Fantasy Football Multiverse: Houston Texans

(FTN’s Matt Jones is going team-by-team to investigate some of the biggest fantasy issues around the NFL for the 2021 fantasy football season. Follow the whole Fantasy Football Multiverse series.)

The idea of the multiverse is fascinating to me. You change one small thing in one timeline and it breaks off and affects things down the road in profound ways. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that has Earth-shattering, Thanos snapping implications. In fantasy football, it’s just my fancy way of saying that range of outcomes exist. My goal for this series is to pick a player from each team that is either polarizing or interesting in some other way. The flow will be the same throughout each article. For the next edition in this series, we’ll look at:

• Team-Level ADP
• Context for Brandin Cooks
• Altering Cooks’ Projection for 2021

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Team-Level ADP

Context for Brandin Cooks

People are O-U-T out on the Texans. It’s a big mess with Deshaun Watson’s legal issues and unwillingness to practice/play for the team are all contributing to a black cloud over Houston. I’ve always been against the line of thinking that goes “well…someone has to catch passes there!”. I’m looking at you, Breshad Perriman drafters. This is a different situation with Brandin Cooks, though, because he’s actually #good at football. He’s thrived in many different uniforms and through changes in offensive systems before. There are so few examples of this type of team-level ADP that I’m struggling to find specific comps. There are 17 examples of wide receivers taken between picks 60 and 120 in drafts with a gap of 100+ picks to their team’s WR2. Five of those 17 (30%) players have sported double-digit win rates.   

Altering Cook’s Projection for 2021

Brandin Cooks currently slides in as Jeff Ratcliffe’s WR27 in his latest projections. That’s on a 21% target share. There’s just not much competition for targets down in Houston and I think that could be a low estimate. Last year, guys like Jarvis Landry and Marvin Jones were earning about a 21% target share. Cooks is much better in my opinion and there’s just nothing stopping him from being a target hog.

If he grabs hold of that role and they give him 24% of the targets in this offense, he vaults up into a top-end WR2. That 236.1 PPR output would see him sandwiched between Amari Cooper and Tyler Lockett in Ratcliffe’s projection. He’s being drafted in the 40s amongst wide receivers, so he’s definitely worth a look in your drafts as the offseason wraps up.