RADIO
If you want to win your fantasy league, you have to hit on the right sleepers. Every year, players get identified as mid/late round picks that you HAVE to draft. You've probably seen 15 different Twitter threads just today about sleepers. But some of these sleepers wind up being bad. You have to make sure you can sort through the noise and find the right sleepers.
Today, we'll be talking about one of my favorite wide receiver sleepers: Kadarius Toney of the New York Giants.
Toney flashed some major potential last season, but injuries also limited his overall production. But if Toney is healthy in 2022, he's going to win some people some fantasy leagues.
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2022 Fantasy Football Sleeper: Kadarius Toney
Kadarius Toney is currently being drafted as the WR47, per FantasyPros' ADP. Right now, that puts him in between Chris Olave and Russell Gage overall, if you want to get a sense of the kind of players who he is being considered with.
But unlike a lot of those guys, Toney has a pretty clear path to being his team's No. 1 receiver. He's currently the first Giants wideout going off the board, with Kenny Golladay going on average about two rounds later than Toney is.
This is a confusing Giants receiving corps, which helps explain how a team's potential No. 1 receiver is going so late. It also doesn't help that Toney dealt with a variety of injuries all season long in 2021. Players with injury concerns get pushed down fantasy draft boards—sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly.
But here's the thing with Toney: when he's healthy, he's the most electric receiver on this Giants team. And even though we didn't get to see much of him healthy, what we did see was impressive.
A lot of the hype about Toney comes from his Week 5 performance against the Cowboys, when he was targeted 13 times, catching 10 of those passes for 189 yards.
In that game, he showcased his quick movement and his ability to make plays in the open field. The Giants kept feeding him the ball because 1) he was doing a lot with the ball and 2) he was the team's best receiver by far at that point.
Here's something I found earlier this offseason and mentioned in my Breakouts, Busts and Locks piece over the Giants:
Per Pro Football Reference/Stathead, the list of rookies since 2000 with 150-plus receiving yards in a game is 33 players long. Toney is eighth among those players in yards. Just looking at the top-15 in yardage among these games, we see Ja'Marr Chase (twice), Anquan Boldin, Mike Evans, Rod Gardner, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Odell Beckham, Justin Jefferson (twice), Antonio Bryant and Marques Colston. Those are the hits: guys who went on to have at least a couple good years after. The misses in that top group: Justin Blackmon (whose off-field issues are what derailed his career, not his on-field play), Keelan Cole, and Hank Baskett.
Why's Everyone Low on Kadarius Toney for Fantasy Football?
The Giants.
Okay, that's not the only reason that Toney is being drafted so low. But it's definitely a reason: the Giants have a quarterback who people are universally low on, and the team has a lot of mouths to feed at wide receiver.
On paper, the receiving corps looks really messy. There's Kenny Golladay, the team's big signing last offseason. There's rookie Wan'Dale Robinson. And then there's Sterling Shepard and Darius Slayton, two flawed receivers who have had some really good flashes.
But there's a reason the Giants took receivers in the first or second round two years in a row, which is that the team clearly doesn't think Shepard and Slayton are players with long-term value in New York.
And Golladay...well, there's a pretty sizable chance that Kenny Golladay is no longer good.
If we go by stats/analytics, we can see how much Golladay underperformed last year. Per PlayerProfiler, he ranked 75th among wide receivers in yards per target despite ranking 10th in aDOT. There were a lot of missed opportunities for Golladay. Some of that was because of the QB, but filtering out non-catchable targets finds him with a true catch rate of 75.5%, which ranks 90th at the position, so it pretty clearly wasn't all the QB's fault.
Golladay struggled to get separation, ranking 95th in average target separation. He was 56th in contested catch rate. 91st in fantasy points per route run. The QB rating when targeting him was 73.1, which ranked 97th among receivers. It was 89.8 when targeting Toney and 93.8 when targeting Shepard, just for comparison sake.
And if you don't believe the numbers, you can believe the tape:
Another factor that's held against Toney is his injury issues. And, well...I don't know what to say about that. Last season, he missed time in training camp with a hamstring issue, then hurt his ankle in Week 5, then hurt his ankle again in Week 6, then missed time with a quad injury, then had an oblique injury, and then had a shoulder injury. He also had a knee issue this offseason.
Those are a lot of things, and it's fair to be scared off of him. I just think the upside is worth the risk.
Kadarius Toney 2022 Fantasy Football Outlook
Toney's 2022 outlook obviously depends on his health. If he continues to deal with a growing list of ailments like he did in 2021, he won't pay off.
But usually, Toney is the third or fourth wide receiver that you'll be drafting onto your team. At that point, you can afford to take a risk a little more than you can in the earlier rounds.
And Toney's worth it. He's an electrifying player when he's on the football field. And while the fact he's already not at 100% in the preseason is definitely not a good thing, I'm drafting Toney like he'll be on the football field, because there aren't really many players you can draft as your WR4 who have the upside that he has. Here's my hot take: on a per-game basis, Toney will put up WR2 numbers. Hopefully, he's on the field enough for his overall finish to also be in the WR2 range.
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