2021 QB Fantasy Football Scoring Review
Josh Allen delivered for your fantasy football team last year.
QBs on whole, however, did not.
The group regressed from a 2020 fantasy-scoring boom to deliver its weakest output since 2017. Allen’s position-leading 27.0 points per game last year (which obviously differed by scoring format) would have ranked just 7th among QBs in 2020. It also would have landed him 2nd at the position in 2019, 2018 and 2017.
The NFL saw pass attempts decline in 2021. That followed 3 straight years of increases in the category.
2017: 1028.7 (attempts per NFL week)
2018: 1039.5
2019: 1050.2
2020: 1059.9
2021: 1039.6
There’s reason to believe in a rebound there. We previously saw even higher attempts per week (a little more than 1,076 in both 2015 and 2016) take an even larger plunge (1028.7 in 2017).
As you can see above, 3 straight years of growth followed that previous fall.
Everyone is well aware at this point that throwing the ball gets it downfield much more efficiently than running. So it’s unlikely that league coaches are collectively deciding to lean back toward 1980s football.
Just look at the draft picks and money spent on wideouts this offseason.
So don’t be surprised if we see passing totals rebound in 2022. Last year’s decline, however, did show up in fantasy points.
Weekly Scoring
Just like each of the past few years, I lined up QB scores for each week throughout the season and then took the median for each spot in the position rankings. The 2021 result for the weekly top-scoring QB beat that spot for each of the previous 3 seasons. But things went the other direction the rest of the way down.
Check out the drastic differences by spot vs. 2020’s big scores:
The splits proved less pronounced in 2019 and 2018, but still favored those seasons over 2021. We need to look back to 2017 for the last time QBs scored fewer fantasy points per game.
You can check our 2022 fantasy football rankings for our predictions on how everyone at the position will score this season.
As for this article, I’m going to shift slightly now to focus on how specific QBs fared on a weekly basis.