Fantasy Football Draft Takeaways: Travis Etienne, Kenny Pickett, Anthony Richardson (2024)

With the 2023 fantasy football season disappearing into the rearview mirror, let’s take a look back at some of the weird and quirky choices or stats and facts that shaped how it played out. Below are 10 fun facts from 2023. If you have more suggestions, tag me and FantasyPros on Twitter with them. Here are 10 Fun Facts from the 2023 fantasy football season. Below we dive into a few notable names.

2023 Fantasy Football Fun Facts

Travis Etienne‘s Lack of Consistency is a Multi-Year Problem

In 2022, Travis Etienne played so well over the first nine weeks of the season that the Jaguars moved on from James Robinson, thinking they had a true workhorse running back. Unfortunately, from Week 9 onwards, things got worse, not better for Etienne. Between Weeks 1-9, Etienne averaged 14.0 points per game and 6.2 yards per carry to go along with 0.5 rushing EPA before averaging 3.5 yards per carry in Weeks 9-16, before a stats-padding win over the Jets in Week 17. Etienne also saw his PPG drop to 10.2 and his rushing EPA drop to -1.7. In 2023, Etienne again thrived over the opening half of the season, averaging 20.5 points in Weeks 1-8 before averaging 13.1 for the rest of the season. For two years in a row, Etienne hasn’t had enough juice to last the season at his peak performance. Fantasy managers need players who don’t fade when the games matter most.

Travis Etienne must have really enjoyed his bye week…

Weeks 1-8: 20.5 points per game

Weeks 10-15: 12.2 pic.twitter.com/DQlEWPlgcy

– Tom Strachan (@NFL_TStrack) December 21, 2023

Kenny Pickett Defied the Odds to Experience Minimal Positive Regression

Last offseason you probably heard how Kenny Pickett’s low 1.7% touchdown rate was the 660th-lowest rate among quarterbacks to start 10 games or more since the year 2000 (679 total sample size). The NFL average touchdown rate over the last three seasons among quarterbacks starting 10 games or more has been 4.53%, so it seemed inevitable Pickett could make a sizable jump to at least closer to average. Pickett did progress in this category — by a whopping 0.2% — to 1.9%. The only starting quarterbacks with lower rates were Daniel Jones (1.3%) and Ryan Tannehill (1.0%). Pickett might have been hampered by Matt Canada, but at a certain point, we can just accept it’s not going to matter for fantasy football, despite having good weapons surrounding him.

Anthony Richardson Showed Why We Chase Ceiling Outcomes

Fantasy football is all about ceiling outcomes. If you worry yourself too much about safe floors and injuries then it can be very easy to miss out on some of the more exciting players. Anthony Richardson only played four games but he averaged 18.2 points in those games (including two games he left early). In his two full games, Richardson scored 20.9 and 29.6 points. Richardson finished as a top-12 QB in PPG, and in four incomplete games, he scored 72 points — more than Ryan Tannehill (67.6 in nine games) and Daniel Jones (57.0 in six games). Remember folks, Christian McCaffrey was injury-prone until he wasn’t.