Welcome to the 1st Annual Urban Meyer Awards, presented to the worst in everything NFL!
Let’s begin with coach. The worst head coach of the 2022 season is…Josh McDaniels of the Raiders! How bad was he? I quit counting after five 13-point leads were given up to lose games. And this was a playoff team last year! This team was stacked! How can a stacked team go from playoffs to 6-11? Ask the new head coach, who couldn’t keep his players focused when they needed to be.
Worst QB? Gotta be Dak Prescott of the Cowboys! Two QB’s led the league in interceptions (with 15): Davis Mills and Dak Prescott. Mills played in 15 games. Prescott played in 11 and part of a 12th before he got hurt. Let’s not forget how Dak lost the Cowboy’s last playoff game with…2 picks! Cooper Rush had 0 picks before the Philly game where he threw 3. But that was all he threw all year.
Worst RB? I’m going to go with Michael Carter of the Jets. He starts out the season as the Jets starter, over rookie Breece Hall. Superstud Hall quickly becomes “the guy”, before he gets hurt, leaving the backfield to Carter once more. By the end of the season, the Jets starting RB is…Zonovan Knight. Wait, what? Epic fail by Carter.
Worst WR? Elijah Moore of the Jets. He was mediocre at best, and downright goose egg at worst. Why does anyone want him?
Worst TE? Anyone not in the top 4, aka Kelce, Hockenson, Kittle, or Andrews. The rest of them are roster fodder, lottery tickets you’re hoping to hit. Worst of the worst? Give me Kyle Pitts, although a lot of that was due to his QB.
No argument about McDaniels. I still wouldn’t compare him to Urban Meyer (nobody compares to that train wreck of a coach), but I get the idea.
Dak… He was underwhelming, I agree. But Zach Wilson was worse. He also dragged down Elijah Moore, whom he ignored completely. That’s also why you could speculate on Moore. Maybe he can bounce back under a new QB.
On RB, Carter looks like a safe bet. From “he could lead the backfield” to “we’d better trade for another RB as we don’t trust him to back up our undrafted rookie” was a pretty steep decline.
On WR, I would nominate Jalen Tolbert. A third round pick for a team that was especially needy on WR at the beginning of the season, Tolbert was a popular target for me at the end of the 2nd round of dynasty rookie drafts. It looked like he had a path to immediate production carved out for him. And then he busted completely. He obviously didn’t come even close to what Dallas had expected.
Diontae Johnson gets an honorary mention for racking up 882 yards on 147 targets (86 catches), but not finding the end zone even once, making Jakobi Meyers look like a scoring machine in comparison.
On TE, Jonnu Smith is a safe bet. Yes, 2021 already showed us that we cannot expect him to be fantasy relevant any longer. But those who still had a spark of hope that he might bounce back in 2022 got that spark firmly extinguished.
We could add the K position here, but a) it’s meaningless, and b) we’d all nominate Brett “Jitterfoot” Maher anyway.
Thank you for bringing up Diontae Johnon. OMG yes, he deserves to be mentioned. A major “regression” to norm candidate next year for receiving TDs.
I’d add in Chase Edmunds who was universally drafted in redraft league’s because the Dolphins made him a priority signing in the offseason and then ended up completely buried on the depth chart before trading him mid-season to the Broncos.
Great topic! Always good to get some venom out about those fantasy players who let you down during the season.
Seems like forever ago that Allen Robinson was going to regain his Pro Bowl form now that he was receiving passes from an elite QB in Stafford. Welp. Oh, and Courtland Sutton was going to become the next DK Metcalf now that elite QB Wilson was throwing him his patented deep, accurate balls. Double Welp.
While Tolbert was a highly touted rookie, he wasn’t a first round pick, so you can’t pin lofty expectations on him. A lot of the expectations for him came from being drafted by Dallas, which busted more because of Dak than anything else.
That said, he was a draft bust, but I’d call both Diontae Johnson and Elijah Moore more significant busts this season.
Sure, Wilson was worse. But Dak had a bigger contract and loftier expectations. While a lot was expected from Wilson, I think most football watchers tempered those expectations with question marks coming into this season. We all saw a stacked Jets team, and thought, “Ok, Robert Saleh handed the keys to the family Lamborghini to Zach Wilson. How will he do with it?” So it turns out the kid crashed the car into a phone pole. This was not completely unforeseen from the range of possibilities for anyone (except for Jets management).
