383: Finding Breakout Wide Receivers

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Speaker 1: This is the lad Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha Jay Jake zacher reson What's up everyone. It's JJ Zacheres and the editor in chief at FanDuel and at number five dot com. And this is episode three hundred and eighty three of the Late Round podcast with many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. Last week on the show, I went over some of the ways that you can spot breakout running backs in your fantasy football drafts. As you can tell by the title of this episode, we're gonna be doing the same thing today, but with wide receivers. We'll define what a breakout wide receiver is. We'll find players who have been breakouts, and we'll talk through some traits that those wide receivers shared. Those trends will help us have an easier time spotting breakout wide receivers moving forward. And then I'll share my favorite middle and Late Round targets at the end of the show. Now, before get into the research, I want to remind you guys about FanDuel's Football multise. It's a contest on fandle where you build lineups based on Madden simulations and then you can watch those simulations play out on fandal's YouTube page, where my colleague Jim sonis and I give commentary on the games. Each game is unique and that there's a what if scenario associated with it. This week, for example, we're looking at what if the Patriots signed Cam Newton. Test your prediction skills and play a free DFS tournament for three thousand dollars in real prizes by making your lineup around the Cam Newton Patriots versus the Buffalo Bills. And then there's another game happening the next night as well. So head tofandle dot com slash NFL multiverse to enter, and don't forget to subscribe and tune into fandl's YouTube channel on Wednesday at eight pm Eastern to watch the game and to watch yours truly. So, in order to find traits that breakout wide receivers have shared through the years, we've got to define what a breakout wide receiver is. My definition for breakout might be different than yours, and that's okay. If you'd rather think of this as how to spot value wide receivers, that's totally fine. I don't want anyone to get hung up on the term being used as opposed to what we're trying to solve here. But the way I define breakout is the following. And this is all on number five in an article that I did on this topic last week. But I took all drafts that were done since twenty eleven, and I'm using Myfantasy league dot com as the source for ADP here. But I took all fantasy drafts and I charted where wide receivers were drafted. That's on the X axis, the ADP for every wide receiver. Then on the Y axis, you've got how many points a wide receiver scored. So you're looking at the relationship between where a guy was selected in a draft, his average draft position, and how many points he ended up scoring. That gave me a trend line that I could work off of. That trend line is essentially ADP expectation. It's the number of points that we'd expect a wide receiver to score at a particular average draft position. From there, I looked at all wide receivers who outperformed expectation by one hundred and more points. That numbers kind of ore ortrary, but we need some sort of baseline. But since we're talking breakout players. Here, I looked at guys drafted after round five, where we found that opportunity cost really starts to flatten. That's what I've talked through on previous episodes of the show over the last month. So all wide receivers who were drafted after round five in a twelve team league, so pick sixty who ended up outperforming expectation by one hundred or more points. Those are our breakout wide receivers that gave us a sample of fifty two wideouts. So the question now is did those fifty two wide receivers have anything in common during the year they broke out? Yes, of course they did. Why am I doing this podcast? There were four trends that I discovered when looking at her fifty two player sample. The first one was that, just like our running back study, these wide receivers are coming from ambiguous wide receiver depth charts. There's not a whole lot of competition or good competition at the position for these breakout wide receivers. Let me explain, among our fifty two wide receivers this sample, only eight of those breakout wideouts had a wide receiver teammate selected in the top twenty four during that breakout season. So to put that another way, eighty five percent of these wide receivers who were far exceeding expectation didn't have a super elite fantasy wide receiver on their team. And then sixty three percent of our sample saw their top wide receiver teammate fall off draft boards after round four, and the average pick for the first team wide receivers selected was pick seventy. That's after the fifth round. All this tells us is that these wide receivers are traditionally coming from teams without high end wide receivers. A lot of them are coming from ambiguous wide receiving groups. Now, trend two is one that I found kind of interesting, but it's that these breakout wide receivers don't always have amazing fantasy quarterbacks throwing them the ball. We'd assume that they'd have good quarterback play. Quarterbacks matter, but that's not really the case, at least when looking at how we're predicting the season or average draft position. Among our sample of fifty two wide receivers, the average ADP of their quarterback that year was QB nineteen. But what's really really interesting about this, and maybe I'm just super nerdy, because I find this interesting. But what's really interesting is related to what I just talked about with teammates. Like I said, only eight wide receivers in our breakout sample had a wide receiver teammate drafted in the first two rounds. But of those eight, the average quarterback ADP was QB ten And if you expand that to looking at the first four rounds, so breakout wide receivers with a teammate drafted in the first four rounds, the average quarterback ADP has been QB twelve. When the top teammate has been drafted after the first four rounds, that quarterback ADP falls to QB twenty two. Now, this