From now till Thursday, September 1 — the day of the final preseason games — FantasyLabs will be releasing our 2016 team previews: 32 previews in 32 days. Are you ready for some football?
Miami Dolphins Team Preview
After back to back 8-8 seasons in 2013 and 2014, the Miami Dolphins took a step back in 2015, finishing with a record of 6-10. With just the 27th-ranked scoring offense and 19th-ranked scoring defense, the Dolphins fired head coach Joe Philbin after Week 4. Former Chicago Bears offensive coordinator Adam Gase is now the man in charge of returning the Dolphins to prominence.
No matter how you spin it, when any team loses 10 games it’s not good — but in the Dolphins’ case those 10 losses were very bad. Only three of the 10 losses were by seven points or fewer. The Dolphins were consistently beaten up by everyone, especially the AFC South. A Week 17 win against the Patriots prevented the Dolphins from getting swept by their own division, but the Dolphins’ five divisional losses came by an average of 20.6 points. They were regularly trounced by the teams most familiar with them.
With the departure of Lamar Miller, the Dolphins will be relying on an array of unproven and injury-prone running backs, but Ryan Tannehill’s fifth year as a starter could be his best yet, as Jarvis Landry and DeVante Parker arguably give Tannehill the most dangerous weapons of his career. Vegas has set the Dolphins 2016 win total at seven, signaling that not much improvement is expected in Miami. Despite a poor outlook for the Dolphins’ team success in 2016, there is reason to be excited about some of the Dolphins’ fantasy prospects.
Quarterback
Ryan Tannehill
2015 was another up-and-down year for Tannehill. His completion percentage dropped from 66.4 percent in 2014 to 61.9 percent in 2015, and while on the surface that drop looks bad the fact is that Tannehill’s high 2014 completion percentage was a function of his insistence on not throwing the ball downfield. Tannehill’s yards/attempt average has increased each of the last three seasons, and his clip of 7.2 yards/attempt in 2015 ranked 23rd in the NFL, above the likes of Matt Ryan and Derek Carr. Tannehill is still far from a consistent downfield passer, but 2015 was a step in the right direction, as Tannehill in 2014 ranked just 36th out of 39 quarterbacks (who had at least five starts) in yards/completion.
With an average of 18.21 fantasy points per week, Tannehill finished the 2015 season as the 23rd-best DraftKings quarterback on a points-per-game basis. Tannehill was especially on his game when he was at Sun Life Stadium. According to our Trends tool, Tannehill had a Plus/Minus of +3.82 when the Dolphins were at home:
Tannehill’s high 85.7 percent Consistency is evidence that, in ideal situations, Tannehill can be a productive fantasy asset. Of course, last year Tannehill was bad on the road. Four times he failed to throw a touchdown in a game. Three of those games were on the road.
While Tannehill has the ability to run, his 141 yards on 32 attempts weren’t enough to offset his lack of passing touchdowns last year. The combination of Landry and Parker could help catapult Tanny to new heights in 2016, but there is a chance that Tannehill has plateaued as a fantasy quarterback, as he has between 24 and 27 touchdowns passing in each of the past three seasons. Still, Tannehill has proven he is capable of producing sporadic big games. Early season matchups against the weak pass defenses of Cleveland (Week 3) and Tennessee (Week 5) bode well for his fantasy prospects.
Matt Moore
Moore’s career 33-28 TD/INT ratio isn’t terrible for a backup, but Moore has never found much success consistently moving the ball down the field, throwing for over 300 yards just once in 25 career starts. Moore hasn’t started a game since 2011, and as the backup for the duration of Tannehill’s career he has attempted just 30 passes from 2012 to 2015. Moore doesn’t project to offer much upside as a fantasy option if Tannehill were to go down, and any production of his would likely be dependent on Landry and Parker both becoming elite receiving options. In all reality, if forced to start he would probably limit their production severely.
Wide Receivers
Jarvis Landry
To say that Landry had a nice start to his 2015 season would be an understatement. A DraftKings Plus/Minus of +5.07 in the first half of the season showed that Landry could still thrive in the Dolphins’ sometimes vertically-challenged offense:
In the end, Landry’s 110 catches and 1,157 yards were major improvements on his rookie-year totals, but his low total of six all-purpose touchdowns led to his finishing outside the top 10 in wide receiver DraftKings points per game. But with 166 targets (sixth in the NFL in 2015), Landry’s high number of opportunities in the Dolphins offense bodes well for his chances to be a consistent (even if low-end) WR1 each week.
Despite having a low touchdown total in 2015, Landry has a history of red-zone targets suggesting that his touchdown total will increase this year. With 22 red-zone targets in 2015, Landry tied for fourth in the league. However, Landry converted just three of these targets into touchdowns, making him the only receiver with 20 or more red-zone targets not to convert at least five into touchdowns. In 2014 Landry caught 11 of his 13 red-zone targets for five touchdowns, showing that he does possess the ability to be a fairly effective red-zone threat. Landry will get every opportunity as the No. 1 receiver to make big plays all over the field. It’s just up to Landry to convert these opportunities into scores more often than he did last year.
