2024 Fantasy Consistency Review: Production

You may have noticed that our best ball rankings look different than our season-long projections. That’s intentional, and primarily due to one reason: week-to-week consistency.

Take Alec Pierce, for example. Pierce averaged 20.6 FPG in his five best games, but just 5.3 FPG in his 11 other contests. Pierce was either better than Puka Nacua (18.8 FPG) in his boom weeks or worse than Jordan Akins (5.4 FPG) in his bust weeks. Those in deep redraft leagues who were forced to start Pierce on a weekly basis were effectively rug-pulled, while those in Best Ball Mania benefited from an 18% advance rate (higher than Ladd McConkey) and a 24.2-point performance in the only week that matters – Week 17.

With all of that in mind, I wanted to look at 2024’s most- and least-consistent scorers in fantasy.

Tristan Cockroft does this yearly for ESPN, as does John Paulsen for 4for4. I’m going to approach this in a similar way to Paulsen. We’ll be looking at each player’s numbers in every week throughout a full season. We’ll then calculate a player’s standard deviation to determine how much variation there was in their fantasy scoring on a week-to-week basis. Then, we’ll standardize these scores across a scale by dividing a player’s fantasy points per game by his standard deviation, to determine that player’s coefficient of variation (CV).

Among all non-QBs (min. 10.0 FPG), here were last season’s 20 least and then most consistent fantasy scorers by coefficient of variation:

Least Consistent

Quick Hits

• We see only two RBs on this list, but 11 RBs on the list of the most consistent producers of 2024. The consistency of usage and production that RBs experience relative to their WR and TE counterparts is a large part of what makes them so valuable for season-long leagues. When all else is equal, you are going to want to prioritize a RB in your flex spot when it comes time for your home league draft.

• It shouldn’t be surprising to see a number of high-ADOT WRs on this list. Alec Pierce (22.2), Rashod Bateman (15.0), and Marvin Harrison Jr. (14.1) all ranked in the top-20 in aDOT this season. Deeper targets have inherent volatility, which makes all three of these players difficult to roster in season-long formats. Harrison Jr., specifically, was able to shed the ‘4th overall pick in the 2024 NFL draft’ limelight to become the poster boy for a sacrificial X WR. Last year, he earned the 10th-most vertically breaking routes (horizontally breaking routes are +28% better for fantasy scoring), and Arizona threw him zero designed targets (fewer than Michael Wilson). Thanks, Drew Petzing!

• A player’s standard deviation is tremendously important for both DFS and best ball. Higher standard deviations reflect a higher potential for an unbeatable score in a given week, at the cost of increased inconsistency. Many players responsible for their positions’ highest-scoring games of the season (Taysom Hill, Jauan Jennings, Jerry Jeudy, Zach Charbonnet, Cade Otton) wind up on this list with extremely high standard deviations. These players can almost always be regarded as elite-tier DFS plays when their ownership sinks to single digits thanks to their position-leading ceilings.

Jauan Jennings, WR, San Francisco 49ers

Jennings' inconsistency was the result of three massive games in a sea of otherwise mediocre scores – 49.5 DraftKings points in Week 3, 25.1 in Week 11, and 28.0 in Week 14 – but his 2024 efficiency is really what gets me excited.

Jennings ranked 12th in 1D/RR (0.12, ahead of Ladd McConkey), 17th in FP/RR (0.54, tied with McConkey), and 14th in YPRR (2.47, ahead of Ja’Marr Chase) of 116 qualifiers who were targeted at least 50 times. Players improve, sometimes dramatically so, and we need to leave room in our fantasy minds for that. It’s certainly rare for Jennings to vault into top-15 levels of WR efficiency in his age-27 season – but I can’t ignore these eye-popping efficiency numbers when Brandon Aiyuk is coming off a torn ACL, Deebo Samuel is in Washington, and Ricky Pearsall is coming off 1.45 YPRR and 0.07 1D/RR (marks that would have ranked 85th and 88th of 116 qualifiers).

While Jennings was inconsistent from a production standpoint, he did earn a target share of at least 20% in 9 of his final 10 games. Over the full season, only Justin Jefferson earned a target share of 20% or higher in over 90% of his games. Top-15 efficiency and consistent usage? I can’t get enough Jennings at his WR42 price tag on DraftKings, even with the modest concerns over his calf injury.

