RADIO
As part of RotoBaller’s Breakouts, Busts, and Locks series for the 2022 season, this article will take a closer look at the Baltimore Ravens. Before getting into the selections, let’s clarify how we can define each designation:
Breakout: A player who will not only exceed ADP but jump into a territory of fantasy production they have never reached before.
Bust: A player who will fall short of expectations and ADP.
Lock: A player who is a safe pick at a relatively high ADP, with an injury being the only major possibility to derail from being a fantasy lynchpin.
Baltimore enters 2022 with a bit of an identity crisis. The Ravens under head coach John Harbaugh had been a model of consistency with their stout defense and a run-heavy offense until last season was derailed by injuries on both sides of the ball. It doesn’t take much digging to see just how much their offense pivoted to the passing game as a result of these challenges…
| Year | Baltimore Team Pass Attempts | League Rank |
| 2019 | 440 | 32nd |
| 2020 | 406 | 32nd |
| 2021 | 611 | 9th |
With such an aberration to the team’s offensive balance, it is difficult to project value for 2022 using 2021 benchmarks because the team simply did not operate the way they wanted to. However, with uncertainty comes inefficiencies in player value, so let’s take a look at three Ravens with big fantasy implications.
Fantasy Football Breakout: Rashod Bateman
Second-year wide receiver Rashod Bateman is one of the most intriguing players for fantasy entering the year. While the team should be expected to return to its conservative offensive philosophy, Bateman has very little competition for targets outside of tight end Mark Andrews. As the team traded away its former WR1 Marquise Brown to the Arizona Cardinals, it was widely speculated that they would add another aerial weapon to take some of the pressure off of Bateman. Instead, they doubled down on their run-heavy scheme by using the resulting draft capital to select a center in the first round.
The Baltimore wide receiver depth is now as follows:
Rashod Bateman
Devin Duvernay
James Proche II
Tylan Wallace
Jaylon Moore
Binjimen Victor
If you haven’t heard of anyone after Duvernay, you are not alone. Bateman enters the season as the clear WR1 who is likely to get force-fed targets almost regardless of his second-year development. Bateman actually fits the profile of how the team tried to use Brown last year and will be one of the hottest mid-round receivers in upcoming drafts.
While the passing volume in Baltimore should certainly go down, it’s not crazy to think Bateman could match or even exceed Marquise Brown’s 26.7% target share from last year. At the time of this writing, Bateman has an ADP of WR35 (79 overall), but securing a 27 or 28% share even on a modest 450 pass attempts puts a top-20 finish within reach if he can make some plays in the red zone.
Mark Andrews splits with/without Lamar Jackson last season.
With - 5 REC/67 REC YDS/.5TD - 14.9 FPPG
Without - 8 REC/101 REC YDS/.6TD - 21.76 FPPG'20 FPPG - 12.2
'19 FPPG - 13.8Marquise Brown averaged 16.73 FPPG with Lamar and 9.3 without him.
Rashod Bateman SZN. pic.twitter.com/EqPj0Bl5RR
— Nick Penticoff (@NickPenticoff) June 17, 2022
One reason why it isn’t outlandish for Bateman to secure that target share is that a regression in target share may in the cards for Mark Andrews…
Fantasy Football Bust: Mark Andrews
Mark Andrews was the top tight end for fantasy last year, ending Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce’s five-year run atop the position. The fact that Andrews lead the position was amplified by the scarcity of the tight end position as well as Andrews’s mid-round draft capital. This all added up to Andrews being a textbook league winner in 2021.
This year, fantasy managers will not have the luxury of selecting Andrews in the middle of drafts. With a now second-round ADP (20th overall), this could be a clear case of chasing points instead of projecting forward.
Andrews’ elite performance raises two red flags as it relates to projecting a repeat performance:
- Quarterback splits with Lamar Jackson and Tyler Huntley
- Uncharacteristically high passing volume
Addressing the quarterback splits first, Huntley only started five games and yet the disparity in production is significant…
| Mark Andrews Production | With Lamar Jackson (12 Starts) | With Tyler Huntley (5 Starts) |
| Targets Per Game | 8.2 | 11 |
| PPR Fantasy Points Per Game | 15.9 | 22.2 |
| Yards Per Target | 8.8 | 9.1 |
It can also be called out that Andrews’ numbers with Jackson are propped up by a scorching 41-point performance against Indianapolis in Week 5. While he scored at least 14.9 points in all five of Huntley’s starts, he came in below that mark in six of Jackson’s 12 starts, posing a modest consistency risk for a player with such high draft capital.
Now addressing the passing volume, it could be argued that the expected passing volume decrease should also impact breakout pick, Rashod Bateman. However, the key difference between Bateman and Andrews is the difference in each of their baseline values. Andrews’ whopping 153 targets last year was easily the best at the position (19 more than Kelce) and would have ranked ninth even among wide receivers. That simply is not sustainable for a tight end on a team that should get back to the bottom five in pass attempts. His target share was also through the roof at 25.8%, making him one of only two tight ends to even break the 20% mark (Kelce at 21.1%).
Andrews won’t kill your fantasy team, but I expect a decrease in both target share and team target volume, which should also have a related decline from his nine touchdowns last year. I would still rank him as the number two tight end behind Kelce, but the price of a second-round pick simply will not return value considering the talent that can be acquired at other positions.
Fantasy Football Lock: Lamar Jackson
Lamar Jackson, quite simply, is being priced closer to his floor than to his ceiling. His ADP is hovering around QB5, typically neck and neck with Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray. He has the upside to be the overall QB1, as the team is healthy and restoring the brand of physical football that suits its roster. Jackson has also made it clear that he wants to “earn” the massive contract extension that the entire NFL world already expects him to land.
It is easy to forget just how dominant Jackson was when he was at full health and the team was firing on all cylinders. While few expect him to repeat his historic MVP season in 2019, his probable range of outcomes sits somewhere between that finish and last year’s injury-riddled disappointment.
When dissecting Jackson’s 2021 fantasy performance, it is quite a bit better than many people think. While he finished as the QB16 due to five missed games, he still scored 20 points per game, which was tied for eighth-best. In addition, a few of the names above him in points per game (Murray, Jalen Hurts, Dak Prescott, and Aaron Rodgers) missed at least one game. The reason that matters is that if Jackson held his per-game average through a full slate of 17 games, he would have finished as the QB5. This is incredible when you consider it is extrapolating from 12 active games where he constantly battled injuries to both himself and his offensive line while getting very little backfield support. To have a 2022 ADP match what his 17-game pace would have been in a nightmare 2021 scenario is why he is a near-lock to return value against cost.
Further making the case for Jackson is the safety provided by his rushing value. He averaged 64 rushing yards (while not at full strength), which would have been good for a 1,000-yard rushing year over a full slate of games. To put into perspective just how valuable that is, if we only extrapolated his rushing production over a full 17 games while keeping his passing production at his actual 12 games, he still would have been a QB1 in 12-team leagues (12th ahead of Ryan Tannehill). Even without much improvement, if any, to his passing production, he is an absolute lock to be a high-end QB1 if he can stay on the field.
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