655: Breakout Wide Receivers

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha, j J Zacher Reson, Jess. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyeson in this episode six hundred and fifty five of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. Last week on the show, I looked at ways to spot middle round running back breakouts. I've got ways to find late round breakouts too, but that's in the Late Round Draft Guide, which is currently available for purchase over on lateround dot com. If you haven't listened to that episode, but you somehow found yourself listening to this one hit pause, go back in the feed and listen to that. I think it's the better show to listen to first. But today we're going to run through that same exercise, but with wide receivers. What should you be looking for in the middle rounds at the wide receiver position. What trends can help you increase your probability of hitting on the position in fantasy football? Those are the questions I'm to help answer today. Before doing so, I wanted to give a shout to the Establish the Run podcast. The podcast is free and it's toasted by two legends in the fantasy space, Adam Levitan and Nevin Silva. You probably remember them from their time at Roadal World. Establish the Run episodes are quick, fun and packed with analysis. They cover fantasy news and reactions, rankings, how to bet, player props, best pall and more. I think it's a great compliment to this podcast because it's more conversational in nature, and they cover topics that I might not cover. I'm a longtime listener and I can vouch that they know what they're talking about. So go check out the Establish the Run podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts, and don't forget to sign up for Fandle Fantasy. For users who got to make a deposit on Fandle Fantasy, you can deposit today to receive two free entries. All you have to do is deposit a minimum of ten dollars in your fantal dfs account and you will be instantly rewarded with two free vouchers. Be sure to deposit now and play for free. Head over to fandle dot com or download the Fandle Fantasy app today. Eligibility restrictions apply. Go to fandle dot com or download the Fandle app for more details. Just like the running back episode, we have to figure out what it means to be a breakout from the middle rounds. We need some parameters. So, just like the running backs, I laid out a scatterplot where I applotted every player who's been drafted in Fantasy football since twenty eleven, and I compared that ADP to how many points per game that player ended up scoring. So on the X axis of this graft you've got average draft position. On the y axis, you have how many points per game a player scored at that ADP. Once you plot all players since twenty eleven, and this is thanks to my Fantasy league dot COM's ADP data, you can create a trend line, and what the trend line tells us is expectation. It tells us how many points we'd expect a player to score at a certain ADP based on history. In the late round draft guide, I looked at middle round wide receivers as players who were drafted between pick sixty and one oh eight and twelve team leagues, so round six through round nine. Since twenty eleven, we've seen one hundred and sixty seven wide receivers draft between round six through round nine and twelve team leagues while playing eight games in the season. So that's a pretty decent sample size. It's one hundred and sixty seven wide receivers. Now the question is how many of those players were breakouts. But what exactly does a breakout mean. I've defined breakouts in two ways, and this is gonna sound very familiar if you've been listening to the show. But moderate breakouts are players who exceeded eightyp points per game expectation by three or more PPR points. So, for example, let's say a wide receiver who gets drafted fiftieth overall is expected to score twelve points per game in PPR formats, but he ends up scoring fifteen point five points per game. That means he exceeded expectation by three or more points. He exceeded it by three and a half points. That makes him a moderate breakout. A true breakout is a player who exceeds ADP expectation by six or more points. So if that same player had scored eighteen and a half PPR points per game, he would have been a true breakout. And for the record, those are just random numbers for example purposes. So of those one hundred and sixty seven middle round wide receivers that we've seen drafted since twenty eleven. Forty one of them have been moderate breakouts. They exceeded ADP expectation by three or more points, accounting for twenty four point six percent of our middle round sample. The true breakouts represented seven point two percent of the sample. Twelve wide receivers exceeded ADP expectation in the middle rounds during this timeframe by six or more points. Those subsets, those groups, those are the guys that I analyze to see if there are breakout wide receiver trends, and there are, I wouldn't be doing the show if there weren't. There are three things I want to call out on today's show that can help guide you in finding a breakout wide receiver and round six through nine. The first is similar to the running Back episode last week, and you may have listened to the episode last month on this But breakout wide receivers in the middle rounds, they tend to come from ambiguous wide receiver groups. But it's not as extreme as it is at running back. Let me explain. At running back, we found that we never see breakout middle round running backs when their teammates get drafted in rounds one and two. Their teammate running backs at wide receiver, it was a deal, but it's not as big of a deal during this timeframe. Since