338: The Death of the Elite Fantasy Wide Receiver

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Speaker 1: This is the Label podcast with your host JJ zacher Resa, j J Zacher Reason. What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at fandel and at number five dot com. And this is episode three hundred and thirty eight of the Late Round podcast and many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. I have a list that I use for potential Late Round podcast topics for the off season. But the list isn't just filled with bulleted items to cover. It's filled with questions. There are questions that I want to dive into for off season shows just like this one. One of the questions on the sheet for this offseason says, are wide receivers dying? Clearly, I'm not being very thoughtful with how I phrased these questions, but the idea behind this one was is the edge from the top group of wide receivers fading? We know Michael Thomas dominated this year and he gave fantasy managers a significant edge. I'm not just talking about him here, Clearly he was massively important. I just mean as I mean by looking at top wide receivers, is their benefit from a fantasy points scored standpoint not as significant as it used to be. This entire question was built on intrigue, which is the case for most of the questions that I try to answer during the offseason. This year, it just felt like there was a little bit more parody with the wide receiver position. And I don't mean looking at preseason average draft position in postseason results. I just mean that throughout the fantasy season, there didn't seem to be many wide receivers who were consistently giving you a huge, huge edge over the competition, with the exception of Michael Thomas. So in looking at this question, I did what I do every single year. At the end of the season, I look at the positional breakdowns for things like target share, receiving yard share, touchdown share, and I compare those numbers to what we've seen in the past. You guys might remember a show at the start of last offseason where I ran through a similar exercise and I talked about how running backs were being involved more in the passing game and how that impacted fantasy football. I'll be looking at similar numbers today. That's where I started when trying to answer this question. Now, before looking at those numbers, I want to let you guys know that to celebrate the start of twenty twenty, Fandel is offering a twenty twenty bonus in every January featured NBA Shot contest. Just roster a player who records a twenty twenty game and win a share of twenty thousand dollars. For more details was at fandle dot com, slash NBA, or download the Fandel app. Today, eligibility restrictions apply, so let's look at some of this data to kick things off. We'll start with targets, and twenty nineteen, wide receivers accounted for fifty eight point four percent of the NFL's targets, and these are wide receivers based on their positional eligibility. That number was just slightly below twenty eighteen, which was well above what we saw in twenty seventeen. As a whole, since twenty eleven, wide receivers are getting a little less of the target pie across the league, but it's not overly overly significant. The real difference in target share across the three positions is at running back and tight end. Running Backs did see a drop in target share this past year, but over the last three seasons they've averaged twenty one point one percent of the NFL's targets. Tight Ends have seen twenty and a half percent over the last three years. Compare that to twenty eleven to twenty thirteen, so a three year span earlier in the decade, running backs at a target share that was two percentage points lower. Tight end was over a percentage point higher. But since we're worried about top wide receivers, the overall landscape doesn't necessarily tell us a ton. Wide receivers as a position could be seeing the same type of volume, but that volume may be spread out more than it used to be, meaning the top receivers aren't giving you much of an edge in target share. So let's look into that. In twenty nineteen, the top five wide receivers in fantasy football accounted for seven and a half percent of all wide receiver targets. The average from twenty eleven to twenty fifteen was seven point nine percent, So yeah, this year saw a slight drop, but again it wasn't significant. Top ten wide receivers saw fourteen point four percent of wide receiver targets. During the first portion of the decade, that number was fourteen point eight percent. So again, maybe we're seeing a slight dip, but it's not glaring to the point where we'd say elite wide receivers are dying off now in some targets have dropped for top ten wide receivers through the years. And for the record, I'm gonna be referencing things like top ten wide receivers throughout today show, and I'm fully aware that it's an arbitrary way of doing things. I'm only looking at this from a high level to see if there are any general trends that exist in order to dig deeper and investigate further. So to all you arbitrary cutoff haters, I feel you. But what we may be feeling a little bit from a target standpoint with wide receivers is that top wide receivers have seen a drop in overall targets since twenty eleven, which is when the NFL really started to become a more pass heavy league. From twenty eleven through twenty fifteen, for example, the top ten Fantasy wide receivers average fifteen forty two targets per season one five and forty two targets over the last four that's dropped by sixty one per season, or over six targets per receiver. The thing is, though, that's happening at every level. Wide receivers ranked eleven through twentieth have also seen a drop, as have the next ten widers. It's really just the target shairs have shifted a little bit and that's caused slightly lower volume output for wide receivers overall. So essentially, to make this all a little bit cleaner, yes, volume is down at wide receiver. It's not overly significant, but it's down. But the question we're trying to answer is our top wide receivers dying. When looking at that from a volume perspective, there's a slight trend in the wrong direction for these top wideouts. Their target shares are a little bit lower. Looking at individual wide receivers help show this a little bit too. Back in twenty eleven, two wide receivers had a target chair at or above thirty percent. The next year there were also two, and then four, and then three and then three again. So from twenty eleven through twenty fifteen, an average of two point eight wide receivers per season had target shairs at or above thirty percent. That's always considered an elite tier since then we've had one per season. Only one wide receiver each year has hit a thirty percent target chair. Having that wide receiver has given you a nice edge in fantasy football, but they've become rarer, meaning hitting on that player in your draft becomes more difficult. Players with a twenty five percent target share have dropped two From twenty eleven to twenty fifteen, we averaged eleven point four per season. Since then, it's been nine and a half and twenty percent target share are higher. Players have dropped as well. It's gone from twenty eight per season at the