Jayden Reed, WR, Green Bay Packers

It’s impossible to deny that Reed is a great football player. Over the last two seasons, Reed has ranked 8th-best (+2.7) and 10th-best (+2.1) in fantasy points over expectation. Among WRs entering their 2nd or 3rd season, Reed ranks 6th-best in career YPRR. Hyper-efficiency is a noted precursor to increased volume, but Reed earned fewer targets in his sophomore campaign than he did in Year 1. So, what gives?

The obvious excuse for Reed’s 2024 dud was Jordan Love’s health. The Packers averaged a +3.6% PROE (7th-highest over the full year) in Love’s healthy games prior to his Week 8 groin injury, and Reed averaged an impressive 18.3 FPG (WR8 over the full season) in that split. From Week 8 on, Green Bay posted a -6.0% PROE – a mark that would rank ahead of only Philadelphia and Indianapolis over the full season. The fantasy results for Reed were just as depressed as the Packers’ pass rate – 8.9 FPG in his final 10 games.

But it’s easy to argue it’s sunshine and rainbows for Reed in 2025. If we assume a top-12 PROE for Green Bay, and prescribe him the volume he earned in Love’s healthy games, the argument for a low-end WR1 finish writes itself.

But let’s not forget what happened after Love’s groin injury. Reed recorded a 13.9% target share and was out-targeted by Tucker Kraft. Reed still crushed his expectation (+1.5) – he is, after all, a great player – but I’m not sure if Matt LaFleur is willing to give him the opportunity one would normally give a great player.

Over LaFleur’s last four seasons as Packers HC, only Davante Adams has broken through his ‘WR by committee’ approach to exceed a 77% route share. Reed himself has only exceeded a 75% route share 6 times in 33 career games. Keep in mind that we’ve never (within the Fantasy Points Data era) seen a WR finish top-45 at the position while running a route on fewer than two-thirds of a team’s dropbacks. Reed just barely exceeded that mark (69% route share) in 2024.

The argument for Reed beating his WR44 ADP on DraftKings is fairly strong: he’s a great player, and it’s reasonable to expect Green Bay to pass more. But I have a hard time arguing that Reed can beat his ADP in a league-winning way if his coach doesn’t trust him enough to prioritize him over Tucker Kraft across a 10-game stretch. I view Reed as little more than an acceptable value, and training camp reports don’t suggest he’s anything other than that.

Jordan Addison, WR, Minnesota Vikings

I understand being hesitant to draft a player who has a new QB and will be suspended for the first three games of the year. But the suspension doesn’t matter much for fantasy. Weeks 1 through 3 have minimal bearing on your full-season success, and Addison will still be available for the fantasy playoffs.

And there are plenty of reasons to think JJ McCarthy can be great for this offense, or that the offense can be great even if McCarthy isn’t. Kevin O’Connell’s offenses have ranked top-6 by PROE and top-5 by red zone pass rate in every season he’s been a head coach. In 2024, Minnesota threw for the 5th-most passing yards and the 5th-most passing TDs with Sam Darnold under center. In 2023, Minnesota threw for the most passing yards and the 5th-most passing TDs, despite 8 games from Joshua Dobbs and Nick Mullens.

McCarthy could be the best QB that Addison has ever played with. McCarthy was Brett Whitefield’s QB1 in the 2024 draft (ahead of consensus QB1 Caleb Williams), and he’s had roughly 16 months to learn O’Connell’s offensive system – notably more than Darnold or Dobbs had when they took the field for the Vikings.

Keep in mind that Addison averaged 15.8 FPG (~WR14) in his healthy games with Darnold and 13.0 FPG (~WR31) in his healthy games with Mullens. He’s priced as the WR43 on DraftKings (well behind our best ball ranking) despite outperforming that mark with two (potentially) inferior QBs.

It’s rarely talked about with WRs due to the general ambiguity of the target-earning pecking order, but the contingent upside for Addison would be massive if anything happened to Justin Jefferson. We saw this in 2023, when Addison played in four games without Jefferson, but with Kirk Cousins, and he averaged 20.7 FPG – a mark that would have ranked top-4 at the position in each of the last four seasons.

My base case for Addison is that he’s a clear ADP-beater with a path to a WR2 finish (with a healthy Jefferson) or a WR1 finish (if anything happens to Jefferson).

