Buy or Sell: Martavis Bryant

Martavis Bryant
ADP: 91.9
WR: 33

Martavis Bryant exploded onto the fantasy football scene in week seven of 2014, scoring six TDs in his first four games. He finished with eight TDs on just 26 receptions.

With so much upside, but so little to base conclusions on, there’s a fair amount of disagreement over where he should be drafted this season. ESPN has him going at 91.9, or WR33, while Fantasy Football Calculator has him going in the fifth round of 10 team leagues.

Will he continue progressing into a star? Or will teams figure out how to minimize the impact he has and turn him into a one-year wonder?

Buy: Andy

The Pittsburgh Steelers were 3-3 during the first month-and-a-half of the 2014 season, during which Bryant was inactive. He made up for lost time when he got on the field, with those six scores in four games.

The Steelers, during the 10 games Bryant played went 8-2, steamrolling into the playoffs.

One would guess he’s not going to score a TD every three times he catches the ball. The beauty? He doesn’t need to. With a season under his belt, Ben Roethlisberger will undoubtedly show even more confidence in Bryant, who had at least five and as many as seven targets in seven of the first eight games he played before fading at season’s end.

Bryant certainly is the number two option in Pittsburgh, behind possibly the league’s best WR in Antonio Brown. But there also are plenty of balls being tossed around by Big Ben, who threw 30 or more times in 15 of 16 games. And Bryant can get his yards and scores in a myriad of ways. He’s 6’4 and has added some weight, so he’s an ideal red zone target. But he also scored TDs of 94, 80, 35, 21 and 19 in 2014, so he has the speed and breakaway ability to turn just a couple catches into a nice day.

With Brown on the other side, Bryant is unlikely to face a team’s top corner or double teams, so opportunities should abound. There will be some ups and downs – Roethlisberger throws up the occasional dud game and Bryant will have some second-year struggles. I might not take him as high as he’s going in Fantasy Football Calculator’s projections, but I’d take him a full three rounds and maybe four before ESPN has him off the board. Really, ESPN drafters? We’re taking Allen Robinson, Eric Decker, Jarvis Landry and Kevin White above this guy? I probably start pondering him a bit in the fifth round, start sweating if I don’t take him in the sixth and pounce anytime after that.

He’ll usually put up a solid day and there will be plenty of weekends where he’s going to leave you sitting pretty. Get him on your team.

Sell: Vomhof

I liked Martavis Bryant coming out of college, and he certainly didn’t disappoint as a rookie.

Bryant scored nine touchdowns in 11 games in 2014, including one postseason game—and he did it in limited snaps as the team’s third receiver. And now the reports out of OTAs have been glowing.

That’s all great, but I’m not buying him where he’s going in drafts right now. (To be clear, I would be thrilled to get him at his ESPN ADP of 92, but realistically he’ll be long gone by then. Other sites show him much higher—FantasyFootballCalculator.com, for example, has him at 47.)

The Bryant hype is simply out of control. He’s now going in fifth round of many leagues and occasionally creeps into the late fourth.

That’s nuts! That price essentially bakes in all of Bryant’s upside.

Let’s get real here. Bryant will see the field more this year, but there’s no way he scores as much. Nine of his 31 catches went for TDs last year—an unsustainable rate that surely will regress in 2015.

And it’s hard to invest so much draft capital in a guy who will only be the No. 3 fantasy option on his own team. Le’Veon Bell and Antonio Brown aren’t going anywhere.

I expect Bryant to be a boom-and-bust fantasy option this year, with his output largely tied to whether he gets into the end zone. He’ll have two-TD games and he’ll have some 2-25-0 lines, too. (He had fewer than five catches in nine out of 11 games in 2014 and fewer than 45 yards in seven.)

I’m not going to pay a fourth-round price for a ticket on that rollercoaster.

Bottom line: I like Bryant, but hate his ADP. I’ll pass.

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