What if: a 2019 NFL alternate history
If you have kids, you’ve played “What if?” for approximately one billion hours of your life. “Daddy, what if cows had human ears?” “Mommy, what if you had a cookie that was the size of the entire world?” One “what if” can be fun (provided your child isn’t too gibberish). A thousand “what if”s can be tedious.
So maybe I’m tedious! It’s possible. I’ve never been accused of not being a hypocrite. But I do enjoy a good game of fantasy football “what if.” I played it on Pro Football Focus after the 2017 and 2018 seasons, but since I’m not there anymore (for, you know, reasons), you get to enjoy my flight of fancy this year!
Below, I look at how the world of fantasy football in 2019 might been different with just a few “step on a butterfly” changes across the season. Does it matter? Not really. But in some cases, it kinda does. Regardless, it’s interesting.
What if … Melvin Gordon doesn’t hold out?
One the one hand, through Week 4 (before Gordon returned), Austin Ekeler was the No. 2 PPR running back, with 107.0 points, many of which could have gone to presumptive bell cow Gordon. On the other, from Week 5 on, even with Gordon on the field (albeit with a bit of a working-him-in trend early on), Ekeler was still the RB5, so I don’t think it’s a fait accompli that we could just toss a bunch of Ekeler’s early points Gordon’s way. On the other other hand, an Ekeler that doesn’t have 107.0 points in Weeks 1-4 likely isn’t an Ekeler that gets 202.0 in Weeks 5-17.
Before we knew Gordon was going to be holding out, he was an easy first-round fantasy pick, coming off a 2018 season in which he was fantasy’s RB8 despite missing four games (RB5 on a per-game basis). Ekeler has looked like a stud every year of his career, but not an every-down-type stud, so it’s hard to imagine he would have gotten the workload he did without being forced into the early opportunity. Across the full 2019 season, Ekeler finished as RB4 and Gordon RB22. If Gordon plays all 16 games, maybe it’s not an exact reversal, but it certainly would be closer to that than the contrary. Ekeler would probably be a relatively solid RB2, Gordon a borderline RB1. And a Gordon who was coming off of an RB1 season might be in line for that huge contract he was wanting this offseason. All in all, I’m a die-hard supporter of players getting what they can, but man did that not work out for ol’ Mel.
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What if … Andrew Luck doesn’t retire?
The Colts went 10-6 in 2018, earning a Wild Card berth and beating the Texans in the first round of the playoffs. Luck was PFF’s No. 4 graded QB that year (you better believe I’m using their data until they cut me off) and the No. 5 fantasy quarterback. T.Y. Hilton was the No. 14 fantasy receiver despite missing two games. Eric Ebron was the No. 4 fantasy tight end. The team was expected to contend not only for the AFC South in 2019, but were a fringe Super Bowl candidate.
And then Luck retired. He was replaced by Jacoby Brissett, who was the No. 33 QB in grading, No. 23 in fantasy scoring. Hilton finished only 57th in PPR scoring (in 10 games), while Ebron and Jack Doyle both struggled to get much going. The team did start 5-2 before finishing 7-9, third in the division, but didn’t have it’s first loss by more than one score until Week 13.
First off, a Colts team with Luck is far more likely to make the playoffs. They lost in overtime in Week 1, lost by a combined six points to Pittsburgh and Miami in Weeks 9 and 10, and were edged out by the Texans by 3 in Week 12. Can they win two of those games with one of the league’s best quarterbacks (you know, assuming he was healthy enough)? The answer is obviously yes.
As for fantasy, well, we know Luck is miles ahead of Brissett. Ebron and Doyle would have put up better numbers, though exactly how that would have broken down is tough to guess. But Hilton? He played 86 games between 2014 and 2019 — 51 with Luck, 35 without. In the 51 games with Luck, he put up 17.0 PPR points per game, a full-season pace of 272.0, solidly WR4 last year. In the other 35, that average is 11.7, 187.6 for 16 games, outside the top 30. Obviously everything would have been better off in Indianapolis with a healthy Luck last year, but nowhere is that more evident than in the fortunes of T.Y. Hilton.