Jerry Jeudy, WR, Cleveland Browns

Nobody wants to touch Browns’ pass catchers in drafts, but Jeudy’s 74.2 DraftKings ADP looks laughable compared to our WR33 (53 overall) ranking. Jeudy’s 2024 inconsistency was a logical consequence of the Deshaun Watson plague and Amari Cooper getting shipped to Buffalo. In the first six weeks of the season (with Cooper and Watson), Jeudy averaged 5.8 targets per game (0.17 TPRR) and 9.3 DraftKings FPG (WR64). From Week 7 on, Jeudy averaged 9.7 targets per game (0.23 TPRR) and 17.4 DraftKings FPG (WR9).

The future QB uncertainty in Cleveland is suppressing Jeudy’s ADP, but I don’t think that makes much sense. Watson and Dorian Thompson-Robinson combined for 4.8 YPA and a 65.0 passer rating across 402 dropbacks (53% of the Browns’ dropbacks). 4.8 YPA is the 2nd-worst mark since JFK was assassinated in 1963, while a 65.0 passer rating is the 2nd-worst mark of the last decade. Unless we think the combination of Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett, Dillon Gabriel, and Shedeur Sanders will be once-in-a-lifetime levels of bad, I don’t see a great reason to be this bearish on Jeudy.

This offense ranked 3rd in plays per game (65.8), threw the ball at a league-leading 65% rate, and is listed as an underdog in 16 of its 17 games this season. That’s a recipe for 40-plus dropbacks per game. Jeudy is the clear WR1 in Cleveland, and he averaged 0.49 FP/RR (29th of 116 qualifiers over the full season) in his eight games without Watson or Thompson-Robinson. A full-time route share in a fast-paced offense that is constantly playing from behind is a recipe for fantasy success at a WR40 price tag.

Most Consistent

Quick Hits

• All of the top-5 most consistent RBs ranked in the top-10 in XFP/G inside the 10. A robust goal-line role is generally a requirement to becoming one of the most consistent producers in fantasy football. Among those high-end players, Aaron Jones appears to be the most susceptible to a reduction in goal-line work after HC Kevin O’Connell noted that Jordan Mason will “bring something to the table” in short-yardage and goal-line situations. I’m fine with Jones in best ball, but I want to be significantly more cautious with taking him in redraft leagues.

• Derrick Henry has long been known as one of the most gamescript sensitive players in fantasy football history. Gamescript dependency doesn’t lend itself to consistency – but Henry ranked as our 12th-most consistent producer last year because the Ravens won 12 games, compared to the 9.0 wins that Tennessee averaged in his final five seasons as a Titan. For 2025, Baltimore is favored in 15 of 17 games, and they are tied for the league’s highest win total at 11.5.

• We see a handful of low-aDOT, high-volume WRs on this list, which shouldn’t be surprising. Players like Wan’Dale Robinson (7.8 targets per game) and Khalil Shakir (6.5 targets per game) were serious target earners but combined for one game over 20.0 fantasy points. I’m only interested in drafting this archetype of WR on best ball or redraft teams that started slow at WR and need consistent production at the position to hold them over – like within robust RB teams. For DFS, these types of players are fine in cash games, but they are the first I remove from my tournament pool.

Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery, RBs, Detroit Lions

It’s incredibly rare to have two RBs from the same backfield with the consistency and the production necessary to qualify for this list. There were two other backfields with teammates who averaged more than 10.0 FPG (Seattle and Tampa Bay), but Seattle finished with Charbonnet as the league’s 2nd-least consistent producer, while Tampa Bay had both of their RBs finish outside the top-40 most consistent producers.

Any split backfield in an offense that recorded the most PPG (33.1) since the 2018 Chiefs and the 2nd-most YPG (415.7) since COVID is going to be awesome for fantasy, but Detroit’s backfield was uniquely great.

Both Gibbs (+4.4) and Montgomery (+2.0) notably exceeded their expectation in healthy games together, and there was only one game all season (Week 8) where both players were fully healthy and didn’t both exceed double-digit fantasy points. Montgomery wound up as 2024’s most consistent producer on the back of an outsized role inside the 10 (2.4 opportunities per game inside the 10, 4th-most), finishing with the 8th-most rushing TDs (12), despite just 185 attempts (27th-most).

