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Welcome to our fantasy football Breakouts, Busts, and Locks, a new series on RotoBaller where our writers look at three key players on each NFL team. Today, we're talking about the Dallas Cowboys.
The Cowboys were one of the most prolific offenses last year but they traded away Amari Cooper in the offseason and lost Cedrick Wilson in free agency, changing the dynamic of the receiving corps.
Below, you'll find a fantasy football breakout candidate, a fantasy football bust candidate, and a safe fantasy football pick for the Cowboys based on early ADP for fantasy football drafts in 2022.
Fantasy Football Breakout: Jalen Tolbert
We're going to start in an unlikely place here: third-round rookie wide receiver Jalen Tolbert.
Last season, three Cowboys saw 100-plus targets: CeeDee Lamb (120), Dalton Schultz (104) and Amari Cooper (104). (Note: I was going to write about Schultz as a breakout candidate, but that's almost too easy: he had 808 yards and eight touchdowns last season.) In addition, Michael Gallup had 62 targets while playing just nine games and Cedrick Wilson Jr. had 61 targets as the third/fourth receiver — his role was dependent on Gallup's availability.
Now, Wilson is in Miami. Cooper is in Cleveland. Gallup is nursing a knee injury and his availability to open the season is in question. In this pass-happy offense, someone is going to step up and produce. It could be James Washington, but considering how his role got smaller in both 2020 and 2021 with the Steelers, I don't have high hopes for him to suddenly explode in 2022.
Especially not when Jalen Tolbert is here.
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Cowboys writers have been talking a lot about Tolbert. He missed some OTA time with a hamstring issue, but he's back on the field now and looks like someone who can contribute immediately.
And yeah, I know...rookie receivers, especially ones taken after the first round, aren't usually great fantasy options. Last year, 25 wide receivers were drafted in the third round or later. The only one you could reliably start in fantasy was Amon-Ra St. Brown, with Nico Collins having some deep league viability.
However, the Cowboys are likely to be pretty desperate at receiver until Gallup returns. Combine that with all the chatter, and I think we get a surprising rookie showing from Tolbert. If I'm betting on any wideout drafted third round or later in 2022 to be a redraft option, it's either Tolbert or Velus Jones Jr., both of whom are in situations where limitations with their team's depth charts open up opportunities for early snaps.
Fantasy Football Bust: Ezekiel Elliott
Ezekiel Elliott is, once again, in the best shape of his life:
We've heard this before, haven't we?
Elliott is being drafted as the RB20 right now. Getting someone with Elliott's track record as your RB2 seems like a no-brainer decision, right? Especially if he's in great shape? Well, not so fast. Even with his ADP depressed this year, I'm steering clear of Elliott. There's just too many factors working against him.
Elliott had 1,002 yards last season and 10 touchdowns, plus 47 catches for 287 yards. Solid, but in 17 games, he had his second-fewest scrimmage yards in his career (only 2017 was worse), and that year he played seven fewer games and finished with 37 fewer yards.
Digging into some analytics from PlayerProfiler give us some more reasons to worry about Elliott. He was 31st among running backs in fantasy points per opportunity and was pretty inefficient across the board: 39th in true yards per carry, 45th in breakaway run rate and 37th in yards created per touch.
The Cowboys are going to get Tony Pollard more involved this season. I know we say this every year, but Pollard almost doubled his rushing yards per game last season from 27.2 to 47.9. He saw a career-high in targets and he played at least 40% of the Cowboys' offensive snaps in five games, including three of the final five games he played last season.
Meanwhile, Elliott opened the season with a snap rate of at least 70% in six of the first seven games. After that, he hit that mark just once. His two 100-yard games and five of his 10 touchdowns all came in the first five weeks. Before Week 10, Elliott had double-digit carries in all nine of his games. From Week 10 on, just half his games featured double-digit carries.
Dallas wasn't phasing Elliott out, but it was diversifying how it approached the backfield. Elliott also has 1,650 carries in his career, plus 288 targets. Back in 2015, Joseph Juan wrote a piece about how running backs fall off a cliff after 1,800 carries. Elliott will reach that number in 2022.
One more thing: Elliott has finished with fewer rushing yards per game in every season of his career, bottoming out last year at 58.9 yards per game. There are a lot of bad trends here when it comes to Zeke. I appreciate that the fantasy world has gotten smart about where it drafts him, but I'm not convinced that Elliott finishes as an RB2. Not with Pollard taking even more snaps and Elliott's efficiency going down every season.
Fantasy Football Lock: Dak Prescott
There are a couple of safe picks on this team. I think CeeDee Lamb and Tony Pollard are both guys who can return the value that you expect from people at their ADP, for instance. However, the safest of the safe picks here is quarterback Dak Prescott.
Dak was the overall QB7 last season in 16 games. He drops to QB9 if going by average scoring per game, but either way you slice it, Dak was a solid fantasy starting quarterback. Digging deeper into the data, Dak finished as a top 12 fantasy scorer in 10 weeks. He was especially productive to end the year: overall QB2 in Week 16, QB4 in Week 17, and QB1 in Week 18.
Prescott threw 37 touchdown passes last year but scored a career-low in rushing touchdowns with just one. Considering he has 25 career rushing scores and is another year removed from his ankle injury, we should see Dak running a little more in 2022, which brings his upside up. Dak is being drafted as the QB7 on average across the major fantasy sites. If he stays healthy, he's going to return at least QB7 value, if not higher.
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