Before I explain why Sam Bradford should be nowhere near any set of 2012 fantasy football rankings restricted to players who should actually be drafted, let me stipulate two things. One: As a St. Louis Rams fan I'm both rooting for Sam Bradford and convinced he'll eventually have a nice, if not stupendous, breakout year. Two: With that in mind, he's not had a good NFL season yet.
In 2010 he had a high-volume season that looked good because he was a rookie, because so much had been expected of him, because the Rams played an easy schedule, and because our mental counting stats for quarterbacks haven't adjusted to the huge increase in passing and offense in the NFL. It was a high-volume, inefficient season, exacerbated but not created entirely by Pat Shurmur's conservative offense.
The positive flipside, if there is one, is that Sam Bradford's 2011 wasn't as bad as it looked, or at least wasn't as worse as it looked. He didn't play a full season, so his counting stats looked bad, and he more or less even-traded accuracy, which casual fans know how to measure, for the occasional longball, which casual fans don't.
There's been a lot going on to hold Bradford back over the years, but not enough to let him off the hook entirely for his numbers so far. And certainly not enough to predict the kind of breakout that would get Bradford drafted in the average casual fantasy football league.