twenty eleven, we've had twenty four middle round wide receivers who had a wide receiver teammate drafted in the first two rounds. Five of those twenty four wide receivers were moderate breakouts. That's not a great rate, but it's at least not zero like it was with running back. But I do need to stress that middle round wide receivers generally break out at a lower rate when they have teammates getting drafted in the early rounds. Since twenty eleven, sixteen point seven percent of middle round wide receivers with a teammate drafted in either round one, round two, or round three they ended up exceeding expectation by three or more points. So about seventeen percent of these middle round wide receivers with early round teammates were moderate breakouts. Among the rest of the middle round sample, that number was twenty seven percent, so ten percentage points higher. And the math is the exact same for true breakouts too, just two point four percent of middle round wide receivers with a teammates selected in the first three rounds ended up as a true breakout That was eight point eight percent among players who didn't have that kind of teammate. Now. I talked about this on the Ambiguous Wide Receiver Core episode back in June, but this makes a ton of sense. Wide receivers playing with elite wide receivers will likely have a tougher time really reaching a ceiling, but it's not the end all. Unlike running back, multiple wide receivers are on the field at once all the time, so multiple players can eat. It's just that it's still hard for that wide receiver two on his team to overcome his stud teammate. Some examples of this in twenty twenty two include DeVante Smith with AJ Brown going early, Adam Thielen with Justin Jefferson, and Hunter Renfro with DeVante Adams. It's not the end of the world for them, and this is not best ball advice. For the record, this has managed season long leagues, although there's obviously some overlap, but historically players in their positions have had a slightly lower hit rate than players in more ambiguous situations. Now, most of you who have been around all offseason already knew some of that because I covered it on episode six hundred and forty five. But the second thing to keep in mind with these middle round breakouts is that team situation doesn't seem like that big of a deal. The average quarterback ADP for middle round breakouts since twenty eleven has been a little over one hundred and fifteen, meaning these breakout wide receivers their quarterbacks have fallen off fantasy draft boards on average at pick one hundred and fifteen. For non breakouts, that number is actually lower, it's one hundred and nine, meaning their quarterbacks have been better. Now, I did split up team wide receiver ones and team wide receiver twos are worse within this data. This actually wasn't published in the Late Round Draft Guide, and I wish it would have thought to put it in, But team wide receiver twos are worse who ended up being moderate breakouts they had a quarterback ADP of ninety eight point four or their quarterbacks ADP was on average ninety eight point four. So you've got a middle round wide receiver who's not the first wide receiver being selected from his team. He ends up breaking out. Taking all of those players, their quarterback's ADP average was about ninety eight, which makes sense that it was better than the wide receiver ones in the middle rounds because wide receiver twos are worse are likely not going to be the first read for a quarterback, and better quarterbacks are going to get their number two or number three options involved more, and better quarterbacks generally have higher ADPs. The thing is, though wide receiver twos are worse who didn't break out, their quarterbacks still had better ADPs than that, so the quarterback ADP stuff is completely irrelevant. This doesn't mean that we should conclude that quarterback play itself is irrelevant at wide receiver in fantasy football. It just means that it's likely already baked into a player's cost. It may even be baked in too much given some of this data. Think about what breaking out means. A player is exceeding some expectation by a large number of points per game. In order to do that, he's doing something that people didn't expect him to do. So at the end of the season, maybe his offense was awesome, maybe that helped him break out, And there is some validity to that because breakout wide receivers do come from offenses that end up scoring about point two more touchdowns per game than the offense is where non breakouts came from. But it's likely that going into a season we had no idea that offense would be as good as it ended up being, which is why we see quarterback ADPs look the way they do for these middle round wide receivers. And yeah, this isn't some flawless way of measuring this, especially because people were valuing quarterback rushing a little bit more than they did before, and those quarterbacks aren't necessarily better options for their pass catchers. Like in the end, you should drive to have a player in a good situation. You should want a player in a Josh Allen offense more than a justin fields offense. That's if we completely remove cost. But we have to keep two things in mind. Number One, generally speaking, the market is going to account for that there is a cost involved. It's why Gabriel Davis has the ADP that he has right now versus Darnell Mooney when Darnell Mooney is a much more proven player. But number two, wide receiver talent matters. A player won't see a high target chair in his offense if he himself is not good, no matter the offense that he's in. Tight ends also don't seem to affect breakouts across a larger sample. I think that's probably