Episode 526: Breakout Wide Receivers

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ Zachertha j J Zacherson. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zachares and the editor in chief at Fandel and at Number five dot com in this episode five and twenty six of the Late Round podcast. So many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. As you guys know, last week I talked all about breakout running backs and fantasy football. If you weren't able to hear the episode specifically on that topic and then the mailbag episode that followed, I'd go back and listen to those shows before this one. Today's shows about wide receivers. We know what to generally look for when spotting breakout running backs, and we now know there may be a way to really increase your odds on hitting on a breakout running back with the ambiguous RB one theory. But what about wide receivers. I'll talk about that today, but before we get into the data, the Olympics are back and Fandel is giving fans an exclusive opportunity to get in on the action with the USA gold Medal bonus. All you have to do is head over to FanDuel's Sportsbook in place one hundred dollars or more in wagers on the Olympics prior to July twenty sixth. You'll be awarded a one dollar bonus in site credit for each gold medal the United States wins at the Olympics, regardless if your wager wins or loses, show your support for Team USA and head over to FanDuel today. Must be twenty one years or older in president of Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee or Virginia. Bonus issue does not much rawables like credit that expires in seven days. Max bonus fifty dollars. Restrictions apply. See full terms of sportsbook dotfanel dot com. Gampling problem called one hundred fifty two forty seven hundred in Colorado, one hundred bets off in Iowa, one hundred and nine within in Indiana one hundred two seven to zero seven one seven for confidences will help Michigan one hundred gambler in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia, and the Tennessee redline one hundred and eighty nine nine seven eight nine. Like the running back study, I've looked into how to spot breakout wide receivers. In the past, I've done two separate episodes on the topic on the Late Round podcast, but the episode and study that last year was a little bit more detailed than the one before that, And just like the running back study, I started the wide receiver one by plotting wide receiver average draft position versus postseason result. So in the X axis you have where a wide receiver was drafted. On the Y axis, it shows how many points that player ended up scoring. This gives us a trend line of ADP expectation, or how many points we'd expect the wide receiver to score at a particular average draft position. From there, to get a breakout wide receiver sample, I looked at all wide receivers drafted after round five or pick sixty who exceeded expectation by one hundred or more points. The reason I chose one hundred points that was sort of arbitrary, but I chose after round five because that's about where we see opportunity costs drop in fantasy football, meaning we're starting to get into this area of the draft where there are a lot more question marks for players. From twenty eleven through twenty nineteen that yielded fifty two wide receiver breakouts. We did have five more wide receiver breakouts happen in twenty twenty as well, with Justin Jefferson, Chase Claypoole, Robbie Anderson, Cole Beasley, and Curtis Samuel all exceeding ADP expectation by one hundred and more points last year. But when I did the study last year, I obviously didn't have those players as part of the breakout sample. I looked into that fifty two players sample and found some common trends. I found that, just like the running backs, these breakout wide receivers seemed to be coming from ambiguous wide receiver groups. Of the fifty two players, eight of them had a wide receiver teammate drafted in the first two rounds of fantasy drafts. The vast majority were on teams where the first wide receivers selected on that team came after round four, hence the ambiguity. The second trend was that quarterback play didn't really matter, or seemed to matter. It's nothing, It didn't matter at the end of the season. But if you're trying to tie your wide receivers to quarterbacks, by ADP, it's not all that necessary. The quarterbacks for these breakout wide receivers averaged an ADP of QB nineteen. So again, maybe at the end of the season they mattered and they were good, but at the start of the season we weren't necessarily looking at them favorably, which could be why their wide receivers were being drafted outside the first couple of rounds. Trend three is that breakout wide receivers tend to be most impactful when they're young. To put this another way, the degree in which they broke out was more significant when they were in year one through year five, with a focus on years one and two. That was the case last year too. The two biggest breakouts are players who exceeded expectation. Most were rookies, Justin Jefferson and Chase Claypoole. Now, the last trend is that breakout wide receivers rarely come from nowhere. Typically, these breakout players had some sort of target share during the previous season before that breakout year. If you look at what happened with Jefferson, Claypool, Robbie Anderson, Beasley, and Curtis Samuel, they seem to fit these trends, none of those players had teammates drafted in the first two rounds of drafts. Last year, they all almost had teammates drafted outside of round three as well, but DJ Moore and Juju Smith Schuster were at the tail end of round three. The quarterbacks were only drafted later, and the non rookie breakouts were coming off seasons where they had significant target shairs. Cole Beasley had to share of