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: To celebrate Festivus, time for the airing of grievances. Which player, coach or team disappointed you most this season?
DAVID DOREY
Wow – so many. Jordy Nelson, T.Y. Hilton, Amari Cooper. DeMarco Murray, etc. But the most disappointing is anyone on the Raiders. After a promising 2016, the Raiders entered this season with one of the better lines and supposedly an upgraded backfield. All have flopped. Marshawn Lynch ran for more than 76 yards only once. Amari Cooper is inexplicably bad. Derek Carr is turning in just an average sort of year. Michael Crabtree has been the lone good player but went cold for the last month. Losing their offensive coordinator from last year has devastated the offense.
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.
ALAN SATTERLEE
To me, it’s hands down Mike Evans. He just looks the part of a receiver who should be dominating defenders weekly. Coming into the season, Evans was up from 1,051 yards to 1,208 to 1,321 with two dozen-touchdown seasons on his three-year resume. But what a clunker — a near-consensus 1st round pick, Evans is on pace for just 935 yards, he hasn’t scored for seven weeks and as WR24 he barely has more fantasy points than Jermaine Kearse. He hasn’t had a 100-yard game all season — how can this be?! Evans could have fallen to the third round (and how insane would that have been, and how beyond-excited would have you been back in August) and it still would have been a bad pick.
Satterlee is the Fantasy Football Insider for the Charlotte Observer and is syndicated in a few other newspapers in the southeast. Satterlee first started playing fantasy football in 1990.
MICHAEL NAZAREK
I had the first pick in two FFPC leagues and took RB David Johnson. The wrist injury isn't what irritates me, it's the fact he's now unlikely to return to play in 2017. It's the most frustrating thing EVER!
Nazarek is the CEO of Fantasy Football Mastermind Inc. His company offers a preseason draft guide, customizable cheat sheets, a multi-use fantasy drafting program including auction values, weekly in-season fantasy newsletters, injury reports and free NFL news (updated daily) at its newly re-designed web site. He has been playing fantasy football since 1988 and is a four-peat champion of the SI.com Experts Fantasy League, a nationally published writer in several fantasy magazines and a former columnist for SI.com. He's also won in excess of $20K in recent seasons of the FFPC High Stakes Main Event. www.ffmastermind.com. Nazarek can be reached via email at miken@ffmastermind.com.
IAN ALLAN
Marcus Mariota, Jameis Winston and Derek Carr need to be on the list. They are all capable young quarterbacks with potential, but none of them have taken the step up. They’re in the third and fourth years, so this was the season it should have happened, but they haven’t yet ascended into being good quarterbacks. With Winston, there are too many forced throws and hare-brained decisions. If he wants to “eat some Ws”, as they say, he’s got to be better. With Mariota and Carr, they don’t seem to willing enough to take shots down the field that do damage. They check it down too much. With the Titans in particular, the structure of the offense seems to be flawed.
Allan is a member of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association Hall of Fame. A co-founder of Fantasy Football Index in 1987, he generates most of the writing, player rankings and analysis for that publication. His work can be seen in Fantasy Football Index magazine and also at www.fantasyindex.com.
SCOTT PIANOWSKI
Marcus Mariota is driving me crazy; come on, 10 touchdowns, 14 picks, those are 1970s stats. He's been a Top 9 quarterback just once all season. Mariota's fall is complicated -- it partly tied to injury, poor coaching, disappointing supporting cast. Perhaps it's a Class of 2015 thing, because Jameis Winston has been lousy in Tampa Bay, too.
Pianowski has been playing fantasy football for 20 years and writing about it for 17. He joined Yahoo! Sports in 2008 and has been blogging 24/7 on RotoArcade.com ever since.
SAM HENDRICKS
Cannot give the biggest bust to an injured player so David Johnson and OBJ are of the hook. Jordy Nelson suffered when Aaron Rodgers went down so I am giving him a pass (groan)... that leaves Terrelle Pryor Sr. I know what you’re gonna say... but he is on IR. Yeah, but he stunk it up in the nine games he actually started: 20 catches, 240 yards and 1 TD for a high draft pick. Not that I drafted him in any of my leagues. Honorable mention goes to Isaiah Crowell, who I did draft in quite a few leagues. I expected more and was burnt for it.
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 won the Fantasy Index Open in 2013. Follow him at his web site, www.ffguidebook.com.
ANDY RICHARDSON
It's hard to know where to start. The Bucs seemed to be a team on the rise, but they've been simply terrible, with Jameis Winston and Mike Evans the most notable busts. The Raiders have been shockingly inept; loved them having to come out in Week 14 to announce their offensive coordinator wouldn't be fired during the season. But for me the Titans really stand out as the team that's gotten the least out of the most talent. Yes, they're 8-5 and might make the playoffs (and get blown out). They've had a really favorable schedule, they've been mostly healthy, and they've seen a lot of soft defenses. But the only decent fantasy option most weeks has been Delanie Walker. I blame the coaching staff for doing less than with more than most other teams.
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.