Predicting 2020's Breakout Offenses

Photo: USA Today Sports

The goal of this series is to try to identify the offenses that have the best chance of breaking out in 2020 and putting up better than expected fantasy numbers across the board.

In general, there are two ways in which a player can greatly outperform his fantasy ADP:

1. A bigger piece of the pie. The player takes on a larger than expected role in his team’s offense. He sees a higher share of carries, targets, or touchdowns than expected.

2. The entire pie is bigger. The player does not take on a much bigger role than expected but the offense he is playing in makes a big leap forward, making the entire pie bigger. When this happens, most of the key pieces of the offense outperform ADP.

The focus of this series is all about the second category — finding the offenses that are ready to explode.

• The next 2017 Rams…
• The next 2018 Chiefs…
• The next 2019 Ravens…

In each case, the team’s offense made a huge leap forward and had multiple guys crush expectations for fantasy. If you invested heavily in these offenses before their breakout season, you had a great shot to win your league.

What characteristics did recent breakout offenses have in common?

That will be the focus of this, the first article in the series. Here, we will look backward at what we can learn from recent success stories. We will use these lessons to help our quest to identify the right 2020 offenses to target in our drafts.

Future articles in this series will take a look forward and try to identify the offenses most likely to break out in 2020.

Offenses featured in future articles will include:

• Denver Broncos
• Cincinnati Bengals
• Arizona Cardinals
• New York Giants
• Jacksonville Jaguars

Recent Breakout Offenses

Over the last three seasons, nine offenses scored at least 33% more points than they did the previous season:

These majority of these offenses share three things in common:

1. A new quarterback who made a leap.
2. A recent influx of exciting young skill position players.
3. A new play-caller or change in offensive philosophy.

We will discuss each of these three factors in more depth.

1. A young quarterback who made the leap

We may argue about how much running backs matter but nobody disputes the outsized importance of the quarterback position. In fact, one of our offenses that made a big leap in points does not really fit the mold of a breakout offense but does exemplify how quarterback play is the biggest variable in terms of offensive improvement. The 2016 Indianapolis Colts scored 25.7 points per game with Andrew Luck at the helm. He missed the entire 2017 season and the team’s points scored per game plummeted all the way down to 16.4 with Jacoby Brissett as the starter. With Luck back in the lineup for 2018, the team bounced right back up to 25.9 PPG.

The most glaring commonality between our breakout offenses was young starting quarterbacks providing a big upgrade over the previous year’s starter. Six of the nine offenses were led by a quarterback 23 years old or younger.

• 33% of our breakout teams had rookie starters.
• 33% of our breakout teams had second-year quarterbacks who did not start the majority of games as rookies.

2. An influx of young skill position talent

Another common denominator between nearly all of the recent breakout offenses was an influx of young skill position talent that made a leap.

The 2018 New York Giants were the lone breakout offense that did not feature a new quarterback. But that was a team that got Odell Beckham back after he missed nearly all of the 2017 season and added Saquon Barkley with the #2 pick in the draft. Adding those two talents to the lineup led to a big jump in production from the previous season.

Lamar Jackson deserves most of the credit for the 2019 Ravens offensive explosion but it definitely was aided by the emergence of 23-year old Mark Andrews as one of the league’s best tight ends and the explosive element added by rookie Marquise Brown.

In short, a big improvement at the skill positions seems to greatly increase the chances that a young quarterback makes a leap. This will be a key factor to focus on when looking for 2020’s breakout candidates.

3. Change in offensive play calling and scheme

The third factor that a majority of our teams had in common was a new play-caller. New offensive systems unlocked the latent potential in some of these offenses and contributed to the big leaps in production. Seven of the nine breakout offenses featured a new play-caller. The two breakout teams who did not make big changes to their system were led by arguably the top two offensive minds in football, Andy Reid and Kyle Shanahan.

Sean McVay for the Rams, Kliff Kingsbury for the Cardinals, and Matt Nagy for the Bears are especially noteworthy. Each completely revamped the offensive scheme and played a huge role in their team’s scoring a lot more points than under the previous regime. When looking for 2020 breakout candidates, we want to focus in on the offenses that are undergoing big schematic changes with the potential to lead to more scoring and bigger fantasy numbers.