2021 Fantasy Football: Quarterbacks to avoid next season
It's late in the 2020 fantasy football season, which means a lot of fantasy owners have already been eliminated from championship contention and are looking ahead to next season.
Keeping an eye on trends, career trajectory and offseason developments, fantasy owners can start red-flagging some players who may have been productive and reliable fantasy options this season, but not so much for 2021.
Here are three quarterbacks to avoid in your 2021 fantasy football draft.
(All point totals are according to the Yahoo! Sports fantasy scoring system.)
Cam Newton (New England Patriots)
Cam Newton was a fantasy football revelation in the first two weeks of his first season with the Patriots. In wins over the Dolphins and Seahawks, the former league MVP racked up 25.7 and 35.8 fantasy points, respectively.
Then Cam came down with COVID-19 and miss and his performances have been wildly inconsistent ever since. The low point was a -3.1 effort against the 49ers in which he threw for fewer than 100 yards and three interceptions. There was also a 27-point showing against the Texans. In the last two weeks he's scored 25.5 fantasy points in a rout of the Chargers, then 3.3 points in a loss to the Rams.
Bill Belichick has stuck by the 31-year-old Newton -- in part because the Patriots simply do not have another QB on the roster nearly as talented -- but whispers are growing louder that this season will be Newton's only season in New England.
Wherever he might wind up playing in 2021, Newton has become too unpredictable to rely on as a week-to-week fantasy starting quarterback.
Matt Ryan (Atlanta Falcons)
Of course, fantasy football owners don't care whether a player's NFL team wins or loses, only that the player puts up individual stats.
So it doesn't matter much that Ryan's Falcons are struggling through a season in which they're 4-9 going into Week 15. What matters from a fantasy perspective is that the Falcons could start a rebuild this offseason -- which could start with drafting Matt Ryan's replacement.
At 35 years old, Ryan is still productive. He ranks 16th among quarterbacks in total fantasy points (257), but ever since Atlanta's bye in Week 10, he hasn't scored more than 16.9 fantasy points in a game after putting together a few 30-40 point outings pre-bye.
The Falcons should land a high first-round draft pick and are likely to use it on a new quarterback. That could lead to Ryan being traded and throwing his fantasy situation into uncertainty, or lead to him being benched at some point in 2021 to make room for the rookie.
Dak Prescott (Dallas Cowboys)
Through the season's first five weeks, Dak Prescott was the league leader for fantasy points among quarterbacks. In Week 5, however, he suffered a gruesome season-ending leg injury. To this day, Prescott's 35.1 fantasy points per game is still the highest average in the league.
Prescott's timeline to return to the field is still unknown. If he is cleared to play next season, fantasy football owners may want to avoid Dak until he proves he can get back to what he was prior to the injury as a fantasy performer.