twenty one percent in twenty nineteen, Robbie Anderson's was nineteen and a half percent, Curtis Samuels was almost eighteen percent, and then, as I already mentioned with the last trend, the younger guys broke out at a more substantial rate, with Justin Jefferson and Chase Claypole exceeding expectation the most. I want to dig more into the ambiguous wide receiver group in the age thing a little bit more today. I do think that if you're drafting a non rookie wide receiver with a middle or late round pick, you won some sort of backbone from the previous season, the median target chair from the year before a player's breakout through the years over the last ten years has been almost seventeen percent. Two thirds of the qualified wide receiver breakouts hit at least a fifteen percent target shair the year prior to that breakout. For some perspective, that target share was hit by fewer than fifty wide receivers in twenty twenty, so you're rarely working with players with breakout players who come from absolutely nowhere as non rookies a season like Tyrell Williams twenty sixteen or Terrell Prior's twenty sixteen or dj Huk's twenty nineteen. They honestly don't happen very often and don't pay too close attention to quarterback ADP when drafting or wide receivers. When a quarterback has wide receivers who have high ADPs, that quarterback is generally going to outperform expectation. I talked about that on episode five hundred and sixteen. But breakout wide receivers are being drafted later and from ambiguous wide receiver groups, so it would make sense that the quarterback isn't necessarily highly regarded entering a season. I'm really interested if we can learn more about the age factor and then about the ambiguous wide receiver groups. Similar to the running Back Breakout show. So that's what I set out to do to look more into those two things. Let's start with the ambiguous wide receiver group trend. If you look at the fifty seven wide receiver breakout, so I'll add the five that happened this past year, and you see where the top wide receiver from their NFL team was being drafted in Fantasy. The average ADP of that player was pick sixty eight. Now, some of the breakout wide receivers were their team's wide receiver one by ADP. To be clear and just that I don't make the same mistake that I made with the running back episode. By team wide receiver one, I'm referring to players who are the first wide receivers being drafted on their actual NFL team. So Justin Jefferson was not that last year. Adam Thielen was that for Minnesota. Whereas right now, Justin Jefferson is that he is his team's wide receiver one because in twenty twenty one, he's being drafted ahead of Adam Thielen. That's what I mean by team wide receiver ones. It's strictly by ADP. I'm not guessing or predicting who the wide receiver one is going to be. Let's approach this the same way I approach the running back study. Let's look at every wide receiver who's been drafted after round five since twenty eleven, and let's see if there's anything of substance between a player who's his team's wide receiver one versus a player who isn't. We've had a lot of wide receivers drafted after round five over the last ten years. According to my Fantasy league's ADP data. In redraft leagues, we've had seven hundred and sixty eight wide receivers get selected after round five over the last decade. Of those seven hundred and sixty eight, one hundred and nineteen of them were the first wide receivers drafted from their team. So you've got one hundred and nineteen team wide receiver ones versus six hundred and forty nine Wide receiver twos are worse of the wide receiver ones. Thirteen exceeded expectation by one hundred and more points. That's a breakout hit rate of about eleven percent. Of the non wide receiver ones, we have forty four breakouts. That's a hit rate of under seven percent. So from that alone, it seems like team wide receiver ones are a better bet than team wide receiver twos. But we have to keep in mind that there's probably some bias here. We're looking at expectation, so late round picks have lower expectation than a middle round pick, and most team wide receiver ones are being drafted in the middle rounds, So how a player exceeds expectation, that's still all relative to ADP. But we also know that in the late rounds we're drafting players who may not sniff a football field. We're throwing darts. So I don't think this is super super shocking. I don't think the fact that wide receiver ones are better than wide receiver twos right now, given this data, that's not all that shocking, even though expectation is relative to ADP. To sort of help this problem, I'll do what I did with the running back study, and that's look at a more apples to apples comparison. We'll look at the middle rounds around six through nine. That represents pick sixty one through pick one hundred and eight. Since twenty eleven, fifteen of our breakout wide receivers have come from these middle rounds. Of those fifteen, nine of them were drafted as their team's wide receiver one, which remember is strictly determined by ADP. Six of them were drafted as their team's wide receiver two or worse. That's the numerator of our fraction here. But what we're trying to figure out isn't just the raw number, it's the hit rate, So that numerator divided by some sort of denominator. Over this timeframe, there have been eighty nine team wide receiver twos or worse drafted in that range, So since six of them broke out, that's a breakout rate of six divided by eighty nine or six point seven percent. Meanwhile, there's been seventy two team wide receiver ones drafted in this range, with nine of them breaking out. That gives us a hit rate of twelve and a half percent. To put this another way, you want team wide receiver ones. They've almost had twice as good of