% of deep balls — the lowest among all qualified QBs (min. 250 targets). (Deep passing stats courtesy of the FTN deep passing tool.)

Busts 

Larky: Robbie Anderson

Robbie Anderson resurrected his career with the Panthers in 2020, catching 95 passes for 1,096 yards, courtesy of Teddy Bridgewater. His role was close to the line of scrimmage, while DJ Moore was the deep threat. In 2021, the roles reversed, and Moore returned to high weekly target volume. Playing with Sam Darnold in 2021, who he struggled with when they were Jets teammates, Anderson averaged fewer yards per target than every WR not named Ray-Ray McCloud last season, and his 519 yards on 110 targets is at a comical level.

Unfortunately for Anderson, Darnold is back at QB for the Panthers in 2022, and Christian McCaffrey should be healthy for the start of the season. I have no interest in drafting the third option — behind McCaffrey and Moore — in a Sam Darnold offense. Anderson’s ADP is ridiculously low, so there’s a decent chance he “exceeds” it and finishes as the WR60 per game.  However, that’s not a startable fantasy asset. Late in your fantasy drafts, you’re better served aiming for backup RBs with upside or rookie WRs taken in Round 2 or 3 of the NFL draft.

Loechner: Nobody

The only two players on the Panthers who I could even consider bust candidates are Christian McCaffrey and DJ Moore. Both are expensive to acquire (McCaffrey a high first-round pick, Moore is drafted as a high-end WR2). But both should also hit value. They aren’t being overdrafted.

Every other player on the Panthers is just so incredibly cheap that it doesn’t seem fair to label any of them as bust candidates:

• QB: Matt Corral (QB32) and Sam Darnold (QB39)
• RB: D’Onta Foreman (RB60) and Chuba Hubbard (RB65)
• WR: Robbie Anderson (WR79) and Terrace Marshall (WR110)
• TE: Tommy Tremble (TE50)

Bets

Larky: Christian McCaffrey outscores all other RBs by more than 3 points per game 

If you take away all 19 of Christian McCaffrey’s touchdowns from his 2019 season, he still averaged more fantasy points per game than Jonathan Taylor did in 2021. Health with McCaffrey is a serious question mark, but that’s the case with most RBs in fantasy, and none offer you the per-game upside of McCaffrey.  

In 2021, McCaffrey had a 50% or higher snap share in four games and hit 25+ fantasy points in all of them. One of those games was against the Saints, who allowed the fewest fantasy points per game to RBs, and another was against the Commanders, who allowed the fifth-fewest fantasy points per game to opposing RBs. McCaffrey is matchup-proof. Across 19 games from 2019-2020, McCaffrey averaged over 29 fantasy points per game. For context, Taylor just averaged 22 fantasy points per game in 2021, and Derrick Henry’s insane eight-game stretch last year, when he was on pace to break the rush attempts record, was only 24 fantasy points per game in PPR leagues.

Loechner: Christian McCaffrey is the overall RB1 

I wrote an entire article about why Christian McCaffrey should be the 1.01 in fantasy drafts this year. My favorite stat from that article:

In games in which McCaffrey has played at least 30 snaps, here are his ridiculous fantasy stats in PPR leagues:

• Top-12 fantasy RB 91% of the time
• Top-5 fantasy RB 75% of the time
• Top-3 fantasy RB 60% of the time
• Finishes outside of the top-15: Once (!) In 32 games

I also wrote a long Twitter thread about the game theory and philosophy behind the stance.

The TLDR version: “CMC is the ‘play-to-win’ pick at 1.01, and anything else is playing scared.”