RotoGrinders Fantasy Football Projections: Free SZN Until Preseason
The fantasy football season is in full swing, and we’re totally jacked about the action we’ll see in the new 17-game setup. We’re putting our premium projections model to use for the 2021 NFL fantasy gaming season, but there is just one problem: Premium DFS action doesn’t start until August 12th. Well, never fear. The NFL projections and rankings for RG premium will be available to anyone until the DFS action starts. That means you can check them out free until August 12th.
Fantasy Football Projections – Free Until Preseason Week 1
You can see in the link above we’ve got a few ways we’ve split them up:
— Fantasy Season
— Fantasy Playoffs
— Regular Season
— Full Season
— Team Offense Rankings
— Team Defense Rankings
For the Fantasy Season only, we’ve included best ball rankings that take our raw fantasy projections and adjust them for position scarcity. These projections are currently considerate of the half PPR scoring site UnderDog Fantasy. If you like DraftKings best ball (with bonuses) or traditional PPR, we’ve also got fantasy point projections and positional rankings for those formats. If you are into player and team prop bets, we also included the raw fantasy stats produced by the projections model for your analysis.
Who Are The Sleepers in Fantasy Football This Year?
It’s a loaded question because information sources are better than ever. Very few players fly totally under the radar. That being said, I’ll cherry-pick a few players that our projections system liked more than the consensus ADP and talk about them now.
Myles Gaskin – RB – Miami Dolphins: The Dolphins made zero offseason acquisitions to their running back depth chart that should give us even mild pause in projecting Gaskin as the lead dog. Of particular interest is Gaskin’s non-week 17 rushing shares of 75%, 75%, 78%, and 61% in his last four healthy games. Perhaps even more interesting is the target volume he received, with 8 individual weeks well over 10% share and just a single game with fewer than 4 targets. His average draft position at RB24 leaves room for upside.
Nelson Agholor – WR – New England Patriots: Whether it’s Cam Newton or Mac Jones at QB, Agholor is primed for a solid workload at a cheap price.
He’s coming off a renaissance season in Las Vegas where he finally displayed some of the talent the Eagles hoped they would see when they took him in the first round back in 2015. He was often targeted on deep shots – some very successfully – and accumulated respectable production in a very fantasy unfriendly situation. The situation doesn’t improve much in New England, but his draft price more than accounts for that and he’s objectively one of the top two targets no matter the quarterback. There is room for him to decimate his WR62 price point.
Adam Trautman – TE – New Orleans Saints: Jared Cook has set sail for Los Angeles, leaving the 2020 mid round selection Trautman as the presumed heir to the Saints TE throne. His competition includes the journeyman Nick Vannett and Garrett Griffin alongside youthful plodders Ethan Wolf and Dylan Soehner. The setup is certainly looking good for him to be the primary TE passing option, and you don’t have to assign him any kind of crazy volume to jump him up the rankings pretty far at a weak TE position. Player Profiler has his closest comparable player as Dallas Goedert, and his minuscule production as a rookie can be chalked up to youth and sporadic playing time. It’s a leap to say he’s a lock, but he certainly has upside on the draft cost of TE13.
Carson Wentz – QB – Indianapolis Colts: We aren’t suggesting this a fun play, or a sexy play. However, the Colts look like a pretty damn good football team and we are suggesting that he has zero excuses with regards to the talent surrounding him. Jonathan Taylor, Marlon Mack, and Nyheim Hines in the backfied. Michael Pittman, T.Y. Hilton, and Parris Campbell at WR. These are skill players that most QBs would feel very comfortable with. Simply stated: he would have to be even worse than last year to not pay dividends on his current draft price of QB22 using the late-round QB strategy. He’ll be back with former QB coach Frank Reich, where they will hope to rekindle the magic that made him look so promising in the Eagles SuperBowl season. DON’T WATCH THE GAMES, but do consider Wentz as a super cheap punt to round out your QB position in Best Ball formats.
Rankings and Projections: What Was Your Process?
RotoGrinders Fantasy Football Projections are designed to help you build better rosters on fantasy sites like Underdog Fantasy, DraftKings, FanDuel, and any traditional scoring format season-long site.
We use data from our providers (such as Sports Info Solutions Inc. and SportRadar) to generate baseline expectations for each week of the NFL season. We project the weeks individually to capture the specific scenario as closely as possible. We also leverage the time test betting market expectations to set the parameters of the game environment. The foundation set with this data helps us deliver an accurate forecast at the team level.
Once the expectations are set for the team, the process pivots to the player level where we assign the projected usage rates of rushing, receiving, and scoring across all the fantasy positions. This is where we introduce information outside the world of data to help inform our projections, without being dismissive of relevant past season usage stats that may be applicable to the upcoming season. Snap counts, air yards, deep passing, pressure rates, target share, red zone usage, and situational workload splits are just some of the data points used to inform our decisions on player usage.
The resulting outputs are displayed above, with rankings based solely on the fantasy stats that come from the projections model. We rank for points per reception (PPR), half-point per receptions (.5PPR), and the DraftKings best ball format featuring player bonuses. We also rank for the full 18 week season, the Week 1 through 17 season used by many leagues, the week 1 through 14 regular season used commonly in best ball, and the week 15 through 17 playoff weeks also used commonly across many leagues.
These projections will be available to all through August 12th, 2021. RotoGrinders premium members will be able to access fantasy projections throughout the entire NFL preseason. They will also have access to the preseason DFS projections and the LineupHQ optimizer for all preseason games.
You may have come for season-long fantasy information but you should absolutely stay for our non-stop coverage of each week of the NFL season with premium DFS projections, rankings, and tools. You can sign up for access to these great tools here.