is all actually pretty intuitive. In order for a quarterback to make multiple wide receivers usable in fantasy football, he'll need to be good, and most early round wide receivers will have reasonably good quarterbacks. So what this means is that when you're looking for a breakout wide receiver, if that wide receiver has a teammate drafted early, then he better have a decent quarterback. I've got an example of one later on the show, but this is an important thing to note. Now. The third trend is that breakout wide receivers are usually more impactful when they're young. So these fifty two breakout receivers, the guys who outperformed ADP by one hundred or more points while being drafted after round five, they're really of all ages. We've seen big values from older players at times, I would assume because older players see worse average draft positions. So if they end up not falling off and they actually play well, then they can exceed expectation a lot easier. But across the fifty two breakout players, six of them were rookies. Eight of them were year two players, which is tied for the highest number of any subset. Four of them were from year three, six from year four, eight from year five, eight from year six, and then after year six we see fewer and fewer breakouts, but we also see fewer and fewer on wide receivers make it that far into the league. The thing is, when you look at how far these different subsets exceeded expectation, it's very clear that the younger a player, the better. Maybe rookie seasons aside. The biggest value that we've had since twenty eleven, by the way, was Odell Beckham's rookie season, so he skews the rookie data just a little bit. But the six rookies in our breakout sample, on average exceeded their ADP expectation by one hundred and thirty one points. The year two guys exceeded it by one hundred and thirty four points. That's the highest of any subset. Year two wide receivers are where it's at. As you move down the list, the intensity of the breakout gets weaker. We do see a small spike among year five players, but the biggest breakouts at wide receiver have been players who are really young in the league. If you look at all year one through year five players in our sample, they're exceeding expectation by a little over one hundred and twenty nine points. Year six to year twelve you get one hundred and fourteen points. So there's a different there. They're all exceeding expectation, but the younger guys are exceeding expectation at a faster rate, a higher rate. I don't think that's necessarily shocking, especially if you think of a breakout being someone who hasn't done anything in fantasy throughout his career. But while older wide receivers can exceed value at a decent rate later in drafts, younger players are doing it a little bit better now. The last trend to talk about today is that breakout wide receivers rarely come from nowhere. We know that the statistics that are stickiest year over year in fantasy football are volume driven statistics, So if a player ends up breaking out, he actually, on average, has had a decent target share the year prior to breaking out. Like I said before, we had six rookies in our sample, so obviously those six guys don't have any previous season data. But I should note, and this wasn't in the article, but of those six wide receivers, of six rookie wide receivers, each of them were at least a Day two pick during the NFL Draft, So even those guys weren't totally coming out of NOA. But of the other forty six players, and actually there's forty five of them with previous season data because Jeremy Macklin missed an entire season with an injury before he ended up breaking out, So of the forty five players left in our sample, the average previous season target share for those players was almost sixteen percent. The median target share was over sixteen percent, and only eight of those players saw previous season target share under ten percent. Just to give you guys some perspective on that sixteen percent number that was hit by only forty two wide receivers last year, it's not that low of a target share. I was kind of shocked by how usable these breakout wide receivers were during their previous season, at least from a volume standpoint. So these guys really don't come from nowhere very often. DJ Chark seasons from twenty nineteen aren't all that common. So to recap, we've got trend one being that breakout wide receivers come from ambiguous situations. The second trend is that they don't always have elite quarterbacks. Trend three is that they're typically young, and trend four is that they don't always come from nowhere. That's how you can find a breakout wide receiver. So let's run through some examples. I've got six of them for you today that I really like this year. There are more guys that I'm cool with, but I like these six the most. The first guy is Deontay Johnson. You'll see Johnson drafted pretty high in some drafts, but according to Best Ball ten's EIGHTP, he's got an overall ADP of ninety three. He's passed our threshold of pick sixty, which is the end of the fifth round, and he fits the criteria really well. Juju Smith Schuster isn't being drafted as a top twenty four pick, so that's a plus. Things are somewhat ambiguous there too. I think from a projection standpoint, Juju should be projected for the most looks in that offense. There's no doubt, but there's still an outside chance that we see Johnson with more targets, or at the very least there's a chance that we see him with more quality targets. He's a second year player, which is the top spot for these breakouts, and last season during his rookie year, he had almost that's a nineteen percent target chair. Johnson's someone who's been on my radar since the beginning of the offseason when I did my Dynasty Buys episode, and the only thing that's changed is that he's a little bit more expensive than he was back then, but he hasn't gotten to the point where the opportunity cost in taking him is super significant. I'm very into Deontay Johnson this year. Mi Cole Hardman is another second year player to target. He's being selected at pick one hundred and eight, so he's going even later in drafts than Deontay