wide receiver position for the first half of the decade to twenty four. And this is all compounded by a really, really interesting trend in touchdowns. This past season, sixteen point four percent of all wide receiver touchdowns were scored by top ten wide receivers in fantasy football, we had seventy nine of them among the players who finished in the top ten. That sixteen point four percent number is the second lowest that we've seen since twenty eleven. The only time it was lower was in twenty seventeen at sixteen percent. That means two of the lowest touchdown share seasons among top ten wide receivers over the last decade have come over the last three years, and it's been a pretty significant difference. We're talking about a sixteen percent to touchdown share for twenty seventeen and twenty nineteen when the other seasons that we're analyzing here, so the other seven since twenty eleven, the top ten wide receivers during those seasons have averaged a twenty percent touchdown share. They've seen twenty percent of all wide receiver touchdowns. And what's even more interesting is that this had sort of a trickle down effect, especially with lower end wide receiver twos and higher end wide receiver threes. Now, let me walk through this in a pretty detailed way so that it's not confusing. I know, listening to this stuff can be hard sometimes because you're not able to actually see these numbers, But hear me out. I just went through the touchdown share numbers for wide receivers ranked in the top ten at the position since twenty eleven, or the percentage of wide receiver touchdowns scored. As I just talked about. The twenty nineteen season saw top ten wide receiver score a little bit over sixteen percent of all wide receiver touchdowns, and that was low. Now, if we do that exercise for the next ten wide receivers in the ten after that, we can start to show replaceability, at least when it comes to touchdowns. If players in the next groups of ten are scoring at a similar rate as the top ten receivers are, then that means that the top ten wide receivers are giving you less of an edge. In twenty nineteen, the wide receivers ranked eleven through thirtieth scored twenty six percent of all wide receiver touchdowns. That subset of wide receivers had a wide receiver touchdown share that was nine point six percent higher than the top ten wide receivers this past year. Because top ten wide receivers last year had a sixteen point four percent wide receiver touchdown share and this next group had a twenty six percent share, the difference between the two is nine point six percent. Now, if you do that exercise for each season since twenty eleven, you find that twenty nineteen, twenty seventeen, and twenty twelve had the highest difference between top ten wide receiver touchdown share versus the touchdown share for the next twenty wide receivers in fantasy football. In other words, those top ten wide receivers weren't providing that significant of an edge, and it's really not close. When you look at every other season, top ten wide receivers were scoring touchdowns at a much much higher rate. And what's interesting about the twenty twelve season that I just referenced, a lot of the reason top ten wideouts weren't giving you much of an edge is because the next ten wide receivers scored a lot of touchdowns. It was sort of an outlier year for that group. Really, wide receivers ranked twenty first to thirty it didn't do all that well at least in twenty twelve, But in twenty nineteen and twenty seventeen we had the two best seasons in touchdown share among wideouts ranked twenty first to thirtieth. What that tells us is that the players who are your lower end wide receiver two are your higher end wide receiver three. They're scoring touchdowns at a higher eight than we've ever seen, at least over the last decade, and that makes top wide receivers less significant and important. Touchdowns correlate to volume. The more volume a player has, the more we should expect them to score, so it's not surprising that a slight dip in volume for top receivers then also results in a slight dip and touchdown share. Now, of course, you could do the same exercise by looking at raw fantasy points, and unsurprisingly, given everything that I just talked about, wide receivers ranked a lot eleventh to thirtieth. We're closest to the top ten wide receivers this past year than they have been since twenty eleven, and potentially beyond. I just didn't look past twenty eleven. So overall, the point here is that top wide receivers kind of sucked in twenty nineteen. It's a broad generalization, and this doesn't account for where they were being drafted, which is important. This isn't me saying don't draft wide receivers early next year no matter what, because we're not looking at the accuracy of ADP versus postseason result. We're working with perfect information. But I do think that this is a trend. We've been pretty consistently seeing a wider distribution among targets at the wide receiver position, and when touchdown variants doesn't hit, you get a season like this one last year touchdown variants hit in a positive way. It was great, but we've seen a steady decline in individual players seeing elite target shares, and we've now had two down seasons for the position over the last three in terms of touchdowns and fantasy points scored, at least in terms of how well the top players separated themselves. The thing is, each year when I do analysis like this, the takeaway is that you should actually do the opposite of what it sounds like. I'm suggesting. If there are fewer elite wide receivers, then that makes the actual elite wide receivers really really good for fantasy purposes. They're unicorns, and this is definitely true. Michael Thomas was a unicorn this year. But like I said before, it's only becoming more and more difficult to find that unicorn. There's a balance that needs to happen and be realized when you're drafting your fantasy team each year, you should strive to get players who are giving you the biggest edges, but you can't ignore number one, where you'd be getting other usable players at that position in the draft, and then number two, the actual probability of hitting on that player. The probability of finding that unicorn, and if you look at the wide receiver landscape, it's easy to see that finding that player is becoming increasingly more difficult. And it's also easy to see that there's been a downward trend, albeit not the biggest one in the world. An elite target share and touchdown share. Again, players who hit those high marks are going to give you a nice edge. But we also have an easier fallback plan now with the depth of the position, and you can't find that at running back. Now. We've got months to think about twenty twenty draft strategy, but I wanted to share the kind of thing that I dig into before really honing in on what I want to do during a draft. It's sort of a foundation. It's information that I've got in the back of my head now when I'm researching other topics, and hopefully that information will help you too. That's gonna do it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you've get subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB Thanks everyone. I'll talk to you on Friday with the Weekly Mailbag Show.