Deshaun Watson Fantasy Stats: Fantasy Four Factors 2023

Fantasy Four Factors capture four key aspects of a player’s upcoming season: consensus rankings, pedigree and past success, performance trends over more recent games, and consistency both in performance and snap count. 

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Deshaun Watson Fantasy Fantasy Football Four Factors

I’ll start by saying I won’t be drafting Deshaun this year. He is gross, and we don’t need to re-litigate everything. But, I’ll still provide my analysis independent of personal feelings.

Deshaun Watson has one of the strangest four factors profiles I’ve ever seen. The problem is that he barely has any meaningful stats over the last two years. He only played 6 games last year and none the year before, leading to a 0/10 pedigree. For us, pedigree only considers 2 years. In the NFL, this is a lifetime and looking further back might be wishful thinking.

Even worse, Deshaun had an awful performance in the consistency category. A 1/10 is abysmal, especially for quarterbacks. The problem was that he was never on the field. However, even when he was on the field he was inconsistent and had high variance. This leads us to the next category.

Deshaun Watson has the highest trend score of any player we looked at. Trend scores look only at the games a player played in over the last 2 years, so for Deshaun we have 6 games to look at. In those 6 games he went four games averaging worse than QB 20. Then, in the last 2 games of the year he finished QB5 and QB6. To our model, this looks like a humongous jump of 15 spots for the last third of the dataset. 

However, this data is perhaps a bit misleading. It is a small sample size. It was against two bad teams (Pittsburgh and Washington). It was in weeks where many elite quarterbacks sat to prep for the playoffs. I think the 10/10 is a huge overstatement.

This all leads to a 6/10 consensus score, roughly the QB9. This is probably a fair placement, but I think for all the question marks around this guy and the huge risk, that price tag is probably a bit steep. 

Deshaun Watson Stats Analysis

There are two sides to the Deshaun Watson coin this year. First, the offense is pretty talented. Nick Chubb might be the best RB in the NFL. Amari Cooper and Elijah Moore are interesting WRs with high upside. And the last few games last year Deshaun did have some pretty good performances maybe showing he is back to form!

But dig a little deeper. Those strong performances which inflate Deshaun Watson’s trend score were against…Pittsburgh and Washington. Easy to put points up against them. And Deshaun Watson also put up his worst passing stats last year by a wide, wide margin. And he is still a high-baggage QB coming off the worst performance of his career and not playing for 2 years before that. I think I’ll pass even aside from any moral qualms. 

Fantasy Football Four Factors Explained

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