Mike Evans has shown no signs of slowing down, but he’s not being drafted like the WR1 he is in fantasy football. (Photo by Julio Aguilar/Getty Images)
Mike Evans is coming off the standard-issue Mike Evans season, which is to say he was great in 2023.
In fact, Evans was better in his first year with Baker Mayfield than he’d been in his last year with Tom Brady. He caught 79 passes last season for 1,255 yards on 136 targets while producing a league-best 13 touchdowns.
Evans has now played a full decade in the NFL and has caught at least 70 passes in eight different years, plus he’s scored a dozen or more TDs five times. Famously, he has never finished a season with fewer than 1,000 receiving yards.
If you’re looking for any signs of decline in the performance of Evans in his age-30 season … well, good luck. No such indicators exist and all the underlying advanced numbers look excellent. Last year, he once again finished among the leaders in contested catches (16-for-30) and average depth of target (15.0) while setting career highs in both yards-after-catch (333) and YAC per reception (4.2). Evans also played all 17 games in 2023, so there are no health concerns here.
If we just gave you the raw numbers on Evans without a name attached, you’d probably assume he was a locked-in WR1 in fantasy, a consensus second-round pick in nearly all formats. His per-17 average season over the course of his career looks like this: 84 receptions, 1,289 yards, 10 TDs. Evans pretty much nailed those stats last year — five fewer catches, three more touchdowns — while finishing as the overall WR4. In six of the past eight seasons, he’s delivered a top-8 positional finish.
Basically, the man never gives us a dud. Evans hasn’t yet ranked outside the top-30 at his position in fantasy at the end of any season and he has seven top-10 finishes. He’s as bankable as it gets among great players.
However, the fantasy community has clearly become bored with all these 1,200-12…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/fantasy-football-metronome-mike-evans-still-a-ridiculous-draft-value-after-a-decade-of-production-174244379.html
Author : Yahoo Sports
Publish date : 2024-05-29 17:42:44
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