Rewind: Rookie Wide Receivers in Season-Long Leagues

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Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's JJ. I know you're probably anticipating a mailbag episode to drop today, but instead we're going to take things back to last summer. I do studies every off season, and last off season I did one where I looked at rookie wide receivers and redraft leagues. I asked the simple question are they worthwhile in the season long format? And the data was really interesting and with people perhaps thinking about roster construction maybe early best ball drafts, I thought it would be a worthy rewind topic for the show this week. I'll be back in your ears early next week with a Cell Candidates episode. Until then, I hope you enjoyed the rewind, and remember to check out Lateround dot com and get that Prospect Guide pre ordered. I think the easiest way to start this is by analyzing things similarly to the other episodes that I've done recently, by looking at ADP expectation and seeing how these rookies performed against that expectation. If you haven't listened to those episodes, no problem. All I'm referring to is a scatterplot. Were on the X axis you've got average draft position, and that data is courtesy of Myfantasy League dot com. On the y axis, you've got points per game, So you plot each player in fantasy football on this graph. Some wide receiver who was selected fiftieth overall may have scored twelve PPR points per game one year, so that's a data point. Maybe someone at seventieth overall scored sixteen PPR points per game, and so on. When you do that for each position, you can create trend lines for each position as well, and those trend lines represent expectation. They represent how many points we'd expect a player to score at a particular ADP. So from there we can see which players exceeded or didn't exceed expectation. Since twenty eleven, we've seen one hundred and sixty three rookie wide receivers get drafted in redraft leagues. Some ADP sources will have more, some are going to have fewer. It just depends on where you draw the line. One hundred and forty three of those wide receivers played at least eight games. Let's focus on those players. Since we're working with points per game and not cumulative, no, we need a number of games played threshold. So one hundred and forty three rookie wide receivers, ranging from Amari Cooper's rookie season where he went pick forty two overall all the way to Ryan Switzer, who went two hundred and fifty third overall. What I first want to figure out here is whether or not these players did well versus ADP expectation overall, Like just generally, are rookie wide receivers good or bad at exceeding expectation? I can tell you that at the highest of levels, if you group all rookie wide receivers together, the answer to that is that rookie wide receivers overall played below expectation. The average difference between expected points per game versus actual points per game among all of these one hundred and forty three rookie wide receivers is minus point four to three, meaning the average rookie is playing point four to three ppero points per game below expectation. If you listen to some of the episodes that I've done this month, then you might remember how I looked at the percentage of players who exceeded expectation by three or more points, calling that a moderate breakout. Well of the one hundred and forty three wide receivers, thirty two of them were moderate breakouts. That's a twenty two percent rate, and that's lower than the overall wide receiver population during this timeframe. So again, at the highest of levels, rookie wide receivers have actually been bad bets, not good ones. The problem with just concluding that and moving on it's about eightfold. One of the reasons we shouldn't do that is because a lot of this data is likely being dragged down by some serious unpredictability, especially in the late rounds. A rookie wide receiver in your fantasy draft has never played in the NFL. We have no data on that player. We think we know if he's going to be good, but we're naturally going to be better at projecting a player who we've actually seen play on an NFL field. What that means is that we're doing a whole lot of dart throwing with these rookies, and like I said, that's especially true in the later rounds. What's interesting is that the better rookie wide receivers, the ones who are good or have higher ADPs, they've actually exceeded expectation at a pretty decent rate. For some a really decent rate. Let's start splitting out up this sample of one hundred and forty three wide receivers. Let's group them up into top one hundred picks, picks one hundred to one fifty, and then players picked past one hundred and fiftieth overall. So fourteen wide receivers out of these one hundred and forty three were drafted in the top one hundred of their fantasy drafts. If you think about it, those are the really good wide receivers who were probably early first round picks in the actual NFL draft. DeVante Smith was barely in that range last year, Jamar Chase was in that range, but players like Jalen Waddle, Elijah Moore, they were outside of it. According to his data, we don't see rookie wide receivers in the top one hundred EIGHTDP very often. Remember in a twelve team league, that's like the first eight rounds. But get this, of those fourteen wide receivers, eleven of them ended up exceeding expectation, just exceeded expectation, They outperformed their ADP. But that's a seventy nine percent rate, and thirty six percent of them exceeded ADP. Expectation by three or more points, they were moderate breakouts. Those breakout rates got worse and worse as you went down in ADP. And I remember, I'm comparing all of these players versus EIGHTP expectation, So yes, we'd expect players with a lower ADP to not do as well. But this is all versus expectation, so a player getting drafted earlier has to score more points to meet expectation. When looking at the rookie wideouts who were drafted between picks one hundred and one hundred and fifty, that rate of exceeding expectation goes from seventy nine percent to forty eight percent, and the rate of being a moderate breakout or exceeding expectation by three or more points goes from thirty six percent to thirty percent. And then there's the group of wide receivers who get selected after pick one p fifty. This is the bulk of the players, since we're mostly throwing darts at rookies and season long leagues. Of these players, though just thirty seven percent exceeded ADP expectation, fewer than nineteen percent of them exceeded ADP expectation by three or more points. It's a little bit counterintuitive, but as you