DeVante Parker
The 14th pick in the 2014 NFL draft took awhile to make an impact (totaling just four catches through his first 10 games), but once given the opportunity Parker made his presence felt in a big way:
Part of being a great football player is being able to produce consistently week in and week out, so it’s not a given by any means that Parker will be able to convert this strong six-game sample into a complete 16-game season. Still, Parker’s final six-game average in 2015 stretched over a full season would have ranked him above Landry in total fantasy points.
At 6’3” and 209 lbs., Parker has a WR1’s size and athleticism (including a 4.45-second 40-yard dash), but in an age in which rookie receivers produce earlier and earlier in their careers Parker’s 494 yards and three touchdowns make him just the 50th-most productive rookie wide receiver since 2010 (in terms of total fantasy points). Parker’s hot end to 2015 indicates that he has a good chance to reach his first-round expectations, but Parker will need to show that he has the ability to be a real threat each week, especially as a scorer, since a lot of the team’s receptions and yards will likely go to Landry.
Also, keep an eye on Parker’s recent hamstring issue. While the Dolphins ‘remain optimistic’, as a rookie Parker had issues with a foot injury that caused him to miss time.
Kenny Stills
Stills is a burner. His blazing career 16.5 yards/reception average ranks sixth among all wide receivers to record at least 100 catches since 2013. This big-play ability was on constant display during Stills’ two years in New Orleans, but 2015 marked career lows for Stills in targets, receptions, yards, and touchdowns. For Stills, Miami last year might as well have been the Bermuda Triangle.
Stills is a weekly boom-or-bust receiver (as evidenced by his four games in 2015 without a reception). The big problem with Stills is that, unless Gase opens up the offense and unveils a much more aggressive Tannehill, Stills’ boom potential isn’t actually all that great. His most productive game (by far) in 2015 was a 5-81-1 outing, and he didn’t record more than three receptions in a game the rest of the season. Overall, he finished 12 of his 16 games with no more than two catches. Even with Parker a non-factor in the offense for the first 10 games, Stills failed to find any sort of consistent or explosive fantasy production, making him a very iffy fantasy option for 2016, even if he were to see a slight increase in targets.
Leonte Carroo
Rutgers’ No. 1 receiver for the past two years, the third-round rookie Carroo averaged 101.1 yards and 1.25 touchdowns per game as a senior. Carroo possesses a nice combination of size and athleticism, but at only 6’0” and 211 lbs. he’s likely to function primarily as a possession receiver in the offense. Despite this, Caroo finds himself in a friendly offense for his skill set, as the Dolphins have proved that they can get fantasy production out of receivers who lack elite speed (Landry runs just a 4.77-second 40-yard dash). With the ability to line up all over the formation, he should see playing time if any of the receivers ahead of him are injured, and it’s possible that during the season he could overtake Stills even if injuries don’t play a factor.
Matt Hazel
With zero career catches and good-but-not-great college career production at Coastal Carolina (2,553 receiving yards and 28 touchdowns), Hazel isn’t a lock to make the team this year. At 6’1” and 198 lbs., the third-year Hazel combines average size with average athleticism. There is little reason to expect any sort of fantasy production from Hazel in 2016.
Jakeem Grant
After running a 4.34-second 40-yard dash at his Texas Tech pro day, Grant was selected by the Dolphins in the sixth round and officially became this year’s J.J. Nelson. Severely undersized at 5’6” and 165 lbs., Grant has long odds of becoming an every-down receiver in the NFL. Still, Grant has the potential to become an elite returner in the NFL (he had four return touchdowns in college), and as a senior he was Tech’s leading playmaker, with 90 receptions for 1,268 yards and 10 touchdowns to which he added eight rushes for 68 yards and two more scores. Any receiver who has a 10-125-3 stat line against Louisiana State’s defense is probably more than a track star. Especially if he returns kicks for the Dolphins, he has the potential to light up a guaranteed prize pool in 2016 if the team gives him a few snaps per game.
Running Back
Jay Ajayi
At the moment it appears that Ajayi will be the Dolphins’ starting running back in Week 1. However, Arian Foster wasn’t signed to sit on the bench (if healthy), and Ajayi will likely lose most of his passing down reps to the veteran.
This is not to say that Ajayi isn’t capable of being a three-down back in the NFL. As a junior at Boise State, Ajayi became the first player in Football Bowl Subdivision history to record 1,800 yards rushing and 500 yards receiving in a single season. Unfortunately, Ajayi didn’t get much of a chance to show what he could do as Lamar Miller’s rookie backup last year, as he never received more than nine carries in a game and averaged only 3.8 yards/carry when he did get the ball.
