First, some big news: I recently expanded my database. It now contains (very nearly) complete career data for every QB, RB, WR, and TE active in the NFL at any point after 1993. That comes to about 950 players and over 4500 player-seasons. In particular, I've got 73 different WRs who have at one point scored 140 or more fantasy points in a season (my cutoff for "legitimate fantasy starter"), and those 73 combined to accomplish that task 177 times. So we shouldn't have any problem finding some guys who were in situations similar to Keyshawn's current one, right?
Wrong. Even with all that fresh new data, it seems that there is very little precedent for a receiver of Johnson's caliber changing teams in the offseason. I rounded up a list of all WRs who scored 140 fantasy points, and then played for a different team the following year. I only found 10:
|-- YR1 --||-- YR2 --|
LastName FirstName YR1 AGE TM FPT TM FPT
---------------------------------------------------------
Alexander Derrick 1997 26 bal 155 kan 123
Brooks Billy 1995 31 buf 142 was 22
Early Quinn 1995 30 nor 157 buf 104
Emanuel Bert 1997 27 atl 153 tam 76
Graham Jeff 1995 26 chi 154 nyj 115
Ismail Raghib 1998 29 car 150 dal 146
Martin Tony 1998 33 atl 154 mia 134
Miller Anthony 1993 28 sdg 158 den 141
Rison Andre 1994 27 atl 157 cle 88
Thigpen Yancey 1997 28 pit 182 ten 67
Everything there should be clear: FPT is fantasy points. AGE is the
player's age during the first season (by the way, in this and all my
other studies, I'm defining a player's age to be his age as of
December 31 of the given year).
First things first: as you can see, this group's production went in the tank big-time after they switched teams. They went from an average of 156 fantasy points to 102, a decline of 35%. All ten saw their fantasy points drop. By now, you should have been expecting an overall decline, but maybe not that big.
To get a frame of reference, we take a quick look at all WRs who scored over 140 fantasy points in a given year. Here's the breakdown, with the above numbers repeated for comparison:
YR1 YR2
Category Number FPT FPT CHANGE
-----------------------------------------------------
All WRs over 140 147 176 141 -20%
over 140 / changed tm 10 156 102 -35%
------- the next year ----------
Category Number Improved Declined 0eclined
---------------------------------------------------------------
All WRs over 140 147 33 114 78%
over 140 / changed tm 10 0 10 100%
This doesn't bode well for Keyshawn, but I'm not ready
to slide him down my draft list -- not yet anyway. Looking at the
list above, we really don't see many guys who are truly comparable to
Johnson. Brooks, Early and Martin were all on the wrong side
of 30 when they changed teams (Johnson was 27 last year), and of the
others, only Rison and maybe Miller had a track record as good as
Keyshawn's. The others were either inconsistent or coming
off their first good season.
Bottom line: there are just not enough examples of high-quality WRs changing teams to get a good read on Keyshawn's fate. What little evidence there is suggests that Keyshawn is in for a rough year, and that's without even taking into account the run-first nature of the Bucs' offense. All that said, I'm ignoring the data and rating Keyshawn higher than most. Call it a hunch -- even hard-core number-crunchers are allowed to use those from time to time.
Let's now turn to the more general question. What about all the other, more ordinary, WRs who changed teams? Is there a general trend that might tell us something about Shawn Jefferson and Bert Emanuel and Curtis Conway?
I'm just a little surprised to say that the answer appears to be yes. To get a data set as large as possible, let's lower our cutoff to 60 fantasy points. With the lower standards, we can now find gobs of receivers who changed teams -- 91 of them, to be exact. Here is the breakdown:
YR1 YR2
Category Number FPT FPT CHANGE
-----------------------------------------------------
All WRs over 60 589 117 102 -13%
over 60 / changed tm 91 99 67 -32%
------- the next year ----------
Category Number Improved Declined 0eclined
---------------------------------------------------------------
All WRs over 60 589 208 381 65%
over 60 / changed tm 91 16 75 82%
A much sharper decline for the receivers who changed teams. But
wait, there's more to the story. As it turns out, the team-switchers
tended to be older as a group than the non-switchers. The average
age of the movers was 29.3, and the average age of the entire group was
27.8, which means the decline could be at least partly due to age and
not the change of scenery. To correct for this, we give one final
breakdown, focusing in on only receivers aged 26-28 (in the first
year):
YR1 YR2
Category Number FPT FPT CHANGE
-----------------------------------------------------------------
over 60 / age 26-28 209 119 104 -13%
over 60 / changed tm /age 26-28 39 98 71 -28%
-- the next year --
Category No. Imp Dec 0ec
-----------------------------------------------------------
over 60 / age 26-28 209 74 135 65%
over 60 / changed tm / age 26-28 39 8 31 79%
The result is still just as clear. It does appear that receivers who
switch teams are more likely to bite the dust than receivers who
don't, and this squares with conventional wisdom. Maybe it takes
awhile for WRs to learn the new system, or maybe this means that, in
general, the teams that let these receivers go knew what they were
doing.