2018 Summer Sleeper: Detroit Lions

Michael Zingone Posted On July 14, 2018

In our annual 32-part Summer Sleeper series, DLF scribes identify a lightly-touted player on each NFL roster who may be worthy of your consideration. Our subjects all have varying levels of “sleeperness,” but each merits a bit of in-depth discussion here in the Premium Content section.

To help everybody along, we are going to be categorizing our sleepers under one of three headings:

Super Deep Sleepers – Players who aren’t roster-worthy in 12-team leagues, but are still worth keeping an eye on.
Deep Sleepers – An end of the roster player who is more often than not on the waiver wire in 12-team leagues.
Sleeper – A likely rostered player who makes for a good trade target. Their startup ADP puts them out of the top-175 or so.

Because we aren’t going to give you the likes of mainstream sleepers, most of these players will undoubtedly fizzle. All we are asking is for you to keep an open mind and perhaps be willing to make room for one of these players on your bench. You never know when the next Adam Thielen is going to spring up. Feel free to add your own thoughts about our choice for the designated sleeper, or nominate one of your own in the comments below.

The Detroit Lions have one of the most solid cores of fantasy players across the entire NFL. In DLF’s June ADP, six of the top 150 players drafted were on the Lions’ roster, only bested by the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles, the perennial powerhouse Green Bay Packers, and… you guessed it… the star-studded Cleveland Browns.

Looking through the Lions’ depth chart, it’s hard to find a player who stands out as a value for dynasty owners. I’ve been preaching how Matthew Stafford is underrated month-in and month-out, as he’s a top-five dynasty quarterback in my eyes, but he doesn’t qualify as a sleeper. At running back, you’ve got the new addition in Kerryon Johnson, who is currently being selected in the first round of rookie drafts, and the ever-consistent Theo Riddick, whose ADP sits at 150 overall in June – not really sleeper territory.

At wide receiver, one of the team’s strongest positions, there are two players who finished as WR1s last year, Marvin Jones and Golden Tate, and another – Kenny Golladay aka Kenny G, Kenny Goatladay, Babytron, etc – who dynasty owners are pretty high on as a year two player.

Putting this all together, I could try to write about how LeGarrette Blount is going to get ten touchdowns as a sleeper or perhaps that T.J. Jones is actually going to be the third wide out on the team, but neither seem appealing to me, even at their costs. Instead, I’m going to turn my attention to someone you may not even know was on the roster.

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Luke Willson, TE

Category: Super Deep Sleeper

Many know the name Luke Willson from the famous “Wilson to Willson” connection in Seattle over the past five years. The former Rice University standout has been a solid contributor to the Seahawks since drafted in the fifth round of the 2013 NFL draft, but he hasn’t done much to “wow” fantasy owners in that same span. Willson has averaged roughly 28 targets per year, corresponding to 18 catches, 226 yards, and two touchdowns per season on average.

So why am I high on Luke Willson as a super deep sleeper heading into 2018? Like much of tight end success, it boils down to athleticism and opportunity.

Athleticism

Everyone knows the key to being an elite tight end is uber-athleticism and size. I’m only half exaggerating that statement; among the highly valued dynasty assets in today’s game, many have a complete athletic profile in the 90%+ percentile in many NFL Combine categories. Think Jimmy Graham, Greg Olsen, Evan Engram, Antonio Gates, etc as highly athletic players we have come to know as the model for success at the position.

Enter Luke Willson, a six-foot five-inch, 251-pound dynamic athlete that fits the mold of many of the aforementioned players. Willson boasts a 96th percentile 40-yard dash time, near 90th percentile vertical and broad jump scores, and good agility scores to complement his overall profile.

You can check out all of Willson’s measurables below (via MockDraftable).

We can conclude that Willson, if nothing else, is an above average athlete at the tight end position, which arguably is where athleticism matters most in the overall profile of any given player. Willson found himself playing behind an even better athlete (and former basketball player, in case you didn’t know – much like Antonio Gates) in Jimmy Graham the past two years in Seattle. There simply wasn’t enough opportunity for Willson to emerge in that offense – which leads me to my next point.

Opportunity

There is ample opportunity on the Lions for a tight end to step in and succeed right away in 2018. Per Peter Howard’s Opportunity Lost database (you can find it directly linked in his Arizona Cardinals Summer Sleeper article), the Lions lost 114 targets from their 2017 roster. This isn’t a lot on the surface, ranking only 20th in the league in highest targets lost from last season.

However, digging into the data a bit more, we can find that a staggering 112 of those 114 targets came from the tight end position last year! Since the end of the 2017 season, the Lions have moved on from long time starter Eric Ebron as well as backup Darren Fells. These two recorded 86 and 26 targets, respectively, in the 2017 season which was over 20% of Matthew Stafford’s total targets.

Stafford has been one to use tight ends historically in his offense. Over the past three seasons, the tight end position has averaged nearly 18% of Stafford’s total targets. Additionally, in 2012, tight ends accounted for over 200 targets with Stafford at the helm! That was obviously a while ago, but it shows that the tight end is a consistent part of how Matthew Stafford likes to distribute his targets and has upside to be a focal point.

So focusing back on Luke Willson – here we have a player who is an objectively above average athlete at tight end, is going to a team that consistently utilizes their tight ends, and that team just lost 114 tight end targets from just a season ago. Plus, I’ve gone through this whole article without mentioning that tight ends usually take time to develop in the NFL!

Should Willson hit – which, despite all the praise I’ve written here is admittedly a long shot – he could have a career congruent to that of Martellus Bennett who moved on from Dallas and had a very similar beginning to his career.

Overall, when looking for late round tight ends to target, I believe in athleticism and opportunity as the two driving factors of success. My last stat for you is that since 2010, tight ends to receive between 75 to 100 targets have finished as the TE18 or higher roughly 84% of the time (per the FFStatistics database). Willson, who is currently going undrafted in DLF ADP, has a strong chance of outperforming expectations this year if he’s able to take advantage of the opportunity given to him. Keep him on watch as the preseason goes on.

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