because so few tight ends the obscenely high target chairs to begin with, and of the tight ends who get drafted early who do see those target chairs, they don't always have middle round wide receivers for a study like this, So again, don't look at this in a black and white way. Just know that you don't need to bump a wide receiver down dramatically if he has one of those ends. Overall, I think it's easy to boost a player up during a draft because of his situation. But the reason I say situation doesn't matter much is because it seems like the market is already accounting for it, so you don't want to double count it. The key, and this is really key to all things fantasy football in a way, but the key is finding a breakout offense, an offense that has cost effective players throughout your draft. If, for example, the Giants do really well this year with this coaching change, then all of their players are going to have an easier time beating ADP because ADP is reflecting a not so good offense. And then the last thing for these middle round breakouts is probably the most important. Similar to running back, age matters at wide receiver. Again, I'm doing all of this analysis by comparing players to where they were drafted or how people thought about those players entering a season, which is important because it gives us trends on how fantasy managers might be thinking about certain types of wide receivers. So I did an entire episode on rookie wide receivers in re draft leagues back on episode six hundred and forty seven, and I noted how rookie wide receivers are really good bets and re draft leagues because not only do they exceed expectation at a pretty good rate, but they perform better during the second half of the season, which makes them even more attractive. When talking about the middle rounds and rookie wide receivers, we're really just talking about the best of the best this year, we're talking about someone like Drake London. Historically, rookie wide receivers in the middle rounds have given you above average breakout rates, both in terms of moderate and true breakouts. In fact, rookie wide receivers have one of the highest breakout rates among any age group in the middle rounds. But you know who's been more impressive. You know who's been the most impressive second year wide receivers. Second year wide receivers in the middle rounds are freaking awesome. Almost forty one percent of them since twenty eleven have been moderate breakouts, with eleven percent of them being true breakouts. So they're really really good bets to at least exceed expectation by a good number of points, and then they're decent bets compared to their counterparts that being league winners. Meanwhile, the general thought in fantasy circles is that third year wide receivers are the ones that you should target. They are the breakout candidates. But when compared to how the market acts compared to expectation, that hasn't been the case over the last decade at all. In fact, of all the age groups at wide receivers since twenty eleven, like literally every single age group, third year wide receivers have had the worst breakout rate. And my explanation for that is that people probably think that the third year breakout thing is a thing when it really isn't, so they inflate the cost for those players. Don't fall victim to that. A third year player can be a fine pick, but they've been moderate breakouts at just the nine point five percent rate since twenty eleven. Remember for second year guys that number was forty percent, it was over forty percent, And I talk about this in the draft guide, But fifth and sixty year wide receivers have done pretty well in the middle rounds as well. I think that's likely due to those players potentially switching teams after a rookie deal, or they're just being some sort of survivor bias. As in players being drafted in the middle rounds who are in year five or year six, they're likely good players. They have this high ADP or relatively high ADP despite being in the league so long. You know they're veterans, but they're not past their age apex yet, so there's still room for a breakout. So don't ignore those players either. But overall, in these middle rounds, first and second year players are very good bets. Fifth and six year guys shouldn't be ignored either, and third year wide receivers are generally overrated, and of course we don't see many breakouts after year six, which isn't all that surprising. So wrapping this all up, you want ambiguous wide receiver situations. You want team wide receiver ones over team wide receiver twos. You shouldn't care a ton about situation, and first and second year wide receivers they tend to crush. That leaves us with players like Drake London obviously, and then a lot of second year guys Rashad Bateman, I'm and Ross Saint Brown, Elijah Moore, Kadarius Tony and sort of kind of DeVante Smith even though he's got aj Brown going early. It's a really good year for these second year wide receivers. Maybe that means the market is catching up and realizing that these types of players are good, and that could lead to some of these trends not being as strong this year. But I do think buying into those guys is a good call because historically those are the types of players who have broken out. 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 Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found it. I follow me on Twitter at Late Round qb Re. I'm gonna check out lateround dot com to purchase the Late Round Draft Guide. You can get more detail on all of this breakout talk and tons more. It's updated weekly through August and it's just twenty four ninety nine. Thanks for listening to everyone. I'll talk to you later in the week.