a breakout wide receiver hit rate over the last decade versus the alternative. And yes, this is exactly what we saw with a running back sample analyzed last week. This is all backed by yet another study done by my friend Rich Reebar from Sharp Football Analysis. He wrote that since twenty ten, seventy eight point eight percent of all wide receiver one scoring seasons have come from players that were the first wide receiver selected on their team, fifteen point nine percent of been the wide receiver two and ADP from their team, and just evan of the one hundred and thirty two have been lower than that. Rich's looking at this from the perspective of a top twelve season, I'm looking at it from a perspective of beating ADP expectation. But both are coming to the exact same conclusion. You want team wide receiver ones. So the question then becomes, do you want that player to be the obvious wide receiver one on his team or do you want his teammates to be drafted close to him, which would tell us that the situation is really, really ambiguous, because remember the ambiguous RB one theory states that when you're looking for ambiguous backfields to target, you should be attacking middle round team RB ones who have teammates who are also being selected in the middle rounds. Is that the case for wide receivers, well, if anything, the opposite would be the case. Over the last ten years, we've seen seventy two team wide receiver ones drafted in the middle rounds. We know that already. Of those seventy two, fifteen of them had a wide receiver teammate drafted with them in those middle rounds, So fifty seven of them had a wide receiver two teammate drafted in the double digit rounds. Of the fifteen with a wide receiver teammate also selected in the middle rounds with them, the hit rate was just six point seven percent. That's the same as the non wide receiver ones drafted in the middle rounds. Meanwhile, the breakout hit rate for the wide receiver ones without a teammate drafted near them was a little over fourteen percent. This may seem to suggest that you want more standalone wide receiver ones in the middle rounds. The problem is, unlike running backs, there's another position that can influence our wide receiver's output, and that's tight end. If you include tight ends in our sample, the rates converge a little bit more. To put this another way, if you pretend that a tight end in the earlier middle rounds is like a wide receiver in the middle rounds, the hit rate for a wide receiver one with a teammate being drafted near him grows, or you could just think of it this way. I know this is kind of confusing. Just hear me out. Team wide receiver ones are better than team wide receiver two. Of the team wide receiver one subset. The data says that we shouldn't want a teammate drafted around that wide receiver one unless that teammate is a tight end. In fact, of the twenty two wide receivers who have had no wide receiver teammates drafted around them, but where they did have a tight end teammate draft in the single digit rounds, we saw four wide receivers hit. That's a hit rate of eighteen percent. That was the most significant hit rate that I found when looking at teammate situations by ADP. Now, there's likely some noise to this data. Part of me thinks that the hypothesis as to why this is a thing would be that good quarterbacks, and I'm not saying good quarterbacks by ADP, but good quarterbacks may be utilizing their tight ends more because tight ends aren't usually a quarterbacks first option. So it tells us that the quarterback is going through his reads efficiently to get to that tight end, and therefore he's a good quarterback because he can progress through his reads. That's probably somewhat of a stretch, though maybe you guys can come up with the logic behind the data. But in the end, I think the data that matters is the wide receiver one versus the non wide receiver one. Thing. You want team wide receiver ones over team wide receiver twos. They're hitting at a more substantial rate throughout your draft. So what about age? How does age play into all this? In the study done last year, I noted that age seemed to matter, but it seemed to matter from the perspective of how big the breakout was. Meaning, if it was a given that a wide receiver broke out, if he was younger, that breakout was more significant. He exceeded ADP by more points. Rather than looking at the degree of the breakout, what I'm more interested in today is looking at the breakout rates of different ages. How often do rookies breakout? What about thirty year players or fourth year players. That's going to set us up better to grasp the age side of things. If you look at our entire sample of wide receivers drafted after round five and you section off that sample by year in the league. One of the lower breakout hit rates is actually for rookie wider scis. Since twenty eleven, five point four percent of rookie wide receivers drafted after round five have broken out. That number jumps to six point three percent for second year players. It's four point three percent for thirty year guys, and then it jumps to almost nine percent for fourth year guys. And then something interesting happens. The breakout rate starts to peak for fifth and six year players. Over the last ten years, eleven point four percent of all fifth year wide receivers drafted have given us a performance with an exceeded ADP expectation by one hundred and more points. With six year guys, that number was fifteen percent. Now, before we get super excited about this, we have to remember a few things about the data that we're working with. First off, this is not saying that fifth and six year wide receivers are better than other wide receivers. When you factor out cost, all of the stuff that I'm referring to today is in reference to average rapt position. It's