Why Did Marcell Dareus Flop with the Jaguars in 2017?

There are very few hard-and-fast rules in the world of fantasy football. “Late-round quarterback”, “Zero RB”, and “kickers in the last round” are good guidelines, but even those generally-accepted ideas have exceptions to them.

There is, however, one concept that I know to be unwaveringly true when it comes to individual defensive players (IDP): do not trust defensive tackles. Even year-to-year consistency maven Aaron Donald is now not even classified as a DT in most leagues, meaning that there is no reliable annual option at the position for fantasy players.

I should have known that, and yet I trusted my 2017 season in one league to the talents of then-Buffalo Bills middle man Marcell Dareus. Dareus would eventually get traded to the Jacksonville Jaguars midseason, and end up with a lost season; he was just 71st in points per game at the position.

What was the cause behind Dareus’s big flop in Florida?

[am4show have=’g1;’ guest_error=’sub_message’ user_error=’sub_message’ ]

Before the Fall

Let’s start with a perhaps obvious question: why is it such a big deal that Dareus fell flat last year?

Dareus, 2011’s third overall selection in the NFL Draft, had been an anchor for the Buffalo defensive line since he set foot on a field. In his rookie year, the behemoth 6-foot-3, 331-pound wrecking ball terrorized opposing running backs and passers and racked up 5.5 sacks and 4 tackles for a loss — as a two-gapping nose tackle.

Since then, he has continued to dominate both in the box score and in the fantasy totals. The table below shows Dareus’s tackles, sacks, tackles for a loss, and fantasy points (balanced scoring) from 2011 to 2016.

The high-water mark for Dareus came in 2013-14, where he averaged just under 60 total tackles and 12 defeats (sacks plus tackles for a loss) per season and was a top-five positional fixture in defensive tackle-specific leagues.

2015 saw a drop-off in big-play value, however, and Dareus’s value went along with it. He remained mediocre for fantasy production in 2016, but this was due to playing just eight games thanks to a broken foot at the end of 2015 and lingering hamstring issues. In addition, off-field issues that Dareus dealt with during his college career cropped back up, and he was suspended for four games in 2016 for arrests due to felony possession of drugs; this wasn’t the first time Dareus had had run-ins with the law during his time in the league.

That said, 2016 was nearly a career fantasy year for Dareus.

When we examine his production on a per-snap basis, Dareus bounced back in a big way, but simply had limited playing time. The table below shows Dareus’s points per snap (snap counts courtesy of Pro Football Focus), as well as his snap rate in games played.

2015 was definitely a dip in quality for the Buffalo big man, but if Dareus had played a full season’s worth of snaps in 2016, he would have been DT2 behind only Aaron Donald.

Dareus was definitely worth a buy-low after his small-sample rebound in 2016. Does he still have rebound potential after jaunting to Jacksonville?

Flunking in Florida

With chances burned and his role shrunken, Dareus was in a fraught relationship with Buffalo last year. Still, he found a way to get “out of the frying pan and into the Panhandle”, as the saying goes, after a mid-season trade to the Jacksonville Jaguars.

In truth, things got much worse.

Despite his bounce-back year in 2016, Dareus fell apart last year before being swapped and then his play suffered even further. The table below shows his per-snap fantasy production and snap rates in games played for 2017.

By far the worst season of his career in terms of fantasy production, Dareus ended up playing a larger role with the Jags but a much less fantasy-friendly one. Whereas he was allowed to rush the passer heavily with the Bills, Jacksonville employed him as a traditional run-stuffing 0-tech. The charts below show this.

Due to this usage, Dareus’s sack rate (percent of sacks per snap) and stuff rate (percent of tackles for a loss per snap) plummeted to career-lows of 0.25 percent and 0.00 percent respectively in his Jacksonville debut. Rather than using him as a dynamic wrecking ball threat, the Jaguars are anchoring Dareus in the middle of the line and nothing more.

This complicates matters somewhat for Dareus’s 2018 and future outlook in IDP fantasy football.

While Dareus played over 50 percent of the team’s defensive snaps from week 14 through the AFC Championship Game, he remains in a non-pass rushing role – one that dampens any excitement for him as a fantasy asset. In addition, per Ourlads.com’s NFL depth chart projections, Dareus is likely still the second-stringer at nose tackle heading into this season for a unit that slides defensive end Calais Campbell into the interior on passing downs. To make matters even worse, this same team just selected rookie defensive tackle Taven Bryan in the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft.

Marcell Dareus was once a phenomenal exception to the rule of not trusting fantasy defensive tackles, but he simply cannot be relied on to anchor a fantasy IDP roster anymore.

[/am4show]