Pro Football24x7’s Spotlight: Fantasy Quarterback

Along with our player rankings we will highlight one player at each position who has the possibility of a monster fantasy season. We start with football’s most important position, quarterback.

Houston was the only team in the NFL last year to have 2 wide receivers, a TE, and a running back each having at least 50 receptions. They also had the third highest amount of total offensive yards last year. They have perhaps the deepest wide receiving corps in football that most fans have not heard about, Andre Johnson, Kevin Walter who both had 8 touchdowns last year, David Anderson, Andre Davis, and Jacoby Jones. Each brings their varying strengths to the playing filed and head coach Gary Kubiak does not hesitate to use all five. TE Owen Daniels has caught 133 passes over the past 2 seasons and 2nd year running back Steve Slaton who caught the 50 passes as a rookie will only get better in the passing game. This all leads me to my spotlight player to watch at quarterback, Matt Schaub.

Schaub has completed no less than 65% of his passes in each his last three seasons, the last 2 in Houston and he spreads the ball around as well anyone in football. He sits at 10 on my board, and has been drafted 79^th over all on average in the early drafts I have been able to poll. That puts him in the middle of the sixth round in twelve team drafts.

The knock on him though is that he has missed 10 starts over the past two seasons, I think that changes and we will see a full year from him. With the skilled players he has around him throwing for thirty plus touchdowns and for more than  4,000 yards are real possibilities. That could make him a top five fantasy quarterback that you can sit back and wait to draft.

The best way to project forward is to always view back, when I do I see a viable comparison between Schaub and quarterback Lynn Dickey and his 1983 Packers. Dickey’s wide receivers James Lofton and John Jefferson each had over 50 receptions, as did TE Paul Coffman and running back Gerry Ellis. Dickey threw for 32 scores and 4,458 yards for an 8-8 team. The Packers that year just as Houston will have this year had a suspect defense, the similarities are there.