in reference to the market. Now to that point, keep in mind, how fantasy managers behave Remember the things that fantasy managers do in drafts. When it gets to be the later rounds, who are you thinking about drafting the veteran wide receivers with a large sample size under their belt, or the rookies or the second year players with more variants attached to their profiles. It's almost always the latter. We want more variants in the later rounds of our drafts. The truth is fewer wide receivers in general will make it to year five or year six of their careers. In fact, since twenty eleven, we've seen a total of one hundred and thirty nine fifth and six year wide receivers drafted in Fantasy football, and that's within our sample of wide receivers drafted after pick sixty. If you only look at rookie wide receivers, then numbers one hundred and forty seven. So we've been drafting more rookie wide receivers over the last ten years than fifth and sixt year wide receivers, even though we're looking at how these players performed against expectation. So many rookies are being drafted late. As Dart throws one hundred and thirty three of the one hundred and forty seven rookies that have been drafted have been double digit round picks. We're basically saying, yeah, sure, maybe he's gonna work out, whereas with the veteran guys, we kind of already know the type of player that they are, so there's far less guessing. So plenty of rookies are probably giving you zeros and that drives this number down, whereas that doesn't happen nearly as often with veteran wide receivers. If you look strictly at the middle rounds to give us some more apples to apples comparisons, around six through nine, things change a little bit. In the middle rounds, rookie wide receivers have a hit rate of about seven percent. The sample size is pretty small, with just fourteen wide receivers getting selected in around six through nine since twenty eleven. Within this subset, one of them has exceeded expectation by one hundred and more points, and that was Mike Evans. Second year wide receivers, they've had a hit rate of twelve and a half percent. So in the middle rounds, rookie and second year wide receivers have a higher hit rate than what their hit rate was overall. Why likely because of what I said before. We're throwing a lot of darts at first and second year wide receivers in the late rounds, and a lot of those players are going to give you zeros for the entire season. But in the middle rounds there's just naturally higher expectation for younger players. They're likely early round NFL draft picks who are going to see the field. When you look at third year wide receivers in the middle rounds, they have a zero percent hit rate, meaning zero Third year wide out since twenty eleven, who have been drafted around six through nine have exceeded expectation by one hundred and more points, and fourth year wide receivers have not done that much better. Fifth year wide receivers get us back to about twelve percent, and then six year guys and there have been fifteen of them, but six year guys have absolutely crushed it through the years. Five of the fifteen six year wideouts have exceeded expectation by one hundred and more points. Now, again, maybe there's going to be some noise to this. I would actually say there's almost definitely noise to this specific year, that sixth year wide receivers are this much better competiti to the market when placed next to a fifth year or seventh year wide receiver because players from year seven through year ten they haven't hit at all. Thirty eight players have gone in the middle rounds who have been year seven through year ten guys, none of them have been breakout wide receivers. It would then seem a little bit naive to think that drafting sixth year wide receivers is like some obvious way to win fantasy titles when just a year later things are so bad. Now, I will say the degree in which these breakouts occur still seems to favor early career wideouts. If you look at the double digit rounds or the late rounds, rookie wide receivers have an average difference in ADP expectation of about minus eight points, meaning rookie wide receivers being drafted late on average aren't giving you a good return. That's kind of to be expected for the reasons that I just talked about. What's interesting is that even though one of fourteen rookie wide receivers drafted in the middle rounds gave us a true breakout season, which is not a very high hit rate. Middle round rookie wide receivers have exceeded expectation on average by about twenty five fantasy points. To put this another way, these middle round rookies aren't really breaking out, but they're exceeding expectation pretty regularly. Of the fourteen taken in the middle rounds, nine were able to exceed ADP expectation. Meanwhile, this data sort of confirms that second year wide receivers are a gold mine for fantasy football, especially middle rounds second year wide receivers. In terms of just general hit rate in the middle rounds, only sixt year wide receivers were better than second year wide receivers. But then on top of that, second year wide receivers exceeded expectation on average at the highest rate among all career seasons. Let me put this another way, first and second year wide receivers have the second highest and highest average in terms of ADP expectation sixty year wide receivers or third. So in the middle rounds, those younger players are exceeding expectation by a good number on average. But considering second year wide receivers also have the second highest breakout rate. It tells you that not only are they breaking out, but they're doing so by a larger margin than the other subsets. Let me phrase this in a more concise way. Rookie wide receivers aren't breaking out at a super high rate no matter where you're drafting them, but on average, they're still exceeding expectation in the middle rounds at a decently high rate. The difference with a second year wide receiver is that not only are they averaging a higher point total above expectation, but they're also breaking out at a higher rate. So you really want second year wide receivers. Year three and four wide receivers tend to do pretty poorly according to this data, especially when looking at the middle rounds, where the samples are more apples than apples. