494: What a First-Round Wide Receiver Bust Looks Like

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Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacher Retha j J. Zacher reson what's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen, the editor in chief at Fandle and at number fire dot com in this episode four hundred and ninety four of the Late Round Podcast the many shows that are part of the FanDuel podcast network. Thanks for tuning in. The position that's scrutinized most by fantasy analysts during NFL draft season is undoubtedly wide receiver. We know running back and wide receiver are generally more important in fantasy football. You start more of them in your lineup, so the demand for those positions is higher. But with running backs in the NFL draft, draft capital or where those running backs were drafted, goes a really long way because opportunity works differently at running back than it does a wide receiver. For running back to see volume, he's got to beat out the players on his depth chart, and then he's got to get the call during a game once he's on the field. Though, if they call a running play volume, it takes more coaching intervention for that running back to touch the rock. A wide receiver also has to beat out his teammates to see the field, but then he needs to get open in order to see a target from his quarterback, and getting open doesn't just happen. A wide out has to be talented in some way to earn that target. This is why I generally say that talent does still matter for running backs. A running back still has to beat out competition on his team, but it matters more a wide receiver. There are additional steps needed for that wide receiver to secure volume. That's a really dumb down way to describe why opportunity and talent aren't the same at running back and wide receiver, and it's indirectly a dumbed down way to describe why draft capital would matter more for running backs than a wide receiver. I can at least tell you that within my models, draft capital matters a lot less at wide receiver than it does at running back. That's simply drafting fantasy wide receivers based on where they were drafted that would yield worse results than if you did the exact same thing at running back. What that means is we've got to be a little bit more careful with how we view wide receivers who are drafted early no player is bustproof, but that's especially true a wide receiver, even first round wide receivers. On today's show, I'm going to be looking into this in more detail. With so much talk around wide receivers across the fantasy football space, I'm gonna look and see if there are any shared characteristics of first round wide receivers who have been fantasy football bus and then we'll look and see what this means for the twenty twenty one draft that's coming up in about a month. Before getting into the things, this is your reminder that it's almost time for daily Fantasy Baseball and there's no better place to play mlbdfs than with fandel. For only four dollars on opening day, you have a chance to compete for a part of the five hundred thousand dollars prize pool, with first place taking home one hundred thousand dollars. Set your lineup on April first over on fandle and get the baseball season started off right. For more details as at fandle dot com or download the FANDLE app today. Eligibility restrictions apply, Okay, So our overall sample here is all first round wide receivers and Since a lot of the data that I work with goes back to twenty eleven, we'll look at all first round wide receivers who are drafted from twenty eleven onward. And our goal here, just to reiterate, is to look at first round bus and then find any characteristics that those busts share. That way we might be able to spot future ones. The problem is there's no general way of defining what a bust is. Is it a wide receiver without a wide receiver one season, without a wide receiver two season. Since expectations are high with first round wide receivers, I'm going to subjectively define bust as a wide receiver without a wide receiver two season in points per game in his NFL career. I also want to give the wide receiver a little bit of time to hit that wide receiver two season. It wouldn't be fair to look at someone like Jerry Judy right now and just call him a bust. So we'll look at first round wide receiver since twenty eleven who have played multiple seasons, and then we'll see if they were able to give us wide receiver two or better production. Let's start there, and then parameters as we go. So technically we're looking at wide outs drafted from twenty eleven through twenty nineteen. Since we're giving every wide receiver multiple seasons to hit that wide receiver two threshold, that gives us a sample of thirty two wide receivers. It's not a massive sample, but it's not completely irrelevant. Either of those thirty two wide receivers, fifteen of them gave us at least one wide receiver two season or better. And really, when you look at the list of bus versus the non bus by using this criteria, it actually splits things up pretty well. The player most on the fringe in the bus group is Corey Davis, but aside from him, you're looking at clear bus. You're looking at players who did not perform well in the NFL objectively. I'll just read that group for you so that you know who's included. And some of these names may bring back some bad memories, So if you're driving right now, you might want to pull off to the side of the road. But it's Corey Davis, John Ross, Mike Williams, Corey Coleman, Josh Dockson, Lakwan Treadwell, Kevin White, Prashad Perriman, phill Door, set Tavon, Austin Cordero, Patterson, AJ Jenkins, Michael Floyd, Justin Blackman, John Baldwin, Marquise Brown, and Nikhil Harry. Maybe it's a little early to have Marquis Brown on this list, but in total, subjectively, I think we'd agree that captures BUS pretty well. That almost all of those players are indeed BUS. I'm going to refer to that group as the BUS group, and then the remaining fifteen wide receivers that'll be the success group. Some of the successes could be considered BUS, but I'll change the criteria later on. Now, within my model, I have a stat scorer that looks at the three metrics that I reference all the time on the show, receptions per game, yards per team, pass attempts, and touchdown share, and I take the best seasons in each of those metrics for each prospect. Over this timeframe that I'm looking at, we've had four players with a negative stat scorer who were drafted in the first round, So twelve and a half percent of first round wide receivers from twenty eleven through twenty nineteen had a negative stat score. They were Kelvin Benjamin Bershad Perriman, Philip Dorsett, and Corderol Patterson. Only Kelvin Benjamin hit a wide receiver two season or better once in his career, and we know how his