Joe Burrow entered Week 15 averaging 20.8 PPG and ranking as the per game QB12. That’s about right in line with ADP where he was the QB13 in FFPC best ball and QB15 in redraft (where managers could risk a QB2 slot on Trey Lance and Justin Fields). Looking at his best ball ADP, he was outscoring Russell Wilson and Ryan Tannehill who were drafted ahead of him, but was scoring below Kirk Cousins.
If you drafted Burrow, you couldn’t argue too much with the results for the price, but his performance counted among my biggest disappointments, especially after a moribund Week 15 against Denver. After all, this was a QB who drew rookie comparisons to Andrew Luck in Screener, and his weapons were unmatched. He throws to the best possession receiver in football in Tyler Boyd, one of the best Year 2 breakout candidates in recent memory, and a generational rookie prospect as a new addition.
And then Week 16 happened.
In their annihilation of the Ravens, Burrow threw for 525 yards and four touchdowns. Boyd, Tee Higgins, and Ja’Marr Chase combined for 81.3 fantasy points. All three ranked among the top-18 wide receivers, but most of the damage was done by Higgins, who came in averaging 14 PPG with five career WR1 finishes . . .
. . . and left as the WR16 on the season. Higgins’ peripherals were pointing to a breakout across the first 10 weeks, and if you’ve been reading the excellent WR Usage Trends and Takeaways with Bjorn Yang-Vaernet and the Buy Low Report with Conor O’Driscoll, then you were adding shares in all formats along the way. (More on Conor in a moment.)
Higgins broke out with two WR1 performances in Weeks 12 and 13 but had quieted again before his 43-point explosion against the Ravens. For much of the offseason, I had Higgins as a second-round value in redraft and a first-round value in dynasty. (In my newest update last week, I had him at WR9, sandwiched between Cooper Kupp and A.J. Brown. That puts him at No. 15 among non-QBs.) Those rankings ended up being optimistic, but his recent five-week stretch with 116 points places him below only Kupp during the vital late-season push.
The Ravens entered the game taking Bengals’ WRs equally seriously or unseriously, as it may be. After Burrow shredded them for 416 yards and three scores in the first meeting, Baltimore’s rhetoric leading up to the Week 16 tilt was that they wouldn’t use an Aaron Rodgers/Davante Adams-style defense on Burrow and Chase (who embarrassed them for 201 yards the first go around). They weren’t putting Burrow in the Hall of Fame just yet.
Burrow needs another decade of big performances to build his HOF case, but if he eventually reaches that level, we’ll look back to a 500-yard performance in the stretch run of the 2021 season as the moment when it all felt possible.
What Did It Do For RotoViz In Fantasy?
Jewel: I put out cinnamon.
Dan Dority: Where?
Jewel: The meeting table.
Dan Dority: On whose instruction?
Jewel: Cinnamon’s good with peaches.
Dan Dority: Do not put unauthorized cinnamon on the (gosh darned) meeting table! That’s all the #%&@ we need.
Frequent readers and listeners know that Colm Kelly and I drafted an FFPC best ball team with Blair Andrews that made it to the semifinals of the 100k tournament. We were looking for big weeks from Rodgers, Adams, and Jonathan Taylor to get us through. (Eight of the 12 teams had Mark Andrews, so a big performance from him would be helpful in eliminating the other four squads.)
At halftime of the first Saturday game, things were looking pretty exciting, but Rodgers and Adams cooled down. Then Taylor was corralled by a swarming Cardinals defense that (rightly) had no other interest. Things looked bleak until the Bengals/Ravens shootout started.
The other Burrow team is interesting as it belongs to none other than the aforementioned Conor O’Driscoll. His team is clear of the field and will advance to the final 12-team tournament and try to win $100,000 next weekend. Conor’s team is a work of art:
- This is a Legendary RB or Modified Zero RB with Dalvin Cook as the anchor. When Cook missed with COVID this week, it morphed into a high-scoring Zero RB powerhouse with help from two members of the 2021 Zero RB Candidates list in Sony Michel and Devin Singletary.
- It has fantastic WR depth and upside. A.J. Brown returned at just the right moment and eviscerated a surging 49ers squad. Sliding Brown into a lineup with the WR3, WR4, and WR8 on the season provides immense upside. He also has Marquise Brown, a borderline WR1, and Boyd, a second pairing option with Burrow.
- Mark Andrews gives Conor his Elite TE, the key piece in building unstoppable best ball win rates.
- The 2-QB roster includes Burrow and Jalen Hurts, two quarterbacks with prices in the recommended QB Window, both of whom paid off in a big way, especially Hurts. Conor would have still easily advanced with Hurts’ points instead of Burrow’s this week.
Conor executed every key element of the RV Best Ball Workshop, and he paired it with strong player selection to get within one step of $100,000.
Our team did not put up nearly as dominant a performance, but it is in second place currently. It’s likely to slip to third place but advance to the final 12. We obviously won’t feel comfortable until the final whistle sounds.
The RotoViz tools and Best Ball Workshop help you build an evidence-based juggernaut and post elite win rates. This particular example is only one of many from the 2021 season, and I’ll be working through the results and tactics behind those results at the season’s end. Join us for these discussions at a discount by taking advantage of our Christmas sale this week.