Ajayi has good size at 6’0” and 221 lbs., and while his 40-yard dash of 4.57 seconds isn’t amazing he was a top performer at the combine in his jumps and shuttle drills. If/when Foster gets hurt, Ajayi possesses the skills to thrive as a three-down back in Gase’s zone-running scheme, but the Dolphins will need to change their habit of not giving their top running back many opportunities to touch the ball (see: Miller, Lamar).
Arian Foster
Foster’s 2016 fantasy outlook is almost entirely dependent on how he recovers from his ruptured Achilles. Can he stay healthy? Foster has played just 25 of a potential 48 games since 2013. But when Foster has been physically right, only a few running backs have been able to match his production:
With a Plus/Minus of +4.97 and average point total of 22.03 from 2014 to 2015, Foster has flashed his high-level ability when he has been on the field. A large part of what makes Foster such a consistently effective back is his receiving skill, as he pulled in 78.6 percent of his targets last year, turning 22 receptions into 227 yards.
It wouldn’t be shocking to see Foster take over the Dolphins’ full-time running back job if he manages to stay healthy. However, the likelier scenario is that Miami will deploy Foster as its primary receiving back. In Foster’s four-game 2015 campaign, he averaged just 2.6 yards/carry, which was dead last among the 72 running backs to get at least 50 carries. This average was by far Foster’s lowest of his career. Still, the Houston Texans in 2015 averaged just 3.7 yards/carry, so it’s possible that Foster’s struggles had more to do with the Texans than his declining ability.
Kenyan Drake
The Dolphins third-round draft pick, Drake served as Alabama’s change-of-pace back for his entire career, spelling first Eddie Lacy, then T.J. Yeldon, and finally Heisman winner Derrick Henry. Drake can apparently do it all — except be a lead back. He’s certainly a shifty runner (with a career average of 6.4 yards/carry), and he can also catch the ball out of the backfield (with 29 receptions as a senior). In his final year of college, he also returned kicks, famously taking one for a touchdown in the National Championship Game. With a broken leg and fractured arm already in his injury history, Drake faces durability concerns, but his 4.45-second 40-yard dash, as well as the possibility that he was underutilized on a loaded Alabama roster, makes him an intriguing and potentially high-upside fantasy back. He’ll just need to see touches. (And he might get them if Foster suffers an injury.)
Damian Williams
At 5’11” and 222 lbs., Williams looks the part of an NFL running back, and his 4.45-second 40-yard dash demonstrates why Williams seemed to have such a bright future after starring as a JUCO All-American and later an Oklahoma Sooner. A career 3.5 yards/attempt average in two NFL seasons hasn’t helped Williams find a role in the Dolphins’ backfield, but he is athletic and has back-to-back seasons with 21 receptions. If he had the opportunity to see regular touches, he could be a three-down back because of his size and receiving ability.
Tight End
Jordan Cameron
After posting an 80-reception, 917-yard, and seven-touchdown 2013 season with the Browns, Cameron arrived in Miami ready to repeat that production as Tannehill’s No. 1 tight end. Despite playing in all 16 games for the first time in his career, Cameron hauled in just 35 receptions for 386 yards and three touchdowns in 2015. Looking at his game-by-game numbers, Cameron had every chance to make plays during the first five games of 2015, and his early struggles appear to have greatly reduced his role in the Dolphin’s offense for the rest of the season:
More concerning is the fact that tight ends have generally struggled to find much production with Tannehill at quarterback. Charles Clay’s 2013 season of 69 receptions, 759 yards, and six touchdowns is by far the most productive campaign from a Dolphins tight end since Tannehill joined the team in 2012, and Cameron doesn’t seem likely to come close to these numbers after his brutally inefficient 2015 season. Parker’s growing role in the offense will also take targets away from Cameron, and second tight end Dion Sims will still have a role on the team as well.
Dion Sims
A diminished role in 2015 saw Sims record just 25 targets in 13 games after getting 36 targets in 14 games the previous year. Sims, with just four career touchdowns on 48 receptions, has received fewer than five targets in 40 of his 42 career games. Even with a Cameron injury, Sims likely won’t be a meaningful fantasy option in 2016.
Two-Minute Warning
While the Dolphins offense should go as far as Tannehill is able to take it, solid weekly fantasy options are available at both receiver and running back. Based on how the Dolphins’ 2016 opponents did last year against the skill positions (on a per-game basis), there are plenty of opportunities for some Dolphins to ball out this year:
Early season matchups against Cleveland, Tennessee, and Pittsburgh look awfully tasty for Tannehill, Landry, and Parker, and Weeks 10-12 figure to be good for the running game. While Vegas’ win total of seven games isn’t a great sign for the team, don’t overlook the talent the Dolphins possess at wide receiver and running back, especially once the crowded Miami backfield is cleared up.
