10 team, 3 keepers and bonus keeper. My 3 keepers are Taylor, Diggs, and Lamb. For bonus keeper do I go Pittman in the 8th or Amon-Ra St. Brown in the 15th
I thought we resolved this already in favor of the cheaper player who was the WR5 over the second half of his rookie season?
Unless you just happen to have the same dilemma as some other lost soul.
Amon-Ra provides excellent value for a last-round pick. But Pittman is set for a monster season and will be a top 5 WR this year.
With Taylor, Lamb, Pittman and Diggs on your roster, I don’t see a lot of things that can go wrong for you this season.
Good luck!
So do you want the top 5 WR you can get in the 8th, or the top 5 WR you can get in the 15th?
Of course, only Amon-Ra has actually BEEN a top 5 WR; Pittman is just hoping to become one, with a QB on his last legs and one of the league’s top 2 rushers in the backfield.
Indianapolis had the league’s top 1 rusher in the backfield last year, and an arguably worse QB, and still matched Detroit’s team passing production.
If Jameson Williams won’t play at all this year, Amon-Ra can be a top 10 WR. But if Williams will enter the picture mid-season and steal just a few targets, Amon-Ra will quickly drop out the WR1 range.
In 2021, he saw 119 targets, while Kalif Raymond and Josh Reynolds saw a combined 120. And Reynolds only played 10 games.
Amon-Ra saw 67 targets in his final 6 games. Prorated to 18 games, that’s 201 targets.
Projections are worth no more than someone’s opinion.
If Williams plays in the role they drafted him to play–i.e., to stretch the field and take the top off of the defense–he’ll still targets from Chark, not Amon-Ra, who fills the role of the underneath possession receiver, like a young, fresh Jamison Crowder. Williams making the offense more potent as a whole will just provide more opportunities for everyone on the offense to produce.
And it’s not a stretch to think that the offense might be more potent than when its other three WRs in 2021 were Kalif Raymond, Tyrell Williams and Breshaud Perriman. And Goff has had a full offseason under the offensive coordinator that took over in mid-season last year–you know, after which Amon-Ra became the WR5 in fantasy?
St. Brown is a proven player in a proven system. Pittman is a speculative buy on one of last year’s mid-level WR2s, dependent on a new QB who was run out of his career hometown in favor of Marcus Mariota last year–on a team that ALSO sports one of the best rushing attacks in the league.
C’mon, man…
Was that self-reflection? That would be a first…
I’m not trying to talk Amon-Ra down here. Personally, I don’t expect Williams to take the field a lot this year, if at all. That leaves Amon-Ra in a very comfortable situation, where his only serious competition for targets are T.J. Hockenson and D’Andre Swift. That is one of these “few mouths to feed” situations that I find invaluable for fantasy purposes.
But Pittman is in a similar situation in Indy. His main competitors for targets are Nyheim Hines and rookie Alec Pierce. And even if the team change won’t rejuvenate Matt Ryan (and I don’t think it will), he’s still not worse than Goff.
Again, Amon-Ra provides fantastic value for a 15th round pick. But I still expect Pittman to finish the season ahead of him. If by enough to justify a 7 round difference remains to be seen.
Well, over the past two years, Ryan’s completion percentage has been lower than Goff’s (67.11% for Goff, 65.94% for Ryan), and they’ve been pretty close in production (8155/44/24 for Goff, 8549/46/23 for Ryan). Ryan is also going to the first team he has ever played for not named the Falcons in the twilight of his career with all-new coaching and all-new receivers, while Goff has continuity back to last year when he was tearing things up with Amon-Ra.
And let’s not forget that Amon-Ra’s QB for 3 of his 6 big games to end the season was not Goff, but Tim Boyle. However bad you think Goff is, he’s still not worse than Boyle.
Pittman is a roll of the dice. Amon-Ra is an investment.