Gibbs (13.9 XFP) earned a worse workload than Montgomery (14.3 XFP) in their healthy games together, but that didn’t matter when it came to single-game upside. Gibbs recorded the 3rd-most games of 25.0-plus fantasy points (5) despite the 14th-best workload at the position over the full season. He did it on raw efficiency; Gibbs led the league in explosive run rate (10%), ranked 6th in MTF/Att (0.23), and ranked 4th at the position in YPRR (1.85). Their respective standard deviations largely capture the gap here in teammate efficiency; Montgomery was largely a byproduct of an efficient offense, while Gibbs was more directly responsible for the offense's efficiency.

For 2025, it should go without saying that the easiest possible win for new Lions OC John Morton would be to feed Gibbs. Gibbs was notably more efficient than Montgomery, but HC Dan Campbell has already noted (via Coachspeak index) that Montgomery is “one of our best offensive players. That’s not changing right now.”

The chances that this is a split backfield like what we saw in 2024 keep Gibbs out of contention as the 1.01, but Montgomery would bear the brunt of any offensive regression. Remember, this was one of the best offenses of the last half-decade, and Montgomery scored 33% of his fantasy points on TDs and handled 62% of backfield XFP inside the 10. If Detroit scores fewer TDs, that hurts Montgomery. Detroit scoring fewer TDs also implies a higher pass rate, which benefits Gibbs (who earned 61% of backfield targets when the Lions were trailing).

I like a soft fade on Montgomery (outside of Lions stacks in best ball), and a neutral position on Gibbs at their respective ADPs.

AJ Brown, WR, Philadelphia Eagles

Brown was notably more consistent in 2024 than he was in 2023 (1.69 CV), which can be attributed to the Eagles' pass rate falling from 58.6% in 2023 to 48% the previous year.

That dropoff in pass rate didn’t notably impact Brown’s output (17.0 FPG in 2023 compared to 16.7 FPG in 2024), but it did limit his spike weeks. Brown had just 3 games last season (23%) in which he earned double-digit targets, compared to 8 such games in 2023 (47%).

This isn’t something that matters as much for season-long leagues (you are starting Brown every week regardless), but this dramatically altered Brown’s best ball profile year-over-year. Brown didn’t register a top-80 fantasy outing by a WR last year after recording three of the top-45 WR outings the year prior. Brown (12.8% advance rate) helped out best ball teams about as much as Greg Dortch (13.0%) or Treylon Burks (13.3%) – a rather dramatic change from the 22.5% advance rate he recorded in 2023 (special thanks to Tom Strachan for the advance rate data).

It’s always important that we understand what we are betting on. At a WR12 ADP, Brown will need some regression from either Saquon Barkley or the Eagles defense to be a true difference maker in best ball this year. Given that Barkley (8th-most rushing yards in any season ever) and the Eagles defense (4th-fewest PPG allowed of the last half-decade) were both historically great, some baseline regression here is highly likely.

Tony Pollard, RB, Tennessee Titans

Pollard was never able to turn his consistent production into any massive fantasy outings, recording as many outings of 20-plus fantasy points (1) as Justice Hill and Dameon Pierce. This was despite playing in five games without Tyjae Spears, where Pollard averaged 17.8 XFP/G and 24.2 touches per game – marks that would have ranked 3rd and 1st among all RBs over the full season.

With Spears now dealing with a high ankle sprain, there is a chance we see Pollard earn league-leading usage to start the season. But can he capitalize on that?

If Pollard and this offense experience any positive regression, the answer to that question is almost certainly a yes. Pollard was the league’s 6th-least efficient back by fantasy points over expectation last year (-2.3), and was even worse in the games Spears missed (-3.9). That wasn’t entirely his fault; Tennessee ranked 3rd-worst in yards before contact per attempt (1.30), and all 17 of the Titans' games were quarterbacked by Will Levis or Mason Rudolph. Despite these handicaps, Pollard still ranked 6th-best in yards after contact per attempt (2.76).

We know the usage can be overall RB1-esque if Spears isn’t in the fold, and we have to assume No. 1 overall pick Cam Ward improves offensive output beyond what we saw from Levis and Rudolph last year. I find myself happily clicking Pollard at his 77.0 ADP on DraftKings, as he’s effectively just a leveraged bet on the Titans’ offense improving this season.