career ended up. We know college production matters, and this gives us a glimpse of that. If you look at the success group the average college dominator, which looks at market share of receiving production, it actually wasn't a whole lot higher than the bus group. It was less than two percentage points higher. If we look at yards per team pass attempt, which is the most predictive production related metric in my model, the success group has a best season average of three point one point one. The bus group had one of two point eight one. And then this is actually pretty interesting, but not surprising. Of the bottom half players in our sample and yards per team attempt, only three of them were in the success group. And those three were Devonte Parker, who really would have been called a bust a couple of years ago. The other was Kelvin Benjamin, who I just talked about, and the last one was aj Green. This, this very basic exercise tells us what we already generally knew that college production matters for wide receivers even when you've segmented them and you're looking at only first round picks. And for the record of the first round wide receivers from last year's draft, the player with the worst yards per team pass attempt rate was Henry Ruggs. He had a really bad production profile. The player who had the second worst one was Jalen Reger. Just something to consider. Another trend within this sample goes back to what I've been talking about on the show for a while now, and it's that first round wide receivers are more likely to bust when they aren't early declares. Our success sample has two players out of the fifteen who weren't early declares who played all four years in college. They were Kendall Wright and Devonte Parker. Both of them had a good season, but they didn't have sustained production in the NFL. On the flip side, in our bus group, seven of a possible seventeen players were not early declares. They played all four years in college. You've got two of fifteen in the success group and seven of seventeen in the bus group. You want your wide receivers to declare early, and that's still true even when they have first round draft capital. Now, when you look at breakout age, there's actually very little correlation. The median breakout age in our success group is only point three years better than the bus group. Now that's something, but it doesn't seem as meaningful as the early declared stuff. Combined with college production, and when you layer in stricter parameters, all these numbers only get stronger. Nine of the players in our sample had multiple years of fantasy success. We'll call them the elite group. Their yards per team attempt to average saw an even larger delta between them and the non elite group, and absolutely zero of them, none of them. None of them played a full four years in college. They were all early declares. So let's take a step back for a moment. I threw some numbers at you because it backs the basic stance that's talked about this show all the time. You want productive wide receivers, you want them to be young, and you want them to declare early. When looking at first round wide receivers, only the age piece seems to be less significant, and that's probably because in order to be a first round wide receiver in the first place, a player has some criteria that's already been met. None of these wide receivers were bad prospects in the grand scheme of things. Some of them were definitely overdrafted. I'm saying that objectively given what production says, but none of them were like not worthy of being drafted at all. That's probably why breakout age matters a lot less when looking at first round wide receiver bus. But what's not being factored in, or what hasn't seemed to matter to front offices that much, is whether or not a player was an early declare. And that's worked that my buddy rich reebar Over at Sharp Football Analysis did last offseason, and then I've referenced on this show a ton ever since, you don't want your first round wide receivers playing four years in college. Maybe if they went to a smaller school you can be a little bit more leaning, but for them to be truly elite, it's just not happening, at least over the last decade. And that's honestly really critical when looking at this year's class and beyond. Davante Smith is not an early declare wide receiver. Kadarius Tony played all four years and those are two wide receivers who could go in the first round of next month's draft. Davante Smith is essentially a Locke now. Of the two, I'm most definitely worried about Tony most given his profile. He has a negative stat score in my model, his yards per team attempt rate is low, and he played all four years. He has Fantasy Football bust written all over him. At least, DeVante Smith has the production. He's got production on his side, it's just the early declare piece that's missing for him given that he's going to be a first round wide out. Now. I'll have my pre draft rankings in April, so you'll eventually see and hear where my head's at within the context of this year's draft class. But I feel like as I've moved through analyzing this class, the less I like it. I've gone from feeling really good about this group of wide receivers to reckoning some issues with nearly every single prospect, and today's analysis just re emphasizes that point. Now, I will say, I think one thing to keep in mind with all of this is that we've had some funkier data that we're working with this year. With the pandemic players may have made decisions that they otherwise wouldn't have made. We may look back at this draft class and realize that the wide receiver group broke some trends, that they had some non early declares hit, and maybe they had some unproductive players hit as well. But as I always try to preach on this show, we have to think about how we're utilizing our information. The application is what matters here. We can go into our rookie drafts understanding that circumstances are a little bit different because they are there's a gray area. There's always a gray area, but there's more of a gray area here in twenty twenty one. And you should always be open minded, but it's important to not strays so far off of your general process that you're then over emphasizing speculation. You can absolutely be a little bit looser this season with your parameters. I think that's a fair thing to do, But don't go so far in one direction that you all of a sudden lose that baseline process, because in the end, the data is telling us something important. It's telling us that successful first round wide receivers they do declare early, that successful first round wide receivers they are productive don't lose sight of that. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you've got to 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 with the weekly mail Bag show.