With the 2020 fantasy Draft season behind us, I wanted to take a look at the ADP draft values from last season. Using the articles I wrote in May and June to dive into how things went. The question is did anyone smash their ADP value? Did anyone fail to live up to the price paid in drafts?

I went through 15 rounds and picked one player from each round that I thought to be the best value for their ADP at the time. The exercise wasn’t about filling a squad but picking who I thought was the best value in that round. Here’s how it went.

Round 1- Davante Adams, WR, Green bay Packers

Adams finished as the WR 1, with 115 receptions, 1375 yards and 18 TD’s

Adams was going off the board as the 9th overall pick and behind two WR’s. Michael Thomas, who was on average the 4th overall pick, finished with 63.9 half ppr points. That’s the WR 100 for the season.
The other WR was Tyreek Hill, who went just before Adams’ ADP and actually finished just behind Adams as the WR 2 for the season,15 points behind Adams but Adams played in 14 games compared to Hills 15 games.

Something that really solidified Adams draft value was how the Top 4 in the first round were nowhere near giving back the price that was paid for them. CMC and Barkley were both injured for pretty much the whole season. CMC finished with 81.9 points, Barkley got 12.4, whilst got Zeke 197.7

Last season’s top 4 got a total of 355.9 half ppr points combined, compared to Adams’ 300.9 points. Obviously, injuries can’t be helped, so this skews the stats slightly. That doesn’t change the fact that the 9th overall pick put up those numbers. Especially when the top 4 brought back no value. The injuries massively helped but on his own, Adam’s 2020 ADP value was an absolute steal.

Round 2 – Kenyan Drake, RB, Arizona Cardinals

In the second round of the draft, you are still expecting to be picking up top talent in the position you pick. So grabbing Drake in the second as the 21st overall pick and 11th RB, I was expecting to be getting top 12 RB numbers. At the time it felt like he had top 5 RB upside, especially based on the second half of the 2019 season after his trade from Miami.

We didn’t quite get that from him. Drake finished the Season as the RB 14, having run the ball 239 times, racking up 955 yards and getting 10 TDs. He also added 25 receptions for 137 yards.

Drake did miss week 8 and had he have had a solid 10 point game, he would have made it onto the top 12 RB list. That’s just the way football goes sometimes. So due to injury we didn’t quite get the value back in round two. However, 10 points away aren’t too bad of a loss either.

A big factor that hurt Drake’s value too was fellow RB, Chase Edmonds. Edmonds was used a lot and ended as the RB 28 for the season. Taking 97 carries away from Drake and racking up 448 yards on the ground and another 408 yards receiving.

Oh and don’t forget that the Arizona QB is Kyler Murray who loves to take the ball and run himself. He had 819 rushing yards and managed to bag himself 11 rushing TDs too.

Looking at those two factors it’s actually quite remarkable that Drake managed to finish as high as he did. However, the double negative factor here is definitely something to remember when drafting in 2021.

Round 3 – JuJu Smith-Shuster, WR, Pittsburgh Steelers

For me, JuJu had a disappointing season. After an injury-hit Steeler season, 2020 was all set up for a big year. Big Ben was back, the D was ready to be the No.1 D in the league and JuJu was set to have a glorious season. Things didn’t quite pan out the way we hoped.

When I write the Draft value article, JuJu was coming off the board as the 33rd overall pick and WR 12. JuJu finished as the WR 18, with 97 receptions, 831 yards and a total of 9 TDs. He was still Big Ben’s saviour when he needed a play but it turned out that the offence wasn’t quite as elite as made out. The other big factor was the ball was spread around a lot more evenly.

4 players were targeted over 90 times each. Ebron was targeted 91 times. The Rookie Claypool had 109 targets. JuJu was next with 128 and then the most targeted player was Diontae Johnson with 144 targets. All of this reduced everyone to under 1000 receiving yards and everyone under 10 TD’s

Bad Juju?

As a Wr in the 3rd round, you are banking on low WR 1 or high WR 2 numbers and that wasn’t paid back for the price you were taking JuJu at. Although it was close, other players in the same ADP performed much better. Adam Thielen went one pick before JuJu and finished the season as WR 8. The WRs going just behind JuJu all performed better too. AJ Brown finished WR 11, Ridley finished WR 4 and 14 picks after JuJu was taken, Keenan Allen came off the board. Allen ended up as WR 14 for the season. All of these WRs I would be taking over JuJu for the 2021 season. Perhaps if he spent more time concentrating on the task at hand rather than fueling the opposing D then maybe we might have seen a better season.

Going forward, this Steelers team is changing and we will have to see if JuJu is still part of their plans. If he is with the Steelers, I’d expect more of the same if not less from him with the likes of Diontae and Claypool moving up.

That was a look at the first 3 rounds. Next up will be rounds 4-7 to see if anyone managed to smash their mid-range draft value.

Until then Rush Nation
Keep Rushing

Pittsy – @PittsyNFL