Philadelphia Eagles WR A.J. Brown is one of the most talented players in the league. However, he hasn’t been able to deliver a truly elite fantasy season. Should fantasy football managers be comfortable selecting Brown in the first round of Best Ball drafts?
A.J. Brown’s 2024 Fantasy Outlook
I have quite a love/hate relationship with Brown from a fantasy standpoint. On the one hand, he’s really good at football. He’s proven that throughout his five-year NFL career.
Is A.J. Brown still a top-10 WR in fantasy football drafts going into 2024 after a bumpy end to the season?@DerekTateNFL provides his thoughts on a recent episode of The PFN Fantasy Football Podcast!
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On the other hand, QB Jalen Hurts might not be as good as we thought, and Brown doesn’t quite command volume the way the truly elite receivers do. Perhaps the veteran WR has that elite WR1 upside. But after five years, we haven’t seen it… at all.
In three of Brown’s seasons, he’s averaged between 17.0 and 17.7 fantasy points per game. The other two years were his rookie year and an anomalously down 2021 season.
Fantasy managers certainly aren’t going to complain about 17-18 points per game. However, there has been a sentiment surrounding Brown that he’s capable of an elite WR1 season. We just haven’t seen any evidence of that.
Brown’s target share increased from 2022 to 2023, going from 29% to 30.1%. Yet, watching him play, it felt like there were several games where getting him the ball just wasn’t a priority.
From Weeks 3-9, Brown was that elite WR1 we wanted him to be, averaging 26.0 fantasy points per game. Unfortunately, once Week 10 rolled along, that was not only it for Brown as a WR1, but that was it for Brown even being startworthy.
From Week 10 through Week 17 (I’m excluding Week 18 because the Eagles pulled starters at halftime), Brown averaged just 12.3 fantasy points per game. He didn’t have a single game of 20+ fantasy points over that span.
Should You Draft Brown in 2024 Best Ball Leagues?
Brown is one of the 10 best wide receivers in fantasy and worthy of being an early-round selection. The issue is that he’s often priced like a top 6-8 wide receiver. That’s fine. He can finish there. He’s done it three times.
But there’s never been any indication he can be better than that. Essentially, fantasy managers are drafting Brown at his ceiling.
Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t draft Brown. I just might be a little lower on him than consensus. I don’t see how he can ever really have a better setup than he did in 2023.
Brown averaged 2.59 yards per route run, ninth in the league, and was targeted on 28.1% of his routes run. He caught 106 passes. Sure, he could do better than his seven touchdowns. But that’s the only improvement I can see — and touchdowns are largely random.
If Brown has an outlier 14+ touchdown season, then he can get to 20 points per game. But I don’t see a 100-catch, 1,700-yard season in his range of outcomes.
I’ve admittedly painted a rather negative picture of a definitively good player who has been a top-eight fantasy receiver for three of the past four years. However, when we’re talking about first-round picks in Best Ball drafts, merely very good isn’t enough.
KEEP READING: Best Ball Stacking Strategy
As a result, I’m typically looking at other players when Brown’s name tops the list of available players. But if he falls at all below his ADP, he’s well worth drafting.
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