go on in your draft, rookie wide receivers become worse bets, even when expectations are low for those players. And I think it has everything to do with the fact that there are usually a handful of rookie wide receivers with projectable target shairs each season. They're the guys who go in Round one of the NFL drafts and are maybe Day two picks. But after those players are off the board, good luck nailing the exact guy who's gonna blow up. There are a lot of them who could, but there are usually only one or two who actually do. You can see this when breaking down these rookies by rookie wide receiver rank as well, so the rookie wide receiver one in a given season, the rookie wide receiver two, and so on. Historically, the rookie wide receiver ones have exceeded expectation have produced a higher points per game than expected points per game based on ADP. But these rookie wide receiver ones have exceeded expectation over seventy two percent of the time. That's not that surprising since we just talked about how top one hundred, Rookie wide receivers usually are able to exceed expectation. Rookie wide receiver twos are at fifty five percent, Wide receiver threes forty five percent wide receiver four seventy two percent. I could keep reading these results, but that wouldn't make for a good podcast. Instead, I can tell you that after about rookie wide receiver six, where sixty three percent of the players exceed expectation, we hit a wall. The vast majority of rookies ranked wide receiver seven or worse in their rookie class don't exceed expectation, even when that expectation is very, very low. So let's quickly recap because I've got one more thing that I want to share. When a rookie wide receiver is a top one hundred pick by ADP, he exceeds expectation at a very high rate. As you move down the draft. As you go through the draft, those percentages shrink, and it's probably because rookie wide receivers become much more of a crapshoot and not many of them are breaking out. We have a decent sized numerator, but a massive denominator, But overall, the hit rates for rookies is actually quite good, especially during those higher leverage rounds. And what if I told you that these rookie wide receivers are even better than you expect, that they're even better than all of this. When looking at how a player performed versus expectation, I'm looking at the whole season. But as we know, rookies may need a little bit of time to get acclimated, meaning the start of their rookie seasons could be slower, bringing down their season long points per game averages. And that's generally what we see. I took our sample of wide receivers and I cut it down to wide receivers who played at least five games during both the front and the back half of their rookie seasons. Because what I did was compare how they performed during the first half of the season versus the second half. It would make sense for the front half numbers to be lower, right for rookie wide receivers to perform better to have better production during the second half of their rookie year. That's what the numbers show. Let's look at rookie wide receivers drafted in the top one hundred who played at least five games in both halves of their rookie season. On average, those players saw their points per game averages go up by almost a full point from the front half to the back half of the season. The next group of players who were drafted between picks one hundred and one to fifty, they saw their averages increase by almost three freaking points. And then the last group, all the players who were drafted after pick one p fifty, Their increase from front half to back half points per game was one point two to three. So think about what this means. We saw that generally speaking, top one hundred rookie wide receivers exceed expectation at a pretty high rate. But those numbers that were using to conclude that they include the entire season. In reality, rookie wide receivers have been better during the second half of the season, and that's the more important part of the fantasy season too, because you're in the fantasy playoffs, and the same happens at other rookie wide receiver levels as well. The overall hit rates may not be as good when you're not talking about the stud rookies, when you're not talking about the Jamar Chases, of the world. Those hit rates are also skewed a little bit by the fact that rookie wideouts are scoring more points on the back end when things matter most. Think of it this way. Those rookie wide receivers who've been picked between picks one hundred and one fifty over the years, they're exceeding expectation at a forty eight percent rate. A fifty percent rate would mean they're just completely average, because half of them are exceeding expectation and half aren't. But that forty eight percent number is working off of full season numbers. If you were to focus only on the second half numbers the second half averages, the equation changes completely. The rookie wide receivers with top one hundred and eightyp go from seventy nine percent to eighty three percent in terms of exceeding expectation when you focus only on their second half numbers. The next group are rookie wide receivers getting drafted between picks one hundred to one fifty. That rate goes from forty eight percent, which I was just talking about, to seventy four percent. And then the last group, the guys who get drafted past pick one p fifty their hit rate right from thirty seven percent to forty three percent, and each group got better when looking at moderate and true breakout rates as well. The reason I love comparing these players to ADP expectation is because it embeds a market evaluation into these types of players. What this data is telling us is that fantasy managers probably are underrating the really good rookie wide receivers in redraft leagues. Just generally speaking, when it comes to the later round ones, they're not. But the ones who get drafted in the single digit rounds and into the double digit rounds they generally end up as pretty good values. But their value is enhanced when you remember how rookies are scoring points. Their values even when you look at season long numbers, but if you focus on the second half numbers, the numbers that they're posting after getting used to the NFL game for a little bit, or maybe after they see the field a little bit more, that's where these players are winning for you. So the bottom line takeaway is that you should probably be drafting rookie wide receivers more frequently or at least a little bit higher, and you should probably be playing the slow game with them because you want to be able to extract as much value as possible during the most important weeks of the season.