If you look at just the fantasy football options on the Saints, then you likely anticipate that they will have one of the better offenses in the league. Derek Carr is highly proficient, and he’s looped so far past overrated that he’s sneakily underrated now. He’s throwing some nice weapons, too. Chris Olave and Alvin Kamara are universally drafted, Rashid Shaheed is a sexy sleeper, and Taysom Hill is one of the most annoyingly useful fantasy football tight ends out there. When Juwan Johnson returns from injury this offense could have seven fantasy-relevant players, if everything goes as planned. Unfortunately, what you’re seeing right off-screen is their offensive line breaking down and letting yet another free rusher at Carr. The Saints have the worst offensive line in the league. Before Saints fans come at me, please direct your ire at PFF, Draft Sharks, PFN, Fantasy Data, and The 33rd Team, who all have the Saints as a bottom-four unit in the league.
That’s where the rub lies; this team is going to have to figure that out on the fly. What does this mean for their fantasy football options in 2024 fantasy football leagues? Let’s figure it out!
Overvalued: Chris Olave, Wide Receiver (WR10, Pick 17 Overall)
Gird your loins, I’m about to get upset about people misusing statistics.
One of the statistics that people like to bandy about is unrealized air yards. I have a major bone to pick with unrealized air yards in its raw, uncut form. Unrealized air yards are an extremely useful tool to find opportunities to produce left by the wayside for whatever reason. These 50 unrealized air yards, I bet there was a long catch and run touchdown in there! Those 75 over there, that was a nice PPR week. If only luck was on their side, things would have turned out differently, right? Wrong! Unrealized air yards only matter if something changes. And, so far, nothing has changed in New Orleans. It’s the same folks that have been there the last two seasons, where Olave has ranked in the top five in unrealized air yards in each of his first two seasons in the league. Now, people are gamblers fallacy-ing him into being a second-round pick, claiming that his unrealized air yards have to become sweet, sweet fantasy points eventually. They don’t! And that has nothing to do with Chris Olave, that has to do with the team around him.
To put this hyperbolically, I’ve cloned myself six times. These clones now play the five OL positions and QB for the Saints. I’m the offensive coordinator, and I am going to try to throw to Olave as much as possible. Here’s what will happen every play: five terrible offensive linemen get destroyed and the quarterback does his best with what he’s got, and he chucks it downfield to Chris Olave. The play literally never works, and Chris Olave finishes leading the league in unrealized air yards, yet there are zero catches in there.
Fast forward to 2025, if I run the same group of six Jeff clones out there, do we expect Chris Olave to cash in those air yards? The Saints are running everything out the same as they did the two previous years, yet fantasy managers are cashing in their chips this year.
To bash all that together into one mega sentence: all the unrealized air yards in the world won’t matter if the Saints OL is going to be the worst in the league (it is), Derek Carr can’t get Chris Olave the ball because of it (Olave ranked outside the top-40 in catchable ball rate in each of his first two years in the league) and if Olave struggles to catch the desperation balls (67th & 75th in contested catch rate so far in his career & 72nd and 63rd in true catch rate so far). It doesn’t all add up, folks.
Undervalued: Alvin Kamara, Running Back (RB16, Pick 51 Overall)
People in the fantasy football world are down on Alvin Kamara because his rushing efficiency wasn’t what it was in years past when he was a top-two or top-three fantasy option every season. While that Alvin Kamara likely closed its final chapter back on Christmas 2020 (when he had six touchdowns in the fantasy football finals!), a portion of old Kamara still exists.
Alvin Kamara is still one of the premiere pass-catching fantasy football running backs in the NFL, and because of this, I truly do not care about his rushing efficiency. In an ever-present desire to one-up each other’s ability to evaluate the player, the fantasy football cognoscenti have decided that the fantasy football RB3 will be a pick outside of the top 50. It’s truly mind-boggling because we don’t evaluate player talent, we evaluate player talent through the lens of fantasy football points accumulation. To appreciate Alvin Kamara, you need to be a pass-catching running back pilled. To put it simply, one catch is worth ten yards. That’s it. A hard-nosed, rumbling, well-fought run from Kenneth Walker probably results in seven yards; that’s 0.7 fantasy points or half as many fantasy points as Derek Carr panickily dumping off the ball to Alvin Kamara for 4 yards.
Simply do this: when you see Rachaad White up in your queue, just take Alvin Kamara, instead. He’s a top-ten fantasy football back this year because the Saints are so bad. But they were bad last year, and he was RB3 per game.
Sleeper: Rashid Shaheed, Wide Receiver (WR57, Pick 131 Overall)
Honestly? This offense is probably not going to turn out well for anyone deeply involved. But, Derek Carr will throw the ball at least 30 times per game, and Alvin Kamara & Chris Olave can’t take all those targets. In steps Shaheed, who the Saints used radically different in each of his two seasons, with Shaheed flourishing in both roles. In Shaheed’s rookie year, he was rarely used, garnering only 34 targets with an average depth of target 11.6 yards downfield. He caught a very respectable 82% of these passes and averaged 6.6 yards after the catch per reception. He wasn’t getting a lot of targets in 2022, and the ones he received were meat & potatoes chain movers that he was able to do more with than most would.
In 2023, they used him differently. His depth of target jumped up three yards per target, to 14.3. He caught fewer passes (61%) and had fewer yards after the catch (3.3), but he had more impactful targets. He also had a lot more of them, going from 34 to 75 targets between his rookie and sophomore campaigns. We’ve seen two very different Rashid Shaheeds so far in the NFL, but what if we combined them and made them the team’s WR2? If you gave him 100 targets (9 more than his career total thus far) and a mix of usage, you’re likely looking at a 1,100-yard receiver with about 60 to 65 catches. All that for a guy going around defenses and kickers.
