Thomas Campbell-USA TODAY Sports
New Orleans Saints rookie wide receiver Kenny Stills has been getting a lot of buzz as a Fantasy Football sleeper this season. Stills has been stoking the fires of his sleeper potential by racking up stats in the preseason.
I get it, we all love sleepers in fantasy football. I’m as guilty of it as the next guy. I love scanning a team’s roster and trying to identify that proverbial diamond in the rough.
But, as I’ve had to learn the hard way, sleepers are sleepers for a reason. They usually don’t pan out and leave me wondering what I was thinking. After all, if there was a good chance they would be worth a high draft pick, we would all know about them and they wouldn’t be sleepers anymore.
Every year we see some young players do well in preseason and become the favorite player to jump up draft boards. This year one of those guys is Stills. But don’t be fooled by preseason hype.
Stills didn’t get taken until the fifth round of the draft this spring because scouts had serious doubts about his speed and lack of size. He’s not a big-bodied possession receiver, but he doesn’t have the speed and quickness to be a slot guy.
That means Stills ends up somewhere in the NFL no-man’s land for receivers. In today’s game you either need to be tall and strong enough to play on the outside or quick enough to make a living running underneath routes out of the slot. Or you can just be Calvin Johnson, that seems to be working for him.
Stills may very well have a bright future ahead of him in the NFL — but not this year. This year, he’s going to be like all rookie receivers and spend most of his time struggling to adjust to the pro game.
Don’t fall into the sleeper hype; let someone else in your league waste a roster spot on Stills this year.
Ben Sullivan is an NFL writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @bensullivan52, “Like” him on Facebook and add him to your network on Google.
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