There might be no team with better vibes around it in the entire NFL. The perennial lovable losers proved last season that they could go toe-to-toe with the NFC’s best last season, and that they’re not your Daddy’s Lions. The kneecap biters have some high hopes coming into this season, with three different skill position players ranked inside the top five at their position, and 6 players going inside the top-106. Let’s dive a bit deeper into their ranks to find an overvalued, undervalued, and sleeper player headed into the 2024 fantasy football season!
Overvalued: Jahmyr Gibbs, Running Back (RB4, Pick 11 Overall)
Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t like Jahmyr Gibbs. I stood alone and suffered the slings and arrows of people on Twitter calling me stupid for saying he would be fine after he started the year slow (13.3 touches for 62.3 yards per game). From week 7 through the end of the fantasy season, Gibbs flipped it around, averaging 16.8 touches for 98.2 yards per game. He was a monster, scoring a touchdown per game in that stretch as well (he finished with 9 games inside the top five at the position). Still, he is overvalued as the #4 running back off the board, thanks to David Montgomery’s presence.
Montgomery stole touches, and touchdowns, from Gibbs last season, and if you look at the running backs going after him (Jonathan Taylor & Saquon Barkley), they have no competition for carries, which gives me extreme pause taking Gibbs above them. Montgomery isn’t going away, and it means that taking Gibbs at RB4 is taking him at his ceiling.
Undervalued: Jared Goff, Quarterback (QB13, Pick 105 Overall)
There isn’t a quarterback in the NFL who is as set up as Jared Goff going into the 2024 season, with the one exception of Mr. Flexy-Flex himself, Brock Purdy. If you look at it from a pure fantasy football perspective, Goff has three top five players at their positions by ADP (Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jahmyr Gibbs & Sam LaPorta), and he is Mr. Reliable. He has missed just four games over the last eight seasons, making him one of the most bankable fantasy football QB2s on the planet. He’ll also be quarterbacking the team with the third-most projected points according to Las Vegas, and he’ll return in the same role (he threw the ball the second-most times in 2023).
Since joining the Lions, he is one of four players with 12,000 passing yards and 75+ touchdowns, joining Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Justin Herbert. He also has the fewest interceptions of that group. Among all projected 2024 starters, he has the third-lowest interception rate since joining the Lions.
In short: he’s going to play all 17 games, and he’s going to throw the ball a ton to one of the best skill position groups in the NFL.
Sleeper: Jameson Williams, Wide Receiver (WR47, Pick 106 Overall)
It’s do-or-die for Jameson Williams this season, as the former top-ten pick is yet to make a splash in his first two seasons in the NFL. Granted, he started his rookie year recovering from a January ACL tear, and he missed six games in his sophomore season due to a gambling suspension. That makes this year the first “normal” season that Williams will have in the NFL. Jameson Williams didn’t get a lot of targets last year (41), but thanks to the fifth-highest average depth of target (15.6 yards), and the second-highest contested catch rate (75%), he finished with a respectable 1.96 fantasy points per target (good for 28th).
The Lions used Jameson Williams so rarely, that it’s hard to make a case for him. But, we’ve seen flashes of relevance from the Lions’ field stretcher in recent years, with Kalif Raymond and Josh Reynolds combining for seven top-36 games last season. He’s the “I like him better in Best Ball” king, however, as we will likely have no idea when to start him.
