Through the first 11 weeks, four men rotated in and out of the top slot each week for total wide receiver fantasy points: Brandon Lloyd, Roddy White, Hakeem Nicks, and Austin Collie.
Ladies and gentlemen, after Week 12, we have a new leader: Dwayne Bowe.
*Special thanks to Playerfilter for compiling and embedding the data.
Some of you either dropped him or traded him away earlier in the season; the rest of you probably had him benched when he amassed 108 yards and two touchdowns in Week 6 at Houston. In case you can’t do math, that’s 22.8 fantasy points in standard scoring leagues.
If you continued to bench him, you missed out on this:
Week 7 vs. Jacksonville – 81 yds, two TDs, 20.1 fantasy points
Week 8 vs. Buffalo – 16 yds, one TD, 7.6 fantasy points
Week 9 at Oakland – 63 yds, one TD, 12.3 fantasy points
Week 10 at Denver – 186 yds, two TDs, 30.6 fantasy points
Week 11 vs. Arizona – 109 yds, two TDs, 22.9 fantasy points
Week 12 at Seattle – 170 yds, three TDs, 35.0 fantasy points
Which leads me to ask, is this guy even human? In the last seven weeks, he has averaged 21.6 fantasy points per game with at least one touchdown in each game.
So, how bad were his first four games if it took him 12 weeks to take the lead with those kind of numbers? Take a look:
Week 1 vs. San Diego – 13 yards, zero touchdowns, 1.3 fantasy points
Week 2 at Cleveland – 45 yards, zero touchdowns, 4.5 fantasy points
Week 3 vs. San Francisco – 61 yards, one touchdown, 12.1 fantasy points
Week 4 – Bye
Week 5 at Indianapolis – 33 yards, zero touchdowns, 3.3 fantasy points
That’s a whopping 5.3 fantasy points per game through the first five weeks. No wonder my buddy Aman traded Bowe away after the Oakland game. “He dropped a pass to clinch the Raiders game, which the Chiefs ended up losing in overtime. I basically decided that even though he had a touchdown in that game, the multiple bad drops just made him too unreliable,” Aman said.
That would be multiple drops in multiple games. Not exactly a comforting sight from a third or fourth round pick. As a result, Aman traded Bowe away in two leagues:
Trade No. 1 – Dwayne Bowe, Felix Jones, Jacob Tamme for Santonio Holmes, Jason Witten, Pierre Thomas
Trade No. 2 – Dwayne Bowe, LaDainian Tomlinson for Andre Johnson, Mike Tolbert
The trades weren’t horrendous (okay, maybe the first one was kind of bad), and the second one actually ended up working out well with the injury to Ryan Mathews.
My poor buddy Thomas, on the other hand, was not so lucky; he cut Bowe after Week 3. Yes, cut. Whoops.
Before the season began, who in their right mind believed that Bowe would be leading all receivers in fantasy points after Week 12? Not I. If you’re raising your hand, you’re either a Kansas City homer, an LSU homer, or you mistakenly thought that Matt Cassel was Tom Brady and Bowe was Randy Moss (all about the cornrows).
Needless to say, Bowe has been one of the biggest fantasy surprises of the season. And, as of right now, he’s the best fantasy wide receiver through 12 weeks.
