The top fantasy football rookies of the past 20 years
To celebrate the arrival of a new NFL rookie class -- and thus a fresh batch of fantasy assets -- the Yahoo fantasy team decided to conduct an exhaustive, in-depth scientific review of the greatest debut seasons of the past two decades.
Unfortunately, "exhaustive" and "in-depth" and "scientific" required a bit more effort than we were willing to expend. So what you're getting instead is a thorough-ish review of the 20 best rookie seasons we could recall from the past 20 years. It's like a scrapbook of our fantasy past, loaded with running backs.
(Seriously, the one thing that jumps out when you think about stellar rookie seasons is the number of backs who were dominant in year-one, and how few receivers thrived. Tight ends? Those guys have basically never scored as rookies, unless they were Patriots in 2010.)
If any of this year's buzzy rookies -- Manziel, Watkins, Evans or Hyde -- intends to crack the top 20 of the fantasy era, they'll have to beat the first-year performance of a once-promising dual threat QB...
— Andy Behrens
