Fantasy football impact: Will the Raiders offer any fantasy relevance in 2014?

The SB Nation Fantasy Football preview is coming soon, and along with that will be our consensus rankings at each position, and of the top 150 overall. When compiling that top 150, I mentally checked off a list of the teams. Sure, the Eagles and Chiefs and Broncos were checked off early. Toby Gerhart got the Jaguars off the schneid in the 40s, and Carolina, Cleveland and Baltimore followed soon after. When Mike Wallace came around at 77 as the first Dolphin, I thought, that finished all the teams.

Then I came across Darren McFadden at No. 97.

Basically, not only are the Oakland Raiders terrible for fantasy value, they are forgettably terrible. There were worse teams than the Raiders a year ago. Houston and Washington won fewer games; Houston, Jacksonville and Washington had worse point differentials. But, as far as fantasy is concerned, you could have pretended Oakland didn't exist, and nothing would have changed.

• They had the sixth-worst Interestingness Quotient.
• They were seventh-worst in team fantasy depth.
• They've finished third in the AFC West in five of six years, and fourth in the other.
• They have had more roster turnover than any other team.
• They lost a huge chunk of their fantasy scoring from last year

So, what is there to look for out of the team? Are there sleepers? Will new additions Maurice Jones-Drew and Matt Schaub make a difference?

Regardless, the string ran out on Schaub in Houston, and the Texans dealt him to Oakland in March for a draft pick. And oh boy, is Schaub excited to be a Raider.

I am of the mind that Matt Schaub is still a fine NFL quarterback. Not great, but a fair piece ahead of the Terrelle Pryor-Matt McGloin combo Oakland ran out there a year ago. On the other hand, Schaub no longer has the Andre Johnson security blanket he enjoyed throughout his Houston tenure.

Schaub is a placeholder for the team, until second-round draft pick Derek Carr is (ideally) ready to take the reins. It's hard to see that happening in 2014, though.

To be fair, it's really close — I have McFadden as my No. 30 running back, Jones-Drew as my No. 32 — but yes, despite everything in that earlier paragraph, I think McFadden is a better fantasy play than Jones-Drew in 2014. Part of that is the fact that Oakland, when deciding between McFadden and Rashad Jennings after last year, held onto McFadden before also signing Jones-Drew. Part of that is gut feeling.

But there's also this: At the elite level at each position, you need guys who are likely to play as many games as possible. When a player is averaging 15, 18 fantasy points a game, their bad games are still 10-pointers, and any absence is critical. On the other hand, the middle tiers, the guys who score 10-ish a game, you would rather they just miss a game. A bad game from a mid-tier guy is a four-pointer, and that's worthless. When McFadden is out, pick up someone with a favorable matchup — Darren Sproles, or Lamar Miller, or DeAngelo Williams — and roll them out. Jones-Drew plays every week, and his bad games just hurt you.

Latavius Murray, a 2013 sixth-round draft pick, missed last season with an injury, but has been garnering some publicity entering camp. It's possible he could be a viable sleeper running back in deeper leagues.

The Raiders' top three receivers — Rod Streater, Denarius Moore and James Jones — could all easily lay claim to being the team's No. 1. Streater was the top performer of the three last year, putting up 104 fantasy points and finishing 35th at the position. But he played every game; Moore missed three, and his 95 points in 13 games is a better per-game average. Jones is the big-game guy, the one who has had absolutely dominant single games.

Of course, those big games Jones had came when he had a quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, who is quite a bit better than his current passer. When Greg Jennings left Green Bay for an inferior quarterback, his numbers fell off a cliff. And Jones is no Greg Jennings.

"Mychal Rivera" is a cool name. Unfortunately, Mychal Rivera, without the quotation marks, isn't much of a fantasy tight end. Nor is David Ausberry, the team's other primary option. Unless something changes drastically, neither is anything approximating fantasy relevance.