The Value of the Highest Fantasy Floors

A ceiling is nice in fantasy football. It’s fun to toss Lamar Jackson into your lineup every week and know there’s a chance he’s going to give you one of those electric 42-point outings like he offered in Week 2 last year against the Dolphins. But floors can be killer, like Week 7, when Jackson went only 9-of-16 as a passer for 120 yards and didn’t account for any touchdowns. Obviously, Jackson is a premier best ball asset, but even in regular redraft, his ceiling is enticing.

The high-floor players, though, are different beasts. If you’re favored in your matchup, or if you have some high-variance players in your lineup you want to offset with some security, you might not care as much about the DeSean Jackson types who can go crazy. You might just want someone who can get you a comfortable 10-15 points.

Our own Jeremy Popielarz highlighted high-floor players in our best ball guide a few weeks ago, but more from a game-theory perspective. Today, I wanted to look at the actual numbers. These are the players who offered the highest fantasy floors in 2022 and what that might mean for 2023.

(Week 18 games are omitted from this data — the fantasy season was generally over, and many players were playing limited snaps in the season finale.)

Patrick Mahomes, QB, Kansas City Chiefs

2022 floor: 17.08 fantasy points (Week 3)

No surprise here, but Patrick Mahomes had the highest floor of any player last season. That floor was good for a QB11 finish. He did have a lower positional finish in Week 2 (QB13). But for all intents and purposes, if you rostered Patrick Mahomes in 2022, you had a fantasy QB1 16 times in 17 weeks. We knew he was the best. But here’s another data point.

Jalen Hurts, QB, Philadelphia Eagles

2022 floor: 15.96 fantasy points (Week 4)

Managers of Jalen Hurts last year might have ended the fantasy season with the slightest of bitter tastes in their mouths, because despite his enormous floor he missed the fantasy semifinals and finals to injury. But if they’re being honest, those managers would admit that there’s no way they’d have been in those semifinals and finals without Hurts, who finished as a top-six fantasy quarterback 12 times in 14 games before he missed Weeks 16 and 17. His “bad’ games were a QB15 finish in Week 4 and a QB12 finish in Week 6. Maybe the arrivals of Rashaad Penny and D’Andre Swift take away some of Hurts’ rushing upside, and that would negatively impact his floor, but there’s room for it to fall anyway.

Joe Burrow, QB, Cincinnati Bengals
Josh Allen, QB, Buffalo Bills

Burrow 2022 floor: 13.48 fantasy points (Week 8)
Allen 2022 floor: 12.58 fantasy points (Week 11)

Both Josh Allen and Joe Burrow come with a very unfortunate asterisk, as they missed your fantasy finals due to the Damar Hamlin game. But (a) that’s no one’s fault, and (b) we probably don’t need to worry about that happening again. And absent that, both of these guys remained stars all year. Allen, even dealing with a UCL injury and some serious health concerns, finished as a QB1 (top-12) in 14 of his 16 games, with QB14 and QB18 finishes otherwise. Meanwhile, Burrow was top 15 every game except Week 8, including 11 top-10 finishes.

Breece Hall, RB, New York Jets

2022 floor: 10.1 fantasy points (Week 1)

Obviously this is a small sample, as Breece Hall only played through Week 7 before tearing his ACL. But even in the game he was injured, when he only played 12 snaps, he managed 13.2 PPR points on the back of a 62-yard touchdown run on one of his four carries. Hall’s floor game came in his NFL debut, and he improved over each of his first five games, from 10.1 points to 13.0 to 15.2 to 15.8 to 27.7. He scored a touchdown in each of his final four games. We’ll see if Hall is healthy to start the 2023 season — early indications are good, but ACL tears are finicky beasts — but if he is, the floor is as high as anyone’s.

Daniel Jones, QB, New York Giants

2022 floor: 9.04 fantasy points (Week 8)

This is the last quarterback I’ll bother with here, but I thought Daniel Jones was an interesting name. Among quarterbacks who played a full sample of games (i.e., no Davis Webb, Sam Howell or Joshua Dobbs), only Mahomes, Allen and Burrow had a higher floor than the much-maligned Jones. Jones didn’t carry a very consistent ceiling last year, with only four top-10 weekly finishes, but after a career marked by the occasional implosion game (he had games of under 5 points in each of the previous two seasons), even Jones’ relative implosion in 2022 (8-for-13 for 71 yards in Week 4) came out fine because he ran for a pair of touchdowns in the team’s 20-12 win. Ceiling is more important, but Jones’ floor has gotten so much better.

Austin Ekeler, RB, Los Angeles Chargers

2022 floor: 11.2 fantasy points (Week 1)

If the Chargers had done what basically everyone outside of SoFi Stadium wanted them to do and benched at least a big chunk of their key players in their season finale, this would have been Austin Ekeler’s floor for the whole year. Instead, they played Ekeler half the game for no real reason and he put up 9.0 points. Those two games, one on each end of the season, were — not at all coincidentally — two of his three lowest-snap games of the season. Per the FTN Fantasy splits tool, Ekeler played under 40 snaps four times last year and averaged 16.9 PPR points per game in those games. Even that is an elite performance. But when he topped 40 snaps (14 games), that PPG average jumped to 23.4. 

Ja’Marr Chase, WR, Cincinnati Bengals

2022 floor: 10.8 fantasy points (Week 2)

Like Allen and Burrow above, Ja’Marr Chase has the frustrating Week 17 non-game on his resume. And of course, he missed a month in the middle of the season. But Chase is now 29 games into his career and has scored at least one touchdown in 16 of them. He had at least 50 yards and/or a touchdown in every game of 2022. He had at least 8 targets in every game but one, at least 10 targets nine times in 12 games. Maybe Justin Jefferson has a higher ceiling than Chase, but even in a crowded receiver room in Cincinnati, Chase’s floor is enormous. 

Travis Kelce, TE, Kansas City Chiefs

2022 floor: 7.6 fantasy points (Week 13)

It’s not that 7.6 points is that impressive a floor by itself. It’s definitely fine, but you normally wouldn’t write a letter about it. But the noteworthy part is that, among tight ends who played more than one game, Kelce’s floor was the highest by a whopping 81%. Dallas Goedert had the next-highest floor, at 4.2 points, with Kyle Pitts (3.5) and George Kittle (3.1) the only other tight ends with even a three-point floor. We know Kelce gives you the highest ceiling a tight end has ever offered. But it’s his floor where he really blows you away.

Cooper Kupp, WR, Los Angeles Rams

2022 floor: 2.9 fantasy points (Week 10)
2022 non-injury floor: 16.4 fantasy points (Week 3)

Cooper Kupp’s an honorable mention here, but emphasis on the “honorable.” In Week 10 last year, Kupp had 3 receptions on 5 targets for -1 yard when he suffered a high-ankle sprain that cost him the rest of the season. (Though it’s worth noting that the injury came 30 seconds into the fourth quarter, so even without the injury that game would likely have been Kupp’s low-water mark.) But Kupp played 26 games over 2021 and 2022, and he was healthy for 25 of those. His floor across the last two seasons, absent that injury game, was 11.4 points in Week 4 of 2021. Kupp finished as WR40 that week. Other than that (and his WR81 finish when he got hurt), he’s been at least a WR2 in every game he’s played for two years. Maybe the utter destruction of the Rams’ roster means Kupp can’t reach the heights he reached before, but betting against him and his floor seems like a bad idea.