Even if you don’t play fantasy football you can learn quite a bit about players by reading fantasy football writers.
RotoViz has a great article up on Jeremy Maclin and where he stands entering the 2016 season. They say that Maclin continues to be underrated in fantasy and use some cool charts from last season to help make their point.
Here’s the gist of it, along with a projection:
Jeremy Maclin seems to be underrated by the community based on his role certainty and effectiveness as the WR1 in the Kansas City offense. He finished 2014 as the overall WR9 and 2015 as the overall WR15 (despite missing a game). I’m projecting him to finish within that range in 2016 with a line of 94/1178/8. Maclin is a very safe high-end WR2 with demonstrated WR1 upside. I am drafting him in front of a handful of his ADP superiors including Jarvis Landry, Kelvin Benjamin, Julian Edelman, and Randall Cobb.
The article states that these are the list of players with at least 120 targets and eight touchdowns over the past two seasons: Antonio Brown, Odell Beckham, Calvin Johnson and ... Jeremy Maclin. One of these things is unlike the others. They’re not saying that Maclin will be Antonio Brown next season but they are saying he’s probably going to be better than what most folks in fantasy football tend to think.
Head on over and read the whole article. Some interesting takeaways in there that put into light how well Maclin and Alex Smith played together last season.