Mike Evans comes from the standard Mike Evans season, which is to say he was Awesome in 2023.
Evans was even better in his first year with Baker Mayfield than he was in his last year with Tom Brady. Last season, he caught 79 passes for 1,255 yards on 136 targets while producing a league-best 13 touchdowns.
Evans has now played a full decade in the NFL and has caught at least 70 passes in eight different years, plus he has scored a dozen or more TDs five times. He famously has never finished a season with fewer than 1,000 receiving yards.
If you’re looking for signs of decline in Evans’ performance in his age-30 season… well, good luck. Such indicators do not exist and all underlying advanced figures look excellent. Last year, he again finished among the leaders in contested catches (16-for-30) and average depth of target (15.0), while posting career highs in both yards-after-catch (333) and YAC per reception (4,2). Evans also played all 17 games in 2023, so there are no health concerns here.
If we were to just give you the raw numbers on Evans without a name attached, you’d probably assume he was a locked-in WR1 in fantasy, a consensus second-round pick in almost all formats. His average season per 17 years over the course of his career looks like this: 84 receptions, 1,289 yards, 10 touchdowns. Evans all but achieved those stats last year — five fewer catches, three more touchdowns — while finishing as the overall WR4. He has posted a top-8 finish in six of the past eight seasons.
In short, the man never gives us a dud. Evans has not finished outside the top-30 at his position in fantasy at the end of any season and has seven top-10 finishes to his name. He is as profitable as it gets among big players.
However, the fantasy community has clearly grown bored with all of these 1,200 to 12 seasons from Evans, as his early average draft position has virtually no relationship to his actual history. He is currently the WR19 in terms of ADP, despite not finishing that low in any season since 2017. Evans is going later than some younger, busier receivers who have never produced at the level he consistently reaches.
This is of course a recurring phenomenon in the fantasy world across all sports. Many of us are so focused on drafting the next big thing that we overlook it current big thing. People will take a victory lap pretty hard if we get an 80-1,150-8 season from Drake London during WR12, even if Evans gives us his usual 80-1,200-10 at a friendlier price.
It’s likely some of you are dismissing Evans because of his age (he turns 31 in August), but he showed no signs of slowing down last year either. Not a single one. It’s not like his best years were a pure product of Tom Brady’s offense, either. This guy has caught two-thirds of his career touchdown passes from a rogue’s gallery of QBs that includes Jameis Winston, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Josh McCown and Mike Glennon.
When we last saw Evans in action just four months ago, he absolutely cooked the Lions in the postseason (8-147-1).
Evans has won with size, strength, length and separation over the last decade, and there’s no reason to think 2024 will look substantially different than any other season of his career.
Destroy this fantasy legend at your own peril.
