Mojo Player Spotlight: Taysom Hill, New Orleans Saints

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Most of what we do in fantasy football is attempting to make things make sense. Only sometimes, they just don’t. Case in point: Through five weeks of the season, Taysom Hill is the TE7 in PPR leagues. And he missed Week 3. The top 12 fantasy tight ends other than Hill average 32.8 targets. Hill? Hill has been targeted once all season.

Obviously, the Saints veteran is a unicorn in usage. He’s listed as a QB in Mojo. Some fantasy providers list him as a TE, some as a QB/TE. Really, for fantasy football, Taysom Hill should probably be just listed as a “flex,” but such a position doesn’t really exist in fantasy. Through five weeks, he’s lined up as a quarterback on 24 snaps, 6 at running back, 16 at tight end and 11 at wide receiver.

Taysom Hill History

The important number above isn’t the 24, the 6, the 16 or the 11. It’s the sum of all of them. It’s 57. The Saints have played 335 offensive snaps this season. Even allowing for Hill missing Week 3’s 69 snaps, he’s played only 21.4% of the offensive snaps he’s been eligible for this season. 

Despite that, he’s scored 5 rushing touchdowns this season (only Nick Chubb, Jalen Hurts and Jamaal Williams have more) and thrown for another. He had 112 rushing yards Sunday and 81 in Week 1, now sitting at 228 for the season, 32^nd in the league. He also threw for a touchdown last week, and for good measure he returned three kicks and recovered a fumble on special teams. You could easily argue there’s no more interesting player in the league, given what Hill does, but “interestingness” is not a factor we use in valuation. Fantasy points, though, are, and he was TE1 in Week 5 after being TE3 in Week 1. He’s one of five tight ends who have multiple top-five weekly finishes, along with Travis Kelce, Mark Andrews, Gerald Everett and Tyler Higbee.

Those are two long paragraphs. Let’s sum it up this way:

Hill was a nonfactor in fantasy (and in Mojo) through his first three seasons, barely topping $3 in value through the end of the 2019 season. But in 2020, he got four starts at quarterback with Drew Brees injured and went 3-1. He was the QB6 in fantasy over that stretch. His Mojo value almost hit $10 while he was starting and stayed in the $8-9 range until a midseason injury in 2021 briefly brought it down into the $6 range … for a week or two, when a Jameis Winston injury let Hill start again, and that value hovered just under $10 from that point forward. 

As of this writing? He’s at $11.17

Going Forward

Let’s put that previous section a different way: When he was a starting quarterback and the team had no choice but to play him almost every snap, Taysom Hill was valued at just under $10 on Mojo. Now, he’s a gadget player who is seeing about 14 snaps a game, and he’s $11.17, up 12.34% from a week ago.

As I said at the top, our job is to make things make sense. Sometimes, things don’t make sense for a short term. Other times, they don’t make sense for longer. But generally, things that don’t make sense start to make sense again before too long. Betting on that is going to be the wisest long-term investment strategy.

Taysom Hill’s Mojo price has been on the rise, and that’s likely to continue at least until this week’s game, and if he puts up another decent game sometime soon, it’ll spike even higher. But in the long run, it’s not going to be this high, and if another decent game doesn’t come — and, given his playing time, that feels like the most likely outcome — he’s seen his peak value. Investing now doesn’t make sense. Hill’s extremely interesting. Feel free to watch and marvel at the things that don’t make sense. But don’t put your dollars behind it.