Johnson. But I've talked about Hardman on the show in the past. He's the perfect kind of middle to late round dart throw. He does have a wide receiver being drafted early, but he's also got a quarterback who can support more than one pass catcher in fantasy football. I think we'd all agree on that his situation isn't totally ambiguous as a result of that, but I do think there are some question marks with how Sammy Watkins is going to be used in that offense, which is contributing to Hardman's lower ADP. If we knew Hardman was going to be the wide receiver too, for sure, he'd have a higher ADP. The one piece of criteria that he doesn't really hit is that a breakout season from Hardman would kind of come from nowhere. It wouldn't surprise me if the Chiefs don't feature him as much as we want them to here in year two, but he ends up getting somewhat of a bump and target share, and then in year three he becomes a big breakout star. That would not be shocking. That's definitely possible, and he'd fit the breakout mold even better in that scenario next year. But I'd rather be a year early than a year late. When you project someone like Hardman, he has a decent enough projection given the offense that he's in to be a lower end wide receiver four or so. But then you look at what happens if Sammy Watkins isn't as involved, or if Hardman just flat out outplays him, or if there's an injury to someone in that offense. The upside is there, and that alone makes him worthwhile, even if he doesn't fit every piece of criteria perfectly. Someone who does kind of fit things really well, as Preston Williams, yet another second year player. He's coming off that acl which is a little bit scary, but look at how well he fits all the criteria. Number One, he's in a pretty ambiguous situation. Devonte Parker isn't being drafted super super high. Number two, they don't have an elite quarterback. Maybe Tua plays a lot and he becomes one, but no Dolphins quarterback has an even remotely high ADP. Number three he's young, already went over that, and number four, he's not coming from nowhere. Preston Williams last year had a ten percent target chair In eight games played, he saw sixty targets. We know he can see volume in this offense, and at his ADP of one hundred and fortieth overall as the wide receiver fifty three, he's a steal right now. I actually have two more second year breakouts. I think targeting those players is a very easy path for a positive ROI this year. Mark He's Brown is one of them. I will say he's got the highest ADP of anyone that I'm talking about today. So maybe some of you are tilting about this because he's being drafted at wide receiver thirty. The main point about Marquise Brown that I think isn't getting enough love is that Baltimore is very unlikely to be as run heavy as they were this past year. Game script probably won't be in their favor to the same degree that it was in twenty nineteen, where they ran under twenty two percent of their plays. Last year while trailing that was by far the lowest rate in football. If there's more passing, that's naturally going to benefit Hollywood Brown. Last season, he ranked fortieth in the NFL and yards per team pass attempt. That was despite playing injured and despite missing a couple of games. Yards per team pass attempt is one of the most predictive metrics that I found at predicting year over year points per game in fantasy football, and he obviously fits the criteria pretty well. I usually don't go for the smaller, speedy players like him in fantasy, like a DeShawn Jackson type, but Brown might honestly be special. And if the Ravens do regress and passed to rush ratio, which they should, then more volume could be headed Brown's way than we think. And then the last second year guy is someone I really didn't think that i'd talk about, but it's Darius Slayton. We can't deny that he fits all the trends really well. He had a fourteen percent target share last year. We have no idea really how things are going to play out for the Giants pass catchers, and he's young. His splits were better last year when injuries occurred to his teammates, but we also have to take splits like that with a grain of salt. Slayton was a rookie. Your expectations really can't and shouldn't be that high, and it was good to see him produce at times last year, showing that he could have a nice ceiling if things break his way. I like the other guys that I talked about more than Slayton this year at their price, but I think he's the right kind of target in redraft leagues. And then, finally, the last player I want to go over today isn't a second year wide receiver. Finally, he's a third year one, and it's Anthony Miller. I'm not high on the Bears offense, but I really like Alan Robinson, Tari Cohen, and Anthony Miller's price tags right now. Embedded in those costs is the fact that the offense is likely to be average at best, but Miller is a good talent. Aside from fitting the trends really well, he had some really strong splits last year without Taylor Gabriel. There was a five week stretch last year where Miller averaged almost eighteen pper points per game without Gabriel in the lineup. He really flamed out the final two weeks of the season. So I'm not trying to be super selective here just to make a point. I'm just saying it's not like we haven't seen Miller as a productive fantasy asset, and he was a good prospect too. My model has Miller as an eighty second percentile wide receiver, which is in the range of being really good. The model likes wide receivers over that eighty percent mark. Miller should be projected for over eighty targets in that offense. My projections have him met almost ninety getting that type of talent as a third year wide receiver with a projection of ninety targets, who also happens to fit all the criteria that I talked about today. To get that player at wide receiver fifty, that's pretty sweet. I'll happily take Miller over someone like John Brown who's being drafted ahead of him. Right now. We could see a strong year from Anthony Miller. That's going to do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've get subscribe 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 later in the week.