What if … Ryan Fitzpatrick starts all year for the Dolphins?
Fitzpatrick is entering his 16th year in the NFL. He has, somewhat incredibly, played all 16 games only three times in that stretch, only once since 2012 with Buffalo. He came close last year, playing in 15 games and starting 13, but the team did defer to Josh Rosen in Weeks 3-6 before giving that a solid “whoopsie” and going back to Old Man Fitz.
Take out that Week 3-6 stretch and Fitzpatrick was fantasy’s QB5 on the season. DeVante Parker was WR4 in the games Fitzpatrick started, WR2 from Week 7 on when Fitzpatrick had the job. Heck, Mike Gesicki was TE8 the rest of the way after Fitz got the job back. And while there’s no iteration of the Dolphins that would have been good last year, they did go 5-6 once Fitzpatrick regained the starting job. They lost Rosen’s Week 6 start 17-16 to an equally awful Washington team. With Fitzpatrick starting all year, we’d have been looking at maybe a 6-10 Dolphins team with a QB1, a WR1, and a TE1. The running game was always going to be a disaster in 2019, but without those Rosen starts, we might be talking about a Dolphins team that is actually interesting for fantasy in 2020. (Honestly, we might be doing that anyway.)
What if … Cam Newton stays healthy?
Playing injury what ifs is always fraught, because once you grant one guy health the reduction ad absurdum wants you to grant everybody health, and then it becomes kinda silly. But I do want to indulge in two here. The first one is Newton, who looked awful through two weeks before missing the rest of the season. Kyle Allen was acceptable for a few weeks as his replacement, but that faded pretty hard, and Will Grier didn’t exactly light things up after that either.
D.J. Moore and Curtis Samuel were two of last offseasons biggest breakout candidates, and while that worked out pretty well for Moore — he finished as WR15 in fantasy — Samuel fell flat, coming in as the No. 36 receiver. And it very clearly wasn’t really Samuel’s fault — he was the only player in the top 15 in air yards who didn’t reach 1,000 receiving yards, and at 627, he wasn’t remotely close. He had 27 targets thrown 20-plus yards downfield, and only five were catchable. Allen put up the league’s lowest passer rating (35.0) on deep balls (yes, worse than if he’d just thrown them all straight into the dirt). Even if Newton isn’t a deep-ball superstar (and he isn’t), just a competent deep-ball passer would have made Samuel a borderline star a year ago.
We’ll see who the Carolina quarterback is in 2020, but Samuel is just about the post-hype sleeperest post-hype sleeper to ever post-hype sleep.
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What if … Nick Foles doesn’t break his collarbone?
Our other injury question is deeper into conjecture, but man if it isn’t interesting. The Jaguars gave Foles a “what the heck?”-level contract offseason, theoretically committing to him for a while in an effort to hold on to the last bits of their contending team from a couple years ago. Instead, Foles broke his collarbone in the first quarter of Week 1. That led to sixth-round rookie Gardner Minshew taking over as starter. He wasn’t ever expected to be a significant contributor in the NFL, let alone a starter in September of his rookie year. But Minshew Mania came on strong. The Jags went 4-3 over his first seven starts before ultimately finishing the year 6-10 (6-6 in Minshew’s starts). Foles came back for a few starts after the bye, but he was so bad that Minshew came right back.
Obviously, though, the Jags went back to Minshew after he had had relative success early in the year. Without that early success, how bad would a healthy Foles have had to be to have them scrap their big free agent acquisition in favor of a little-known rookie who at the time was most known for having a weird name? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say “real, real bad.”
Even if he’s never a star, Minshew has bought himself a fairly lengthy career in the NFL just off of his 2019 performance (kinda like, you know, Nick Foles). Meanwhile, Foles might not even be back on the Jaguars in 2020. All for want of an intact collarbone.