Can Shaquille Leonard Rebound in 2023?

Photo: USA Today Sports

Fantasy football has a long history of recency bias. This means the masses usually look too hard at what happened last year and expect those stats and performances to carry over to the current season.

That's not always the case. Sure, players who put up good seasons generally put up good seasons. And players who generate bad stats often put up bad stats.

But a lot of players have ups and downs. To excel as a fantasy football player, determining which downs are anomalies and identifying players who will rebound is vital.

That's what this weekly series is all about. Each Sunday, we'll give you a player who will bounce back from a subpar 2022 and turn in better numbers for you this season. These are the players you should target in your upcoming drafts.

This Week's Rebound IDP: LB Shaquille Leonard, Indianapolis Colts

IDP fans know of the dominance Shaquille Leonard, formerly known as Darius Leonard, has had to this point of his career. Prior to his injury in 2022, he was arguably the Dynasty LB1. The lowest tackle total of his career was 119 total, and he was a stat sheet stuffer, with 15 sacks and 12 interceptions in just five years. So this begs the question, can he return to form in 2022? At 27 years old, there is still reason to believe we haven’t scratched the entire surface of Leonard’s prime. When reading up on the injury, although most sites have this as a back injury, the surgery was performed on his back to prevent chronic leg pain, which he has played with most of his career. The monster numbers we have seen him achieve have been occurring while playing through pain. Last season enough was enough for him, so he elected to listen to his body and sat most of the season out recovering. This season, we get a pain-free version of Leonard.

A Look at Leonard

Leonard is one of those guys that is worth the post-injury risk. Too often, fantasy managers overthink these types of decisions. Leonard is a rarity in IDP. His rookie season was arguably one of the best IDP seasons we’ve ever seen. In 2018 he posted 161 tackles, four forced fumbles, two interceptions, and seven sacks as a rookie linebacker. Now this season was an outlier by any means, but it may have occurred due to the lack of talent around him at the position. In 2019, the team spent a third-round pick on linebacker Bobby Okereke, and we saw a decline in Leonard’s numbers the next season, although they would still be considered LB1 stats. This past offseason, the Colts moved off of linebacker Okereke in favor of some unproven players like Zaire Franklin and E.J. Speed. These two may very well contribute, seeing as we have a history of multiple successful linebackers in Indianapolis, but they won’t add as Leonard should. Leonard still holds the coveted interior linebacker position, a position IDP fans know is the golden egg in fantasy.

So what have we learned so far? A 27-year-old former elite fantasy player has been playing through pain his whole career while also having his stats cannibalized by a linebacker who earned his way to a starting interior role with a new team. Now that both of these variables have changed, what can we expect moving forward? Your answer here should be "consistency." When choosing a player who should rebound, I looked for a player who was outside the top 100 scoring linebackers, regardless of format, and searched for the biggest “Wow” falloff. Leonard is a no-brainer for a bounce-back. So now that we know he’s your guy to target, let’s break down when and where to get him.