Fantasy Football’s One-Game Wonders of 2021

In fantasy football, your end-of-season total is your end-of-season total. If one player puts up 16 points per game over 17 games and another puts up 34 per game but only plays in eight games, well, they had the same total for the season. (Shout out the Tweet Of Great Debate.)

But we don’t play a full-season game. We play a weekly game, and we just use the full-season numbers as an analogue for that. Generally, it works. But not always. For example, in 2018, Mitchell Trubisky put up 263.02 fantasy points, finishing as QB15, a high-end QB2. But in Week 4 that year, Trubisky had a career game, 354 passing yards, 53 rushing yards and 6 passing touchdowns. Take that game out and give him his average game in its place, and rest-of-2018 Trubisky would have been QB18, a mid-range QB2, with his fantasy total dropping by over 30 and his PPG dropping by 2.4. He was a one-game wonder.

Who were the one-game wonders in 2021? Or, asking another way, whose end-of-season totals, the numbers we see when we sit down at our draft software, are lying to us?

(All scoring is PPR; players needed a minimum of 150 points to be considered.)

Quarterback

Sam Darnold, Carolina Panthers

Total points: 157.5
Biggest game: 31.5, Week 3 (20.0%)

Remember when Sam Darnold looked like a league-winner early in the year? Through Week 4, he had 1,189 passing yards, 5 passing touchdowns and, crucially, 5 rushing touchdowns. He didn’t score another rushing touchdown the rest of the year and still tied for fourth at the position on the season. His Week 4 game featured 2 touchdowns of each variety and 301 yards … which makes it all the funnier that that was the first game Carolina lost last year. And it was all downhill for Darnold after that, as he didn’t even put up half that total in a game the rest of the way, peaking at 15.1 points in Week 6 and getting benched for a while.

Lamar Jackson, Baltimore Ravens

Total points: 240.0
Biggest game: 41.9, Week 5 (17.5%)

Lamar Jackson missed five games last year, which obviously knocked down his full-season total and helped bump up his single-game percentage. Regardless, his massive Week 5 game (442 yards and 4 touchdowns in a crazy come-from-behind overtime win against the Colts) would have scored well here. But here’s where this might matter the most for fantasy: You’ll notice no mention of any rushing scores in Jackson’s big game. He ran for 62 yards but didn’t find the end zone … and of the 12 games he played in 2021, he had zero rushing scores in 11 of them. (He did score on the ground twice in Week 2.) If Jackson isn’t rushing for scores as much as he used to, his ceiling lowers.

Running Back

Michael Carter, New York Jets

Total points: 154.4
Biggest game: 32.2, Week 8 (20.9%)

“Missing some games” is a common theme in this exercise, just because it limits our overall denominator, and Michael Carter missed three games as a rookie last year. His biggest game came in the Jets’ shocking win over Cincinnati in Week 8, when he had 77 yards and a score on the ground and added 9 receptions for another 99 yards through the air. Carter was RB2 (behind Alvin Kamara) in Weeks 7-8 combined, but he only topped 15 points in a game one other time all year. We can expect more from Carter in 2022, but tread lightly on expecting a locked-in starter.

Myles Gaskin, Miami Dolphins

Total points: 173.6
Biggest game: 31.9, Week 5 (18.4%)

“The Dolphins had the 2021 No. 25 RB under contract, but they still went out and got Chase Edmonds and Raheem Mostert.” Kind of weird!

“The Dolphins had the 2021 No. 30 RB (where Myles Gaskin would be if you replaced Week 5 with his rest-of-season average) with no 20-point games under contract, but they still went out and got Chase Edmonds and Raheem Mostert.” Less weird!

Wide Receiver

Tee Higgins, Cincinnati Bengals

Total points: 219.2
Biggest game: 43.4, Week 16 (19.8%)

Through Week 11, Tee Higgins had averaged 55.8 receiving yards per game and scored twice in eight games. From Week 12 to Week 17 (he sat out Week 18), he averaged 107.2 yards and scored 4 touchdowns in six games. That peaked with his 12-reception, 194-yard, 2-score explosion in Week 16 … which was promptly topped by teammate Ja’Marr Chase the next week, when he caught 11 balls for 266 yards and 3 scores. The Bengals, uh, might have a good offense.

Amari Cooper, Dallas Cowboys (now Cleveland Browns)

Total points: 202.5
Biggest game: 38.9, Week 1 (19.2%)

Per Fantasy Football Calculator’s ADP, CeeDee Lamb went ahead of Amari Cooper in drafts last year, but not by a lot — Lamb was WR10 by ADP, Cooper WR15. They both had big Week 1 performances, with Cooper putting up 139 yards and 2 touchdowns and finishing as the overall WR1, and Lamb going 7-104-1, WR13 for the week, but Cooper’s week was clearly better. And then the rest of the year, Lamb averaged 14.0 points per game, and Cooper averaged 11.7. Just in case you were curious why, aside from age, the Cowboys decided to roll with Lamb and send Cooper to Cleveland.

Tight End

George Kittle, San Francisco 49ers

Total points: 198.0
Biggest game: 39.6, Week 13 (20.0%)

If this were “two-game wonders,” George Kittle might break the whole exercise. In Weeks 13-14, Kittle totaled 73.7 PPR points, a solid 37.2% of his full-season total. In those two weeks, he had 22 receptions on 27 targets for 332 yards and 3 touchdowns, even adding 5 yards on the ground. Over his other 12 games (he missed three games to injury), Kittle averaged 4.1 receptions on 5.6 targets for 48.2 yards, and he only had 3 touchdowns in that span. He finished the year as the TE4. Take out those two huge games and replace them with his average, and he falls to TE15. He’s still a star, but fantasy managers are going to want more consistency in 2022.

T.J. Hockenson, Detroit Lions

Total points: 145.3
Biggest game: 25.7, Week 1 (17.7%)

OK, so I stretched our qualifying threshold down to 145 points for T.J. Hockenson, because tight ends are generally working with smaller denominators than the other positions in the first place. Like Kittle, Hockenson had a huge two-game stretch, following up his TE3 finish in Week 1 with another 20-point outing in Week 2. The breakout was happening. He then failed to reach 20 points in a game the rest of the season, including lines of 2-10-0, 2-22-0 and 0-0-0. Hockenson still has good weekly upside, but with Amon-Ra St. Brown breaking out, Josh Reynolds being retained and D.J. Chark being added, he’s a borderline TE1, not a locked-in fantasy starter.