Fantasy Football Sleeper: Detroit Lions WR Golden Tate
Tate garnered some attention in the second half of the 2013 season for producing some big games while Percy Harvin was out with migraines. The best 3 of these big games: Week 8 at St. Louis (93 receiving yards, 2 touchdowns), Week 10 at Atlanta (106 yards, 1 touchdown), and in Week 17, the last game of the regular season, Tate turned in a fantastic performance of 129 yards and a touchdown.
During the offseason Tate left Seattle and was picked up by Detroit. This QB change from Russell Wilson to Matthew Stafford is sure to have a positive impact on Tate’s production. This may seem counter intuitive: Wilson just won his team his Super Bowl, and Stafford has seen his production drop significantly in back-to-back seasons since his excellent 2011 campaign.
It’s true: If you’re a coach in the National Football League, you would certainly want Wilson over Stafford. But when it comes to fantasy football, Stafford is far and away a better QB option than Wilson, and his receivers benefit from this fact.
Consider this: Stafford put up a ridiculous 1,361 passing attempts in the last two years. Compare that to Wilson’s lowly figure of just 800 passing attempts in the past two seasons. Tate will get many more opportunities for yards and touchdowns in Detroit, a pass-first offense, than he did in Seattle, a run-first offense.
Yes, most of Stafford’s targets are directed to the best receiver in the league, Calvin Johnson. But having the NFL’s premier wide out as a teammate should actually help Tate out. Defenses will be forced to key in on Johnson, nearly always double and sometimes triple teaming him. This will give Tate many 1 on 1 matchups, and if he can develop some decent chemistry with Stafford, he can easily eclipse 1,000 yards and a healthy number of touchdowns in 2014.
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