ASK THE EXPERTS appears weekly from training camp through the Super Bowl with answers to a new question being posted Thursday morning. How the guest experts responded when we asked them: It's the season of Festivus and the annual airing of grievances. Who has disappointed you most this season?
JUSTIN ELEFF
I am trying hard not to pick on Julio Jones here for a particularly ill-timed injury. His absence pretty much sealed my fate in PPR, but guys do get hurt -- and at least he lasted a lot longer than Keenan Allen, my second pick on the same team. Instead I'll pick on myself, for being very wrong about Blake Bortles in 2016. I didn't actually wind up drafting him anywhere, thankfully, but if you go back to the Experts Poll in our magazine you'll see I was very bullish on Bortles and Allen Robinson, and both proved to be pretty useless week to week. I still hold out some hope that the next coaching staff will turn things around; it should definitely be possible to get Robinson kickstarted, with or without Bortles. Or maybe I'm just fated to have the same answer to this question in 2017.
Eleff hosts the Fantasy Index Podcast, available in the iTunes Store now. He has worked for Fantasy Index off and on all century.
DAVID DOREY
So many choices…. Have to go with probably Blake Bortles and only because he killed off so many other players after a promising 2015 season. Allen Robinson really is a talent but was a dog this year. Allen Hurns was a huge value in 2015 and a complete waste. We knew the rushing effort would be bad with the Jaguars but Bortles' inability to pass killed an offensive coordinator, then a head coach and overall he was central to the team-wide collapse.
Dorey is the co-founder and lead NFL analyst for The Huddle and author of Fantasy Football: The Next Level. He has projected and predicted every NFL game and player performance since 1997 and has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, radio and television.
IAN ALLAN
I’ve been disappointed in Donte Moncrief. I was expecting big things from him. He’s a receiver I had high on my board entering the season, so he was a key player for me. He missed five games with a broken shoulder, and that’s fine — I understand that injuries are part of the game. And I will give him partial credit for scoring touchdowns in all six of his injury-free games. But he’s also averaged only 45 yards in those games. I expected a lot more. They’ve got Andrew Luck at quarterback, and he’s throwing the ball all over the place (averaging 279 yards per game), yet Moncrief has been plunking along as just a lesser, supporting piece.
Allan is the senior writer for Fantasy Football Index. He's been in that role since 1987, generating most of the player rankings and analysis for that publication. His work can be seen in Fantasy Football Index magazine, and also at www.fantasyindex.com.
SAM HENDRICKS
DeAndre Hopkins and Jamaal Charles. Hopkins has been mediocre at best. Chalk some of that up to his quarterback. Charles was the big tease of 2016 and if you took a chance on him in the draft you were rewarded with a whole bunch of nothing. Either or heaven forbid both of them on your team was a recipe for disaster this year. They were huge disappointments although some of the blame should come back to me for believing in these "miracles."
Hendricks is the author of Fantasy Football Guidebook, Fantasy Football Tips and Fantasy Football Basics, all available at ExtraPointPress.com, at all major bookstores, and at Amazon and BN.com. He is a 25 year fantasy football veteran who participates in the National Fantasy Football Championship (NFFC) and finished 7th and 16th overall in the 2008 and 2009 Fantasy Football Players Championship (FFPC). He is drafting live in the FFPC in Vegas this year. He won the Fantasy Index Open in 2013. Follow him at his web site, www.ffguidebook.com.
ANDY RICHARDSON
Very hard to think of anyone as disappointing as Allen Robinson. He had a couple of eye-opening grabs in the preseason that made me confident he'd have a big year. I drafted him late in the first round in a couple of leagues; painful to think of the players I passed up for him. If we want to talk mid-round picks, other Jaguars come to mind: Allen Hurns, Blake Bortles. So maybe a lot of it is Bortles' fault. Other wide receivers come to mind: Randall Cobb, Jeremy Maclin. These guys killed lineups for weeks before it was finally clear they had to be benched.
Richardson has been a contributing writer and editor to the Fantasy Football Index magazine and www.fantasyindex.com since 2002. His responsibilities include team defense and IDP projections and various site features, and he has run the magazine's annual experts draft and auction leagues since their inception. He previews all the NFL games on Saturdays and writes a wrap-up column on Mondays during the NFL season.