Fantasy Impact: Patriots Receivers

Yesterday, we came up with a SWAG on Matt Cassel's passing numbers, and noted that he would have about 70 fewer completions and about 1000 fewer yards than our projections for Brady.

Today, we will try to figure out where those passes will go, or more appropriately, won't be going.

I am not going to reduce Randy Moss' numbers by a lot, because I think he will become Cassel's "security blanket." I know that if I were playing QB for the Patriots, I would just heave it in Randy's direction and hope for the best. We will have to come back and adjust his numbers later, but let's start with the lesser receivers, who are not going to get the 4th-look checkdown passes that came their way when Brady was pulling the trigger.

We had Jabar Gaffney projected for 55 catches, tied for his career high. Well, now that's not going to happen. His low-end numbers as a starter in Houston were 41 catches, and that sounds good to us. We also reduced his yards per catch from 12.0 to 11.8.

Ben Watson is not healthy right now, and has always seemed to struggle with injuries throughout his career. We had him projected for 45 catches, but now have reduced that to 35 (which is the number he had last year), which seems more reasonable.

We had projected Laurence Maroney to get more involved in the passing game with 21 catches, which was all kinds of wrong. We will put him down to 5 catches (he had 4 all of last year).

We have mentioned that Wes Welker would suffer the most from the absence of Brady, and we still believe it. The Patriots used short passes to Welker in lieu of a running game last year, and now they will actually be handing the ball off for their running game. The most catches he had in Miami was 67; we will project him for 70 this year (that is down from the 94 we originally projected).

So that brings us to Randy Moss. In order for the Patriots receiving corps to have the 282 we are projecting, we only need to take 8 catches away from Moss, leaving him with 83 for the season. That comes out to 5 catches per game, which sounds about right.

Keeping all these players (except Gaffney) at their originally projected yards per catch value gives us a total of 3293 receiving yards on the season, compared to 3280 projected passing yards. We can safely ignore the 13 yard difference.

Now we have to reduce the receiving TDs from the originally projected 33 to 24. Without going into detail, we project Moss with 11, Welker with 5, Gaffney and Watson with 3 each, Kevin Faulk with one, and Mike Vrabel to make his annual TD catch.

How does this affect the receivers' standings? Putting these stats back into our annual projections, Moss falls from the #1 receiver to the #5 receiver, Welker from the #14 receiver to the #35 receiver, Gaffney from the #46 to the #69 receiver, and Watson from the #17 to the #21 tight end.

So, in short, don't worry too much about Moss, Welker goes from a starter to a reserve, and Gaffney and Watson can be dropped.