Odell Beckham: Buy Low or Bye Bye?
A favored strategy in dynasty football leagues is “buying low.” Nearly any time a player is injured or underperforms, the chorus will sing out for everyone to buy low. It’s a sound strategy, but it’s not foolproof. Sometimes, what we perceive as a player’s “low” is actually just a stop on the way to lower depths.
In this article, I want to look at a player who might be considered to have a “buy low” window to determine if we should try to acquire this player, allow other league managers to acquire them, or even sell low if we already roster this player.
Now keep in mind, every player at a certain cost becomes a value as the wise @Ciga_FF once told me on Twitter many moons ago. That said, not every player is a value at their current cost.
Odell Beckham, WR CLE
Even before suffering a torn ACL, Beckham was a descending asset.
The two-time first overall dynasty player (2016 and 2017) saw his ADP descend into the 30s this past off-season. With some time under our collective belts to digest his ACL injury, his current ADP in November mock drafts is off the board as the 58th player overall. Wide receivers who I prefer – being drafted after Beckham in these mock drafts – include Jalen Reagor, Robert Woods, Will Fuller, and DeVante Parker.
The larger issue with Beckham is not just that he is a descending asset — it is his descending production as well. The last time he was a top-ten receiver in points per game was way back in 2018, an entirety in dynasty football.
Our ADP/Rank vs. PPG app provides us with a striking visual of how far Beckham’s production has fallen in the last two seasons. Even if you wanted to give him a pass for his disappointing 2019 season — when changing teams, injury, and poor coaching conspired against him — the fact that he continued to flounder this season has to be alarming. He scored more than 9.9 fantasy points in just three of the six full games he played. In three of those six games, he saw six or fewer targets. Only once this year did Beckham see at least ten targets, which used to be the standard for him — he averaged 10.5 targets per game during the first five years of his career with the Giants.
After their terrible 2019 season, the Browns changed head coaches and fully embraced their run-first construction. Their 29.5 attempts per game ranked 30th in the NFL, but it’s hard to argue with results as they are 6-3. Even prior to the injury, Beckham had also embraced that the Browns were a run-first offense.
When the off-season commences, there’ll be the inevitable chatter that the Browns will need to find a way to feature Beckham in the offense. I won’t buy into the narrative. The reality is, that in 2021, Beckham will be 28 years old, an age where the dynasty community already starts to get antsy about a wide receiver’s long-term outlook. Though he’s almost certainly going to be a Brown in 2021 when he would have a nearly $13 million dead cap hit, his dead cap hit drops to literally nothing in 2022. He’s still going to be on a roster where the team’s best chance to succeed is to run their offense through Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt.
Not only is Beckham tied to a quarterback (at least for one more season) who has provided no evidence that he can sustain high-level wide receiver success, but he isn’t even the lead wide receiver on the Browns. Jarvis Landry’s WR21 finish in 2019 is the highest a wide receiver has finished with Baker Mayfield at QB. Beckham finished as the WR34 in points per game in 2019 and was pacing to a WR32 finish this season. Yes, situations change fast in the NFL, but that doesn’t really provide any comfort.
If the Browns were able to move him this off-season, Beckham would again be thrust onto a new roster and have to develop a rapport with another new quarterback. If, as looks likely, the Browns move on from him after 2021, he will be entering his age-29 season, joining a new roster, off several disappointing seasons. He’s no longer a transcendent talent is now a WR3 but still carries the name value of a WR1/2. Taking a look at the DLF Trade Finder app, there are several trades that I am especially fond of.
Pivoting from Beckham to Diontae Johnson is a slam dunk accept. You get a four year age discount with Johnson, and Johnson was outscoring Beckham on a per-game basis 13.1 vs 12.3 points per game entering this past Sunday. The gulf would be even more pronounced if you remove the two games that Johnson played less than 25% of offensive snaps due to injury. Excluding those two games, Johnson has averaged 15.2 points per game.
Another interesting pivot is Jarvis Landry. This feels like someone being able to cash out on the name brand even if the generic version (Landry) is actually better.
The last trade I wanted to look at was Beckham for Christian Kirk. Similar to the Johnson trade. you get an age discount, and similar to the Landry trade, you are trading for points this year. When you consider that both Kirk and Beckham are WR3s, this is another trade I would love to make.
If you are able to pull a trade similar to any of the ones cited above I would immediately do so, as it’s hard to see a path for his dynasty value ever rebounding, which leads me to say bye-bye to Beckham.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to disagree (or maybe even agree) with me below, or on Twitter.
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