Fantasy football impact: Can Andy Dalton repeat his 2013 fantasy performance?

Just for fun, here’s a chart of the top 15 fantasy quarterbacks last year, with total points scored and their end-of-year ownership percentage in ESPN leagues.

If you’re me (or, since I’m giving a guided tour of this column, if you’re controlled by me), the part of that chart that stands out the most is the number 60.3. Andy Dalton, despite having the fifth-most fantasy points at the position last year, despite being only one good play away from third place, was owned in just over half of ESPN leagues by year’s end. He was started in less than a quarter of leagues.

In theory, that’s a weird happening, the result of underrating a productive player. In practice, though, it’s remarkably easy to explain.

But there’s no one to balance against a boom-or-bust quarterback. If you ran Andy Dalton out there every week, you’d have some wildly successful weeks, but you’d also have some weeks were he basically lost you your matchup single-handedly. Interestingly, the 2012 iteration of Dalton was just about the polar opposite. He never exceeded 24 fantasy points in a game, but had at least 20 seven different times. It was only good enough for 12^th among quarterbacks.

The pros and cons of Dalton are well-known. He has the fourth-most wins through his first three seasons and has never missed a start. All of that, and yet you’d be hard-pressed to find many who thinks Dalton is much beyond a red-headed version of Alex Smith in that he is competent enough to get a team to the playoffs, so long as the rest of the roster is really good, but no one you’ll win a title with.

Even with his often-impressive production last year, I can’t rank Dalton as a QB1, or even particularly close to one. Even if he repeats last year exactly, the lows for a quarterback matter so much more than the highs that he would be a concern, and repeating last year seems unlikely.

Most would have you believe that he found one last year. Marvin Jones went for 712 yards and 10 touchdowns and while the yardage is nothing special, 10 touchdowns is 10 touchdowns and only nine players caught more. On the other hand, a 712-yard total is nothing special -- Jerome Simpson in 2011 and Jermaine Gresham in 2012 both had more -- and four of Jones’ 10 touchdowns came in Week 8, which was also his lone hundred-yard game of the year.

Green is still an elite receiver, and he’s getting better by the year, with his yards increasing each of his three seasons, and his touchdowns staying at 11 from 2012 to 2013. He was the No. 14 wide receiver in 2011 and has been No. 4 each of the last two years. This despite a mediocre quarterback and a middling offense around him leaving him as his team’s only real option.

Jones, meanwhile, finished 22^nd at the position last year, but I can’t rank him even in my top 50. There are just too many ways for his production to fall off. I’d slot him in the mid-60s at the position, barely inside the top 200 overall.

The Bengals also have Mohamed Sanu, Dane Sanzenbacher, and seventh-round 2014 pick James Wright at receiver, but none of them profile as fantasy-relevant players this season.

As a rookie in 2013, Giovani Bernard followed a two-point fantasy outing with a 17-point one. He followed a one-pointer with a 21-pointer. A five came after a 15; another 15 preceded a six. In other words, Bernard was a very good rookie -- he finished 18^th overall at the position -- but he was far from a reliable week-to-week guy.

This year, I expect far more reliability and consistency from Bernard. Part of that is because Bernard is likely to develop in his second year. But also, he battled BenJarvus Green-Ellis for touches in 2013 and that just doesn’t seem liable to happen this year. Green-Ellis got 220 carries to Bernard’s 170 last year. This year, Green-Ellis is in the last year of his three-year contract. There were rumors, with the team using a second-round pick on Jeremy Hill, that Green-Ellis would be in line for a roster cut. While that hasn’t happened yet, I wouldn’t rule it out as a training-camp occurrence.

Even if Green-Ellis stays on the roster in a depth/mentoring sort of role, he is who he is at this point. He’s unremarkable: a couple yards at a time with the ball even as his famous fumbleproofness has faded in recent years with five fumbles in the last two season.

Hill has also had more than his share of non-football issues (including a guilty plea on battery charges in April of last year), which could be why the team has held on to Green-Ellis. Cutting one running back just before losing the other to non-football events would be ... frustrating.

Regardless, the Bengals look like they’ll be entering the season with Bernard solidly in the No. 1 running back role and Hill as his backup. I rank Bernard as my No. 18 running back, rising a few spots in a PPR league. Hill comes in in the mid-40s, 120ish overall. Green-Ellis is, right now, only an afterthought in fantasy and he’s barely even that.

Tyler Eifert and Jermaine Gresham had superficially similar seasons in 2013. Eifert, the rookie, went for 445 yards and two touchdowns while Gresham, in his fourth season, had 458 and four. But they are tight ends moving in opposite direction; Gresham has never developed into the tight end he was envisioned as being when he was a first-round pick in 2010 while Eifert, the team’s 2013 first-rounder (interestingly, both went 21^st overall), is seen as the on-the-rise tight end.

Moving forward, Eifert is likely to be the guy the team leans more heavily on, and that should be reflected in his fantasy usage. Neither is startable in shallow leagues, but I slot Eifert as my No. 19 tight end and I don’t rank Gresham at all.