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that these players are middle and late round picks. So they're clearly not good or they're not elite. But had they broken out in year one or year two, they likely wouldn't have the ADPs that they have. They'd be higher draft picks. It's as if they're being drafted with a lot of hope in mind. That's a little bit different compared to a player in year five, six or seven veteran. Like those players, they're just not sexy picks. They're players who likely have given us something in the past, but they're being perceived as players who can't really hit because they're further along in their careers. They're just not fun picks, and there's some truth to that, but they do tend to outperform the market. So let's recap all this. I just brain vomited a ton of information into your ears, and I'm sure it's hard to keep up. We know that breakout wide receivers tend to not come from nowhere. The year before their breakout, they typically had a reasonably high target share. We also know that quarterback ADP isn't really relevant for a wide receiver to break out. We know that breakout wide receivers are coming from ambiguous wide receiver situations. The exact type of situation is not totally clear, but we do know that we want team wide receiver ones at the very least, and it seems like team wide receiver ones who have a tight end only being drafted with them in the single digit rounds. Those players seem to crush either that or team wide receiver ones without a wide receiver being drafted near them from their team. But as a baseline, we want wide receiver ones. And lastly, second year wide receivers are the best bet in the middle rounds, while veterans like year five to seven guys are the best bet to exceed expectation throughout all rounds. Year one in two wide receivers tend to break out more substantially in those middle rounds. Year three and four wide receivers don't, and then year five through seven wide receivers are generally safe investments versus the market. So what does that mean for twenty twenty one. Well, one player who really stands out who fits this criteria is Michael Pittman. Bestball ADP has him as a top one hundred pick right now. He's a year two player and he's being drafted as his team's wide receiver one. His quarterback doesn't have a high ADP either. The only piece of breakout criteria he doesn't totally fit is the coming from nowhere thing. But he was banged up last year and he still saw eleven point four percent of Indianapolis's targets across thirteen games, Michael Pittman seems like a fairly good choice, and honestly, as difficult as it is for me to say this because I just more subjectively don't believe in it. Henry Ruggs fits this criteria pretty well too, He just has similar issues to what Michael Pittman has now. ADP can change a whole lot from now until August, and the data that I work with focuses on August drafts. But if Jerry Judy starts to separate himself from Courtland Sutton in ADP, then he seems like a fairly obvious breakout candidate as well as the team wide receiver one from Denver. We'll just see how things look from an ADP perspective as we get closer to seasonal draft time. Now, there aren't a ton of veterans being drafted as their team's wide receiver one in the mid to late rounds this year, but I think Brandon Cooks is one who you could pinpoint and say that he fits what I talked about on today's show pretty well. We have no idea what his quarterback situation is going to look like. He has no wide receiver teammates being drafted near him, he's being drafted as his team's wide receiver one, and he has a target share backbone from last year, the obvious veteran pick. And then, even though rookie wide receivers don't pan out at a high rate in the middle rounds in terms of being true breakouts, Davante Smith is definitely someone to watch. Remember, rookie wide receivers in the middle rounds still beat their ADP by a high number of points compared to the alternative. They just didn't hit that one hundred mark very often. Davonte Smith with a tight end being drafted with him in the single digit rounds and no teammate wide receiver to be seen near him in ADP, he sort of makes sense. And Elijah Moore works for similar reasons, you know, just like the running back episode from last week. I think one takeaway with all of this could also be what not to look for. We shouldn't love team wide receiver threes. We shouldn't love year three or year four players versus their cost. We shouldn't love wide receivers who are just being drafted on hope. So even if there aren't obvious players to target, maybe you walk away from listening to this and you second guess the player that you've been drafting a lot this offseason, that can be just as impactful. Just remember, though, we're looking at trends here, and I'd argue that trends are less concrete than the running back ones that we talked about last week. Even if that's the case, they're still gonna help you gain an edge over your competition. That's gonna do it for today's show, though. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got subscribed to the Late Round podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and over it to follow me on Twitter at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, I'll talk to you later in the week.