In a season where the entire first rounds of most people’s fantasy football drafts have played below standards or been injured more often than not (with the exceptions of Ronnie Brown and more recently LaDanian Tomlinson), I was left with the question, “What the fedge?!” (Give it up for my boy Grant from Ghost Hunters!)

I started thinking about this silly past time and the topsy-turvy way it’s treated us all this season, and I thought, “Are wide receivers taking over the game?” Randy Moss, Plaxico Burress, Braylon Edwards, T.J. Houshmandzadeh… These guys are tearing up the game right now. Case in point, going back to 2001, there has not been a wide receiver in the Overall Top 10 Fantasy Points earners list. Not even one.

This season, so far, there’s two. Randy Moss and Plaxico Burress.

So, I decided to burn a day making a spreadsheet. (You can download the whole spreadsheet here if you feel like nerding out a little.) I wanted to see just what the stats were up to this season in comparison to past seasons. Turns out, I was kind of right…

Take a look at the chart generated by the Fantasy Points Per Game generated by the Top 15 players at each position:

So, yeah, I was kind of right in the way that it would appear that Wide Receivers are way up this season. Wide Receivers averaged around 11.35 fantasy points per game over the past six seasons. In 2007, Wide Receivers are up almost a full point to 12.27 points per game. Now, one point may not seem like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things it is.

At the same time, if Wide Receivers are up then obviously their providers, the QB, should be up as well. Well, not so much, it would seem. The top 15 quarterbacks averaged 16.25 points per game over the past 6 seasons prior to 2007. In 2007, they’re averaging 16.46. That’s barely one-fifth of a point.

If you look back to 2001, you see the beginning of a rocky crag of peaks and valleys for QBs, starting with the pinnacle of their mountain range, a 17.77 points per game average. Over the next 6 years, we see them dip and rise. However, if you look back to 2001 on the wide receiver line, it’s almost flat. It stays almost flat right up until this season.

What does that tell us then in 2007 where the Top 15 Wide Receivers point averages are up a good bit for the first time in 7 years, yet the QB totals fall right around the average? That’s telling us that quarterbacks are targeting the Top 15 receivers far more frequently than receivers who didn’t fall onto the list.

So, that means while many of us were focused on the point deviations of positions to tell us that you HAVE to draft running backs first since the first 3 are so much better than the other 12 in the Top 15, that we ended up failing ourselves when teams went pass happy.

Here’s the deviation chart to show you how far apart #1 and #15 were, points-wise, over the last 7 seasons. It’s funny how you can see in 2004 when Peyton Manning set the TD record in 2004. That’s also the season that Antonio Gates came into the league. You can clearly see where LT set the TD mark in 2006, and the Ravens owned the D/ST position.

Now, all the while we’ve seen the top notch receivers blow through the roof, we’re seeing running backs shit all over themselves. The ones who aren’t injured aren’t producing, and the ones who are producing are generally people who weren’t on your hot list at the beginning of the season. So, we’re seeing good running backs with low numbers and mediocre running backs brought in to fill in for their rotten predecessors with higher numbers. That being said, we’re not seeing a large deviation in running backs this season. The nobodies are putting up numbers as good as the stars. For example, last season’s point deviation between LaDanian Tomlinson (#1) and Ahman Green (#15) was 254 points(the difference between #1 & #2 that season was 100). However, the deviation this season among running backs is only 63. Granted, that number will get higher as the season wears on and the cream begins to float to the top.

But, right now…it looks like everything we thought we knew was wrong. Thus is life, thus is fantasy football.

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